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Twin Towers 'appeared to be blinded by smoke'By. Tom Leonard. Updated. BST, 1. 1 September 2. Almost all of them jumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell. One woman, in a final act of modesty, appeared to be holding down her skirt.

Others tried to make parachutes out of curtains or tablecloths, only to have them wrenched from their grip by the force of their descent. The fall was said to take about ten seconds. Watch The Colditz Story Online IMDB. It would vary according to the body position and how long it took to reach terminal velocity — around 1. Horror: A person falls to their death after jumping from the north tower following the audacious terror strike which shocked the world a decade ago.

When they hit the pavement, their bodies were not so much broken as obliterated. Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/1. Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid- air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel- bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre.

And yet, tragically, they are in many ways the forgotten victims of September 1. Even now, nobody knows for certain who they were or exactly how many they numbered.

Perhaps worst of all, surprisingly few even want to know. From the earliest days after the 9/1. American establishment and the media showed an overwhelming reluctance to dwell on those who jumped or fell from the Twin Towers. If this was simply down to qualms at being considered intrusive or voyeuristic when individuals in the most appalling circumstances chose in desperation to die very publicly, it would be understandable. But there are other, more complicated, reasons. In the aftermath of this attack on America’s sovereign territory — a period of intense patriotism — some considered that to choose to die rather than be killed showed a lack of courage.

And in this country of intense religious fervour, many believe that to be a ‘jumper’ was to choose suicide rather than accept the fate of God — and suicide in whatever circumstances is considered shameful or, indeed, a sin that will send you to Hell. At the office of the New York chief medical examiner, a spokesman said this week that they did not consider these people ‘jumpers’. She insisted they fell from the 1,3. Jumping indicates a choice, and these people did not have that choice,’ she said. That is why the deaths were ruled homicide, because the actions of other people caused them to die.

The force of explosion and the fire behind them forced them out of the windows.’Terror: An estimated 2. For those who have discovered that their loved ones may have been among the estimated 2. University administrator Jack Gentul cannot possibly imagine his late wife’s torment before she died.

Alayne Gentul, mother of two and the 4. South Tower and had gone up to the 9. In her final moments, she rang Jack to say in labouring breaths that smoke was coming into her room through vents.‘She said “I’m scared”,’ he tells me quietly. She wasn’t a person who got scared, and I said, “Honey, it’ll be all right, it’ll be all right, you’ll get down”.’Alayne Gentul’s remains were found in the street outside the building across from the tower — sufficiently far from the rubble to suggest she had jumped. Mr Gentul, who has since remarried, is not convinced she took that option but is clearly irked that some believe jumping was some sort of cop- out.‘She was a very practical person who would have done whatever she could to survive,’ he explains in a quiet voice.

But how can anyone know what one would do in a situation like that, having to choose how you go from this Earth?’ The notion that she jumped is, indeed, consoling to Mr Gentul in some ways, in that she exercised an element of control over her death. Ncis Season 6 Episode 2 Cucirca. Jumping is something you can choose to do,’ he says.

To be out of the smoke and the heat, to be out in the air, it must have felt like flying.’On the clear, blue morning of 9/1. Richard Pecarello watched from his office on the other side of the river as the second plane hit. His fiancée Karen Juday was working as an administrator at bond traders Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower. He tried to phone her but there was no answer, and for days and weeks after he looked at photographs on the internet and wondered if she had jumped. She was vain about her face and used anti- wrinkle cream, and he was certain she would have jumped rather than face the flames. Mr Pecarello, 5. 9, made contact with Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, who had captured images of many of the jumpers, and asked to look through his archives.

He saw a couple of photographs of a woman in cream trousers and blue top which he is convinced were of Karen.‘There was one of her standing in a window with flames behind her and one of her falling from the building,’ Mr Pecarello says. It made me feel she didn’t suffer and that she chose death on her terms rather than letting them burn her up.’He has no time for suggestions that she took the easy way out. The people who died that day weren’t soldiers. They were everyday people — parents and housewives and brothers and sisters and children,’ he says in his gruff Brooklyn accent. Horror: The U. S. World Trade Center.

When he tried to show the photos to Karen’s staunchly Protestant family back in Indiana, they didn’t want to know. They go by the official version, that nobody jumped. In fact, nobody liked talking about the jumpers. Unofficial estimates put the number of jumpers at around 2.

Towers. The official account is that nearly all 2,7. Twin Towers attack officially died from ‘blunt impact’ injuries. Ten years on, more than 1,0. They were vaporised in the inferno.

After the planes hit, raging fires pushed the temperatures to 1,0. The metal conducted the heat through the building at a terrifying speed and it reached the upper floors long before the flames did. There were reports of people having to stand on desks because the floor became so hot. Fire experts say people rarely throw themselves out of burning high- rises until they have exhausted every other option.

Indeed, as survivors desperate for fresh, cool air crowded at the windows smashed open by the force of the planes’ impact, it is possible some of the ‘jumpers’ were actually pushed out in the crush. The only research that comes close to being an official account is buried deep in an appendix of the huge report into why the towers collapsed, conducted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Grim: 2,7. 53 died from 'blunt impact injuries' on 9/1. They would have fallen for around 1. As part of its research into where the fire was at its most intense, NIST analysed camera footage and still photographs, and counted 1. All but three leapt from the first building to be hit — the North Tower. The second plane struck the South Tower 1.

The first jumper is recorded plunging from the North Tower’s 1. Boeing 7. 57 between the 9. Sometimes the fallers were separated by an interval of just a second.

At one point nine people fell in six seconds from five adjacent windows; at another, 1. Twenty minutes after the building was struck, two people fell simultaneously from the same window on the 9. At least four jumpers tried to climb to other windows for safety then lost their grip. One person climbed from the 9. The early jumpers came from the crash zone where the plane entered the building — the offices of the insurance brokers Marsh & Mc. Lennan. The last jumper fell just as the North Tower collapsed 1. Photographer Richard Drew says he has a picture of this person clinging to some debris while falling.

What drove some to jump and others to remain? Those who were in the South Tower, just 1. Kelly Reyher watched from the South Tower’s 7.

North Tower. To him, they looked ‘completely confused’ rather than consciously deciding to end it all.