Could Helicopters Have Saved People From the Top of the Trade Center?

Could Helicopters Have Saved People From the Top of the Trade Center?
By
SCOT J. PALTROW and QUEENA SOOK KIM Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL

WHEN a plane hit the World Trade Center's north tower, Stephen L. Roach
phoned his wife twice from the 105th floor and got their home answering
machine. In one message, he said he loved her. In the other, Isabel
Roach says she could hear the desperate shouts of her husband's
coworkers at bond-broker Cantor Fitzgerald LP: "Try the roof! Try the
roof!" Mr. Roach shouted back to them, "There's no way out!"

If he was referring to a roof escape, he was correct. The doors to the
roof were locked. Outside, hovering just a few hundred feet away from
hundreds of workers trapped above the inferno, were New York
police-rescue helicopters. Crews from the Brooklyn headquarters of the
police-aviation bureau had scrambled at the first radio call of an
explosion at the trade center. Of the two choppers that arrived within
five minutes of the plane crash, one was a Bell 412 equipped with a
250-foot hoist and capable of carrying as many as 10 survivors at a
time. The three-man crew was specially trained for rooftop rescues.

As the police pilots swooped in and peered through a smoke-free area on
top of the north tower, however, they saw no one to save. People were
still alive on the top floors, according to the New York Fire
Department. But Greg Semendinger, the first chopper pilot on the scene,
says, "There was nobody on the roof."

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http://www.ainonline.com/issues/12_01/12_01_rescuesquabblepg74.html
Minutes after the first airliner slammed into the Trade Center's North
Tower, two NYPD helicopters, a Bell JetRanger and Bell 412, arrived on
the scene. Both surveyed the roof of the North Tower, which, while
festooned with small antennas and a 360-ft broadcasting tower, still
had
enough space for a small, unlighted helistop, an area of the cluttered
110th-story rooftop certified for helicopter landings.

For the pilot of the NYPD Bell 412, the scene was reminiscent of a
morning nightmare eight years before. In February 1993, a huge truck
bomb went off in the parking garage at the North Tower's base. While
the
loss of life was comparatively low, smoke from the explosion filled the
stairwells used for evacuation. Some workers, caught in the upper
stories of the 1,353-ft tower, opted to go up instead of down.

Hovering over the scene in 1993, NYPD officer/pilot Greg Semendinger
spotted the frantic Trade Center workers, lowered two men to the
rooftop
to remove antenna obstructions, and then proceeded to shuttle 28 people
to safety. Semendinger loaded them into the Bell 412 and whisked them
to
safety at the base of the tower.

But on the morning of September 11, a different scene lay below
Semendinger's helicopter. Through gaps in the thick smoke erupting from
the ruptured tower, Semendinger saw no one on the roof. The reason why
was brutally obvious: the doors leading to the roof were locked.

No Way Out
These doors were locked by order of the Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey (PANYNJ), owner of the Trade Center. They were locked in
part
because of concerns about suicides, daredevil stunts and possible theft
or vandalism of the millions of dollars worth of broadcasting equipment
on the roof. Locking the doors also effectively barred any possibility
of a rooftop rescue.

Authorization and the means to unlock those heavy steel doors came from
a security center located on the 22nd floor. But the security center
wasn't able to help. Falling debris knocked it out almost as soon as
the
first airliner hit the tower.

According to sources within the city government and emergency agencies,
there was another reason the doors were locked: the highly publicized
turf wars the New York police and fire departments have been fighting
for years. Barred by the city decades ago from operating any of its own
helicopters, fire department higher-ups had been incensed by the
police-led Trade Center rescues in 1993, decrying them as dangerous,
unnecessary grandstanding.

===============

http://www.firefighting.com/articles/namFullView.asp?namID=4692
Locked Doors Prevented Air Rescue From WTC Towers
Provider: Evening Mail
WRITTEN BY : Evening Mail, DATE POSTED: 10/25/01Dozens of people
trapped
at the top of the burning World Trade Center in New York could have
been
airlifted to safety had the doors not been locked, it emerged today.

The doors were kept locked because a similar rescue in 1993, after a
terrorist explosion in a basement car park, was slammed as a "publicity
stunt" by fire chiefs and the Port Authority, which owned the centre.
In
1993, 28 people were taken to safety by a helicopter which landed on
the
roof of one of the towers.

But afterwards the Port Authority used its exemption from local fire
rules to insist that the roofs were kept locked to prevent people
committing suicide or launching stunts from the top.

Today the first helicopter pilot on the scene on September 11 said he
believed people could have been saved by a landing on the north tower,
which was smoke-free.

Greg Semendinger told the Wall Street Journal: "There was nobody on the
roof."

He estimated that dozens of people could have been taken to safety
before the tower collapsed.

There were at least 700 people in the north tower above where the plane
ripped into the building, and some were making calls to emergency
services until the moment the tower fell.

One widow has told how her husband left a message on her answering
machine in which people could be heard shouting: "Try the roof! Try the
roof!"