August 08, 2004

Sobering

I've been reading the 9/11 Commission report, and I've just finished chapter 9, which describes the events following the planes' crashing into the WTC. Broadly speaking, there's not much there that wasn't already known: the radio problems, the failures of the chain of command. We've been aware of that. What I didn't realize, presumably because the television cameras deliberately shied away from it, was the number of people who jumped from the buildings. The report mentions this so matter-of-factly that it's doubly horrifying. From page 316:

It is impossible to measure how many more civilians who descended to the ground floors would have died but for the NYPD and PAPD personnel directing them -- via safe exit routes that avoided jumpers and debris --to leave the complex urgently but calmly.
You've probably heard some of the praise for the actual writing of the report; believe me, it's merited. There's very little bureaucratese or jargon to be found in here. It's annoying to have to flip back to the end of the volume to look at footnotes, but since the alternative would have meant pages with two lines of text and the balance taken up by notes, that's a small price to pay.

I'm just starting the recommendations. It'll be interesting to see how they compare to the condensed version we've been getting from the headline writers over the past week.

Posted by Linkmeister at August 8, 2004 08:34 AM
Comments