originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
Your colleague got out in time then?
Yes, thankfully. He and another guy actually went back into the building, one of them twice, to assist others in some of the stairwells. Phil, the
one colleague I know very well and is a good friend, tried to go in a second time but was prevented from doing so, but by that time the situation they
were going back in to assist with was under better control.
Apparently, what was happening was people with physical disabilities were getting trapped/stuck (basically) on the stairwell landings in between
floors. They would stop to let others behind them go by so they wouldn't get pushed down and trampled, and then they'd get stuck on the landings
because people wouldn't let them back into the traffic flow going down the stairs. These two basically had to bull their way back up the stairwell,
against the flow, for a couple floors and then kind of block an opening so the stuck people could get back into the flow and go down the stairs.
There were so many acts of heroism that day that they feel their actions were probably insignificant in the bigger scheme of things, but I thought it
was pretty brave just to go back into the building for any reason, regardless of cause. These two guys were the only people I personally know who
were actually inside one of the towers when the planes hit. Their stories were secondary to a lot of the other things they told me about which were
just...'mind bending' (only way I can think to describe it).
One of the things Phil was telling me about was how different the reality of the aftermath of the impact was to what people think, even today.
Details you never hear of, or even think about. For example, because ~18 minutes elapsed between tower #1 being struck and tower #2 being hit, the
evacuation of tower #2 (where they were) actually began before the 2nd plane struck the building. When UA 175 struck tower #2 it totally rocked the
building from top to bottom. One thing no one ever even dreamed would happen was the ceilings falling. It may not sound like a big deal, but it was
actually a HUGE deal! When the plane struck the building, the building shuddered so hard all the drop-ceilings fell from their attachments down onto
whatever was below them. What this did was essentially dropped a massive, twisted metal grid of aluminum, wire and electrical light fixtures over the
tops of all the desks, chairs, tables and anything else on the floor. This created an almost impenetrable web of twisted metal, wires and ceiling
tiles which was about waist-high that people had to navigate around, over, under and through to even get to the stairwells in order to evacuate. Just
the thought of something like that sends chills down my spine because I would have never thought of something like that happening either! Most people
think about things like smoke, and fire and all those things (and they had all those things to deal with too), but they'd never think about something
like the ceilings all falling and totally blocking every step they needed to take to get to the exits. Over the years since he's probably told me a
hundred different stories like this.
Even to this day I still cannot wrap my head fully around what it would have been like to be inside one of those two towers when 9-11 went down!