Reply #6: "Being one of the fire marshals" he says, so there was a plan

[treestar]

So we have in our trading floor many television sets tuned to financial news information. Well, all of these stations cut away to their news departments, and there were these breaking news stories that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. The story developed literally within minutes, and we understood fairly soon, I would say within three or four minutes, that an airliner had hit One World Trade Center. At least that's my recollection of the timeframe.

Well, we knew now that the damage had been done to Tower One, not our Tower, so we relaxed a little bit about evacuation. Nonetheless, many people in the first minute had bolted for the stairs and were on their way down.

I would still leave though. Which most people did, presumably. How many people were killed in the South Tower versus the North? I would think most of the deaths were from the North because those in the South had a better warning to get out. Though the South crumbled first. Even so, the idea of getting out of there before there was any reason to might have done a lot.

At about five minutes to nine there was an announcement by the Port Authority within our building. First the strobe lights flashed, as they did during their normal fire drills. The alarm system gave a little bit of a whoop whoop, you know, to alert you to an announcement about to be made. Then the very familiar voice, the one we heard all the time, came over the system and said, "Building Two is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building Two. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may return to your office by using the re-entry doors on the re-entry floors and the elevators to return to your office. Repeat, Building Two is secure...."

That would do a lot to get you to stay, since in between crashes there would have been no reason to expect another one. It is still tough for me to blame those who made that announcement, though. They had no way of knowing, at that point, that the South Tower would be hit, too.

we knew in an instant that it was terrorism. I mean, there wasn't for sure terrorism on people's minds when the first building had been hit. Was it pilot error? Was it instrument error? Or just a one-off suicide? Horrible as it was, you didn't know for certain that it was terrorism. But when the second building got hit you instantly calculated the two of them: terrorism.

It strikes me as odd even then that he could recognize that so quickly, but then again there was the 1993 attack, which makes it all the more likely there must have been some thought toward what to do if the building were attacked by terrorists.