In the responses to yesterday’s “Five Phone Messages” piece, which was about producer Scott Rudin‘s plan to produce a 9/11 movie based on Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, crazynine stated that “all media somehow colluded to eliminate each and every image and film still of WTC jumpers from public memory.”

Here’s another aspect of 9/11/01 that you’ll never hear anyone talking about. Reason? It’s simply not allowed. And despite the obvious logic behind it, anyone who brings this up will be slapped down so hard and fast they won’t know what hit them. Ready for it?

It’s about the people in the north and south towers who tried to get out via the fire-escape stairwells but were prevented by two significant slow-up factors. I’m not a 9/11 authority by any means, but I’ve read a good amount about it, and what I’m stating here will seem fairly obvious to anyone who’s tried to move through a dense crowd.

It wasn’t just those Port Authority honchos telling people in the north and south towers to stay in their offices that cost many, many lives (as they dissuaded people from trying to get out of the building by going down the stairs). The ability of people to escape from both buildings was also hindered by the bodies of NYC firemen trying to make their way upstairs. That sounds like an awful thing to say, I know, but isn’t it common knowledge that NYC firemen, brave and gallant to the last, trudged up the stairs of both towers (particular the north tower, which didn’t fall as quickly as the south) to lend whatever assistance they could to people on the upper floors and/or do what they could to put out fires? Isn’t it logical, given this, that their presence on the stairs also made the journey of any person looking to escape (the north tower especially) much slower? It had to.

I remember reading in one of the 9/11 accounts that the fire-escape stairwells were so crowded, particularly the north tower stairwells (which were usable for a much longer period), that it took an average individual approximately one minute to make his/her way from one floor down to another — 60 seconds per floor! So if you were trying to get down, say, from the 70th floor at a certain point that morning, you were looking at a 70-minute trip. If you were on the 60th, an 60-minute hike. On the 50th, a 50-minute journey. Meaning that a lot of people didn’t make it out because of this slow movement.

It’s horribly ironic, but how can it not be true? If the stairs didn’t have a bunch of super-brave fellows with heavy equipment slogging up the stairs en masse, more people might have lived. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the many were slowed down to the point that they never made it out?