How many people worked in the twin towers?

I remember it as 50,000?

Did they have an evacuation plan?

It may be politically incorrect to say this, but if there were 50,000 people working there and 2800 died, then a good job of evacuation was done. It could have been so much higher a death toll. The buildings came down completely, so the vast majority was out in time.

I say this coming from watching the COURT TV 911 special which K. Costner narrated - which was especially annoying to me, for blaming just about everybody except the hijackers. One of their complaints was that people in the South Tower were told to stay at work - well there is a time not to listen to your boss, and it looks like most people took it. Also complaining about people going to the roof to be saved which turned out to be impossible - if you work in a building that size, don't you make sure you know the evacuation routes? Still, most people did, because most people got out.

A simple precaution would be to have fire drills and evacuation plans - and it would be more effective than cashing in the Bill of Rights or "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here."

Striking at 8:46 was one of several actions taken that minimized
the number of deaths--which seems strange for terrorists, no?

I'm not convinced that evacuation from the roof was impossible.
It was dangerous, and probably that option was outlawed out of
fear that panicked people would have an ugly scene on the roof,
but I suspect that many people could have been saved. The door
was locked, so somebody would have had to break it down from
the roof side.

I would guess it was not impossible.

I could see there being no other option for those above the floors on which the planes crashed, but there could have been any type of fire in that building and people get cut off because they were on floors higher than the one where the fire was, and the fire damage cutting off any way down.

So one would think they'd have thought of that and had a rooftop evacuation plan. They thought of designing the building so it could withstand plane crashes. Why not think of rescusing people directly from the top floors?

walk down, but most people went up instead.

Brian Clark walked down from the 84th floor. He said he saw a few
flames, but no blazing inferno. He stopped on 31 to make phone calls!
When he hit the street a friend said he thought the towers might
collapse and Clark said "No way!"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/above.html

I would still leave though. Which most people did, presumably. How many people were killed in the South Tower versus the North? I would think most of the deaths were from the North because those in the South had a better warning to get out. Though the South crumbled first. Even so, the idea of getting out of there before there was any reason to might have done a lot.



That would do a lot to get you to stay, since in between crashes there would have been no reason to expect another one. It is still tough for me to blame those who made that announcement, though. They had no way of knowing, at that point, that the South Tower would be hit, too.






It strikes me as odd even then that he could recognize that so quickly, but then again there was the 1993 attack, which makes it all the more likely there must have been some thought toward what to do if the building were attacked by terrorists.

to prevent more people from escaping by going downstairs.

The surprise factor is so essential to being "successful" with the plan that it could never happen again, at least not this particular way. Any attempt to take over the plane and the passengers are going to attack. It was even happening on that very day on Flight 93. So the terrorists never thought about how the passengers could get access to information - they did nothing about passengers calling from the phones, so that their late start on Flight 93 and not doing anything with the passengers once they took over the plane meant that the passengers had access to information and what was going on so that they at least had a chance to try something to thwart the attack. At which they succeeded, since that flight did not hit whatever target was intended.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-1840

There was also this Odego stuff and other warnings

Might have been nothing odd here. Were there any that were killed? I would estimate that the biggest CEOs would have had offices on the top floors, too, making them more vulnerable.