Just saw a 2 or 3 minute long advertisement for a show called "Voices From Inside the Towers" airing on September 10th on The History Channel. Apparently it's focused on the phone calls placed to 911 and family members from those trapped inside the buildings, with someone in the advertisement saying something to the effect of, "The videos show us what happened on the outside of the buildings, but the phone calls let us know what it was like inside the buildings."
I don't think I'll be able to watch that. I'll try though.
I studied high-rise fire scenarios as part of a school project in the late 70s. There had been a brief fad of popular interest in high rise fires a few years before, following the release of the two separate bestsellers that the movie
The Towering Inferno was based on. Those in turn had been largely inspired by two Sao Paulo high-rise fires (Andraus Building, 1972; Joelma Building, 1974). Both of those real-world disasters saw trapped victims jumping to their deaths in desperation (some attempting to hold onto mattresses), and they focused worldwide attention on fire safety issues inherent in high-rise buildings. The novels were reasonably well researched, but for dramatic reasons they were not very realistic in their depiction of the conditions that would occur in floors above the fire floors. (The movie was even less so, not to mention a poor movie in other ways.) But the fire science community had documented and studied the actual events and examined (via published journal articles) further realistic scenarios, which I duly read around 1977 to 1979 while I was working on my own fire modeling computer project.
Even in 1979 that material was pretty obscure, and by 2001 it would have been forgotten by all but a few specialists (which might include trained firefighters in cities with high-rise construction -- maybe Tri or his brothers here can tell me if they still study those Sao Paulo disasters), but it all came back to me when I saw those lethal boxes of smoke that were the tops of the towers on the morning of 9/11.
So no one needed to tell me that helicopters wouldn't be able to rescue survivors from the roofs, or that people were going to be jumping to their deaths. And I didn't tell anyone what I was seeing happen in my mind's eye inside those walls. I thought the excruciating details would come out, a few days later and a little at a time, when recovery operations began. Instead, events took a sudden turn that changed the nature and timing of the recovery operations completely. (Structural collapse was outside the scope of what I had studied or attempted to model, so that was as much a surprise to me as to any layman.) So there was no revelation of the upper floors, no maps in Time Magazine carefully depicting where each body was found. Sudden death from sudden unexpected collapse became the story instead, and I (and no doubt many others) have been content to leave it that way.
But journalists and historians, doing what they do, have sought those hidden details and have been connecting the dots ever since. (Unlike the Truthers' fantasies, these dots, and their connections, are real.) The behind-the-walls documentaries are a little more complete and a little less toned down every year. And for me, harder to watch, not despite but because of how much I already knew ten years ago, while it was happening, that I was wishing and hoping I was wrong about.
Respectfully,
Myriad
