How many jumpers from twin towers

Nobody jumped. They were forced out, or blown out. I'm disgusted. I tried, but cannot find any reason someone would want to know something like that….

If that's why you're here—you're busted. Now go away. Eric Fischl did not go away. Neither did he turn away or avert his eyes. A year before September 11, he had taken photographs of a model tumbling around on the floor of a studio.

He had thought of using the photographs as the basis of a sculpture. Now, though, he had lost a friend who had been trapped on the th floor of the North Tower. Now, as he worked on his sculpture, he sought to express the extremity of his feelings by making a monument to what he calls the "extremity of choice" faced by the people who jumped.

He worked nine months on the larger-than-life bronze he called Tumbling Woman , and as he transformed a woman tumbling on the floor into a woman tumbling through eternity, he succeeded in transfiguring the very local horror of the jumpers into something universal—in redeeming an image many regarded as irredeemable. The day after Tumbling Woman was exhibited in New York's Rockefeller Center, Andrea Peyser of the New York Post denounced it in a column titled "Shameful Art Attack," in which she argued that Fischl had no right to ambush grieving New Yorkers with the very distillation of their own sadness … in which she essentially argued the right to look away.

Because it was based on a model rolling on the floor, the statue was treated as an evocation of impact—as a portrayal of literal, rather than figurative, violence. They thought that I was trying to say something about the people they lost. You don't even know my father. How dare you try telling me how I feel about my father? He said, 'You don't understand.

I'm getting bomb threats. Photographs lie. Even great photographs. Especially great photographs. The Falling Man in Richard Drew's picture fell in the manner suggested by the photograph for only a fraction of a second, and then kept falling. The photograph functioned as a study of doomed verticality, a fantasia of straight lines, with a human being slivered at the center, like a spike.

In truth, however, the Falling Man fell with neither the precision of an arrow nor the grace of an Olympic diver. He fell like everyone else, like all the other jumpers—trying to hold on to the life he was leaving, which is to say that he fell desperately, inelegantly. In Drew's famous photograph, his humanity is in accord with the lines of the buildings. In the rest of the sequence—the eleven outtakes—his humanity stands apart.

He is not augmented by aesthetics; he is merely human, and his humanity, startled and in some cases horizontal, obliterates everything else in the frame. In the complete sequence of photographs, truth is subordinate to the facts that emerge slowly, pitilessly, frame by frame. In the sequence, the Falling Man shows his face to the camera in the two frames before the published one, and after that there is an unveiling, nearly an unpeeling, as the force generated by the fall rips the white jacket off his back.

The facts that emerge from the entire sequence suggest that the Toronto reporter, Peter Cheney, got some things right in his effort to solve the mystery presented by Drew's published photo. The Falling Man has a dark cast to his skin and wears a goatee. He is probably a food-service worker. He seems lanky, with the length and narrowness of his face—like that of a medieval Christ—possibly accentuated by the push of the wind and the pull of gravity.

But seventy-nine people died on the morning of September 11 after going to work at Windows on the World. Another twenty-one died while in the employ of Forte Food, a catering service that fed the traders at Cantor Fitzgerald. Many of the dead were Latino, or light-skinned black men, or Indian, or Arab. Many had dark hair cut short.

Many had mustaches and goatees. Indeed, to anyone trying to figure out the identity of the Falling Man, the few salient characteristics that can be discerned in the original series of photographs raise as many possibilities as they exclude.

There is, however, one fact that is decisive. Whoever the Falling Man may be, he was wearing a bright-orange shirt under his white top. It is the one inarguable fact that the brute force of the fall reveals. No one can know if the tunic or shirt, open at the back, is being pulled away from him, or if the fall is simply tearing the white fabric to pieces.

But anyone can see he is wearing an orange shirt. If they saw these pictures, members of his family would be able to see that he is wearing an orange shirt. They might even be able to remember if he owned an orange shirt, if he was the kind of guy who would own an orange shirt, if he wore an orange shirt to work that morning. Surely they would; surely someone would remember what he was wearing when he went to work on the last morning of his life But now the Falling Man is falling through more than the blank blue sky.

He is falling through the vast spaces of memory and picking up speed. He never came home. His wife, Christy Ferer, won't talk about any of the particulars of his death. She is a close friend of Eric Fischl's, as was her husband, so when the artist asked, she agreed to take a look at Tumbling Woman.

It, in her words, "hit me in the gut," but she felt that Fischl had the right to create and exhibit it. Now she's come to the conclusion that the controversy may have been largely a matter of timing.

Maybe it was just too soon to show something like that. After all, not long before her husband died, she traveled with him to Auschwitz, where piles of confiscated eyeglasses and extracted tooth fillings are on exhibit. They couldn't show things like that then …. In fact, they did, at least in photographic form, and the pictures that came out of the death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness, without particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving families of the dead.

They were shown, as Richard Drew's photographs of the freshly assassinated Robert Kennedy were shown. They were shown, as the photographs of Ethel Kennedy pleading with photographers not to take photographs were shown.

They were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack was shown. They were shown as the photograph of Father Mychal Judge, graphically and unmistakably dead, was shown, and accepted as a kind of testament. They were shown as everything is shown, for, like the lens of a camera, history is a force that does not discriminate.

What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.

Catherine Hernandez never saw the photo the reporter carried under his arm at her father's funeral. Neither did her mother, Eulogia. Her sister Jacqueline did, and her outrage assured that the reporter left—was forcibly evicted—before he did any more damage. But the picture has followed Catherine and Eulogia and the entire Hernandez family. There was nothing more important to Norberto Hernandez than family. His motto: "Together Forever.

The picture split them. Those who knew , right away, that the picture was not Norberto—his wife and his daughters—have become estranged from those who pondered the possibility that it was him for the benefit of a reporter's notepad.

With Norberto alive, the extended family all lived in the same neighborhood in Queens. Now Eulogia and her daughters have moved to a house on Long Island because Tatiana—who is now sixteen and who bears a resemblance to Norberto Hernandez: the wide face, the dark brows, the thick dark lips, thinly smiling—kept seeing visions of her father in the house and kept hearing the whispered suggestions that he died by jumping out a window.

He could not have died by jumping out a window. All over the world, people who read Peter Cheney's story believe that Norberto died by jumping out a window. People have written poems about Norberto jumping out a window. People have called the Hernandezes with offers of money—either charity or payment for interviews—because they read about Norberto jumping out a window.

But he couldn't have jumped out a window, his family knows, because he wouldn't have jumped out a window: not Papi. She is sitting on a couch next to her mother, who is caramel-colored, with coppery hair tied close to her scalp, and who is wearing a cotton dress checked with the color of the sky. Eulogia speaks half the time in determined English, and then, when she gets frustrated with the rate of revelation, pours rapid-fire Spanish into the ear of her daughter, who translates. She says that she could see him thinking about us.

I know that sounds strange, but she knew him. They were together since they were fifteen. The Norberto Hernandez she knew would have endured any pain before he jumped out of a window.

When the Norberto Hernandez she knew died, his eyes were fixed on what he saw in his heart—the faces of his wife and his daughters—and not on the terrible beauty of an empty sky.

How well did she know him? That morning, I remember. He wore Old Navy underwear. He wore black socks. He wore blue pants: jeans. He wore a Casio watch. He wore an Old Navy shirt. With checks. He wore a white jacket. Under that, he had to wear a white T-shirt. There are pictures. There are pictures of the Falling Man as he fell.

Do they want to see them? Catherine says no, on her mother's behalf—"My mother should not see"—but then, when she steps outside and sits down on the steps of the front porch, she says, "Please—show me. Before my mother comes.

She looks at them one after another, and then her face fixes itself into an expression of triumph and scorn. Only I know Norberto. They said my father was taken to hell with the devil. I don't know what I would have done if it was him.

I would have had a nervous breakdown, I guess. They would have found me in a mental ward somewhere…. Her mother is standing at the front door, about to go back inside her house. Her face has already lost its belligerent pride and has turned once again into a mask of composed, almost wistful sadness.

A phone rings in Connecticut. A woman answers. A man on the other end is looking to identify a photo that ran in The New York Times on September 12, It's a famous picture, the man says—the famous picture of a man falling. It may be, the man says. But I was close enough to tell it was a person. I was so close I could see her face. She seemed calm and relaxed, as if she had no other option but to jump.

I knew I was lucky not to see her hit the pavement. When we got to the west side of the North Tower, we saw many other people jumping from the windows. Those images have stayed with me, and I often wonder what must have gone through their minds before they decided to jump.

I had been there for about 20 minutes when I heard the terrible sound, like a massive tree branch breaking, as the North Tower crumbled. I photographed it as it collapsed and it was only then, when it no longer obscured my view, that I realised the South Tower had also fallen completely. As I ran from the mayhem, I took one frame of a man kneeling on the floor crying, his shirt all torn. I switched lenses and saw a child running and screaming. I realized my digital cards were all full, so I ran a few blocks to the Getty Images office on Varick Street.

There, I was uploading the contents of my memory card to a computer when we were told we needed to evacuate the building because the police suspected a bomb had been placed at the Holland Tunnel, adjacent to the office. I left and took a taxi back to my hotel, from where I filed the photos I had taken. My newspaper ran a late edition that day and used my photos for it. For the rest of the day, I stayed in my room. I cried a lot. I remember calling my ex-wife but being barely able to speak.

Between sobs, I screamed, trying to tell her how many people I had seen jump from the towers. That nightmare scenario has furiously driven safety experts for the past two decades to push for vital changes to US building safety codes.

Up or down, left or right, panicked choices determined the chances of survival for people, unaware the odds were already stacked against them in buildings designed to maximise profit, not safety.

A volunteer New Jersey firefighter, he was driving into the city that morning when he saw the north tower burning and changed directions to get to his firehouse. Time and again, they faced pushback from building industry groups, reluctant to give up valuable floor space. When the World Trade Centre opened in lower Manhattan in , its twin towers were each storeys high. While they were under construction, New York City's building codes for high rises changed to allow fewer stairwells in the towers, halving the number required from six to three.

Keen to maximise open space without columns or other obstructions, the building designers placed the stairwells together in the same central area of the huge, 4,square-metre floors, around 20 metres apart. When American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower at am it sheared through floors 93 to 99 and all three of the building's stairwells in this area were destroyed.

Hundreds of people above the impact site were trapped with no way out. They were killed when the tower collapsed. At am, United Airlines Flight crashed into the south tower, through floors 75 to 85, but this tower had a major difference, a 'sky lobby' around floor 78, with space to transfer between elevators and stairwells set further apart.

Here, one stairwell in the south tower survived the impact, and offered a vital means of escape for those on the upper floors. Professor Corbett believes both towers should have held a fourth stairwell, based on building codes for occupancy rates, but the buildings' owner, the New York Port Authority, was exempt from complying with the city's building codes.

Port Authority documents showed an engineer's recommendation in that they "take advantage of the more lenient provisions regarding exit stairs". To this day, Professor Corbett believes that decision "may well have cost lives".

Decades before the tragedy of the World Trade Centre, public safety expert Jake Pauls was advocating for wider stairwells in high rise buildings. Nicknamed "a warrior on egress" by fellow safety campaigners, Dr Pauls has more than five decades of experience in public health consulting, with a focus on stairway safety and usability in major evacuations. Now 78, and still shuttling between Canada and the US working on safety committees, Dr Pauls told the ABC the stair width in the twin towers in was based on an antiquated measurement going back to pre-World War I standards.

Building codes dictated that stairs must be at least Pictures taken inside the stairwell show office workers in a devastatingly slow descent, at times stopped and pressed flat against the walls to allow firefighters carrying well over 20 kilos in heavy equipment to get up the stairs.

Evacuees included hundreds of people with physical disabilities, some in wheelchairs, being carried down by their co-workers through the narrow stairs.