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“Timing, evacuation plans saved thousands Sept. 11” NYC officials grateful for upgrades after '93 trade center bombing By
Sara Kugler Many officials say the loss of life would have been much higher if not for three factors: the timing of the attack, before the buildings had filled to their workday peak; emergency-evacuation improvements prompted by the 1993 terrorist bombing of the trade center; and the urgent reaction of workers, many of whom had been through the earlier attack. On Sept. 11, perhaps 18,000 people, by one estimate, evacuated the two 110-story towers in less than two hours. ``It looks like maybe 90 percent of the people in the buildings survived that day. It's amazing,'' said Alan Reiss, the trade center's former director. Reiss and others do not discount the devastation of the terrorist attacks or the grief felt by the families of the dead. Yet, in the initial hours after the attacks, many feared that tens of thousands had been killed. Even weeks later, city officials estimated nearly 7,000 people had lost their lives. After fixing errors and removing duplicate names from the casualty lists, city officials say the death toll stands about 3,000 and may drop further. The figure includes about 500 people who were not in the towers at the time of the attacks -- rescue workers who entered afterward and the people aboard the hijacked planes. ``Three-thousand people died, and one has a hard time saying anything about it is a success,'' said Michael Cherkasky, president of Kroll Associates, a security company that helped the trade center's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, revamp evacuation procedures after the 1993 bombing. ``Having said that, it is a remarkable story from the perspective of how the Port Authority was able to organize itself -- the success it had in evacuating the building in comparison to '93, and the heroic efforts of the police and fire.'' In 1993, it took six hours to evacuate most of the occupants after terrorists detonated a bomb in an underground garage, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. After that bombing, batteries were added to every other light fixture in the stairwells in case power went out. Handrails were painted with yellow, glow-in-the-dark paint, which also was used to mark a continuous stripe down the middle of the stairwells. A public address system was added, enabling fire command stations to address tenants. And having been through one emergency, employees listened to what they should do in the case of another, Reiss said.
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