Case Study on Evacuation Rates within the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001

Abstract

While movement of people in crowds and fire drills has been studied by numerous investigators, little data exist for real fire evacuations. This is largely due to the difficulty in establishing an accurate position-time history for the evacuees. The evacuation of the World Trade Center North and South Towers on September 11, 2001 was unique in that major, catastrophic events occurred at distinct times during the evacuation. In this paper, 14 evacuation case studies are presented in which the evacuee reported their position at these known points in time to the media. From this position-time history, the descent rate of these evacuees could be determined. These descent rates are not necessarily representative of the evacuation population in general, but they do provide some distinct data points which are of value to the fire protection and building evacuation community in assessing evacuation from high-rise buildings.