Why in the world would I want to do that on a Saturday??
Well, for one, to see a talk by William Rodriguez, the last man out of the WTC North Tower, a janitor with the only master key who led firefighters up the stairs and unlocked the firedoors to the stairways (they were locked, hmm that’s odd)… also seeing a 9/11 debate and a film festival.
Minus the cold and 7 hours of driving, should be an exciting day!
Of course they were locked. Doors in all buildings are locked from the fire escape onto the floors. The fire escape stairs are supposed to be a one-way passage.
Not odd at all.
Even though you put in a fake email address in when you registered, I’ll still reply to this..
3/4’s of the stairwell doors were locked, and while that may be normal as you claim, that still makes no sense. Kind of made it difficult for the firemen to get in and save people… Rodriguez could only open so many doors and there were 3 sets of stairwells, so how many people were lost that didn’t have to be?
This one kind of stuck in my mind today, and I’m glad that you responded. I did some googling and found a couple of security magazine articles that discuss the tension between security and fire safety that open access in stairwells brings about. (See http://www.securitymanagement.com/library/001784.html and http://securitysolutions.com/mag/security_balancing_security_fire/).
As it turns out, it looks like more of the doors should have been open, although it is late and I’m too tired to pour through fire code to find the exact rules.
This makes me wonder all the more about what systems were in place in the WTC, especially given the previous attacks and the security-conscious nature of some of the major occupants (i.e. financial institutions).
(BTW, I updated my profile to compensate for my funny-looking, but not fake email address)