On the 74th floor of the North Tower,Dharam Pal, chief mechanical engineer forplumbing and fire protection for the PortAuthority of New York and New Jersey,thought the noise he heard was only theexplosion of the television antenna trans-former on the roof, but he didn’t hesitate toleave immediately. In 1993, he and his co-

workers had stayed because they didn’t realizethe severity of the situation.

“I might have stayed this time, too, if I had-n’t gone through 1993,” Pal says. “In 1993,evacuating later, I almost died in the stairwaybecause of the smoke.”

John Van Name, who’d worked in 1993with Brown on the 88th floor of the South

Tower for EBASCO, a predecessor of Wash-ington Group International, was having luncha block away during the bombing. Most of hiscolleagues stayed at their desks because thesmoke from the bomb affected mostly thelowest section of the North Tower. On Sep-tember 11, however, he and 150 co-workerson the 91st floor of the South Tower wereamong the first—Van Name believes—toevacuate offices above the 78th floor.

Even so, Rita Fahy, Ph.D., manager of theNFPA Fire Databases and Systems, andGuylène Proulx, Ph.D., a research officer at

MANY VETERANS OF THE 1993 WORLD Trade Center truck bombingweren’t going to make the same decision on September 11, 2001,that they’d made eight years before.

“Every fiber in my body said, ‘I’m getting out of here,’ ” says MagdalenaBrown, who worked for Washington Group International, an engineering firmon the 91st floor of the South Tower. In 1993, she’d stayed put for hours,then had to walk down 88 flights in the dark.

54 NFPA JOURNAL SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002

factor

WORLD TRADE CENTER EVACUEES SHARE LESSONS LEARNED AS NFPA STARTS NEW BEHAVIOR STUDY■ STEPHEN MURPHY

HUMANTHE

PHOTOGRAPH: AP PHOTO/AMY SANCETTA

Pedestrians flee the area of the WorldTrade Center as the center's South Towercollapses.

Left 91st floor, South Tower, minutes after jet hit NorthTower at 8:46 a.m. Took local elevator from 91st floorto sky lobby at 78th floor.

At 8:50, took express elevator from 78th floor to mainlobby. While in elevator, heard PA announcement thatSouth Tower was safe and occupants should return towork.

Exited WTC through concourse at Church and LibertyStreets and reached subway entrance at Fulton Streetand Broadway, two blocks north of WTC, as second jethit South Tower at 9:03.

Left 91st floor, South Tower, minutes after jet hit NorthTower at 8:46 a.m. Took local elevator from 91st floorto sky lobby at 78th floor.

Took express elevator from 78th floor to main lobby.

Was directed up an escalator to the mezzanine leveland to stay there. Five minutes later at 9:00, was directedto go back down to the concourse and exit the WTC bythe Liberty Street exit of 4 WTC.

At 9:03, second jet hit South Tower and falling debrisat two exits prevented his leaving the building.

Walked 300 to 400 feet to subway beneath WTC. At9:10, got on train. Train left WTC at 9:20.

Left 91st floor, South Tower, minutes after jet hit NorthTower at 8:46 a.m. Unsure which stairwell she took.

Between the 80th and 70th floors, heard PAannouncement that South Tower was safe and occupantscould return to work. Kept going down the stairs.

Between the 50th and 40th floors when the second jethit the South Tower at 9:03.

Reached mezzanine level around 9:20.

Walked down escalator to main lobby, up anotherescalator and exited WTC at Church Street at 9:39.Reached City Hall when South Tower collapsed at 9:59.

John Van Name

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Pete Trombetta

Magdalena Brown

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4

5

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2

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4

5

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2

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SOUTH TOWER

5

78

84

56 NFPA JOURNAL SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002

FIVE SURVIVORS...FIVE WAYS OUT

As an example of thecomplexity of tracking howthousands of people evac-uated the Twin Towers onSeptember 11, the fivesurvivors interviewed forthis article took quite dif-ferent paths to escape,using stairs, elevators, ortrains. The illustrationshows the jets’ impactarea in the South Towerbetween the 78th and84th floors, and in theNorth Tower between the94th and 99th floors. Seepage 45 for another illus-tration of the World TradeCenter complex.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Left 74th floor, North Tower, minutes after jet hit NorthTower at 8:46 a.m. Took Stairwell C.

Below 50th floor, stairwell became crowded.

At 24th floor encountered water in stairwell, andfirefighters coming up slowed down the flow of evacuees.

Exited stairwell at mezzanine level and walked downescalator to main lobby at 9:40.

Stayed at bottom of escalator to help direct evacueesuntil 9:50.

Went to Marriott Hotel lobby at 3 WTC with Port Authoritystaff. Buried in debris in hotel lobby when at 9:59 theSouth Tower collapsed. Dug himself out.

Blinded by dust, crawled over collapsed beams andreached waterfront marina at 10:13. North Towercollapsed at 10:28, crushing hotel lobby.

Left 38th floor, North Tower, minutes after jet hit NorthTower at 8:46 a.m. Took Stairwell C.

Encountered smoke around 20th floor and firefighterscoming up at about the 9th floor.

Had to cross over to northeast corner of core around4th floor.

Exited stairwell at mezzanine level. Descent took 20minutes.

Was directed to a mezzanine exit in the northwest corner.Crossed a bridge over the West Side Highway, headingtoward the waterfront.

Dharam Pal

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Brian Bernstein

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NORTH TOWER

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457

99

94

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 NFPA JOURNAL 57

WTC: ONE YEAR LATER

ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPHER J. McCUSKER

the National Research Council Canada(NRCC), are surprised so many people inthe South Tower felt they were in dangerand started evacuating before the secondairliner hit.

“I would have stayed in place in the SouthTower,” says Proulx, who with Fahy conducteda survey of occupants’ evacuation behaviorduring the 1993 bombing. After the bombing,the World Trade Center made a number ofimprovements in evacuation procedures andaids, including the installation of emergencylighting in the stairways and elevators.

Fahy and Proulx applied to the NationalInstitute of Standards and Technology(NIST) to again fund a similar survey of occu-pants’ behavior and their interaction with thetowers’ environment and the fire on Septem-ber 11. The money NIST is seeking for itsoverall study of the collapse, of which Fahyand Proulx’s study would be a part, is includedin a supplemental homeland security appro-priation President Bush signed in August (see“Inside the Beltway” on page 34).

After months of waiting for funding,NFPA and NRCC started the project on theirown, mailing out more than 600 question-naires last June and July. Fahy and Proulx wereconcerned that the longer they waited to sur-vey survivors, the less valid the findings willbe.

1

“Time is a factor,” says Proulx. “These sur-veys need to be done as soon as possible afterthe incident. As time goes by, people rational-ize their responses as to why they escaped.”Proulx believes that to obtain informationneeded to improve life safety in high-rises, it’sessential to conduct a scientific survey.Although the media have published manyaccounts of survivors’ experiences, those spe-cific cases can’t be generalized.

Fahy hopes the NIST funding will be avail-able to pay for the analysis, once the responsesare back.

What they want to knowIn the September 11 study, Fahy and Proulxwant to gather statistics on the occupants’ ini-tial awareness of the attacks; their actionsbefore evacuation; how they perceived,exchanged, and obtained information; condi-tions on the floors; how long they waitedbefore starting to evacuate; their movementand the conditions in the stairwells; their

evacuation training; the impact of the 1993evacuation on their September 11 behavior;and the outcome for people with disabilities.

Unlike their 1993 survey, which was sentout five to six months after the bombing to1,598 fire wardens for the 1,200 World TradeCenter tenants, Fahy and Proulx contacted

tenant companies to obtain their help in dis-tributing this new survey to staff who were inthe Twin Towers on September 11.

Initial awarenessIn the 1993 study, the wardens returned 406useable surveys. Of these, 84 percent of therespondents in the North Tower and 73.9 per-cent in the South Tower said the explosioninitially alerted them to the bombing.

On September 11, Pete Trombetta heardpipes clanging on the 91st floor of the SouthTower and saw the lights flickering. His firstthought was that it was caused by the con-struction that had been going on for monthson the floor above him. Trombetta, a designsupervisor for the Washington Group Inter-national, didn’t have a window and his workarea faced away from the North Tower. Thefirst plane had hit at 8:46 a.m., and he didn’tknow it.

Van Name, a member of the NFPA Tech-nical Committee on Heat Recovery SteamGenerators, was in his 91st-floor office, facingthe south and east sides of the North Tower,when he heard jet engines then a loud crash.Looking two or three floors up, he saw holesin the North Tower’s east face and a tremen-dous amount of paper flying out of them,followed by a huge fireball. Then another fire-ball erupted on the south face.

On the same floor, but on the south sidefacing away from the North Tower, Brownnoticed paper flying around outside and won-dered if it was ticker-tape parade. She didn’t

feel or hear anything until a secretary ran toher side of the floor, screaming that a planehad hit the North Tower, that it was on fire,and that people were jumping.

On the 38th floor of the North Tower,Brian Bernstein was working at his desk atLehman Brothers when he heard a thunder-

ous boom and felt the building sway, asthough someone had grabbed his shouldersand was pushing him back and forth.

“I looked out the window just a few feetaway to see glass, thousands of sheets ofpaper, and large metal pieces raining down,”he says. “My first reaction was that the top ofthe building blew off in some gas explosion orthat a plane or helicopter had clipped the topof the building.”

Evacuation trainingThe Port Authority’s Pal says everyone on the74th floor in the North Tower took the firedrills seriously after the 1993 bombing whenthey’d struggled to find which dark, smoke-filled stairwells were less crowded. Bernstein,who’d just started working 36 floors below Palthe previous May, believes the building policywas to evacuate the floor where a fire occurredand two floors above and below it, but he can’tremember that being said during a fire drill.

“I think I can speak for most in saying thatpeople in the workplace don’t really pay toomuch attention to a fire drill,” Bernstein says.

Working in the South Tower, Brownrecalls fire drills in which people congregatedwhere the hallways intersected in the centerof the floor and were told to wait for instruc-tions and not to use the elevators. ColleagueVan Name, a senior consulting engineer, saysthat during the drills, which they had at leasttwice a year, a public announcement toldthem they should go three floors below orabove their floor if it were on fire. But they

58 NFPA JOURNAL SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002

TO OBTAIN INFORMATION NEEDED TO IMPROVELIFE SAFETY IN HIGH-RISES, IT’S ESSENTIAL TOCONDUCT A SCIENTIFIC SURVEY. ALTHOUGH THEMEDIA HAVE PUBLISHED MANY ACCOUNTS OFSURVIVORS’ EXPERIENCES, THOSE SPECIFICCASES CAN’T BE GENERALIZED.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

never practiced evacuating the area by goinginto the stairwells.

“You’ve done this hundreds of times sinceyou were a school child, and you know you’llbe able to get out,” says Bernstein. “However,now I can’t help but pay serious attention.”

Actions before evacuatingIn the 1993 study, 65.9 percent of therespondents self-evacuated from the NorthTower, and 45.5 percent self-evacuated fromthe South Tower. Of those who stayed, mostdid so because they were waiting for infor-mation or instructions, were told to wait,thought it was better to wait, or didn’t knowthere was a problem.

After witnessing the fireball on September11, Van Name started to call 911, whichrequired getting an outside line first, butstopped when he thought someone else wasprobably doing it. He next tried unsuccessfullyto reach a friend at LaGuardia Airport to tellhim a plane had crashed into the North Tower.

“Then I decided, ‘This isn’t the place to be,’ ” Van Name says. “I’ve seen power plantfires, but I never saw that much fire in my life.”He and another engineer started herding peo-ple out, telling them to leave everything there,call people later, and not to bother shuttingdown their computers.

“Within a minute, John came down theaisle saying, ‘Everybody up and out,’ ” Trom-

betta recalls. “He didn’t tell uswhy so as not to panic us. Ikidded him that I had to getmy plot plans I had justprinted. He said, ‘No, go.’ ”Trombetta left the 91st floorimmediately, as Brown had onher own.

In the North Tower, Pal,who’s a member of the NFPATechnical Committee onMotor Vehicle and HighwaySafety, looked down from the74th floor and saw large, darkpieces of the building fallinginto the plaza.

“I told my staff, ‘Let’s getout,’ ” Pal says. “Some werealready on their way down.Practically everyone had beenthere in 1993.” He was off thefloor within three minutes of

the crash.Thirty-six floors below, Bernstein paused a

few seconds to see if the building was going tofall over. Then, he looked out the window forthree to four seconds, grabbed his wallet, keys,and Palm Pilot™, which were all in front ofhim, and left for the stairs. His instincts gothim out.

Movement in the stairwells“I never really knew where the stairwellswere,” Bernstein says. “I just assumed theywere in the core somewhere.” He took Stair-way C in the southeast quarter of the NorthTower’s core.

Several times on the way down, the flowstopped. Around the 20th floor, he encoun-tered a lot of smoke. At about the 9th floor, hemet firefighters running up. A few floorsbelow, he noticed water rushing down thestairs.

Bernstein believes he had to cross over tothe northeast quarter of the core at the 4thfloor, exiting the stairway on the mezzanine atthe plaza level. The descent had taken him 20minutes.

On the 74th floor, Pal automatically tookthe closest stairwell, also C. Within seven oreight minutes, he smelled burning fuel. Stillthinking it was a transformer fire, he feltsafer in the stairwell. Below the 50th floor,the stairs got crowded, and people made

room for burn victims to pass. There wasstill no panic, and he still didn’t know whathad actually happened.

At the 24th floor, Pal encountered a lot ofwater, and firefighters coming up the stairsslowed the downward flow. He finally exitedthe stairwell on the mezzanine after a 40-minute descent.

Brown is unsure which of the three SouthTower stairways she took, but she was in the70s series of floors when a public address sys-tem announcement told the occupants thatthe South Tower was okay and they couldreturn to their offices. Although she didn’tsmell any burning jet fuel or encounter anysmoke, she kept going down.

Stopping a couple of times, once as peoplecame back up after the announcement, shewas in the 40s when the second jet hit. Herbody swayed with the building and her kneesbuckled, but people stayed calm because thestairway remained intact. Walking down at agood clip, she reached the mezzanine half anhour after she left her office.

Many people in the South Tower tookelevators down, and Brown thought for asecond about taking one, too. She knew thatin the stairway she’d be in harm’s way longer,but she also remembered that the power lossin 1993 had trapped people in the elevatorsfor hours.

Still, Van Name and Trombetta got on thelocal elevators at the 91st floor. Trombetta hadsaid to Van Name that maybe they should takethe stairs instead, but Van Name said it wasokay to take an elevator as they still had power.

By now, 60 to 100 people had gathered atthe 78th-floor sky lobby, where passengerschanged to the express elevators to the 44th-floor sky lobby or to the main lobby on theground floor. Four or five of the 10 expresselevators were running; the others were out ofservice for repairs or weren’t scheduled to rununtil more businesses were open.

Trombetta, who could now smell some-thing like burning rubber, hadn’t heard theannouncement that the South Tower was safe.

The 25 to 30 people in his elevator to themain lobby asked each other what had hap-pened. One man said a 727 had hit theNorth Tower.

“I knew that 20- to 30-second ride enclosedin that elevator would be the longest of mylife,” Trombetta says.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 NFPA JOURNAL 59PHOTOGRAPH: AP PHOTO/GULNARA SAMOILOVA

People who had fled the World Trade Center in New Yorkafter it was struck by hijacked airplanes react to the sightof the burning towers.

WTC: ONE YEAR LATER

Van Name says most of his co-workers roderather than walked down. Concerned aboutusing an elevator, he discussed with anotherengineer the possibility that the North Towermight lean into the South Tower.

“But I felt getting out faster was better thangetting out slower,” he says.

At the 78th floor, Van Name met twowomen from his office who’d been outsidesmoking and who were going back up to the91st floor to get their coats before evacuating.Two men from his office went back up withthem. The two women evacuated safely bytaking an elevator. The two men were amongthe 13 people from the Washington GroupInternational who died that day. Several of hisco-workers who returned to the South Tower’s91st floor were on the phones to their familieswhen the second 767 jet crashed into the 78thto the 84th floors at 9:03 a.m.

At 8:50 a.m., Van Name took an expresselevator to the main lobby with about 30 otherpeople. While in the express elevator, he heardthe announcement that the North Tower wasin a state of emergency, the South Tower wassafe, and that they should return to work.However, he felt it was better to have a 360-degree path of escape outside.

His two elevator rides took 72 seconds.“The elevators were waiting for us,” he says.

“A number of businesses start at 9:00 and9:30, so the building wasn’t full.”

Getting outside the towersOnce they reached the mezzanine or the mainlobby below it, the evacuees faced morechoices and greater dangers.

Brown left the stairwell on the mezzanineand walked down an escalator to the mainlobby, where security guards urged people tomove faster. By that time, however, she could-n’t run. She went up another escalator and leftthe World Trade Center by the Church Streetdoors because all the other exits were blockedby debris.

Brown then made the final decision thatsaved her life. Although a lot of people wereoutside gawking at the fires in the towers, shekept walking because she just wanted to getaway from it all. She was at City Hall 10 min-utes later when the South Tower collapsed at9:59. A co-worker who’d been in the stairwayahead of her is believed to have tried to catcha train home; his body was found in the sub-

way under the collapsed World Trade Center.In the South Tower lobby, Port Author-

ity staff directed Trombetta and othersthrough the concourse and up an escalatorto the mezzanine.

“Facing the North Tower through 20- to30-foot-high (6- to 9-meter-high) glasswalls, we pasted our faces against theglass,” he says. “We were drawn to the dis-play of carnage. The plaza looked likeArmageddon and Hiroshima. We didn’trealize the danger to us.”

Five minutes later at 9:00, Port Author-ity staff returned and told the group to goback down to the concourse and out of thebuilding by the Liberty Street exit of 4World Trade Center. Without panicking,they started walking.

Then the second jet hit, raining debrison the exit doors, jamming them shut.Trombetta, who thought the debris wasfrom the North Tower, unsuccessfully triedtwo exits, then headed toward the subwayentrance 300 to 400 feet (91 to 121meters) away.Transit personnel opened thegates so the turnstiles didn’t slow peopledown. One of the two trains in the stationwas just leaving, so he got on the second at9:10 a.m. It pulled out at 9:20.

“I owe a debt of gratitude to John (VanName) for acting instinctively,” saysTrombetta.

“John ‘bullied’ people into elevators andsaved their lives,” Brown says. “One colleaguehad a bad hip and probably wouldn’t havemade it out without taking an elevator.”

After stopping in the concourse severaltimes to try unsuccessfully to call his wife onhis cell phone, Van Name himself left thebuilding through the concourse exit at Churchand Liberty Streets and was entering the sub-way two blocks north of the World TradeCenter at Fulton Street and Broadway whenthe second jet hit.

In the North Tower, firefighters andsecurity personnel on the mezzaninedirected Bernstein to an exit in the north-west corner.To reach a bridge over the WestSide Highway, he had to cross a 20- to 30-foot (6- to 9-meter) uncovered area asdebris fell. But he followed the crowd thatway because they were heading where hewanted to go—the waterfront.

Also in the North Tower, Pal walked down

the stopped mezzanine escalator to the lobby,where he was surprised by the amount ofdamage inside. There’d been no damage onthe 74th floor when he left it. The time wasnow 9:40 a.m.

In the lobby, senior Port Authority staffasked Pal if he’d help direct people out sincethey were confused about which way to go, sohe, several firefighters and police officers, andfour or five Port Authority staff began direct-ing people east toward the Borders bookstore,where they could take another escalator backup to street level at Church and Vesey Streets.As he did, he overheard people saying thatthey’d heard on the radio that planes had hitboth towers and the Pentagon.

About 10 minutes later, with fewer andfewer people coming down, the Port Authoritystaff moved to the Marriott Hotel lobby at 3World Trade Center to discuss what to donext. Pal and other Port Authority staff, alongwith 20 to 30 firefighters, had been in thelobby of the 22-story Marriott for no morethan 5 minutes when they heard a loud rumbleand saw the lights flicker. A rush of windthrew Pal up against a wall 15 feet (4.5 meters)away, where he ended up under a beam, buriedin rubble. The South Tower had collapsed.

Cut and bruised, Pal dug himself out, butwith the dust in his eyes, he couldn’t see morethan 2 feet (0.6 meters) away. He yelled, “Isthere anyone here?” No answer. As he tried tofind a way out, he saw what he thought was alight on a firefighter’s helmet and went in thatdirection. At one point, as he crawled by him-self over collapsed beams, his dust-filled eyescouldn’t see how deep the pit below him was.

About six minutes later, he emerged fromthe ruins at a marina. Fifteen minutes later,the North Tower collapsed at 10:28. The bod-ies of seven firefighters and three civilianswere recovered later from the hotel lobby thathad been crushed by the collapse of the NorthTower. All of the Port Authority staff who hadbeen with Pal in the Marriott lobby escaped.

In addition to crediting the safetychanges the Port Authority had made afterthe 1993 bombing, Pal sums up what hadsaved the survivors of the collapse of theTwin Towers: “Getting out immediatelywas the best decision.”

1. Survivors were interviewed for this arti-cle from November 2001 to March 2002.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

60 NFPA JOURNAL SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002