Casualties of The September 11 Attacks - Evacuation

Evacuation

At the time of the attacks, media reports suggested that tens of thousands might have been killed, as on any given day upwards of 100,000 people could be inside the towers. Estimates of the number of people in the Twin Towers when attacked on September 11, 2001 range between 14,000 and 19,000. NIST estimated that approximately 17,400 civilians were in the World Trade Center complex at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In the moments after Flight 11 struck the North Tower, the estimated 8,000 people on the floors below the point of impact were faced with a harrowing scenario. The towers of the World Trade Center complex had not been designed to facilitate a mass evacuation of everybody in the buildings, and in each tower there were only three narrow stairwells descending to the ground level. Many people began to evacuate via the stairs on their own, while others chose to wait for instructions from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Another hindrance to the evacuation of the World Trade Center was that as the planes struck, the buildings shifted enough to jam doors in their frames, trapping dozens of people throughout the building, mostly on the floors closer to the impact zone. As evacuees descended down the staircases in the North Tower, they were directed out of the World Trade Center complex through 5 World Trade Center.

Meanwhile, in the South Tower, many people saw what had happened in the North Tower and chose to evacuate as a precaution. However, the major hindrance to this was that the Port Authority in the South Tower spread the word via the building's intercom system and security guards for workers in the South Tower to remain in their offices. This was done in order to avoid overcrowding on the ground level, which was feared would slow the evacuation and rescue operations in the North Tower. Regardless, thousands of people continued to evacuate the South Tower anyway. For example, in the section of the South Tower between the 78th Floor Sky Lobby and the Observation Deck on the 107th and 110th Floors, there were an estimated 2,000 employees on those floors, including 1,100 on the floors occupied by AON Insurance, those being the 92nd, and 98th-105th. One of AON's executives, Eric Eisenberg, initiated the evacuation of their floors within moments of the impact of Flight 11. A similar evacuation was carried out on the floors occupied by Fiduciary Trust, on the 90th, 94th-97th floors, as well as in the offices of Fuji Bank and Euro Brokers, which occupied the floors directly above the 78th Floor Sky Lobby. Executives such as Eisenberg instructed their employees to take the stairs down to the 78th floor Sky Lobby, where they could take an express elevator to the ground level and exit the building. Within a window of roughly 17 minutes, between 8:46 AM and 9:03 AM, an estimated 1,400 people successfully evacuated the upper floors of the South Tower, while roughly 600 people did not. At the moment of the impact of Flight 175, an estimated 200 people had packed into the Sky Lobby on the 78th Floor and were waiting for the express elevators. A vast majority of these people died on impact, as the lobby was in the lower section of Flight 175's impact zone.