Accounts from survivors paint a grim picture of how the vacuum of information inside the towers compounded the death toll. Even with the sole stairwell in the south tower remaining passable, the occupants above the point of impact didn't get the information they needed to make the right choice. When emergency operator recordings were released of distress calls that day, large numbers of victims had called for help from their mobile phones, only to be told to stay put and "defend-in-place".
Professor Corbett believes that if information from survivors who had made it down the stairs had been relayed to those still in the building with a quick call to their phones, many more may have made it out alive. The US approved 23 building and fire code modifications in , following investigations into the World Trade Centre disaster. They included measures to improve fire resistance in building materials, to reinforce structures against collapse, and add blast-resistant walls to elevator and stairwell shafts — all designed to help buildings stay intact long enough to get people out.
High-rise buildings were required to improve radio coverage systems to ensure emergency crews can communicate with each other inside, and with personnel outside. A requirement for an extra stairwell did get through, but only in buildings above metres, more than 40 storeys high. The width of stairways would be increased by 50 per cent, but only in a building code that does not cover most of the new high rise buildings being built across the United States today, including New York City.
While ICC codes are broadly adopted around the US, they are a minimum standard for building and fire codes and it's up to states and local jurisdictions to decide what to enforce. Karl Fippinger said the ICC will continue pushing the building industry to go above minimum safety codes. We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.
The simplest of escape routes were the stairwells. More on:. Top Stories Celebrity cosmetic surgeon's 'barbaric' attempt to fix a tummy tuck under local anaesthetic. Prime Minister says he does not believe he has told a lie in public life. Totemic symbols of wealth stand erect to ensure the institutional continuity of the financial corporation. But waste is impossible to ignore, much less eliminate, control or even predict.
Starting in , explosives detonated to clear bedrock for building foundations. In July , construction of the Ground Zero memorial ground to a halt when remains of an 18th-century ship were found in the mud.
It was speculated that the hull of this wooden ship was used as part of the debris in a landfill to extend the island of Manhattan into the Hudson River.
Historically, New York used the rubble of its construction operations and wreckage of its seaport to create artificial land and expand its waterfront. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Cheney took the picture to his brother Tino and sister Milagros who both identified the Falling Man as Norberto. He then tried to show the image to Norberto's wife Eulogia who refused to speak with him or confirm it was her husband.
With nowhere else to go, Cheney took the photograph to Norberto's funeral and showed it to the eldest of his three daughters, Jacqueline. They said my father was taken to hell with the devil. I don't know what I would have done if it was him. One detail in the Falling Man's clothing could be the key to discovering his identity — a bright orange undershirt he was wearing under his tunic, seen in a number of the 12 images captured by Drew.
That morning, I remember. He wore Old Navy underwear. He wore black socks. He wore blue pants — jeans. He wore a Casio watch. He wore an Old Navy shirt. With checks. Briley was a year-old sound engineer who also worked at Windows and was a light-skinned black man, with a moustache, goatee and short hair. His co-workers believe the Falling Man is him. His brother, Timothy, who was tasked to identify his brother, knew him by his shoes — black high-tops, similar to those pictured.
When did the moment come when they lost hope? Maybe it came so quick…. The man on the phone does not ask if she thinks her sons jumped. He does not have it in him, and anyway, she has given him an answer. The Hernandezes looked at the decision to jump as a betrayal of love—as something Norberto was being accused of. The woman in Connecticut looks at the decision to jump as a loss of hope—as an absence that we, the living, now have to live with.
She chooses to live with it by looking, by seeing, by trying to know—by making an act of private witness. She could have chosen to keep her eyes closed. And so now the man on the phone asks the question that he called to ask in the first place: Did she make the right choice? Catherine Hernandez thought she knew who the Falling Man was as soon as she saw the series of pictures, but she wouldn't say his name.
He would never have left her alone by jumping. But Sean was too small to be the Falling Man. He was clean-shaven. He worked at Windows on the World in the audiovisual department, so he probably would have been wearing a shirt and tie instead of a white chef's coat. None of the former Windows employees who were interviewed believe the Falling Man looks anything like Sean Singh.
Then a few days later he studied them closely and changed his mind. Wrong hair. Wrong clothes. Wrong body type. It was the same with Charlie Mauro. It was the same with Junior Jimenez. Junior worked in the kitchen and would have been wearing checked pants.
Charlie worked in purchasing and had no cause to wear a white jacket. Besides, Charlie was a very large man. The Falling Man appears fairly stout in Richard Drew's published photo but almost elongated in the rest of the sequence. The rest of the kitchen workers were, like Norberto Hernandez, eliminated from consideration by their outfits.
The banquet servers may have been wearing white and black, but no one remembered any banquet server who looked anything like the Falling Man. Forte Food was the other food-service company that lost people on September 11, But all of its male employees worked in the kitchen, which means that they wore either checked or white pants.
And nobody would have been allowed to wear an orange shirt under the white serving coat. But someone who used to work for Forte remembers a guy who used to come around and get food for the Cantor executives.
Black guy. Tall, with a mustache and a goatee. Wore a chef's coat, open, with a loud shirt underneath. Of course, the only way to find out the identity of the Falling Man is to call the families of anyone who might be the Falling Man and ask what they know about their son's or husband's or father's last day on earth. Ask if he went to work wearing an orange shirt. But should those calls be made? Should those questions be asked?
Would they only heap pain upon the already anguished? Would they be regarded as an insult to the memory of the dead, the way the Hernandez family regarded the imputation that Norberto Hernandez was the Falling Man? Or would they be regarded as steps to some act of redemptive witness? I could never have made the choice not to know.
Jonathan Briley worked at Windows on the World. Some of his coworkers, when they saw Richard Drew's photographs, thought he might be the Falling Man. He was a light-skinned black man. He was over six five. He was forty-three. He had a mustache and a goatee and close-cropped hair. He had a wife named Hillary. Jonathan Briley's father is a preacher, a man who has devoted his whole life to serving the Lord.
After September 11, he gathered his family together to ask God to tell him where his son was. No: He demanded it. He used these words: "Lord, I demand to know where my son is. The next day, the FBI called. They'd found his son's body. It was, miraculously, intact. The preacher's youngest son, Timothy, went to identify his brother.
He recognized him by his shoes: He was wearing black high-tops. Timothy removed one of them and took it home and put it in his garage, as a kind of memorial. Timothy knew all about the Falling Man. He is a cop in Mount Vernon, New York, and in the week after his brother died, someone had left a September 12 newspaper open in the locker room.
He saw the photograph of the Falling Man and, in anger, he refused to look at it again. But he couldn't throw it away. Instead, he stuffed it in the bottom of his locker, where—like the black shoe in his garage—it became permanent. Jonathan's sister Gwendolyn knew about the Falling Man, too.
She saw the picture the day it was published. She knew that Jonathan had asthma, and in the smoke and the heat would have done anything just to breathe…. The both of them, Timothy and Gwendolyn, knew what Jonathan wore to work on most days. He wore a white shirt and black pants, along with the high-top black shoes. Timothy also knew what Jonathan sometimes wore under his shirt: an orange T-shirt. Jonathan wore that orange T-shirt everywhere.
He wore that shirt all the time. He wore it so often that Timothy used to make fun of him: When are you gonna get rid of that orange T-shirt, Slim? But when Timothy identified his brother's body, none of his clothes were recognizable except the black shoes. And when Jonathan went to work on the morning of September 11, , he'd left early and kissed his wife goodbye while she was still sleeping. She never saw the clothes he was wearing.
After she learned that he was dead, she packed his clothes away and never inventoried what specific articles of clothing might be missing. Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn't jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family.
Maybe he didn't jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God. Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after a. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen.
Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.
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