When we look back upon the WTC disasters it is amazing to note that despite previous bombings and fires there, the NYC FD and Port Authorities seemed to have absolutely no contingency plans in place to rescue those trapped on the upper floors!

In photos of the event it is obvious that there was at least one helicopter in the air over the towers throughout the nearly 2 hours that the more fortunate of trapped victims choked, broke out windows and even jumped to evade the tortures of fire and smoke. Why did this have to happen?

Firefighters have always said it is impossible to fight a fire above the 10th floor, yet the city of New York with hundreds of skyscrapers, was and still is totally without any plan to rescue victims by air, using hundreds of helicopters that laid dormant at the time. It also makes no sense to shut down elevators that may still be functional (sky lobby systems) from firefighters for whom time saves lives!

A simple pole-weighted "boarding ladder" (a wide mesh rope ladder as used on ships) some several hundred feet high, could have been moved into place beside the broken windows to give victims something to jump to and on which to cling for a short trip to another nearby roof landing site.

It is very troubling indeed that no emergency preparedness is in place to deal with large scale skyscraper fires, or to commandeer idle choppers and equip them quickly for such critical last ditch lifesaving duty! Even fighting the fire itself should be done by hoses raised by helicopter to the burning floors from outside the building as toting them up stairwells merely slows well equipped firefighters as they may rush upstairs to deal with the internal base of the fire.

There has to be a better way to deal with such an emergency, since it is obvious that stairwells are practically useless, in such tall structures.

OOH! OOH!

LEMME ANSWER THIS ONE!

I need a few minutes to type my annotated response. Bear with me.

911 Never forget the ones who bravely went into harm's way while all others were evacuating to safer ground.

Tall buildings such as skyscrapers are built internally to contain a fire within a floor. They also have fire suppresion systems on each floor. Stairwells are built to withstand fire for enough time to egress the building. All things being equal, a fire in a skyscraper could completely burn up one floor, with minimal or zero spread to other floors. In a normal tall building fire, "shelter in place" works. People evacuate to at least one floor below or ABOVE the fire, depending on location. The assumption is that the fire will either be put out by the building systems, or fire department, or they will be evacuated via stairwells.

The WTC problem is that the fire was not a building fueled fire, and also the fire barriers were breached.

Skyscrapers are probably safer than homes when it comes to fires.

Boo "para, hope I didn't steal too much." BA