The surviving staff spent the rest of the week in and out of New York hospitals checking logs to see if any of their colleagues had survived. Andrew, now 51, is a history and economics teacher in South Carolina. He has attended a few memorial services since that day but prefers to keep a low profile. It is always there and it might change your life but it shouldn't stop you living it. Image source, Getty Images. Andrew was in the South Tower when the first plane hit and was trying to descend the building when the second plane caused another explosion.
It was a beautiful day. Image source, Andrew Cullen. If the lift had gone up, they would have been killed. A wall of dust and smoke races through streets as one of the World Trade Center towers collapses. Andrew was blown behind a desk in a health club as the store fronts along Wall Street were blown in. Image source, KBW.
Two shafts of light mark the anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers in Related Topics. Published 3 August. NIST responded to calls from Congress and the public to carry out a federal investigation of why the buildings collapsed, the evacuation of building occupants and the emergency response. More than professionals and technical subject matter experts, including 85 NIST staff members, answered the call and participated in the investigation.
As part of the investigation, the NIST team gathered every bit of evidence they could find. Activities included:. Throughout the process, NIST held 23 public meetings and provided multiple opportunities for the public to review and comment on drafts of the reports.
Read first-hand accounts of what it was like to work on the WTC investigation in our blog series. Start with Shyam Sunder's reflections on the investigation and its legacy, and then keep reading for insights on everything from what it was like to catalogue the images and video to how changed one researcher The WTC investigation has had a significant legacy.
In the reports, NIST made 31 recommendations for improvements to building and fire codes, standards, and practices based on the WTC investigation. While the federal government has no regulatory authority for building and fire codes, many U. In addition, NIST scientists conducted tests of steel from the WTC buildings to measure their mechanical properties at normal and elevated temperatures.
These tests led to the development and validation of performance criteria for fire resistive steel. This type of steel, which was not available at the time the WTC was built, would not necessarily prevent a building from collapsing during a fire, but it would give occupants more time to escape. This effort was at the time — and still is — the largest forensic identification effort ever undertaken.
This effort was particularly challenging because in many cases the DNA of the victims was severely degraded by exposure to intense heat from burning jet fuel, as well as moisture and decay in the weeks and months following the attack. To make an identification, experts analyzed segments of DNA called forensic markers. When DNA degrades, these forensic markers break apart, which makes them difficult to analyze.
We needed to evacuate in an orderly way. And so they fear being blind, fear going blind. When David went to escort their guests to the stairs, Hingson called his wife Karen. It was just two minutes after the building had first started to tip. Karen and Hingson had loved walking around New York City. We had a lot of fun doing that. On that fateful morning, at about 8. There were 19 stairs per floor, split into two flights, nine after a turn at a landing. Just mathematically it was a puzzle, so it gave me something to do.
Roselle, though, was still calm. The other reason to do so was to convey to her that I was doing okay. The job of a guide dog is not to lead, that remains the prerogative of the human. And to stop if there are obstacles, or go around them. But David was in a funk by the time they got to the 50th floor.
Hingson remembers telling him to stop, that if he and Roselle could go down, so could he. And, as he did so, it gave the others on the floors above them a sense of assurance.
At the 30th floor, David had more information. Because what if the floor you put the equipment on catches fire? So it comes back to that right. David could see so he could help me down the stairs. No one in their group knew about the attacks, yet. By then, though, a strange calm had descended. She is a very sensitive animal; dogs are. If she was concerned because there was fire too close, she would have behaved differently.
Firefighters stormed up. There was still, not a squeak about the planes.
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