Could you have imagined TWO suicide bombers flying jumbo jets into the buildings, let alone one? I couldn't have.
The very week prior to 9/11, Les Robertson, the Professional Structural Engineer in responsible charge of the design of the WTC Towers said to an anti-terrorism conference regarding his building design "I designed it to withstand a 707 flying into it."
Maybe you didn't consider it, but I'm sure the designers and insurers did. Planes flying over NYC have hit other buildings and even each other before. Obviously this is something to be prepared for, even if only as an accidental incident.
Finally, Ramzi Youssef, mastermind of WTC attack #1 in 1993 was caught with plans to comandeer a plane and fly it into the CIA HQ in Langley. Tom Clancy had written about a fictitious terrorist plot to fly a plane into the Capitol. The use of planes as weapons is as old as the Kamimaze attacks.
Seeing that a military bomber once crashed into the Empire State Building, just down the street, I don't see why this was so unimaginable.
The architect of the WTC used to boast that he designed the towers to take the impact of a 707. I've read that the containment domes over nuclear power reactors are designed to take the impact of a 747. It's a common enough disaster scenario.
If you couldn't imagine it, then maybe it's a good thing we don't hire you to develop building emergency evacuation procedures. The sad thing, of course, is that the people we did hire for the WTC proved to be equally unimaginative.
I don't think they should be punished, but at the same time, their performance evaluation would not lead me to hire them over other qualified candidates if a similar position were to be offered at another building site.
If that sounds 'cruel' -- well, it would be even more 'cruel' to the more competent person who was in competition for the same job. And it would be even more cruel to the ten thousand people working in that building, whose lives would then be at greater risk due to our 'compassionate' hiring practices.
'Failing to reward incompetency' is not a bad thing. It's the basis for the free market system, and it saves lives.
Just a fire raging out of control 90 floors up is enough to imagine potential structural failure of the affected areas doncha think? We all can imagine what uncontrolled structural failure might do to a skyscraper and the danger this represents to it's neighboring buildings. In this particular case, we HAD an uncontrolled fire that we KNEW was being fed by jet fuel resulting in excessive temperatures. Knowing this alone, and we did, should have been cause for an immediate and full evacuation of all potentially dangerous areas, including the south tower.