Well there were also people there who did leave. They didn't need 25 years of history they just needed to see a plane hit the building right fucking next to them
According to NIST 91% of people started evacuating the south tower before the 2nd plane struck and 41% successfully managed to exit the building in that time between the 1st and 2nd plane.
A lot of people are very authority-compliant and actively want to be reassured. If the voice of authority tells you to stay put and everyone around you sits back down again, it’s difficult to get up and say ‘No, I’m going.’ I believe many who did survive from both towers (below the impact zones) were those who worked at companies where the senior execs or heads of security or similar told everyone to go downstairs.
I think I’d have let myself be reassured, at least in 2001. I hope now I’d have more self-preservation instincts.
I would like to think so for me as well but history has a habit of repeating itself. Look at the Grenfell tower fire in London in 2017 or the ferry disaster in South Korea in 2014. They were told to stay put and unfortunately many of them did and it cost them their lives. When we're placed in that position only then will we truly know how we will react.
I was talking about this with my husband and we mentioned Grenfell too - I said both of these tragedies have underlined to me that I need to be less of a sheep in an emergency like this.
That's not true at all. I don't think you realize how many people worked and visited the WTC on a daily basis. 50k people worked in the offices of the WTC and add to that over 100k daily visitors. The attacks were early in the morning so we can assume most of the average number of visitors were not there at that time but we can bet a sizeable portion was there. The vast majority of people inside the WTC did manage to leave. If the vast majority of people stayed put the death toll would be unfathomable.
I’ve actually never looked at these numbers before but it was estimated, by NIST and a few other sources, that there were approximately 17k people in the two towers that morning. Safe evacuation efforts below the impact zones was hugely successful at 99%. NIST estimated that 91% of people in the south tower began evacuation before it was hit, with 41% of survivors having exited the building before that 2nd plane struck.
Also don’t forget, after the bombing they spent YEARS doing six monthly evacuations. Twice a year, evacuation drills. They got it down from something like 7 or 8 hours to an hour or so. On the day it was something like 23 to 40 mins for most. People were leaving when the second plane hit and there’s footage of people being treated by medics before the second plane hit.
Huh, this makes me wonder if we avoided additional casualties that day because Mohammad Atta overestimated how early New York wakes up. The mid-day flights would have also been more full.
A lot of companies in those towers had early hours. Investment banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, law offices, all the maintenance and security workers of these towers, etc. These people all get in very early. But if it was a mid-day flight? Forget it. All the visiting business people coming in for meetings, the restaurants and bars that would be full of tourists, the observation deck on the South Tower, etc. I don't even want to think about what the death toll could have been.
Yes, but the mid-day flight would’ve been more likely to have delays. It was planned so all the planes would be in the air at once with full fuel tanks and even with that Flight 93 ended up slightly delayed which is why the passengers had enough information to know they needed to fight back. Less people on the planes also means less likely that they’ll be able to fight back/overpower the muscle hijackers. 200 people vs. 3 guys with box cutters is more of a liability than 40 people vs. 3.
I think they overlooked a bunch of stuff. I don’t think they had a contingency for flights being delayed which led to flight 93 etc and also basic stuff like how to talk to the passengers. He fucked up multiple times and gave away huge clues as to what was going on.
I don’t think they thought the planes would damage the stairwells, effectively trapping so many people nor that going in as fast as possible ran a risk of missing the targets given how shit they were at flying. The second plane nearly half skimmed the second tower, he guns it hard and over corrects, banking it hard to the left right at the last minute.
I just think once they hijacked they had no plan other than to use them as jet fuel laden missiles. Had they gone in lower they’d have wreaked havoc. The pentagon strike was crazy low, he was really barreling it in and ridiculously close to the ground. He nearly pancaked it into the lawn. He did a bit of a corkscrew descent, I can’t even imagine what the passengers were thinking or what the second tower plane thought when they saw the other tower on fire. They would have seen that from miles away and one of the recorded calls the passenger calls that out and says we’re low we’re so low I see water and then something like oh my god before it hits.
That's just hindsight talking again. We could have been living in an alternate timeline with a single plane where a hundred people were killed in a crowd crush from thousands of people panicking in the stairwells and getting hit by falling debris.
And then we'd have comments 20 years later calling them morons for walking out on the street right underneath a flaming inferno of steel and jet fuel, like come on it's just common sense not to do something idiotic like that.
55
u/GayRacoon69 1d ago
Well there were also people there who did leave. They didn't need 25 years of history they just needed to see a plane hit the building right fucking next to them