Everyone will jump when it gets hot enough.  Is their really anyone who
doesn't understand  that.

I was once burned over 20% of my body (2nd degree) in a gasoline fire
on a boat.  I jumped into the water as fast as I could but it wasn't
fast enough.  Very big boat.  Anybody facing burning up or jumping to
end it all will take the
quick end to it, believe me.  It's not a tuff decision at  all. 1000
degrees is hotter than the cleaning cycle on your
oven.  I bet there were many more people who wish they could have
jumped out of those towering infernos
but couldn't get out.

Bill MacKinnon

Getting ready for a third hurricane in four weeks.  Peace of cake,
compared to the
burn unit down town.  "Everything is."




On Sep 10, 2004, at 4:33 PM, Walter Watts wrote:

> Falling Bodies, a 9/11 Image Etched in Pain
> By KEVIN FLYNN and JIM DWYER
>
> Published: September 10, 2004
>
> The New York Times
>
> Three years later, they remain open questions, and many people wonder
> if firm answers would lead to more pain or less, to practical lessons
> for society or to just a
> spectacle for the morbidly curious.
>
> How many people jumped from the upper floors of the World Trade Center
> on Sept. 11?
>
> Why did so many more people jump from the north tower than the south?
>
> What floors did they come from?
>
> Who were they?
>
> The attack on the World Trade Center was one of the most observed
> catastrophes in history, and those who fell or jumped from the towers
> were, briefly, its most public
> victims. They emerged one or two at a time from a blanket of smoke and
> fire that rendered mass death virtually invisible. Nearly all the
> others killed that day - whether
> high in the trade center, on board the hijacked airplanes or deep
> inside the Pentagon - were beyond the sight of survivors and
> witnesses.
>
> Those who came through the windows of the towers provided the
> starkest, most harrowing evidence of the desperate conditions inside.
> Since then, though, they have
> largely vanished from consideration. Newspapers rarely publish images
> of the falling people. Evacuation studies concentrated on the accounts
> of survivors.
>
> The 9/11 Commission, which has compiled the most detailed history of
> the day, mentioned those who jumped only as they affected the people
> on the streets below.
>
> Even now, there has been less fact-finding than guesswork. Some
> researchers say more than 200 people most likely fell or jumped to
> their death. Others say the number
> is half that, or fewer. None have been officially identified.
>
> For the families of those who died, these uncertainties are bound to a
> sprawling spectrum of contradictory sentiments, impulses, and
> reluctance about examining this
> specific wound. Some raised questions about the manner of a loved
> one's death in meetings at the medical examiner's office, during the
> identification process, and
> continue to ponder it; others never pursued the matter in any public
> fashion.
>
> "I want to know everything," said Liz Alderman, whose son, Peter, was
> last seen at a breakfast conference in the north tower. Peter Alderman
> sent out an e-mail at 9:25
> a. m., reporting intense smoke on the 106th floor. What happened after
> that remains a mystery.
>
> "The most important thing I will never know," Ms. Alderman said. "I
> won't know how much he suffered and I won't know how he died. I travel
> back into that tower a lot and I
> try to imagine, but there is no imagining."
>
> Still others say they have learned to live with such uncertainties.
> They are not convinced that exploring the question of who jumped, and
> from where, is likely to produce
> anything more than sorrow.
>
> Bill Doyle, the outreach director for WTC United Family Group, whose
> son Joseph died in the north tower, said many people cannot bear the
> topic. "A lot of them are still
> suffering," he said. "They don't want to be reminded that someone
> might have jumped."
>
> A number of families discussed the question in interviews, but asked
> not to be quoted, concerned with what children might think of a lost
> parent, or worried about causing
> distress to other families, or believing that any words would be
> inadequate.
>
> Gauging the Fires
>
> As part of the major federal investigation into the collapse of the
> towers, investigators from the National Institute of Standards and
> Technology are reviewing amateur and
> professional videotapes that recorded many of the people who jumped or
> fell. "What data we have in this area are being used to better
> understand the movement and
> behavior of the fire and smoke in the towers, and that analysis will
> be in our final report in December," said Michael Newman, a spokesman
> for the agency. The
> researchers are not trying to track individual identities, but to
> gauge the strength and speed of the fires. The number, location and
> time that people jumped could provide
> important clues on where the heat had grown particularly intense,
> according to Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at John Jay
> College of Criminal Justice.
>
> (Page 2 of 3)
>
> Those who dropped from the windows provide powerful testimony on
> another major line of inquiry: the adequacy of the exits. Each floor
> had three exits to serve an acre
> of space -- or roughly the area occupied by a football field, perched
> more than 1,000 feet above the ground. In the north tower, all three
> stairways became impassable
> from the 92nd floor and up after the plane hit. As for the south
> tower, two of the three stairways were destroyed around the 78th
> floor.
>
> "In the south tower, did they jump because they didn't know the
> stairwell existed, or because the path to the stairwell was blocked?"
> said Dr. Robyn Gershon, director of
> an evacuation study being done by Columbia University. "If the
> communications that day had been better, what might have been
> different?"
>
> More than 1,000 people who survived the plane crashes, many on floors
> distant from the impact, had no way out.
>
> Federal authorities reported that during the designing of the towers,
> the Port Authority dropped plans to use an earlier building code that
> would have required six
> stairways in each tower, and turned for economic reasons to the more
> lax requirements of a later code that required only three stairways.
> By building fewer staircases, it
> could make more of each floor available for rent.
>
> Apart from the implications for public safety and policy, it is not
> difficult to understand why people have been loath to confront the
> topic.
>
> Police helicopter pilots have described feeling helpless as they
> hovered along the buildings, watching the people who piled four and
> five deep into the windows, 1,300
> feet in the air. Some held hands as they jumped. Others went alone. As
> the numbers grew, said Joseph Pfeifer, a fire battalion chief in the
> north tower lobby, he tried to
> make an announcement over the building's public address system, not
> realizing it had been destroyed.
>
> "Please don't jump," he said. "We're coming up for you."
>
> Almost instinctually on Sept. 11, people recognized that they had an
> unfortunate view into an intensely private matter, an unseemly
> intrusion not just into someone's death,
> but into the moment of their dying. American broadcast networks
> generally avoided showing people falling. A sculpture that depicted a
> victim, known as "Tumbling
> Woman," was removed from display at Rockefeller Center after one week.
>
> Some commentators later remarked that those who had fallen had made
> one brave final decision to take control of how they would perish.
> Researchers say many
> people had no choice. Witness accounts suggest that some people were
> blown out. Others fell in the crush at the windows as they struggled
> for air. Still others simply
> recoiled, reflexively, from the intense heat.
>
> A spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said the
> city agency had not classified any of the dead as "jumpers," a term
> used when people jump to their
> deaths, because the people were forced from the buildings.
>
> "This should not be really thought of as a choice," said Louis Garcia,
> New York City's chief fire marshal. "If you put people at a window and
> introduce that kind of heat,
> there's a good chance most people would feel compelled to jump."
>
> Temperatures in pockets of the buildings rose to more than 1,000
> degrees, sufficient to weaken steel, according to researchers. The
> first people jumped or fell from the
> upper floors of the north tower just minutes after the impact of
> American Airlines Flight 11. The heat reached people on the upper
> floors long before the flames. Some of
> those trapped reported that the floor itself had grown so hot they had
> to stand on their desks, according to a fire official.
>
> "The heat was absolutely phenomenal," said Dr. Guylene Proulx, who
> studies human behavior in fires for the National Research Council of
> Canada. "If you have ever
> burned your finger, you know how much that hurts and how you pull
> away. In the trade center, it was such a hot fire. It was impossible
> to think you might survive. Why suffer
> a minute longer when it is so unbearable? It may have appeared to be
> the best thing to stop the pain, when the window is shattered and the
> opening is there."
>
> (Page 3 of 3)
>
> Last week researchers who study human behavior in fire gathered for a
> three-day conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland. While five of the
> major papers presented at the
> conference dealt with the fires in the towers, none of them touched on
> the subject of people who fell or jumped, said Dr. Proulx. "The focus
> is on the survivors and what
> made them successful or impeded their evacuation," she said.
>
> Dr. Proulx noted that people rarely die by falling or jumping from
> high-rise fires. Far more common, she said, is that people will find a
> refuge where the heat can be
> endured. And indeed, in scores of phone calls that continued until the
> last minutes, people reported that they had gathered in conference
> rooms or offices that were
> protected from fire by walls. In areas with few or no walls, the
> flames burned for about 20 minutes before moving to the next space,
> the National Institute of Standards and
> Technology reported in June: "This spread was generally continuous
> because of the even distribution of combustibles throughout the floors
> and the lack of interior
> partitions."
>
> While the institute has made public more than 1,000 pages of documents
> from its continuing investigation, it has not yet had any public
> discussion of the people who
> dropped from the building. "There will be reference to it in the final
> report," Mr. Newman said, acknowledging the delicacy of the topic. "I
> don't know how exact the count
> will be."
>
> On March 25, 1911, at one of the worst fires of the early 20th
> century, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory blaze in Greenwich Village,
> young women and men jumped to their
> deaths from windows on the ninth floor because they were unable to
> reach or open any of the three exits. Witness accounts of the
> desperate scenes transformed
> American politics.
>
> Even so, officials never specified how many of the 146 victims died in
> falls. "There was not even a reliable list of the dead," David Von
> Drehle writes in "Triangle,"
> (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003) an acclaimed account of the fire and
> its aftermath. William Gunn Shepherd, a reporter who happened to be in
> Washington Square when the
> fire started, counted 54 people who had jumped or fallen to the
> sidewalk.
>
> Seeking the Cause
>
> In catastrophic high-rise fires, investigators typically seek the
> cause of death, whether from burns, smoke or falling. Of the 85 people
> killed in 1980 at a fire at the MGM
> Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, for example, one jumped from the building,
> according to a report by the medical examiner for Clark County, Nev.
> The fire at the Schomburg
> Plaza apartment complex in Harlem in March 1987 killed seven people,
> including three young people who fell from their apartment on the 33rd
> floor.
>
> Several organizations have tried to estimate the number of people who
> fell or jumped on Sept. 11. In 2002, reporters for The New York Times,
> using a collection of
> videotapes, counted 50 people who fell or jumped. That tally did not
> include falling shapes that could not be identified with confidence as
> human. Later that year, USA
> Today, using a method that included eyewitness accounts, said the
> number was probably greater than 200.
>
> A vast majority of those who fell or jumped came from the north tower,
> perhaps because many more people were trapped on far fewer floors than
> in the south tower. The
> north tower was hit first, from the 93rd to the 99th floor, about 15
> floors higher than the south tower.
>
> The 16 minutes between plane strikes gave large numbers of people from
> the south tower time to flee, an opportunity that many took, survivors
> said, after being
> frightened by the sight of people falling from the north tower. In
> addition, the south tower, though hit second, collapsed first, just 57
> minutes after being struck, before
> deterioration had spread as widely.
>
> In both towers, the people and debris that fell forced officials to
> reroute the evacuation, away from the plaza between the buildings. Two
> of the three stairwells in each
> building ended at the mezzanine level, where people were supposed to
> exit onto the plaza. With the plaza no longer a safe option, officials
> were forced to direct
> thousands of people down an additional level to the underground
> shopping concourse. Once there, they were steered by police officers
> and security guards along the
> improvised escape route.
>
> Whatever form future research takes, it is unlikely to try to identify
> those who died by falling from the buildings. No one survived from the
> floors where people jumped.
> Photographs were typically taken from too far away to capture faces.
> The medical examiner's office said it was hard to distinguish the
> sorts of injuries suffered in a fall
> from those received by people who were crushed in a collapse.
>
> Families on their own, however, have pored over the pictures that show
> people marooned on the upper floors. At times, they have seized on a
> feature of dress or
> mannerism as a clue to identity. In the months after Sept. 11, The
> Times published a picture of people visible at broken windows in the
> north tower. Two women who saw
> the picture said they believed strongly that a man in the photograph,
> the same man, was their husband.
>
> Two years ago, Mr. Doyle recalled, he tried to help two other women
> who felt they, too, had recognized their husbands in a picture of the
> north tower's upper floors. Mr.
> Doyle happened to know the photographer and he took the women to a
> studio in Chinatown, where they studied a blown-up version. They did
> not know the men, after all.
>
> "I don't know what these wives would have done," he said, "if that had
> been their husbands hanging out the window."
>
> Suzanne McCabe, whose brother, Michael, worked on the 104th floor of
> the north tower, says she has no idea what happened to him. She has
> heard he may have tried to
> get to the roof. She says she tries to absorb new information at a
> measured pace. For her, detailed knowledge about what happened to her
> brother, even painful
> knowledge, would ultimately serve as balm. "The truth hurts," she
> said, "but it also heals."
>
>
>
>
>
> ---
> To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to
> <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
>

---
To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>