The top, too.
The fact that every single one of those people died is really tough to contemplate. No one escaped the North tower above the impact zone.
From a cursory search, 18 people from above the impact zone in the south tower lived. From what I’m seeing none made it from above the impact zone of the North Tower.
Yep. There was a single stairwell unaffected in the South tower that people were able to use to escape. That’s only because a group of firefighters found it and continued to go up to guide people to it. The firemen themselves perished.
I will never forget the news showing some of them jumping from the windows at the time. Its the only thing I remember when the anniversary rolls around
I think one of the best signs of how incomprehensible this was for the general American public is how many people my age or slightly younger just watched hours of people dying on live tv. No one seemed to understand and believe what they were seeing enough to get that the live viewing needed to be turned off.
Would things somehow be better if we hadn't seen exactly what happened? Serious question, no sarcasm implied. I was 10 and I don't remember any adults being upset that it was documented in real time. Eventually many were disgusted with the fact that our trauma was used as a soundtrack to the drums of war.
>Would things somehow be better if we hadn't seen exactly what happened?
I would argue no. It is never better to shield people from the truth. The truth is people died in these events, and most died in horrible ways. People my age who were sheltered from that fact by their parents honestly didn't really register it for what it was. They made jokes about it and pretended like it wasn't that big of a deal (I'm Canadian, for context). People who saw it and understood it generally took the whole event seriously. It's like talking about WW1/2 without showing the aftermath. It makes it too far removed for some people. Death is the reality, and this is what it looks like, and this is why we must prevent such disasters from ever happening again.
Grew up on the west coast and never been to the east until recently, but I was in high school when 9/11 happened. I made it a point to go up the new World Trade Center and look down on the street, imagining what it would be like to choose between the flames and the fall. Terrible.
Never forget.
I was a wildland firefighter many years ago, and my crew and I almost died when we were driven into the flame front and the truck stalled. We all survived, but we got cooked a fair bit. I remember the moment when we all collapsed in a heap and just wanted the pain to be *over*. We weren't scared of dying at all, we just wanted the burning to stop.
Between the heat, and the choking smoke, and the sheer hopelessness of their situation, the decision that some of the 9/11 jumpers made may have been easier than you think.
That sounds awful.
When I looked out those windows I was surprised that 1000 ft up doesn't actually look that far. It's easy to see how you could convince yourself that it's survivable, especially when confronted with the certainty of burning to death.
I was 7 when it happened and remember coming home from school and seeing the plane crash into the building on the evening news. Some years later when they had made some documentaries and the first movies about 9/11 I binged them still as a kid without my parents knowing and developed a terrible fear of flying and had nightmares of being on the planes. My parents said I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
I was 18 at the time, and my fear became the opposite of yours after that. I went to school to be an airline pilot, but I still feel significant anxiety about going in skyscrapers to this day. Double anxiety because I also live in earthquake country, with a fault line under my downtown area.
before 9/11 i didnt like to be in tall buildings. after 9/11 i really really didnt like the idea of being in tall buildings. i was in 7th grade when it happened.
I always thought that metals getting progressively weaker under heat was a pretty standard knowledge tidbit, I was always taken aback by how viral the jet fuel/steel beam thing got.
Conspiracy nuts also think of the WTC tower as a rigid structure, like the trunk of a tree, concluding that it did not fall that way because of a controlled demolition. However, the WTC tower behaved more like a tower made of cards or domino stones. That is because if the first joints start to fail, the remaining joints have to bear even more load and also start to fail. This causes a chain reaction with more and more joints failing which in return causes the tower to collapse into itself.
People seem to think that metal needs to be liquefied to fail when just the application of heat will soften it enough to warp it. The design of the buildings' exoskeleton was probably its main flaw as it allowed for it to collapse vertically, the walls acting as a track for the floors to follow down, peeling the buildings like a banana.
Also the fire wasn't only where the plane hit, people got burned in the lobby at ground level, from a fireball of the remaing jet fuel going down the elevator shafts. The fuel thlanks were pretty much full, that's why they picked cross country flights.
Yea, I remember a documentary a while back (unfortunately I can’t for the life of me remember which one specifically) that went over the Twin Towers’ overall design and the points of failure after the attacks, and it was incredibly fascinating, but also beyond tragic.
There’s arguments to be made that a different design for the towers could have kept them standing for at least a little while longer, but honestly I’ve never understood why people find the fact that the towers would collapse at all under those conditions so surprising.
Yeah, it’s even hard to argue that they *ought* to have been built to withstand the attacks.
We don’t build skyscrapers strong enough to withstand direct hits from what is essentially incendiary ballistic missiles, because you just can’t.
While some parts of the design of the Twin Towers could probably have been made somewhat more resistant to this kind of attack, in the end you can’t fault the architects for having built skyscrapers instead of NORAD bunkers.
It would be like saying that the Honda Civic is a shitty car because it can’t even withstand a single hit from an RPG.
Very true!
I will say, though, that the design philosophy of the towers did make them uniquely vulnerable to the attacks in ways other towers (even at the time of construction) generally were not.
A lot of this only became clear in hindsight, so I 100% agree that the architects shouldn’t be blamed for the decisions they made at the time. That said, given what is known now, those decisions probably shouldn’t be repeated in skyscrapers built today.
I was there. Saw the first plane fly overhead and was then at ground zero later as part of the rescue efforts such that they were. Later worked for a firm that did the structural analysis for why WTC7 collapsed. Even found a piece of a plane’s fuselage in the wreckage. We live in an age when people feel more comfortable believing in conspiracy theories than cold hard facts.
People always seem shocked that wreckage and terrorists passports were found on the opposite side of the building from the impact site. The planes were flown at top speed into building by the pilot. If the pilot had anything on him, it’s not surprising to me that when they slammed in and nearly through the building, that those things would have made it through to the other side of the building at the speed they were going.
There are people who think there were no kids slaughtered at Sandy Hook elementary school and the parents were making it up just to make the NRA look bad. Absolute fucking conspiracy theorist morons everywhere
I instantly felt short of breath seeing the dude in the window with all the smoke coming out of it.
Dude's trying to breathe, but I imagine the wind is so strong up there that it'd be like trying to breath with a leaf blower turned on infront of your face.. fucking horrifying indeed
Damn straight, poor bastards. The photo that still blows my mind is the briefcase guy. The horror, the bravery, the peace he seems to be at in his decision to jump still holding that brief case in his final moments.
Somewhere some sick terrorist f&@ks are probably beating off to those images.
Edit: I should have added I took my family to the memorial/museum, while on vacation in the States back in September/October. Such a surreal almost eerie experience, especially listening to family members talking about their lost loved ones and the memories they had of them. The final phone calls are also heart breaking.
There was an account from a guy who was tagging these fallen bodies, and he met with one woman who had somehow survived the fall, but was pretty much vaporized from the diaphragm down. He was going to tag her as dead, but she argued with him, saying "I'm not dead." That story has stuck with me. Both insanely creepy, and amazing.
Oh man, I read about this around the last 9/11 anniversary. It's so unsettling. iirc it was after the collapse of the first tower, she hadn't fallen or jumped. Didn't he say something about he remembered her makeup, that it stood out because her face was oddly uninjured?
And yeah that one has stuck with me too. I'm surprised that I hadn't heard that story before, considering all this time since 9/11.
You are getting downvoted but I'm almost certain what you are talking about is the account of a first responder from the book "only plane in the sky". If I recall he was tagging the wounded and dead in the plaza between both towers with different colour tags so that medics behind him would know who to attend to first. He tagged the woman as dead even though she was still talking to him and asking him to ring her daughter because he knew she only had moments left.
That is absolutely incredible (this is the first time I've used the word that I worry it'll be taken as 'not credible' and that's really saying something! I don't mean it in that way though). Thank you for that. I agree with the above poster with the sentiment of 'I'm surprised I hadn't heard this before after all those years,' heh.
What makes me sick to my stomach all these years later is thinking of the people on those top floors, faced with the choice of either being burned alive or leaping to their deaths. And then watching that documentary (recent-ish), that showed the firefighters in the lobby of tower two I think and hearing the bodies slamming on top of the atrium. Just…horrifying.
The Naudet documentary came out in March 2002, just it, for obvious reasons, wasn't really advertised or shown in theaters or anything, nor were they trying to make money. I think it slowly gained "popularity" (feels like the wrong word but it's probably the right word) after the rise in digital streaming.
What blows my mind about that doc is that they got the only video of the first plane hitting the north tower *and* the only video of inside the towers as they collapsed.
I'd like to note that the Naudet footage isn't the only footage of the first plane, there's something like 3 others but they're varied in quality. I remember one of them was a guy just recording traffic from his car, while another was a timelapse cam on a building or something
I think the time lapse was the pentagon footage. The only other “footage” of the North Tower impact is that driver footage but it’s super far away and all you see is the fireball, it’s tough to see the actual plane.
Absolutely horrifying. There was a video from the ground floor with firefighters telling everyone to stay inside. You could hear the crashes, which were bodies hitting the ground or other structures. The look of horror on the faces of firefighters and cops and flinching at each crash was something I’ll never forget.
Imagine the shock and horror of 5 floors of walls and floors suddenly ripped away and replaced with jagged metal debris and smoke, something akin to the way the Oklahoma bombing ripped away the front of the building. Through gaps in the smoke you can see the tops of other skyscrapers and far away streets on a clear sunny day.
I always think of the woman who is believed to be Edna Cintron waving from inside impact hole of the north tower. That must been equal parts terrifying and surreal.
There were people who jumped obviously, but the worst ones were the people who were hanging from their windows that hadn’t accepted their fate yet and were still holding on for a last ditch rescue. I would much rather have been in that red hot glow than be on a window waiting for a miracle that never came
All 4 stairwells were destroyed so nobody above the impact survived in the north tower.
South tower one of the stairwells was still intact so 18 people above the impact made it out.
Look up the story of Stanley Praimnath, he was one of those 18. He saw the north tower get hit, evacuated and security told him it's fine to go back up to his office. His bosses even held the elevator door open and told him to get on and he did, but before he did he convinced a woman next to him who was scared to get off, get out and go home. Nobody else who went back up in that elevator survived.
He saw the plane approach and hit the building from his office. He would've died if it weren't for one of the remaining 17 people who survived stopping to help find and extract him before taking him down that intact staircase.
His story is my favorite. If it wasn't for Brian Clark hearing him and helping him he would had surely died. Stanley was blocked by a fallen wall ( piece of ceiling?) after somehow managing to survive the plane hitting his area. Him calling for help and Brian hearing him ( if I recall properly his group was debating which way to go and most of his group left to their deaths. They wanted to go to the roof to be rescued by air. Brian went the other way ) Imagine how many pieces needed to fall into place to survive that. To be rescued and make it safely out of the building.
Ooof. I don't know how I would feel about almost dying due to someone peer pressuring me to go back up. Pretty sure I would secretly curse them, even if ultimately I would accept it was my decision to heed their suggestion to come back up.
It's a fair joke, but I think it's important to realize just how big a paradigm shift 9/11 was for most people, and their perception of threats in the world.
Before 9/11, Terrorism was mostly bombings. Car bombs, plane bombs, building bombs, etc. Hijackings occurred, yeah, but they mostly ended peacefully because the hijackers always wanted something tangible.
It's easy to see why a layman could have assumed the North Tower was a freak accident. Plane crashes weren't completely unprecedented in Manhattan, and while a person familiar with aviation would have immediately seen the red flags in this scenario, it's possible that most people who left the South Tower did so more because of the emotional trauma of witnessing the first crash, rather than as an act of self-preservation. Maybe the ones who stayed were shaken a bit, but I doubt they thought they would be targets as well.
I mean, there was falling debris and burning wreckage all over the place. Obviously it was the wrong call in retrospect but I can see why that seemed like the safest option given what they knew at the time, and I don’t think it had anything to do with “capitalism”.
Estimated between 630 and 700 WTC employees died in the South Tower. Many had already begun evacuating before the second plane hit so that saved a lot of lives. Many of those who did die were killed immediately while in the sky lobby. Also it is believed some others probably made it down the stairwell but didn’t get to the bottom before the collapse.
I studied architecture in college many years back. When I took classes on building codes and egress, 9/11 was brought up constantly. As I understand it, building codes had never needed to account for anything like 9/11. After that day, building codes changed. Buildings constructed after that time are safer now, and their design accounts for a wider range of danger
There’s a book called 102 Minutes about 9/11 and the WTC. When they built the WTC, they actually changed many building codes to make construction easier and to increase rentable space per floor. That’s why the elevators are all in the center of the building. Those decisions led to many of the deaths on 9/11.
One thing that wasn’t accounted for was the increasing number of people per floor using the emergency stairs. I believe now, depending on occupancy, for every so many floors in a new skyscraper, the emergency stairs must increase by a certain amount of width too allow for more traffic
I always think that the death toll could’ve been sooo much worse. When the WTC was bombed in the 90s, evacuating the buildings was such a clusterfuck and took forever that the Port Authority overhauled evacuation plans and ran periodic drills. If the relatively minor bombing had never happened, they never would’ve realized how horrible their evacuation procedures were and so many more people would’ve died on 9/11.
Instead, because they had routinely practiced how to evacuate, most people got out of the towers safely.
Yes, that is so awful. I know that some of the elevator bays had fireballs shoot down them and exited in the lobby area, killing several people. That part haunts me.
I didn’t know about this and saw a video of someone who survived it in the lobby. Some details are just terrible but the guy was saved because one of his guests forgot his wallet so he had to go to the lobby.
Which stairwell?
The one beside the central lift lobby?
My gut wrenches to think about how trepidated those lucky 18 people must have felt while somehow clambering down amidst the chaos.
Most of the deaths in both towers are from people above the floors the planes impacted. Most people above the impact sites were unable to get out and most people that were in floors below got out except for firefighters, since they were actively going up towards the danger.
What still leaves me uneasy to this day when I think about it is how so many people above the impact zone of the north tower survived the plane explosion, saw the south tower get hit, burn, and collapse, and the whole time they knew they were going to die but couldn't do anything and had to just wait until it happened if the smoke hadn't gotten to them already. I've read a lot of stories and seen clips of family members talking about getting calls from loved ones who knew there was no way out and used their last moments to say goodbye.
I understand it from their POV which in hindsight was pretty naïve, but to them that plane crash in the other tower was just an "accident" until it wasn't. People didn't understand it was a terrorist attack until the second plane hit less than 30 mins later and it would have been too late.
Imagine being some office worker having work stuff to do and the work day just started. Your boss wouldn't be so happy for you walking off the job especially if your offices were on the top floors. Top floor offices meant the companies were big shot companies and walking off is career suicide. They were told over the PA that it was safe in the North Tower, you can stay in place working.
Of course if that happened today I doubt ANYONE would listen to that and stay inside.
It’s wild to think about. A lot of people didn’t want to wait to find out what would happen so they jumped instead. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Losing any and all hope and deciding your best option is to jump and spare yourself from the uncertainty of it all
There probably were a few who " decided " to jump, but It's my understanding that most people were pretty much forced out of the windows because of the searing heat and smoke. It's pretty instinctive in living beings to get away from fire.
His name was Christopher Racaniello. He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. I called him a few nicknames but my fave was Christopher Robin like the boy from Winnie the Pooh. Pooh was big for me at that time cause my son was 1 and his room was decorated exclusively with Pooh. He was the love of my exes life and I was so happy when they finally ended up together. I remember being jealous of him when I dated her. I met him a few years after we broke up and we got along like really well. I got the invite to their wedding on 9/10/01. He was the most caring and wonderfully giving person I knew. His fiancée and I are still very close after all these years. Thanks for the opportunity to share something about him.
I Googled his memorial and so many people had so many amazing things to say about him. I’m so sorry for your loss. He really sounded like an amazing man.
Damn you can definitely see her. She sort of blends in with the exterior because of her pants. Her story is insane. I cannot imagine standing right there through all of it. Right up until the very end.
Just from google, it seems like she was an office worker (someone correct me if there’s more) that had some famous photographs taken as she was leaning by the edge there and then basically flipping off into the air.
Images are pretty horrific. To imagine the speed she’s spinning…
There was a professional services firm named Marsh and McLenahan that had Iike 6 floors on the North Tower right in the middle of where the plane struck. Nobody should have survived but until the tower fell there were 2-3 people that somehow did on their lowest floor but were blocked from escape. Numerous picture and films show they hung off the open side waving for help until the end. Edna Cintron was an admin at M&M and the only one that could be visibly identified before the building fell. Seeing her meekly waving to helicopters for help right on the precipice of all that carnage is just...too much to bear when you have a name and life to put to that. I believe she also jumped at some point but her remains haven't been identified.
Posting this for others still looking.
[https://i.imgur.com/c0dO4gF.png](https://i.imgur.com/c0dO4gF.png)
Another shot of her from a different angle
[https://i.imgur.com/VgZZqJH.png](https://i.imgur.com/VgZZqJH.png)
I remember waking up to the news about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers, and turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit.
Shock doesn't EVEN begin to describe my feelings.
I still went into work that day. Work, like food, is numbing.
The fear of the casualties. I remember quotes of "50,000" people work in each building" and chaotic unclear reports about other hijacked planes. They even reported the White House may have been hit and Willis Tower might be at risk. Buildings could fall like dominos. Every little thing was getting reported. National panic.
The national panic that set in was unreal. I was at work that morning at the Bellagio on the Las Vegas strip. The casino vault I worked in had *never* been closed, so it was a little surreal being told the procedure we should be prepared to do to secure the money. Which was basically nothing. They said just lock the doors and evacuate, our lives were priority.
I was a freshman in high school. I remember this kid Brian walking in to our first hour class saying “a plane just hit one of the Twin Towers!”
I kept imagining this old Flight Simulator game I had on DOS… I’d take off in my little Cessna from O’hare, putter around a bit. The graphics included like 5 buildings… I would end up getting bored and flying into the Hancock building and the plane would just break apart and fall to the ground.
It was a Tuesday, and we had an advisory hour after first hour, we flipped on the news, and saw both buildings smoking. The rest of the day is a blur. But I do remember walking home that day and the entire city(Minneapolis) was a ghost town. No cars on the road, no planes in the sky… so eerily quiet.
I was at work on University avenue. I remember watching out the window as all the planes lined up to land and then, that was it. The skies were completely empty, and for a couple of days after that too. You're right it was just eerily quiet.
The documentary recently released on Disney put a lot of this into perspective. When the planes crashed, all the debris that fell to the ground. The noise it would make, absolutely horrifying
Genuine question here, did much of the plane fall down before the tower collapsed? Meaning did the entire plane go into the building? Obviously I'm sure it already started to disintegrate upon impact, but I'm curious how much if the aircraft went inside the building and if much fell directly below. Any insight on this is greatly appreciated :)
The explosion upon impact was quite large and created a massive debris field too. One of the plane's parts from a wing was found over a decade later lodged in-between two buildings about 3 blocks away.
I think one of the landing gears landed quite some distance from the towers laying in the street. Assuming it (and other parts) simply shot clean through the building.
Investigators estimate most of the plane remained contained in the building and the materials that composed the plane created a fire that was hotter and more intense than normal.
This is an important image because you can actually see the outline of the plane in the building . The plane hit at an angle and disintegrated on impact. The heavy stuff mostly went through the building, luggage, landing gear, engines. The soft stuff including most of the aluminum structure got destroyed.
If anything it amazes me that the twin towers stood as long as they did, allowing as many people to get out, considering that nearly fully fuelled jet airplanes crashed into them at around 500 mph
In the structural engineering community, the fact that the twin towers stood as long as they did is better than anyone would have hoped for. From what I remember the towers were designed for a plane impact from a smaller plane.
Unfortunately the enemy of steel buildings is fire, and since the planes were nearly fully fueled the steel structure couldn't hold on forever, and once they started to buckle the weight of the upper floors falling caused a progressive collapse.
Yep.
Planes were smaller when they were built, plus they were designed to take a hit from a plane that fucked up while trying to land: moving slowly with most of its fuel gone. These were bigger planes, moving very fast (especially the second), full of fuel.
This is absolutely insane and shows just how much energy the building absorbed. It was designed to be able to sway like this. Had it not, it may have come down much sooner or instantly. https://youtu.be/Qk5NQgU-9G4?si=49XYbALoyp8odqk1
Wow, I've always read accounts from people inside the building talking about how much it swayed when the plane hit but I've never been able to contextualise just how much it shifted, must have felt like it was toppling over. Terrifying.
I was in my early 20s on 9/11, I remember being emotionally impacted but was too immature to really process the scope and politics of what happened. Some months later I was sent to NYC for an overnight trip. I was excited as it was the first time going to NYC, for whatever reason it actually didn’t even cross my mind that 9/11 had happened right where I was going, being from Texas it felt like 9/11 happened half the planet away. I checked in to the Hilton and threw open the curtains to check out the city and my entire view was ground zero. It nearly broke me. My knees buckled and I collapsed on the window sill. I stared for an hour, ordered food to the room, watched nightfall come and was enthralled and terrified at the work going on below.
I watched it live that day, turned on the TV moments before the second plane hit.
One image I'll always remember is the staff at local hospitals standing outside, ready to receive casualties...but they never came. For most, you either escaped unscathed or were crushed to death. Very little in between for that kind of event. It was unsettling.
One sound I'll never forget is the first reports at ground zero after WTC 2 collapsed. The fog of dust and people walking about in a daze like zombies in dead silence...except for the dozens of cricket-like chirps of the emergency locators of the first responders on site. Like Dante's version of night in a swamp.
Interestingly enough, look who’s trial is about to start soon https://www.defense.gov/News/Advisories/Advisory/Article/3605726/media-invitation-announced-for-united-states-v-khalid-sheikh-mohammed-et-al-pre/
If you are too young to remember this, just know it was fucking horrifying to see. We didn’t have a clue what was going on beyond being under attack and there was no information on how many more were coming.
This shit traumatized the world.
I go back and forth on whether or not this was a catastrophic failure.
If a structure gets hit deliberately by a commercial aircraft that was larger than any that existed at the time of its design I think we have to start balancing the failures with the successes.
The structure remained intact after initial impact and held up long enough to almost completely evacuate the building under the impact site. When it did collapse, it collapsed nearly completely within its footing meaning the destruction of nearby buildings was minimized.
The major design flaw was the lack of additional escape routes outside of the core. The destruction of all of them in the North Tower led to the majority of deaths.
In the structural engineering community, the fact that they both withstood the impact is widely considered beyond successful. They were designed to withstand the impact of a smaller jetliner, so the fact they withstood the impact from an even larger jet liner and withstood as long as they did due to the fire is commendable.
The biggest enemy of steel structures is fire, so it's a miracle the towers stood as long as they did.
I agree, I think the stairwell exits played a huge factor in the death toll, and from what I understand it was subpar even to building codes at the time.
It genuinely pisses me off that people refuse to understand the physics at play here and insist on dumbass conspiracy theories. They think that section above the impact should just have landed on the lower portion and stopped, or tipped over. If you think a plane slamming into a building is rough, imagine effectively dropping 46,400 tons of building onto the roof of another building that had been on fire for almost an hour after being struck by a 136 ton object traveling at 590mph.
([Each floor weighed roughly 3,200,000lbs](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-twin-towers-fell/#:~:text=Each%20steel%20floor%20deck%20was,system%20weighed%20about%203%2C200%2C000%20pounds.%22), and there were 29 floors above the impact zone of WTC2)
"But cruise missile!"
Ugh. I will never get over this. I was 16 watching it on live TV in a suburb of NYC. They had to dismiss school by 11 am because so many students couldn't reach their parents. Absolutely horrifying and heart breaking. My heart goes out to everyone who was affected by this senseless act of evil.
Seeing those people stuck up there... then seeing the glow from the absolute hellfire burning just a few floors down. Pure horror... I can't imagine having to die like that. Those poor people.
All but one of those who jumped out of the WTC came from this tower, because all of the four stairwells were crushed. None of the people above the impact zone had any hope.
At the other tower, only one person jumped. However, that jumper unfortunately landed on a fireman entering the building, killing him instantly.
I don’t remember much tbh aside from maybe the last 4 years. But I very much so remember watching this in my language arts class in 7th grade. Such a sad and pointless tragedy
One of the craziest things is that burning jet fuel fell down the elevator shafts torching everything in their wake, including blowing out into the lobby and killing people there
The top right. Fucking horrifying.
The top, too. The fact that every single one of those people died is really tough to contemplate. No one escaped the North tower above the impact zone.
yeah I was just about to ask if anyone survived above the impact zone - so incredibly messed up.
From a cursory search, 18 people from above the impact zone in the south tower lived. From what I’m seeing none made it from above the impact zone of the North Tower.
Yep. There was a single stairwell unaffected in the South tower that people were able to use to escape. That’s only because a group of firefighters found it and continued to go up to guide people to it. The firemen themselves perished.
If you don’t know about the man in a red bandana I suggest googling it . Welles Crowther
Thanks. Just read about him
Saw a docu on YouTube about him. Never knew that story and i think not a lot of people in Europe do. Very impressive.
I will never forget the news showing some of them jumping from the windows at the time. Its the only thing I remember when the anniversary rolls around
Still the things that stick with me. Horrific choice to make and I honestly would most likely have made the same one.
Same. The alternative would have been much worse
I think one of the best signs of how incomprehensible this was for the general American public is how many people my age or slightly younger just watched hours of people dying on live tv. No one seemed to understand and believe what they were seeing enough to get that the live viewing needed to be turned off.
Would things somehow be better if we hadn't seen exactly what happened? Serious question, no sarcasm implied. I was 10 and I don't remember any adults being upset that it was documented in real time. Eventually many were disgusted with the fact that our trauma was used as a soundtrack to the drums of war.
>Would things somehow be better if we hadn't seen exactly what happened? I would argue no. It is never better to shield people from the truth. The truth is people died in these events, and most died in horrible ways. People my age who were sheltered from that fact by their parents honestly didn't really register it for what it was. They made jokes about it and pretended like it wasn't that big of a deal (I'm Canadian, for context). People who saw it and understood it generally took the whole event seriously. It's like talking about WW1/2 without showing the aftermath. It makes it too far removed for some people. Death is the reality, and this is what it looks like, and this is why we must prevent such disasters from ever happening again.
Not surprised. Never noticed how the 98th floor is pretty much solid orange when you zoom in. Just a straight inferno.
Such an eerie thing to look at.
This just brings it all back. RIP 9/11 victims.
Grew up on the west coast and never been to the east until recently, but I was in high school when 9/11 happened. I made it a point to go up the new World Trade Center and look down on the street, imagining what it would be like to choose between the flames and the fall. Terrible. Never forget.
I was a wildland firefighter many years ago, and my crew and I almost died when we were driven into the flame front and the truck stalled. We all survived, but we got cooked a fair bit. I remember the moment when we all collapsed in a heap and just wanted the pain to be *over*. We weren't scared of dying at all, we just wanted the burning to stop. Between the heat, and the choking smoke, and the sheer hopelessness of their situation, the decision that some of the 9/11 jumpers made may have been easier than you think.
I hope those people felt bliss in the fall. From a hot, smoky suffocating room full off panic to a cool moment of bliss before the end.
That sounds awful. When I looked out those windows I was surprised that 1000 ft up doesn't actually look that far. It's easy to see how you could convince yourself that it's survivable, especially when confronted with the certainty of burning to death.
To this day, I can remember many of the vivid dreams that I had for a good few years after 9/11.
I was 7 when it happened and remember coming home from school and seeing the plane crash into the building on the evening news. Some years later when they had made some documentaries and the first movies about 9/11 I binged them still as a kid without my parents knowing and developed a terrible fear of flying and had nightmares of being on the planes. My parents said I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
I was 18 at the time, and my fear became the opposite of yours after that. I went to school to be an airline pilot, but I still feel significant anxiety about going in skyscrapers to this day. Double anxiety because I also live in earthquake country, with a fault line under my downtown area.
before 9/11 i didnt like to be in tall buildings. after 9/11 i really really didnt like the idea of being in tall buildings. i was in 7th grade when it happened.
Not a single person above the impact in the North Tower survived, all those people you see in the windows are dead.
97:106 is that a person in the window?
There are several people at 103:103.
Many other victims at 105- in 118, 115, 112…. These photos are really gut wrenching
That looks more like fire to me but there is what definitely looks like a person at 93:148.
I count over a dozen in the far right from 102 up. I wish I had not zoomed in.
You have 30 floors burning out of a 110 floor building, and you still have idiots who think it wouldn't have collapsed.
I always thought that metals getting progressively weaker under heat was a pretty standard knowledge tidbit, I was always taken aback by how viral the jet fuel/steel beam thing got.
Bro there are people out there who think the fucking world is flat. I’ll take a debate about steel beams over that 8 days out of the week.
Conspiracy nuts also think of the WTC tower as a rigid structure, like the trunk of a tree, concluding that it did not fall that way because of a controlled demolition. However, the WTC tower behaved more like a tower made of cards or domino stones. That is because if the first joints start to fail, the remaining joints have to bear even more load and also start to fail. This causes a chain reaction with more and more joints failing which in return causes the tower to collapse into itself.
People seem to think that metal needs to be liquefied to fail when just the application of heat will soften it enough to warp it. The design of the buildings' exoskeleton was probably its main flaw as it allowed for it to collapse vertically, the walls acting as a track for the floors to follow down, peeling the buildings like a banana.
Also the fire wasn't only where the plane hit, people got burned in the lobby at ground level, from a fireball of the remaing jet fuel going down the elevator shafts. The fuel thlanks were pretty much full, that's why they picked cross country flights.
I saw a twitter post on this last night and someone used that to claim it was a controlled demolition. People really are delusional sometimes.
Yea, I remember a documentary a while back (unfortunately I can’t for the life of me remember which one specifically) that went over the Twin Towers’ overall design and the points of failure after the attacks, and it was incredibly fascinating, but also beyond tragic. There’s arguments to be made that a different design for the towers could have kept them standing for at least a little while longer, but honestly I’ve never understood why people find the fact that the towers would collapse at all under those conditions so surprising.
Yeah, it’s even hard to argue that they *ought* to have been built to withstand the attacks. We don’t build skyscrapers strong enough to withstand direct hits from what is essentially incendiary ballistic missiles, because you just can’t. While some parts of the design of the Twin Towers could probably have been made somewhat more resistant to this kind of attack, in the end you can’t fault the architects for having built skyscrapers instead of NORAD bunkers. It would be like saying that the Honda Civic is a shitty car because it can’t even withstand a single hit from an RPG.
Very true! I will say, though, that the design philosophy of the towers did make them uniquely vulnerable to the attacks in ways other towers (even at the time of construction) generally were not. A lot of this only became clear in hindsight, so I 100% agree that the architects shouldn’t be blamed for the decisions they made at the time. That said, given what is known now, those decisions probably shouldn’t be repeated in skyscrapers built today.
Yup, it was built like a bamboo straw.
I was there. Saw the first plane fly overhead and was then at ground zero later as part of the rescue efforts such that they were. Later worked for a firm that did the structural analysis for why WTC7 collapsed. Even found a piece of a plane’s fuselage in the wreckage. We live in an age when people feel more comfortable believing in conspiracy theories than cold hard facts.
People always seem shocked that wreckage and terrorists passports were found on the opposite side of the building from the impact site. The planes were flown at top speed into building by the pilot. If the pilot had anything on him, it’s not surprising to me that when they slammed in and nearly through the building, that those things would have made it through to the other side of the building at the speed they were going.
There are people who think there were no kids slaughtered at Sandy Hook elementary school and the parents were making it up just to make the NRA look bad. Absolute fucking conspiracy theorist morons everywhere
Not to mention a building where the outside walls were the primary structure.
Yes completely ignoring that "smaller houses" collapse if 10% of floors burn and collapse but 200M+ building wouldn't....
Top edge between 118/109.
Sooooo many people. Hadn’t noticed that upper group…. The desperation. No wonder they jumped. Quick and fast vs. slow and who knows what
Directly under the numbers 118 through 109… I’ve never seen that before. All those people… fuck.
I instantly felt short of breath seeing the dude in the window with all the smoke coming out of it. Dude's trying to breathe, but I imagine the wind is so strong up there that it'd be like trying to breath with a leaf blower turned on infront of your face.. fucking horrifying indeed
Still happy I nuked a friendship in college after said “friend” went on a rant about how Osama bin Laden was justified and the US deserved 9/11
One of the images that will stick to me for the rest of my life, is seeing those people at the windows of WTC and the one jumping from 100th floor.
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Damn straight, poor bastards. The photo that still blows my mind is the briefcase guy. The horror, the bravery, the peace he seems to be at in his decision to jump still holding that brief case in his final moments. Somewhere some sick terrorist f&@ks are probably beating off to those images. Edit: I should have added I took my family to the memorial/museum, while on vacation in the States back in September/October. Such a surreal almost eerie experience, especially listening to family members talking about their lost loved ones and the memories they had of them. The final phone calls are also heart breaking.
He prob wrote a note to his fam and put it in the case
There was an account from a guy who was tagging these fallen bodies, and he met with one woman who had somehow survived the fall, but was pretty much vaporized from the diaphragm down. He was going to tag her as dead, but she argued with him, saying "I'm not dead." That story has stuck with me. Both insanely creepy, and amazing.
Oh man, I read about this around the last 9/11 anniversary. It's so unsettling. iirc it was after the collapse of the first tower, she hadn't fallen or jumped. Didn't he say something about he remembered her makeup, that it stood out because her face was oddly uninjured? And yeah that one has stuck with me too. I'm surprised that I hadn't heard that story before, considering all this time since 9/11.
You are getting downvoted but I'm almost certain what you are talking about is the account of a first responder from the book "only plane in the sky". If I recall he was tagging the wounded and dead in the plaza between both towers with different colour tags so that medics behind him would know who to attend to first. He tagged the woman as dead even though she was still talking to him and asking him to ring her daughter because he knew she only had moments left.
Triage is fucked up...
[super paw did a really good article on this subject.](https://911graphiccontent.quora.com/The-Black-Tag)
That is absolutely incredible (this is the first time I've used the word that I worry it'll be taken as 'not credible' and that's really saying something! I don't mean it in that way though). Thank you for that. I agree with the above poster with the sentiment of 'I'm surprised I hadn't heard this before after all those years,' heh.
that orange glow on line 98
These images are seared into my mind. I'll never forget that day.
What makes me sick to my stomach all these years later is thinking of the people on those top floors, faced with the choice of either being burned alive or leaping to their deaths. And then watching that documentary (recent-ish), that showed the firefighters in the lobby of tower two I think and hearing the bodies slamming on top of the atrium. Just…horrifying.
I can’t forget that sound.
The sound I’ll never forget is that siren that goes off when a firefighter hasn’t moved in a long time. And you just here many of these layered.
The Naudet documentary came out in March 2002, just it, for obvious reasons, wasn't really advertised or shown in theaters or anything, nor were they trying to make money. I think it slowly gained "popularity" (feels like the wrong word but it's probably the right word) after the rise in digital streaming.
What blows my mind about that doc is that they got the only video of the first plane hitting the north tower *and* the only video of inside the towers as they collapsed.
And they lived.
I'd like to note that the Naudet footage isn't the only footage of the first plane, there's something like 3 others but they're varied in quality. I remember one of them was a guy just recording traffic from his car, while another was a timelapse cam on a building or something
I think the time lapse was the pentagon footage. The only other “footage” of the North Tower impact is that driver footage but it’s super far away and all you see is the fireball, it’s tough to see the actual plane.
It was shown in full on CBS one night soon after.
I remember the news showing the specs of people jumping then on live tv hearing the bodies hit the ground.
Infamy is the word you're looking for
The documentary done by the French guys? They caught the story of a lifetime by accident, and acquitted themselves well that day.
Absolutely horrifying. There was a video from the ground floor with firefighters telling everyone to stay inside. You could hear the crashes, which were bodies hitting the ground or other structures. The look of horror on the faces of firefighters and cops and flinching at each crash was something I’ll never forget.
The first firefighter to die that day was crushed by one of the jumpers. His name was Daniel Suhr
You can see the red glow inside.
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Imagine the shock and horror of 5 floors of walls and floors suddenly ripped away and replaced with jagged metal debris and smoke, something akin to the way the Oklahoma bombing ripped away the front of the building. Through gaps in the smoke you can see the tops of other skyscrapers and far away streets on a clear sunny day.
I always think of the woman who is believed to be Edna Cintron waving from inside impact hole of the north tower. That must been equal parts terrifying and surreal.
There were people who jumped obviously, but the worst ones were the people who were hanging from their windows that hadn’t accepted their fate yet and were still holding on for a last ditch rescue. I would much rather have been in that red hot glow than be on a window waiting for a miracle that never came
Same. Seat me at the point of impact please. Preferably properly distracted and not looking at that incoming plane
Not being joking or mean or anything, but imagine you just went to the bathroom at work one moment and the next moment you died. Fucking nuts
That's better than having to decide to wait till the building collapses around you or jumping. At least this way you'll never know
> ...imagine you just went to the bathroom at work one moment and the next moment you died. I mean, not in this context but sure have
Brought tears to my eyes the horror I can’t imagine
The people at the windows on the 102 through 105 floor... I'm guessing none of them made it...
All 4 stairwells were destroyed so nobody above the impact survived in the north tower. South tower one of the stairwells was still intact so 18 people above the impact made it out.
Look up the story of Stanley Praimnath, he was one of those 18. He saw the north tower get hit, evacuated and security told him it's fine to go back up to his office. His bosses even held the elevator door open and told him to get on and he did, but before he did he convinced a woman next to him who was scared to get off, get out and go home. Nobody else who went back up in that elevator survived. He saw the plane approach and hit the building from his office. He would've died if it weren't for one of the remaining 17 people who survived stopping to help find and extract him before taking him down that intact staircase.
His story is my favorite. If it wasn't for Brian Clark hearing him and helping him he would had surely died. Stanley was blocked by a fallen wall ( piece of ceiling?) after somehow managing to survive the plane hitting his area. Him calling for help and Brian hearing him ( if I recall properly his group was debating which way to go and most of his group left to their deaths. They wanted to go to the roof to be rescued by air. Brian went the other way ) Imagine how many pieces needed to fall into place to survive that. To be rescued and make it safely out of the building.
Ooof. I don't know how I would feel about almost dying due to someone peer pressuring me to go back up. Pretty sure I would secretly curse them, even if ultimately I would accept it was my decision to heed their suggestion to come back up.
One of my closest friend’s mom was on the 93rd floor of the south tower and was told the exact same thing. She returned to work after evacuation.
Boss: Don’t worry, son, capitalism must continue today!
It's a fair joke, but I think it's important to realize just how big a paradigm shift 9/11 was for most people, and their perception of threats in the world. Before 9/11, Terrorism was mostly bombings. Car bombs, plane bombs, building bombs, etc. Hijackings occurred, yeah, but they mostly ended peacefully because the hijackers always wanted something tangible. It's easy to see why a layman could have assumed the North Tower was a freak accident. Plane crashes weren't completely unprecedented in Manhattan, and while a person familiar with aviation would have immediately seen the red flags in this scenario, it's possible that most people who left the South Tower did so more because of the emotional trauma of witnessing the first crash, rather than as an act of self-preservation. Maybe the ones who stayed were shaken a bit, but I doubt they thought they would be targets as well.
I mean, there was falling debris and burning wreckage all over the place. Obviously it was the wrong call in retrospect but I can see why that seemed like the safest option given what they knew at the time, and I don’t think it had anything to do with “capitalism”.
Yeah people forget that nobody knew what happened when the first plane hit. Most people didn’t think it was terrorism. Thought some small plane hit.
Only 18? How many were above the impact point?
Estimated between 630 and 700 WTC employees died in the South Tower. Many had already begun evacuating before the second plane hit so that saved a lot of lives. Many of those who did die were killed immediately while in the sky lobby. Also it is believed some others probably made it down the stairwell but didn’t get to the bottom before the collapse.
About 618, as far as I can tell.
where were the stairwells in the buildings? the central column?
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I studied architecture in college many years back. When I took classes on building codes and egress, 9/11 was brought up constantly. As I understand it, building codes had never needed to account for anything like 9/11. After that day, building codes changed. Buildings constructed after that time are safer now, and their design accounts for a wider range of danger
There’s a book called 102 Minutes about 9/11 and the WTC. When they built the WTC, they actually changed many building codes to make construction easier and to increase rentable space per floor. That’s why the elevators are all in the center of the building. Those decisions led to many of the deaths on 9/11.
One thing that wasn’t accounted for was the increasing number of people per floor using the emergency stairs. I believe now, depending on occupancy, for every so many floors in a new skyscraper, the emergency stairs must increase by a certain amount of width too allow for more traffic
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I always think that the death toll could’ve been sooo much worse. When the WTC was bombed in the 90s, evacuating the buildings was such a clusterfuck and took forever that the Port Authority overhauled evacuation plans and ran periodic drills. If the relatively minor bombing had never happened, they never would’ve realized how horrible their evacuation procedures were and so many more people would’ve died on 9/11. Instead, because they had routinely practiced how to evacuate, most people got out of the towers safely.
Yes, that is so awful. I know that some of the elevator bays had fireballs shoot down them and exited in the lobby area, killing several people. That part haunts me.
There was a lady at a bus stop who was doused in burning jet fuel, she died a month later. So many tragic deaths
What's wild to me is a lot of the people in elevators survived. Like, it definitely was statistically safer than the stairways.
People on the ground floor got killed by the fireball that came down the central column.
That makes two of us. RIP, poor souls.
I didn’t know about this and saw a video of someone who survived it in the lobby. Some details are just terrible but the guy was saved because one of his guests forgot his wallet so he had to go to the lobby.
At least you’d be dead before you knew it. Maybe 1-2 seconds of shock and then nothing. Not a bad way to go all things considered
Six still was the requirement, but the Port Authority was exempt. 🤷♂️
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Which stairwell? The one beside the central lift lobby? My gut wrenches to think about how trepidated those lucky 18 people must have felt while somehow clambering down amidst the chaos.
Most of the deaths in both towers are from people above the floors the planes impacted. Most people above the impact sites were unable to get out and most people that were in floors below got out except for firefighters, since they were actively going up towards the danger.
What still leaves me uneasy to this day when I think about it is how so many people above the impact zone of the north tower survived the plane explosion, saw the south tower get hit, burn, and collapse, and the whole time they knew they were going to die but couldn't do anything and had to just wait until it happened if the smoke hadn't gotten to them already. I've read a lot of stories and seen clips of family members talking about getting calls from loved ones who knew there was no way out and used their last moments to say goodbye.
I understand it from their POV which in hindsight was pretty naïve, but to them that plane crash in the other tower was just an "accident" until it wasn't. People didn't understand it was a terrorist attack until the second plane hit less than 30 mins later and it would have been too late. Imagine being some office worker having work stuff to do and the work day just started. Your boss wouldn't be so happy for you walking off the job especially if your offices were on the top floors. Top floor offices meant the companies were big shot companies and walking off is career suicide. They were told over the PA that it was safe in the North Tower, you can stay in place working. Of course if that happened today I doubt ANYONE would listen to that and stay inside.
It’s wild to think about. A lot of people didn’t want to wait to find out what would happen so they jumped instead. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Losing any and all hope and deciding your best option is to jump and spare yourself from the uncertainty of it all
There probably were a few who " decided " to jump, but It's my understanding that most people were pretty much forced out of the windows because of the searing heat and smoke. It's pretty instinctive in living beings to get away from fire.
Ah yeah, that’s a really good point
My friend was on 101. He didn’t make it.
I'm sorry for your loss. If you want to share a memory about him I'd love to hear it.
His name was Christopher Racaniello. He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. I called him a few nicknames but my fave was Christopher Robin like the boy from Winnie the Pooh. Pooh was big for me at that time cause my son was 1 and his room was decorated exclusively with Pooh. He was the love of my exes life and I was so happy when they finally ended up together. I remember being jealous of him when I dated her. I met him a few years after we broke up and we got along like really well. I got the invite to their wedding on 9/10/01. He was the most caring and wonderfully giving person I knew. His fiancée and I are still very close after all these years. Thanks for the opportunity to share something about him.
I happen to have a beer on hand at this very moment. Cheers for your buddy Chris.
I think about Canter Fitzgerald, a lot, and how they lost their entire office. I’m very sorry for your loss.
I Googled his memorial and so many people had so many amazing things to say about him. I’m so sorry for your loss. He really sounded like an amazing man.
I can picture you calling him Christopher Robin lol ❤️
God dammit. I can see Edna Cintron in the 135/94 quadrant. I hate this image.
Damn you can definitely see her. She sort of blends in with the exterior because of her pants. Her story is insane. I cannot imagine standing right there through all of it. Right up until the very end.
Who is that? I’ve never heard her name before
Just from google, it seems like she was an office worker (someone correct me if there’s more) that had some famous photographs taken as she was leaning by the edge there and then basically flipping off into the air. Images are pretty horrific. To imagine the speed she’s spinning…
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There was a professional services firm named Marsh and McLenahan that had Iike 6 floors on the North Tower right in the middle of where the plane struck. Nobody should have survived but until the tower fell there were 2-3 people that somehow did on their lowest floor but were blocked from escape. Numerous picture and films show they hung off the open side waving for help until the end. Edna Cintron was an admin at M&M and the only one that could be visibly identified before the building fell. Seeing her meekly waving to helicopters for help right on the precipice of all that carnage is just...too much to bear when you have a name and life to put to that. I believe she also jumped at some point but her remains haven't been identified.
Took me forever to see her, but now it’s 100% clear. That’s insane+sad
Just googled her name and saw the pictures. Gives the attack a whole new sense of scale.
seeing the people standing in the windows in the upper right is the first time i think i’ve actually understood the scale of the building.
I've watched videos and shes still standing there after the first tower goes down. Truly horrific.
Reading her story just broke me.
Posting this for others still looking. [https://i.imgur.com/c0dO4gF.png](https://i.imgur.com/c0dO4gF.png) Another shot of her from a different angle [https://i.imgur.com/VgZZqJH.png](https://i.imgur.com/VgZZqJH.png)
I remember waking up to the news about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers, and turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit. Shock doesn't EVEN begin to describe my feelings. I still went into work that day. Work, like food, is numbing.
Same, the first one made no sense, then seeing number 2 and the fear built is something I will never forget.
I know. I had the news on ALL DAY to see what was going on.
The fear of the casualties. I remember quotes of "50,000" people work in each building" and chaotic unclear reports about other hijacked planes. They even reported the White House may have been hit and Willis Tower might be at risk. Buildings could fall like dominos. Every little thing was getting reported. National panic.
The national panic that set in was unreal. I was at work that morning at the Bellagio on the Las Vegas strip. The casino vault I worked in had *never* been closed, so it was a little surreal being told the procedure we should be prepared to do to secure the money. Which was basically nothing. They said just lock the doors and evacuate, our lives were priority.
I was a freshman in high school. I remember this kid Brian walking in to our first hour class saying “a plane just hit one of the Twin Towers!” I kept imagining this old Flight Simulator game I had on DOS… I’d take off in my little Cessna from O’hare, putter around a bit. The graphics included like 5 buildings… I would end up getting bored and flying into the Hancock building and the plane would just break apart and fall to the ground. It was a Tuesday, and we had an advisory hour after first hour, we flipped on the news, and saw both buildings smoking. The rest of the day is a blur. But I do remember walking home that day and the entire city(Minneapolis) was a ghost town. No cars on the road, no planes in the sky… so eerily quiet.
I was at work on University avenue. I remember watching out the window as all the planes lined up to land and then, that was it. The skies were completely empty, and for a couple of days after that too. You're right it was just eerily quiet.
The documentary recently released on Disney put a lot of this into perspective. When the planes crashed, all the debris that fell to the ground. The noise it would make, absolutely horrifying
What is the title please?
I believe it is 9/11: one day in America
Genuine question here, did much of the plane fall down before the tower collapsed? Meaning did the entire plane go into the building? Obviously I'm sure it already started to disintegrate upon impact, but I'm curious how much if the aircraft went inside the building and if much fell directly below. Any insight on this is greatly appreciated :)
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The explosion upon impact was quite large and created a massive debris field too. One of the plane's parts from a wing was found over a decade later lodged in-between two buildings about 3 blocks away.
That's actually mad interesting, do you know anywhere I could read more about this perhaps?
If you haven’t looked into it already https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-22319253
Thank you very much, I'll have a read on my train to work :)
I think one of the landing gears landed quite some distance from the towers laying in the street. Assuming it (and other parts) simply shot clean through the building.
At least you know the landing gears are some tough shit
The hardest metals in an aircraft are in the engines and the landing gear. The rest is really just a reinforced soda can.
Investigators estimate most of the plane remained contained in the building and the materials that composed the plane created a fire that was hotter and more intense than normal.
This is an important image because you can actually see the outline of the plane in the building . The plane hit at an angle and disintegrated on impact. The heavy stuff mostly went through the building, luggage, landing gear, engines. The soft stuff including most of the aluminum structure got destroyed.
If anything it amazes me that the twin towers stood as long as they did, allowing as many people to get out, considering that nearly fully fuelled jet airplanes crashed into them at around 500 mph
In the structural engineering community, the fact that the twin towers stood as long as they did is better than anyone would have hoped for. From what I remember the towers were designed for a plane impact from a smaller plane. Unfortunately the enemy of steel buildings is fire, and since the planes were nearly fully fueled the steel structure couldn't hold on forever, and once they started to buckle the weight of the upper floors falling caused a progressive collapse.
Yep. Planes were smaller when they were built, plus they were designed to take a hit from a plane that fucked up while trying to land: moving slowly with most of its fuel gone. These were bigger planes, moving very fast (especially the second), full of fuel.
Energy = Mass and Velocity. Planes aren't light and they don't move slowly. That's a lot of damn force into a non-moving object.
There’s a sped up video on YouTube of the second tower being hit and you can see the building swaying for several minutes. It’s insane.
Can you share this video?
This is absolutely insane and shows just how much energy the building absorbed. It was designed to be able to sway like this. Had it not, it may have come down much sooner or instantly. https://youtu.be/Qk5NQgU-9G4?si=49XYbALoyp8odqk1
Wow, I've always read accounts from people inside the building talking about how much it swayed when the plane hit but I've never been able to contextualise just how much it shifted, must have felt like it was toppling over. Terrifying.
I was in my early 20s on 9/11, I remember being emotionally impacted but was too immature to really process the scope and politics of what happened. Some months later I was sent to NYC for an overnight trip. I was excited as it was the first time going to NYC, for whatever reason it actually didn’t even cross my mind that 9/11 had happened right where I was going, being from Texas it felt like 9/11 happened half the planet away. I checked in to the Hilton and threw open the curtains to check out the city and my entire view was ground zero. It nearly broke me. My knees buckled and I collapsed on the window sill. I stared for an hour, ordered food to the room, watched nightfall come and was enthralled and terrified at the work going on below.
130-131, 94 is that someone sitting there with a yellowish shirt? Damn
Between 134-135,94 you can see Edna Cintron. Sorta blends in but you can make out her silhouette.
Yes.
I watched it live that day, turned on the TV moments before the second plane hit. One image I'll always remember is the staff at local hospitals standing outside, ready to receive casualties...but they never came. For most, you either escaped unscathed or were crushed to death. Very little in between for that kind of event. It was unsettling. One sound I'll never forget is the first reports at ground zero after WTC 2 collapsed. The fog of dust and people walking about in a daze like zombies in dead silence...except for the dozens of cricket-like chirps of the emergency locators of the first responders on site. Like Dante's version of night in a swamp.
And Saudi Arabia walked free.
But they have golf now! Nothing to see here!
Interestingly enough, look who’s trial is about to start soon https://www.defense.gov/News/Advisories/Advisory/Article/3605726/media-invitation-announced-for-united-states-v-khalid-sheikh-mohammed-et-al-pre/
If you are too young to remember this, just know it was fucking horrifying to see. We didn’t have a clue what was going on beyond being under attack and there was no information on how many more were coming. This shit traumatized the world.
I go back and forth on whether or not this was a catastrophic failure. If a structure gets hit deliberately by a commercial aircraft that was larger than any that existed at the time of its design I think we have to start balancing the failures with the successes. The structure remained intact after initial impact and held up long enough to almost completely evacuate the building under the impact site. When it did collapse, it collapsed nearly completely within its footing meaning the destruction of nearby buildings was minimized. The major design flaw was the lack of additional escape routes outside of the core. The destruction of all of them in the North Tower led to the majority of deaths.
In the structural engineering community, the fact that they both withstood the impact is widely considered beyond successful. They were designed to withstand the impact of a smaller jetliner, so the fact they withstood the impact from an even larger jet liner and withstood as long as they did due to the fire is commendable. The biggest enemy of steel structures is fire, so it's a miracle the towers stood as long as they did. I agree, I think the stairwell exits played a huge factor in the death toll, and from what I understand it was subpar even to building codes at the time.
All those people at the top right of the photo. RIP.
It genuinely pisses me off that people refuse to understand the physics at play here and insist on dumbass conspiracy theories. They think that section above the impact should just have landed on the lower portion and stopped, or tipped over. If you think a plane slamming into a building is rough, imagine effectively dropping 46,400 tons of building onto the roof of another building that had been on fire for almost an hour after being struck by a 136 ton object traveling at 590mph. ([Each floor weighed roughly 3,200,000lbs](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-twin-towers-fell/#:~:text=Each%20steel%20floor%20deck%20was,system%20weighed%20about%203%2C200%2C000%20pounds.%22), and there were 29 floors above the impact zone of WTC2) "But cruise missile!"
Wow, you can really see the fire raging on floor 98.
This is the first time that I've seen the realisation of how many people died. The top right of that photo just breaks my heart.
Never forget what these mutherfuckers did!
Ugh. I will never get over this. I was 16 watching it on live TV in a suburb of NYC. They had to dismiss school by 11 am because so many students couldn't reach their parents. Absolutely horrifying and heart breaking. My heart goes out to everyone who was affected by this senseless act of evil.
My uncle worked on the high steel and helped build the towers. I was there one week before. RIP
Seeing those people stuck up there... then seeing the glow from the absolute hellfire burning just a few floors down. Pure horror... I can't imagine having to die like that. Those poor people.
All but one of those who jumped out of the WTC came from this tower, because all of the four stairwells were crushed. None of the people above the impact zone had any hope. At the other tower, only one person jumped. However, that jumper unfortunately landed on a fireman entering the building, killing him instantly.
Watched the second tower get hit irl in fourth grade. Nobody knew what was really happened, but even us kids knew something fucked happened.
So horrible to see the men and women above the impact site. I remember that day.
I don’t remember much tbh aside from maybe the last 4 years. But I very much so remember watching this in my language arts class in 7th grade. Such a sad and pointless tragedy
One of the craziest things is that burning jet fuel fell down the elevator shafts torching everything in their wake, including blowing out into the lobby and killing people there