Miracles of 9/11 A World Trade Center Stairway | Miracle Detectives | The Oprah Winfrey Network

Rand's and i have come to talk to Steve Ross who is an expert on how buildings fail and what parts of buildings might survive when there is a failure so I think he's the perfect person to really answer the question of why did people in stairwell B survive what about stairwell B made it so remarkably sturdy and intact part of it was where it was and part of it was how it was built let me show you a little bit about what a typical floor looked like if you actually looked at the building itself the outer wall of the building is here in the center of this is a core area and that core area basically has the elevators there was a big elevator Bank on this side on both towers very similar there was a corridor from the tenant spaces I went all the way through and it was another car door in this direction and this area was held up with a number of extra beams so you had beams relatively close together throughout this entire space and where are the stairwells stairway a was just off of this corridor stairway C was off of this Carter and stairway be the one that survived was off of the central car so stairway B was almost in the center of the building and only stairway B had three big beams fairly close it was kind of in the corner the aircraft hit very high up about the 94th floor and it caused damage throughout this area remember this area here was really the sanctuary particularly right about in the middle of it that's where stairway B was and so what happened is the plane hit here on the 94th floor there were about 10 floors above it once the steel gets above 600 degrees or so it loses most of its structural strength as the floors collapsed on one another and pancaked on top of one another on the way down by the time it got down to the lower floors you had the weight of 75 floors of building pressing on this area but fortunately the debris field by then had spread wider and so it scattered outward so essentially it was West stairwell be the only survivable area of Tower one yes this area was that survival zone basically from floor four or six up to floor 22 where a fair amount of void existed people survived and those lives were there to be saved how they go out there not for me to answer he's speaking to Steve Ross I think made it quite clear that it was actually the physical characteristics of the building that made the destruction of stair will be less likely than some other parts of the building with a hundred and ten storeys of steel and cement collapsing all around you the likelihood of survival is almost non-existent but these people did survive almost unscathed

Channel: OWN

Views: 299,721

Rating: 4.7531586 out of 5

Keywords: OWN, Oprah Winfrey Network, Miracle Detectives, Miracles, Intuition, Power, Prayers, 9/11, 9-11, September 11, Attack, Miracle, Stairs, Oprah, Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey Network YouTube, Oprah Where Are They Now, Where Are They Now Oprah, Iyanla Fix My Life, full episodes, Super Soul Sunday, Oprah Winfrey Show, The Haves and The Have Nots, Have and Have Nots, If Loving You Is Wrong, Iyanla Vanzant, Livin Lozada, Oprah Life Class, Lindsay Lohan, “how-to”, “season”, “episode”

Id: 6IsQeb2q1-o

Length: 4min 11sec (251 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2011