Once the 3500s were pulled, all the firefighters had to pick up their Saber VHF radios again, estimated by the department and Motorola to be between 15 and 18 years old. In a war on 9/11 between terrorists armed with box cutters and fire chiefs who had to rely on runners for messages, bin Laden ended up with the low-tech edge.
(Continued)... decided at the outset that all the department could do was a search and rescue operation.
(Continued)... instincts. So some firefighters diverted people who were slowing down the evacuation of others to waiting areas. As many as 40 to 60 people were sequestered between the 12th and 20th floors of the North Tower. Some stayed there until they died.
This was in 1996. Keep in mind that after 9/11, Giuliani pushed forth the bullshit narrative that he became obsessed with terrorism after the '93 bombing. He did no such thing.
There were 188 people in Windows on the World on September 11 and a few more in the Observation Deck area. Under the city's own code, neither should have been allowed to reopen after 1993 without a fourth stairway, which, National Institute of Standards and Technology found, could have saved lives.
Even though the top chiefs had determined that the fires could not be extinguished, most firefighters went up in full firefighting gear, carrying over a hundred pounds, making themselves slower than many of the overweight and handicapped people they were sent to aid.
(Regarding the city's emergency command center being located, at Giuliani's stubborn insistence, inside the World Trade Center):
They also might have figured out a way to tell people above the fires not to head for the inaccessible roof, and to try instead to go down--a life saving option for the 18 people who were lucky enough to find the only open passageway, Stairway A in the South Tower.
A functioning command center could have also tackled the redundancy of so many units, police and fire, checking the same floors again and again, lessening the need for all those firefighters on the stairs. Delgrosso put it succinctly: "If anybody kept a record of which floors were searched, they wouldn't have needed half those firefighters."
(Note: The emergency command center was located, per Giuliani's foolish insistence, in the WTC.)
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 | 
