Why were there no parachutes? It would at least have given them a chance.
The WTC (like all modern high-rises in the developed world) had a pretty impressive set of firefighting and evacuation infrastructure, procedures, and personnel. This training video goes through it pretty well [0].
- Smoke detectors and pull stations everywhere to ensure any fire is detected and responded to quickly (i.e. before it gets out of hand). There was a fire station across the street.
- A huge console for responding firefighters to see the location of alarm conditions, make building or floor-wide announcements, and even have two-way conversations with intercom stations on particular floors.
- Sprinklers and redundant power for the pumps that run them.
- Fans to push smoke out of the building and supply clean air to evacuation routes.
- Fire stairs, kept closed under positive pressure to keep smoke out, kept unobstructed by regular patrols, encased in material that wouldn't burn through for hours.
- A network of piping and wall-mounted hoses easily fed from the dedicated fire-truck parking.
- Fire drills, designated authorities for the evacuation of each floor, security personnel trained to watch over the fire alarm equipment.
It's not like the WTC wasn't prepared to evacuate in a fire. It's just that nobody anticipated all that infrastructure (pipes, stairwells, etc) getting sheared through by an airplane.
Impact by planes had been imagined prior to the crashes, but I don't know if it had been by the designers. Considering these were very tall structures, it seems likely someone would have at least briefly imagined it.
"The airliner that struck the North Tower struck it perpendicular to the north face. The impact severed all the elevators and all three stairwells. The airliner that struck the South Tower struck at an angle, severing two stairwells, but it left Stairway A, the one they were using, more or less intact."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clark_(September_11_surv...
You might as well ask why people who work in tall buildings don't take parachutes to work themselves. The answer is obvious, and I hope it's equally obvious why buildings don't do this.
On a related note: having to send your shoes through the x-ray machine in an airport security line is almost as bad of an idea. :/
Do you know how many individual paratroopers have jumped out of planes? There is no way the cost is prohibitive.
Parachuting is one of the last ways I'd want to go down, but, why wouldn't I want one if my only choice were to splat or char?
That isn't your only choice because the scenario is exceedingly unlikely to happen.
If safety is your thing, you'd be much better off spending the several thousand dollars on doctors visits, healthier food, gym memberships, and/or public transit throughout the year.
It's unlikely a seatbelt will save my life, but every car I go in has multiple.
The original argument presented here is equivalent to arguing it's too expensive and useless to carry enough lifeboat capacity for everyone on a ship after the Titanic sunk. It's extremely unlikely that I'll ever impact an iceberg.
I've never put on a parachute or practiced deploying one.
Lifeboats are not just for iceberg collisions. There are many reasons for a boat to sink that don't involve a collision.
Buildings don't just collapse from airplane collisions; fires, bombs, earthquakes, structural failure, hostile takeover, and more could all be scenarios where you might only survive if you have a chute.
Obviously these are rhetorical questions: it is far, far more likely to be hit by lightning than to die in a building collapse.
If you truly believe this risk is worth mitigating I would put my money/time where my mouth is and not depend on some building supervisor to keep enough parachutes around and keep them in good condition. Instead you should get some training*, buy a BASE jumping parachute and take it with you when you go above 60m. As you say, they are relatively inexpensive.
[1] Note: be careful -- you are much more likely to be killed in your training than you are to need to use it.
Yes: it's far more cost effective to avoid the risk altogether than attempt to mitigate the exceptionally unlikely event of a very-tall-building collapse or fire, particularly through use of, say, parachutes (into an urban landscape with many landing hazards and few readily accessible landing zones).
On the other hand, that decision also means foregoing opportunities, including the income potential of working for a firm in or near a dense downtown with such tall office towers in it. A cost you might be willing to accept.
Risks and costs can be balanced, though the cases in which people make decisions which are both fully informed and rational strike me as relatively rare.
Cost of installation is by no means the only factor or cost in making a safety feature. In another comment, you appeal to the many number of paratroopers who have jumped out of planes as prof that it can be cost-effectively, as if the cost of a paratrooper's jump could be reduced to the cost of a parachute.
Even if it took someone several minutes to strap on a backpack-like device, it would likely save lives in many scenarios.
As to my appeal to the cost of paratroopers' parachutes, that was in direct response to a very specific claim in the post I responded it to:
>It would be expensive to outfit all tall buildings with parachutes
http://www.sosparachute.com/en/site/sos
And an ABC News story asked the same question two months after 9/11:
Seriously NYC doesn't have any police/rescue helicopters?
If you're referring the 9/11 situation, this is the reason why it wasn't attempted - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clark_(September_11_surv...
That said, I suspect that had they known the towers were going to go down within 2 hours, there might have been some different decisions made. But that's just hindsight. :/