Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley Read Free Book Online

safety team. Many fire marshals weren’t even in their areas when the incident occurred…. All building occupants need some level of training or education if they are going to react safely to a fire in a high-rise.” It wasn’t enough to rely upon volunteer fire marshals or even firefighters. People needed to be able to get out on their own.
    After 1993, it was obvious that changes needed to be made. The Port Authority spent more than $100 million on improvements. But notice where the money went: the perimeter of the complex was ringed with ten-thousand-pound planters to prevent vehicles from getting too close. Some two hundred cameras went up. Truck drivers were photographed on their way into the truck dock. Dogs sniffed for explosives. The Port Authority also installed a repeater system to help boost the fire department’s radios when firefighters had to go up into the buildings.
    But the new vision for the World Trade Center did not feature a role for regular people. Alan Reiss, who was the director of the Port Authority’s World Trade Department, which ran the World Trade Center, put it this way in his testimony to the September 11th Commission: “Evacuation protocols did not change after 1993, but training and equipment certainly did.” Safety engineers’ recommendations to widen the stairways were overruled. It would cost too much money in lost real estate. Fire drills were held twice a year, but the Trade Center’s definition of a fire drill was to ask everyone to gather in the middle of their floors and pick up an emergency phone to obtain directions. Employees did not generally go into the stairwells, let alone down them.
    Information and responsibility remained the province of the exclusive few—the building’s fire safety director, the Port Authority police, and other first responders. The role of regular people was to await orders.
    On 9/11, the ten-thousand-pound planters didn’t help, unfortunately. Neither did the repeater: it was never correctly turned on, and, in the chaos of that morning, firefighters concluded it was broken. Meanwhile, the relatively cheap addition of glow-in-the-dark strips along the stairs after 1993 made the evacuation much easier, survivors reported. But many thousands of people did not even know where the stairs were. Fewer than half the survivors had ever entered the stairwells before, the NIST report found. Only 45 percent of 445 Trade Center workers interviewed after 9/11 had known the buildings even had three stairwells, according to the early results of a study conducted at Columbia University. “I found the lack of preparedness shocking. People were not thinking vertically. They were thinking horizontally,” says lead investigator Robyn Gershon, a professor at Columbia. “Many people said they hesitated to get into the stairways because they didn’t know where they would end up.”
    Most people had no idea how to navigate the transfer hallways on lower floors. Only half had known the doors to the roof would be locked, according to Gershon’s findings. The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that people may have died as a result: “Once the South Tower was hit, civilians on upper floors wasted time ascending the stairs instead of searching for a clear path down, when stairwell A was at least initially passable.”
    After 1993, the fire-marshal system remained in effect. Zedeño was a marshal on 9/11. In fact, she was the only member of the fire-safety team on her floor that morning. Everyone else had yet to arrive to work. Keep in mind that each floor of the Trade Center was about an acre in size. Zedeño was a “searcher,” meaning she was supposed to search the women’s bathroom before she went into the stairs. In reality, she didn’t search for anyone anywhere. She didn’t even remember she was a fire marshal until months after the towers had collapsed.
    It turns out that on 9/11, fire marshals did not know much more than regular people. Of those interviewed