2,000 survivors of the World Trade Centre attacks in New York are being interviewed by a team of British academics in a bid to understand their behaviour and experiences during an emergency situation within a high-rise building.

The research team, made up of experts in fire safety engineering from the Universities of Greenwich, Liverpool and Ulster, have been awarded a £1.6 million grant by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The factors they are studying include whether they started to evacuate immediately or continued to work; the urgency with which the evacuation took place; the realisation that they were in danger; and whether survivors formed groups when leaving the building.

“The survivors of the WTC September 11th 2001 disaster are key to our understanding of how to design a safer built environment,” a spokesperson for the team said. “Their individual and collective experiences could significantly influence the next generation of performance based building codes and high rise building designs.”

The evacuation of the World Trade Centre, which followed the impact of the first plane, was the largest full-scale evacuation of people in modern times.