Columbia University released some more results from its World Trade Center Evacuation Study, and the Daily News translates the findings' recommendation as "Don't wait, don't ask, just go." We found this slide from a presentation (here's the PDF) Mailman School of Public Health Principal Researcher Robyn Gershon gave that has stats on what 2000 people did before leaving the World Trade Center - and many of them waited a few minutes before actually leaving by doing things like changing shoes and shutting down a computer. Gershon told the News that some of those survivors "literally got out as the buildings were collapsing and climbed out of the buildings."
The other alarming thing from the study is that the majority of the people knew nothing about evacuation plans for their office - nothing about stairwells, nothing about fire safety instructions, and many hadn't actually exited the building during a fire drill. It's surprising that so few at the World Trade Center had participated in a fire drill, given that there was the 1993 bombing. We hope that nowadays people do take their building's fire drills seriously, as much of a mid-day interruption as they may be.
