102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (16 page)

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Authors: Jim Dwyer,Kevin Flynn

BOOK: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
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From his helicopter, Greg Semendinger saw just the highest order of desperation. Get to the roof, he wanted to yell, as he flew closer to the building. Another order came from the ground, this time from an ESU lieutenant, Steve Reardon:
Reardon:
Be advised that no one is to rappel onto the top of the building.
The dispatcher had a hard time repeating his words precisely.
Dispatcher:
Units … no one is to compel [
sic
] on top of the building, no one is to compel on top of the building.
But Semendinger held out some hope. From his vantage point, the northwest corner of the north tower roof was pretty clear of smoke. Unfortunately, the automatic window-washing machine had stopped on its rooftop track at that precise location, making a landing impossible. The ESU cops would not be able to climb down on ropes, as they had done in 1993. It was too dangerous, given the smoke and heat. The only remaining option, and it was a long shot, would be to lower the hoist and perhaps pull up a few people from the roof. It would take patience. Only two people at a time could be lifted because of the 600-pound weight limit. And the group would have to be orderly, to police itself. Even then it would be difficult. The cable might snag one of the rooftop antennas, tethering the ship to a burning building. Or the heat rising from the inferno might thin the air, weakening the updrafts that helicopters need to fly.
Semendinger knew that if anyone did make it to the roof, imploring him for help, he would face a torturous choice. His life. The lives of his crew. Those of the people on the roof. As it turned out, the decision was made for him.
 
 
Locked. The doors were locked. They had traveled all the way to the roof, in the smoke, up the stairs, and it was a blind alley. Sean Rooney from Aon; Roko Camaj the window washer; Frank Doyle,
Rick Thorpe, and Stephen Mulderry from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Dozens of people in the south tower had tried to get to the roof, only to find their way blocked.
The situation was identical in the north tower, where a man trapped in the stairwell at the 103rd floor exploded over the radio. “Open the goddamn doors,” he yelled into his walkie-talkie.
In the south tower, Sean Rooney pounded on a door. It wouldn’t move, he told his wife, Beverly, by phone. She told him to try it again while she waited on the line. They had been high school sweethearts and had just celebrated turning fifty together with special vacations to Vermont, to mark Sean’s birthday, and Morocco, for Beverly’s. When Sean returned to the phone, he told Beverly the door still wouldn’t move. “Tell me what you see on TV,” he said. He needed her to figure out how the flames were advancing in the building. He was on the 105th floor on the north side of the building, he told her calmly. That was seven flights above his office. He had already tried to go down without success. Now he couldn’t fathom why the doors leading up would not open.
While she listened, Beverly dialed 911 on another line. The operators who fielded her calls and others’ said that emergency crews were on their way. Hang in there. No one had told the operators that stairway A in the south tower—the one that Richard Fern and his Euro Brokers colleagues had gone down—was open, so they could not tell anyone inside the building to use it. Instead, while they spoke, the operators typed shorthand versions of what they were hearing onto a computer screen.
2 World Trade, 105th Floor. People trapped. Open Roof to Gain Access.
The Port Authority had been locking the roof doors for decades. Agency officials said that controlling access to the space allowed them to thwart vandals, daredevils, and suicides. True, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the two towers had cast a magical aura on what had been seen as dour architecture, but the Port
Authority did not want its roofs turned into permanent stages for people with grievances, exhibitionist impulses, or a desire to hurt themselves. Some managers for companies on the upper floors clearly understood the off-limits policy. Many people, inside the building and out, did not. The ex-firefighter Bernie Heeran had couseled his son, Charles, to go to the roof. After all, the city building code required that people be able to get onto roofs during an emergency. The roof access doors had to be left unlocked. If they were connected to a buzzer system, they were supposed to be fail-safe—meaning that they would automatically unlock if power failed or calamity struck.
The trade center, however, was exempt from the code. The Port Authority had decided to lock the doors and the Fire Department had chosen to go along with that decision, believing that such a policy would reinforce its message that down was the proper way to evacuate in a high-rise fire. As a result, three sets of doors blocked access to the roof in each tower. A person who climbed to the top of the stairs at the 110th floor needed an electronic swipe card to get through the first two. That put the person in a tiny vestibule facing a third door that opened to the stairs leading to the roof. To get through the final door, a person had to be buzzed in by security officers who watched on a closed-circuit camera from their offices on the 22nd floor of the north tower.
Marie Refuse, one of the security officers on duty in the 22ndfloor center, was still at her desk at 9:30. She spoke with Ed Calderon, a supervisor, whose radio code was S-5.
Marie Refuse:
Would you like me to release all doors and gates?
Ed Calderon:
That is affirmative. This is the S-5, that is affirmative.
Marie Refuse:
That’s a copy, we’re doing it now.
There was a problem: the computer that operated the doors was not working properly. ACCESS DENIED, the screen blared. The security
agents on 22 could not open the doors to the roof, or to the floors just below it, which were mechanical rooms and also required electronic access. For that matter, they could not even open their own door, from the inside. A deputy security director, George Tabeek, led a team of firefighters up to the 22nd floor in hopes of getting them out.
George Tabeek:
We’re on 16 right now.
Marie Refuse:
That’s a copy. We can’t use the software right now to try to release the doors.
Roko Camaj, the window washer, had both the authorization and the swipe card, but he couldn’t make it onto the roof, either. He told relatives by phone that he was stuck on the 105th floor with 200 other people. He never specified why he could not get to the roof. Perhaps Camaj and the others had gotten as far as the 110th floor, but the first floor they could call from was the 105th because that was the nearest stairwell door that would open. Camaj used his radio to call down to a colleague at the Port Authority operations desk. The colleague, John Mongello, told Camaj they needed his exact location. The 105th floor, Camaj told him.
“You coming up here?” Camaj asked.
“I don’t think so, Roko,” John said. “I’m going to talk to someone. They may have to find another way to get you.”
“A lot of people up here, and big smoke,” Camaj responded.
John told Camaj he should get down as far as the 98th floor. The stairwell was clear from there down. Somehow the operations desk knew about stairway A, which had not been severed by the plane, the one that a few others had been using to flee. The information had otherwise not circled back upstairs. Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath and Rich Fern, among others, had escaped down stairway A of the south tower from above the crash zone. While some people in the command center at the trade center seemed to know about it, and spoke about it on their walkie-talkies, they could not communicate with the ordinary tenants on the upper floors. Those
people did not know that there was a way out by going down—that there was, in fact, a passable staircase. Most of them were dialing not into the basement command center but into the city’s 911 call center—and no one there was aware of the escape route.
“Roko, take your time,” John said. “You are going to have to make your way down the stairwell.” Camaj’s response was inaudible.
Many others who had climbed to the roof of the south tower were also heading down, though not because they knew of a stairway that would carry them past the smoke and flames. They were simply trying to find a suitable place to make their last stand. Frank Doyle and the some of the other traders from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods struggled back to a conference room on the 88th floor. Doyle called his wife, Kimmy, from a working phone.
“Hi, sweetie,” he said. “We need your help. We’ve tried getting out on the roof but the doors are locked.”
More than a dozen people from the firm were with Doyle, including Rick Thorpe and Stephen Mulderry, who had been on the phone with his brother, Peter, just before the south tower was hit. Only one phone worked and each person used it to make his essential calls. Stephen called Peter again.
“Hey, brother,” he said.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” Peter responded.
“I’m really not,” Stephen said.
He recounted their failed attempts, both up and down, to escape. He asked for his mother’s phone number because she had recently moved, and he had not committed the new number to memory. And he told Peter he loved him.
“Are you sure there’s no way out of that room?” Peter asked.
“No, like I told you, we tried everything,” Stephen said. “We’re just going to wait for the firemen to come get us. But it’s a long way for them to come, and the smoke’s really bad. Some people are talking about throwing the fire extinguisher through the window, but I know that will be the end of us. But if someone panics and does it, there’s nothing I can do.”
A few minutes later, the phone was passed to Rick Thorpe, who called his wife, Linda, at a neighbor’s house. Earlier in the day, after
the second plane had hit, Rick and Linda had agreed that she would go there with their baby, Alexis. He would call when he knew more. But when the phone rang this time, for some reason, Rick could not speak.
“Hello—Rick—Rick,” Linda called into the phone.
There was no response, but Linda and her neighbor could hear the ambient noise from the conference room. People were coughing as it filled with smoke. They were having trouble seeing across the room.
“Where is the fire extinguisher?” someone said.
“It already got thrown out the window,” came the reply.
“Is anybody unconscious?” asked someone else.
Linda and the neighbor could not hear an answer.
The voices of some of the people sounded calm. Others trembled with strain. One man began screaming, the words lost to anguish. Another man tried to console him.
“It’s okay,” the man said, soothingly. “It’ll be okay.”
10
“I’ve got a second wind.”
9:15 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
 
T
he street screamed. Fire trucks rolled in, and ambulances, and police cars, each with its siren spinning alarm into the sky. Another irregular wall of sound came from two-way radios, with hundreds of voices crashing through the aural pipelines. In the middle of the commotion, Gerry Drohan, a construction inspector from the Port Authority, stood on a sidewalk outside the trade center with an ear to his walkie-talkie, and immediately recognized one voice the moment he heard it: a slightly nasal tone, scented with the accents of a youth in south New Jersey, near Philadelphia, and adulthood on the streets of Brooklyn. In a riot of sound, Frank De Martini’s voice was calm and collected. “Construction manager,” he said, identifying himself. “The elevator … the express elevators could be in jeopardy of falling. Be prepared for that. Do you copy?”
The words were calibrated precisely to the task. De Martini was issuing a warning; then he continued what he, Pablo Ortiz, and a few others had been doing for the past half hour, methodically freeing scores of people trapped from the 90th floor down, in offices and elevators just below the impact zone in the north tower. They had been efficient, De Martini and Ortiz, working with a crowbar
and a long flashlight, as if rescuing people were the jobs that they had been hired for. The truth was that neither man had a role in the official evacuation or emergency plans for the buildings. Their regular job was to oversee tenant renovations, with De Martini supervising a team that made sure all changes met Port Authority standards. Both men knew the building, how it worked, and in some ways, they loved it. They were trying to leave, but kept stopping to clear floors. Now De Martini and his crew had reached the 78th floor and its sky lobby.
De Martini got no response to his warning about the express elevators, at least none that could be transcribed from the radio tapes. Around the same time, he issued another request. “
Any construction inspector at ground level,
” De Martini called out.
Drohan was at ground level, having left the 88th floor of the north tower before the first plane hit, thinking he had just enough time to run a simple errand. His daughter had given him a couple of rolls of film to get developed, and he hoped to drop them off, then make it back by 9:00 for an inspection in the south tower of renovations done in the offices of Aon Insurance. All his plans had come to a halt at 8:46, when the first plane struck.
From the street, with no access to television, Drohan assumed that something had exploded in a mechanical room. Then, for one of the few times in his life, he was paged by his wife, who told him that a plane had struck the tower. She was glad to find him already outside. A few minutes later, the second plane crashed into the south tower. Around 9:15, Drohan heard De Martini over the walkie-talkie.
“Any construction inspector at ground level.”
Drohan acknowledged that he was on the street.
“Can you escort a couple of structural inspectors to the 78th floor?” De Martini asked.
De Martini had seen something in the steel—Drohan was not sure what—that he did not like. The drywall had been knocked off parts of the sky lobby, exposing the elevator shafts, and revealing the core of the building. That had prompted his first radio alert, warning that the elevators might collapse. Now De Martini wanted
inspectors from a structural engineering firm to come up to the 78th-floor sky lobby and take a look. He thought Drohan could bring them into the building.
“I can’t get back into the building,” Drohan replied. “There’s a police line.”
De Martini did not settle easily. This, after all, was a man who had once stood on the roof of his restored brownstone in Brooklyn to make sure firefighters did not damage it when they were attacking a blaze next door; a man who had chased down litterbugs on the street to reproach them and point out the error of their ways. He had even faced down a burglar in his own house.
“Let me talk to a police officer,” De Martini said. “Can you give the radio to one of them?”
For Frank De Martini to be worried about the structural integrity of even a small part of the World Trade Center was a giant leap. At his most expansive, De Martini could hold forth to young and old on the wonders of the place, the mighty machines that moved fresh air around the buildings, the giant pipes that carried water from the Hudson River for the cooling plant, the emergency generators that would keep computers running should all else fail. A group from his old high school in New Jersey had visited earlier in the year, and he gave them the tour of a proud insider. He also had been interviewed for a documentary about the trade center for the History Channel. Many of the old-timers at the trade center had not been interested in being filmed—perhaps they were tired of telling their stories—but De Martini relished the opportunity to show off the buildings. He had a fresh eye for the towers, and was himself a newcomer by Port Authority standards, having first worked at the trade center on a three-month assignment after the 1993 bombing. His job was to assess the damage and the progress of repairs, a task he performed for the Port Authority’s consulting engineer, Leslie E. Robertson, who had been part of the team that did the original structural design for the towers during the 1960s. Given the conditions at the trade center after the bombing, De Martini had to make a standing start from chaos, a posture that he relished.
In those months after the 1993 bombing, De Martini, like many
others, also absorbed some of the reassuring, even comforting lessons that were drawn from that first attack. The towers had proven their resilience. The bomb parked in the basement had done tremendous damage all through the confines of the garage, of course, but each tower had proved itself an unflinching colossus. Leslie Robertson was so taken with the strength of the buildings he had helped design in his youth, he arranged to ship a 14,000-pound steel brace that had been blown off the base of the building to his weekend home in Connecticut. There he mounted it on a pedestal in the yard. The point of this industrial sculpture was not the salvaged metal, but its evocation of the Olympian indifference of the structures to a blast that had been powerful enough to tear off a seventy-five-foot column. It was as if the
Titanic
had hit the iceberg and still steamed on to New York.
On the morning after the 1993 bombing, Robertson explained to a reporter that the bombers had parked the truck against the base of the north tower, on its south side—a spot that a layperson might have thought just right for knocking the north tower onto the south. The engineer had made a point that morning of reiterating one of the most striking claims about the strength of the towers, and it was one that Frank De Martini would recall nearly eight years later, when he was interviewed in January 2001 for the History Channel documentary about the towers. “The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it,” De Martini said. “That was the largest plane at the time.”
Videotaped at his desk on the 88th floor of the north tower, where he was flanked by a series of framed photographs showing the towers as they rose during the 1970s, De Martini offered a simple but illuminating analogy to explain how that could be true. The answer, he said, was the pinstriped columns around the outside of the towers.
“I believe the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door, this intense grid,” De Martini said. “And the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing the screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.”
That interview had been recorded in January. Now, eight months
later, and thirty minutes into the crisis on September 11, De Martini wanted the structural inspectors up to the sky lobby, to look into the gaping holes. And if Gerry Drohan could not talk his way past a police officer, De Martini was ready to give it a try from the 78th floor. As it should happen, standing directly in front of Drohan was a senior police officer—an inspector, Drohan guessed, from the white uniform shirt.
Drohan approached the officer, told him about De Martini, and handed him the radio. The policeman talked to Frank, for a moment. Then he handed the walkie-talkie back to Drohan. No way was he getting across the line.
“We’ll have the Fire Department take care of it,” the officer said.
Rather than being rebuffed, De Martini appeared to have been reminded of something. He had to warn firefighters that the elevators looked extremely fragile. Fifteen minutes after his first warning, De Martini broadcast another.
De Martini:
Construction manager to base, be advised that the express elevators are in danger of collapse. Do you read?
Male:
[
inaudible
]
De Martini:
Relay that, Chris, to the firemen, that the ele—
Male:
Express elevators are gonna collapse? … Advise … What elevators? … All express elevators? Which specific … specific ones? [
pause
]
Male:
[
inaudible
]
Far from the clamor on the street, De Martini faced another crisis on the 78th floor. Still trapped in an elevator was Tony Savas, a seventy-two-year-old inspector who worked on De Martini’s construction team. Savas’s predicament had been discovered early, since many of his colleagues from the 88th floor had passed through the 78th-floor sky lobby during their descent, and a number of them had made futile attempts to open his elevator doors. Savas had sent a message over his radio that was cool in syntax but
urgent in content: there was smoke coming in. Word of his trouble had gotten back to De Martini and Ortiz while they were still prying open doors on the upper floors and leading people to safety. They made their way down to 78.
Among the other people on the 78th floor was a young security guard, Greg Trapp, who had moved to New York after serving in the army, to pursue a life in acting and to make his own movies. Earlier in the summer, he had started working as a guard at the trade center, catching any available shifts. That morning, he drew a post at the sky lobby, where he steered people transferring to an elevator for Windows on the World. (The elevator that ran directly from the ground to the restaurant was out of service, necessitating a transfer at 78 for the last leg of the journey.) Hundreds of people were expected for the Risk Waters conference at the restaurant, but only eighty-one had arrived when the first plane hit. In those early minutes, Trapp and a tenant had gone up to about the 84th floor, the first reentry floor from the stairway, and rousted some people from an office.
When he returned to 78, Trapp saw a group of three Port Authority employees at work on the doors to the elevator where Savas was trapped. Trapp peered into the small gap and saw Savas, a man with thinning white hair, seemingly serene. The Port Authority workers all knew him, Trapp noted. That was not surprising: Savas loved coming to work, rising at 5:45, and every couple of years, he promised his wife that he would retire—in a couple of years. Now the colleagues who knew him so well would try to get him out.
Unlike others who had passed through the floor and made a few fleeting efforts to pry open the doors, this group was consumed with the task of opening them. The project challenged their brains and brawn. They managed to move the doors an inch or two, but they knew that the safety locks would not yield easily. Tough as it was, this was work they could do. What could they use for tools? A few feet away was a sign, directing visitors to the elevators for the lobby. It stood on a metal easel. To hold the doors apart, one of the men grabbed the easel and wedged the legs into the little opening. That did not solve the problem: spreading the doors from the
bottom, where they seemed to have the greatest leverage, had the opposite effect at the top of the doors, which seemed to pinch tighter. The doors also had an electronic lock at the top that kept them from opening if the car stopped more than a few inches from the landing.
John Griffin, who had started work during the summer as the trade center’s director of operations for Silverstein Properties, the new leaseholder, came over to the elevator bank. At six feet eight inches tall, Griffin had no problem reaching the top of the elevator door to apply pressure as the others pushed from the bottom, and to manipulate the locking device. The doors popped apart.
Out came Savas, who was surprised to find Griffin, his new boss, involved in the rescue. Rubbing his hands together, Savas appeared exhilarated, possessed of a sudden burst of energy, or so he seemed to the security guard.
“Okay,” Savas said. “What do you need me to do?”
One of the other Port Authority workers shook his head. “We just got you out—you need to leave the building.”
No, Savas insisted. He wanted to help. “I’ve got a second wind.”
The identities of the three Port Authority employees who freed Tony Savas are uncertain, but a number of circumstances—including subsequent photo identifications by Greg Trapp—suggest that Frank De Martini was definitely among the three. Trapp also remembered a man with an earring. Pablo Ortiz wore an earring. The third person may have been Pete Negron, a Port Authority employee who worked on the 88th floor but had not been there when the plane hit.

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