No.

You still are not considering what is called Opportunity Cost and also are still using Results Based Thinking (thus why i doubt you actually play poker).


They did not know the Towers were going to collapse.

First line Responders were already stretched beyond the breaking point just trying to move the crowds on the ground out of danger and then getting as many people out from the accessible floors as they could.


What you are suggesting is that they would take some First line Responder resources away from those tasks and send them door to door to nearby offices in an attempt to gather up enough cardboxes to pile up on all sides to make a difference. Or find and buy a net that would need a construction crew be brought in to secure it properly for it to work.


Neither of those options are practical for 9/11 and taking away Front Line Workers who were already busy saving lives in the towers and on the ground would have cost more of the lives they were helping save then it would have saved from the upper floors.

I don't know what to say. Decisions were made about whether to publish videos of people falling to their deaths. I see no evidence that those decisions were driven by a desire to minimize discussion of skyscraper safety or to minimize criticism of rescue efforts.

As to the latter, there was an enormous amount of discussion in the months after 9/11 about communication failures during the rescue effort and the decision to send so many firefighters into the towers.

I see no basis to classify 9/11 jumpers as suicides. They didn't commit suicide, technical suicide, or any other type of suicide. If I pushed someone off a building just before he was about to shoot me, it be incorrect to say that I "technically" murdered someone.

This too. washoe seems to think that a lot of first responders were just watching the show when they could have been rushing to a trapeze supply store to buy giant nets.

Also, I'm not sure that washoe understands that burning debris was falling off the buildings more or less continuously during the event. Even if nets had been available, it isn't obvious to me that they would have survived the falling debris before the collapse.

You guys would have saved a lot of time if you simply said "Wow, nets and sideways helicopters! Great ideas!" and moved on. He will find a different Youtube rabbit hole to dig into in a couple weeks, so consider modifying your approach at that time.

washoe, as you so often do when you discover a new issue to get excited about, you're letting emotion cloud your reasoning.

Dude, the entire NYC fire department was deployed below. They managed to evacuate tens of thousands of people from the immediate vicinity. It's a question of prioritizing limited resources in a moment of complete surprise and confusion. Nets for people to jump into from 100 floors up just is neither a viable option nor a reasonable used of resources in that setting.

Sure looked like they jumped to me

As I recall there was a documentary film called "the falling man" on Netflix years ago that covered the jumpers in depth. Also a documentary about the phone calls before and after the attack. Both were very moving.

I'm confused by the distinction some are trying to make here.

Not taking sides, just trying to figure it out.

As I understand it, "Jumper' or "jumped' in the normal use connotation for Front line workers suggests someone who is willingly and voluntarily jumping , (ie usually suicide). At least I think that is the distinction Rococo is making (he will correct me if I am wrong).

It is the lack of coercion that is key there.

SO if someone was to put a gun to a family members head and tell you to jup or they would kill them, and you did, they would not typically define you as a 'Jumper' due to the coercion input into your decision.

So no one is saying they did not 'jump' but they are saying they are not what would typically be called 'Jumpers'.

Those who jumped had an infintesimally higher non-zero chance of survival versus staying in the jet fuel fire. They were not suicides under nearly any definition of the term. They were people making a rational decision given survival instinct under the circumstances.

Possibly but I think it is more likely it was heat induced delirium as opposed to any type of calculation.

They would be literally roasting from behind as the intense heat, caused by burning jet fuel and rising up thru the towers would be seeking to exit out the same windows they were seeking relief in. Think of your face near the oven door as you open it and the hot air rushes out the opening.

In the end the step out the window was simply a step away from the heat without regard of where that step lead them., again imo.

We’ll never know for sure I suppose, but they weren’t suicides. And people do sometimes survive falls from incredible heights where they’ve hit terminal velocity. In 1972 a flight attendant survived a fall from over 10,000 metres. In that case she was partially shielded by some wreckage that fell with her, but there have been others who survived without even that. In 1995 a skydiver fell over 4,000 metres when his parachute failed to deploy. He survived as well. There are lots of incredible stories like that.

That's a pretty lame troll attempt.

It's probably a bit of both. The chances of survival from jumping are a tiny bit higher, and you are correct that people have survived falls from incredible heights. But your average person correctly assumes that he is 99.999% certain to die if he jumps from 1000 feet onto a sidewalk.

My guess is that people were doing exactly what they appeared to be doing. They were choosing to jump rather than endure the agony of burning and choking to death, even though they knew that jumping was, for all practical purposes, certain to kill them.

Indeed. And it's more than a little offensive and weird to insist that we use the terminology of suicide to describe what these people were forced to do.

I had a million answers but could not connect to 2plus2 servers. Was it only down for me?
Those falling from an airplane at incredible heights and surviving had the fortune to land on something soft, something was absorbing the fall. A fall at 150 miles can be absorbed by trees, branches, bushes, water, etc. The right vegetation can easily provide enough cushioning.

The terminal velocity for a human in free fall is abut 120mph. I don't think some branches or bushes are going to help you much at that speed.

Probably not, but it's not impossible. Dumb luck and the right debris already on the ground plus the angle of your fall, your blood pressure, whether or not you pass out, prevailing wind patterns, all can come together in just the right way to make a fall survivable. Getting caught in a fire burning at 1,100 degrees on the other hand is simply not survivable.

You are both right. In the overwhelming majority of cases, if you are falling at close to terminal velocity, you will die, regardless of whether you fall into bushes, branches, sand, snow, water, or whatever. But there are a couple of examples of people surviving falls from insane heights.

And beyond that it’s simply wrong and not just academically. Plenty of people have life insurance that treats suicide different from other types of death and no policy in the country would consider the death of anybody in the towers on 9/11 a suicide.

This is of course correct.

Exactly.

I think delirium and/or looking for mercy or respite from the roasting alive were the driving factors. Some people will just opt for the quicker death then the slower roasting death.

But you can imagine the Towers are acting as a chimney works over a fireplace channelling all the toxic chemical laden smoke and heat right up to those open windows as escape points.

What those people in the windows were experiencing was certainly unbearable after a certain point. Once you hit the point you cannot bear one option you take the other, no matter how dire.


It was out for me to but I just assumed the forum wanted a break from me for a while and auto shut me out :}}

Yeah, it felt I'm getting booted off the site.

Great! Now we are all on the same page.

The problem was that they were forced to jump. And while we can only assume what made them jump, we know for certain that they jumped. So we could skip that part and just safely assume they had their reasons. If 200-1300 people jumped off a burning building, that collapsed a few min later It's probably a safe assumption! The next problem is that nobody wanted to talk about it. As per usual. All we got in the media was how great we all worked together, when in reality everything was a mess.

Everything from a to z went wrong. There was no communication possible between the floors. The telephone system went out after the planes collusion.

The doors to the rooftop were shut! Within minutes of the first impact of the world trade center at least 4 helicopters made their way to the site. They were ready to lift amd rescue 10 people's each lift per helicopter. Only did they not see any people. The people tried but could not pass the locks. It was a death trap. Over 1300 people could have been rescued easily from the roof. The smoke wasn't the problem at that time.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1003784754436648720

On a completely other front washoe, your last point triggered for me one of my pet peeves.


If you watch old movies you often see people trying to climb out the roof of a compromised non working elevator in an attempt to save their own lives.

A few years back elevator companies decided that 'escape hatch' was not worth the expense to be built in to every elevator for the few times it was ever needed. They rationalized that as 'more people were likely to get hurt trying to get out, then stay put' which I am sure has some truth but the cost savings were significant for them.

I hate that though. Now if you are stuck in an elevator you are at the mercy of someone coming to save you. You can do nothing to save yourself. You are at their complete mercy sealed in that box.

So for instance even if you were near the ground floor but the elevator doors would not open in 9/11 and they could not spend the time or focus to try and get you out of the elevator as there was easier people to evacuate, you would be stuck there until the towers collapsed on you.

As a person with mild claustrophobia, that is a big fear for me. Getting on an elevator is fine. Being stuck on one with no control, not so much.