Scientists are completing a major study of the behavior of World Trade Center survivors in a bid to make skyscrapers safer and easier to evacuate.
Key recommendations and suggestions include blaze-proof elevators, sky bridges linking high-rise buildings and curbs on mobile phones during evacuations.
"It would add tragedy to tragedy if we did not learn from 9/11," said the study's leader, Ed Galea of the University of Greenwich, England.
Galea and his team analyzed the written accounts of 250 survivors of Sept. 11, and found they show a startling variation in human behavior. Almost half those working on floors below where the planes struck took more than five minutes to begin leaving the building. Incredibly, five percent were still there more than an hour later.
"They sat at their computers while the building blazed," he said. "It is astonishing. We also found most people had long mobile phone conversations to relatives during their evacuation. Such behavior contrasts with the expectations of high-rise building designers. They assume people will exit in an orderly fashion in seconds of a fire alarm sounding."
THREE ZONES
The Sept. 11 disaster had three zones: the floors where the two planes struck; the floors above, and the floors below.
"Everyone on the impact floors ... was killed very quickly," Galea said.
Nearly all those in floors below the impact survived, however, while all but a handful of those above died -- because the crashed planes severed all elevators and each tower's three emergency staircases.
The staircases were clustered together and made of plasterboard. Had they been widely spaced and made of concrete, one staircase might have survived and those above the impact could have got out before the towers collapsed."
SPECIAL SOFTWARE
Using special software called Exodus, Galea also calculated how long it would have taken to evacuate the towers if they had been fully occupied.
"What happened on 9/11 was horrible, but it could have been a lot worse," he said.
"Each tower usually had about 25,000 occupants. However, Sept. 9 was local election day and many people were voting, it was the first day of school term and many parents were late coming in, and it was quite early in the morning. The towers were struck at 8:45am and 9:03am. As a result, there were only about 8,500 people in each tower," he said.
"Had it been later on a normal day, about 13,000 people would have died as opposed to the estimated 2,700 victims who died that day," he said.
In fact, the people on floors below the impact zones only just got out, Galea's calculations revealed. There were only a few minutes between the last occupants reaching the ground and each tower's collapse. Many refused to leave their desks, a situation that could have been improved if senior executives, and other figures of authority, had been recruited as fire marshals.
In addition, as people descended the narrow staircases, firemen were coming up, carrying equipment, causing delay though, according to simulations, not enough to cause loss of life.
The report warns that many high rise buildings are currently not designed to enable the complete evacuation of their occupants.
"We can no longer tolerate that attitude," Galea said. "That is the real lesson of 9/11. We have to find ways to all people out."
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS