Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Let's not forget the late Rick Rescorla, who made sure that about thirty floors' worth of South Tower workers (from the 44th to 74th floors) were most of the way out of the building before the South Tower was hit, which undoubtedly made it much easier to evacuate everyone else.

http://www.medaloffreedom.com/RickRescorla1.htm

The people who worked in the WTC should also be proud. They didn't panic and trample each other.

Me, and Rudy Giuliani, and everyone else with half a brain thought that 10,000 or more were likely to have been killed that awful morning, because we had no clue how much effort had gone into evacuation plans.

Meanwhile, jonah goldberg was kvetching just the other day about the irrelevancy of first responders to the "war" on terror (and, presumably, by extension, any other measures to mitigate actual terrorist attacks while we wait for a terrorist-free utopia to come into existence thanks to our invasion strategy).

Sometimes, the idiocy of the right wing is beyond imagination....

Who was the engineer who decided to reinforce the lighting in the emergency stairways after the first, failed terrorist attack? The evacuation could surely not have gone as well as it did without this, for it only takes one slip in the edark to start a panic.

And credit to the code authorities who make the rules that require enough exit stairs, architects who see them put into practice, structural engineers who make sure a building will stand for a time in fire, and fire marshalls and city code enforcement personnel who enforce all those rules.

Why were there no helicopters to rescue those on the upper floors? It surprised me at the time, and the answer that I got then looks incorrect, since I've seen helicopter rescues at sea in storm conditions far worse than the smoke could be in the WTC.

DSW

> Why were there no helicopters to rescue those on the upper floors?

I would guess that nobody in a position to authorize such a rescue expected the building to fall, or to fall in less than an hour.

> or to fall in less than an hour.

Correction: One tower stood for about an hour and forty minutes. In any case, I would expect that someone was trying to make a plan for how to evacuate the upper levels, but it probably assumed that the building would stay intact long enough and the fire could be extinguished.

I don't also don't think that flames and smoke can really be compared to storm conditions.

>Who was the engineer who decided to reinforce the lighting in the emergency stairways after the first, failed terrorist attack? The evacuation could surely not have gone as well as it did without this, for it only takes one slip in the edark to start a panic.

That was a great idea. I had to evacuate during the blackout last summer, and there were no emergency lights in the stairwell. Even though it was a leisurely evacuation because nothing was on fire, it was awful trying to figure out how to get down 15 flights without a light. And my cell phone wasn't bright enough. Fortunately someone came down behind me with a flashlight.