102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (2 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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The gunman’s accomplices in the Kahane assassination—followers of Sheikh Rahman—were not arrested until three years later, after they drove a yellow Ford Econoline van into the basement of one of those edifices of capitalism, the World Trade Center. At midday on Friday, February 26, 1993, a bomb in that van killed six people: Wilfredo Mercado, Bob Kirkpatrick, Steve Knapp, Bill Macko, John DiGiovanni, and Monica Rodriguez Smith. All had been in the basement, a few yards away, when the van exploded. The electricity mains failed. Then the backup generators were flooded. Dozens of cars caught fire, and the burning tires released waves of filthy smoke. For thousands of people in the towers, the loss of power meant a slow, labored evacuation down dark and smoky stairs, with no guidance from public-address systems. It took ten hours to get everyone out. Yasyuka Shibata had arrived that morning in February from Japan and was sitting down to lunch at Windows on the World when the explosion shook the china on his table. He walked down 106 flights in thick smoke. His face was covered with soot. He swiped at his face with a handkerchief as he spoke to a reporter. “I went from Windows on the World,” he said, “to a window on hell.”
The pursuit of the bombers, the farcical manner in which the plot unraveled—one of the conspirators went back to the truck rental agency and demanded a refund for his deposit on the van that he had just blown up—overshadowed deeper, more disturbing matters that emerged long after public attention in the crime had waned. The FBI, it developed, had had an informant inside the cell that carried out the bombing, but had fired him eight months
before, in a dispute over his $500-a-week stipend. Afterward, the agency quietly hired him back—for $1.5 million—to penetrate other groups of Islamic radicals. The only person to be disciplined for the fiasco was the agent who had championed the informant.
In the eyes of the Fire Department’s senior commanders, the 1993 attack brought chilling lessons in what could go wrong when multiple emergency agencies respond to a disaster. The fire chiefs, while proud of having helped thousands evacuate, believed that their efforts at a coordinated response with the Police Department had simply collapsed. The next eight years appeared to be a golden era of public safety in New York, with crime dropping and the number of fires shrinking. Yet the rifts between the two agencies only deepened. In 1996, the Fire Department took charge of emergency medical response, and promptly stripped paramedics and emergency medical technicians of the ability to listen to police communications. In 1997 and 1998, the city spent thousands of dollars for brand-new radios that would allow police and fire commanders to communicate with each other, but these state-of-the-art devices sat unused, on the shelves in police offices, and in the trunks of fire chiefs’ cars. And just as the two departments had not worked together on February 26, 1993, they never returned to the trade center to drill together.
At the Port Authority, the 1993 attack had a revolutionary effect, at least compared with the reactions of other public agencies. The bombing shifted power in an argument that had gone on for the lifetime of the towers, a struggle that pitted safety against space. The stairs were crowded and dark; while it would have been very difficult to squeeze more stairways into the towers, the Port Authority marked the ones it did have with photoluminescent paint, and provided emergency lights with backup batteries. None of the tenants had known where to go, or whether to go, so a new sound system was installed, and a long-dormant fire warden program was awakened and revitalized. In the concourse shopping mall beneath the trade center, a half-dozen stores were torn out and replaced with corridors, so that the exits would comply with city
codes. One of the deepest secrets of the two buildings was that their structural steel—webbed together in a novel, lightweight design—had never been fireproofed to the satisfaction of the trade center’s engineers or architects. No one had ever tested the fireproofing of the steel in two of the tallest buildings in the world. In fact, it was crumbling off. Not long after the bombing, the Port Authority began to replace the fireproofing, and by the morning of September 11, had completed about 30 floors of the 220 in the towers.
And yet for those present on that blustery February day in 1993, the lasting image was of skyscrapers that appeared, from the outside, to be not only unmolested but Herculean in their indifference to an enormous bomb. The structural engineer explained that not even a Boeing 707, the largest airplane flying at the time they were built, could knock them over. The dead were buried, the basement rebuilt, a memorial erected, the buildings reopened. Over time, nearly all the 1993 bombers were caught and sent to prison. The Port Authority closed the garage to public parking. Ferocious-looking truck stoppers were set around the driveway entrances. No one would ever again be able simply to roll a truck bomb up to the base of the towers. Any person who entered the buildings had to clear a battalion of blue-blazered guards in the lobbies before boarding the elevators. The bottom twenty feet of the towers were as secure as any public space in the world. Every morning, Dianne DeFontes swiped her identification card at the turnstiles. The want of proper identification had held up the clients of David Kravette, stuck on the phone with his wife in the Cantor Fitzgerald office as they discussed the newspaper delivery problem.
By the morning of September 11, 2001, the 1993 bombing seemed to have been the work of another age. The towers had been hit with what the FBI described at the time as “the largest improvised explosive device” in the history of American crime. And yet the bones of the buildings stood with no visible scratches.
Nonetheless, the memories lingered in the soft tissue. Their potency ran in uneven currents across the archipelago of the trade center, where people came and went as businesses moved or
floundered. The memory of that Friday in 1993 slumbered just out of sight, below the gloss and demands of work life, freeing the habitants of the trade center to savor the glories of a morning like September 11, 2001. With the sky bright, the wind mild, a late summer day in New York had begun to unfurl its soft promises.
 
 
As Liz Thompson arrived that Tuesday morning for breakfast atop the tallest building in New York, she would mark the greeting that Doris Eng gave to her as particularly sunny in tone, if ordinary in language. Windows on the World relied not only on the charms of its views, but also on the welcome of its staff.
“Good morning, Ms. Thompson,” Eng had said.
Bright as the day, it seemed to Thompson. Glorious weather: a rich September sky flooded through the windows.
Familiar faces filled many of the tables in Wild Blue, the intimate adjunct aerie to Windows that Eng helped manage. As much as any one place, that single room captured the sweep of humanity that worked and played in the trade center.
Thompson, the president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, was having breakfast with Geoffrey Wharton, an executive with Silverstein Properties. At the next table sat Michael Nestor, the deputy inspector general of the Port Authority, and one of his investigators, Richard Tierney. They ate there nearly every morning.
At a third table were six stockbrokers, several of whom came every Tuesday. For one of them, Emeric Harvey, Eng had a special treat. The night before, another manager at the restaurant had given her two impossible-to-get tickets to
The Producers
and asked her to pass them along to Harvey.
Sitting by himself at a window table, overlooking the Statue of Liberty, was a relative newcomer, Neil Levin, who had become the executive director of the Port Authority in April. No one could recall seeing him at Windows for breakfast before this morning. His secretary had requested a table a few days earlier and now he sat waiting for a companion, a banker friend.
Every other minute or so, a waiter, Jan Maciejewski, swept through the room, refilling coffee cups and taking orders. Maciejewski was one of the handful of restaurant staff workers on the 107th floor. Most of the seventy-nine employees were on 106, at the Risk Waters conference.
Already eighty-one people had arrived for the conference, including top executives from Merrill Lynch and UBS Warburg. They sipped coffee, chewed pastries, and speared slices of smoked salmon in the restaurant’s ballroom, which overlooked the East River. In the Horizon Suite, just across the hall from the ballroom, two exhibitors from Bloomberg L.P., Peter Alderman and William Kelly, had set up a booth and chatted amiably with a former colleague, Christopher Hanley of Radianz. As they stood beside a multi-screened computer display, a photographer from Bloomberg snapped their picture. Across the way, Stuart Lee and Garth Feeney, vice presidents for Data Synapse, were hosts for a similar showcase of their company’s software platform.
In the lobby, 105 floors below, an assistant to Neil Levin was waiting for the boss’s breakfast guest. When the guest arrived, they boarded an elevator, bound for the restaurant. But it was the wrong car, so they had to go back down to the lobby to start over again.
Upstairs, Levin patiently read his newspaper, watched carefully by Nestor and Tierney. Who, they wondered, was their boss meeting for breakfast? When it came to gossip, the Port Authority had the insatiability of most bureaucracies, but Nestor and Tierney couldn’t stick around to satisfy their curiosity, because Nestor had a meeting downstairs. Instead, they stopped briefly at Levin’s table to say good-bye. Then they walked to the restaurant’s lobby and caught a waiting elevator.
A few strides behind them, Liz Thompson and Geoffrey Wharton hurried to get on board. Nestor held the car open for them. Quickly, they stepped in. Then the doors closed and the last people ever to leave Windows on the World began their descent. It was 8:44 A.M.
1
“It’s a bomb, let’s get out of here.”
8:46 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
 
A
bomb, Dianne DeFontes thought, when thinking became possible again. At 8:46:30, an impact had knocked her off a chair in the law office on the 89th floor of the north tower, 1 World Trade Center. The door swung free, even though she had bolted it shut. In another part of the floor, Walter Pilipiak had just pushed open the door to the offices of Cosmos International, an insurance brokerage where he was president. Akane Ito heard him coming and looked up from her desk to greet him. Before Pilipiak could get the words “Good morning” out of his mouth, he felt something smack the back of his head, and he was hurled into a wall. Ceiling tiles collapsed on Ito. A bomb, they decided, several breaths later.
On the southwest end of the 89th floor, the insurance company MetLife had 10,000 square feet of space. After the initial slam, Rob Sibarium could feel every one of those square feet tilting as the tower bent south, so far that it seemed as if it would never recoil. It did, slowly returning to center. Something had happened in the other building, Sibarium thought. An explosion.
Mike McQuaid, the electrician installing fire alarms, was sure he knew what he was feeling: an exploding transformer, from a
machine room somewhere below the 91st floor. Nothing else could rock the place with such power.
In the lobby, Dave Kravette had just ridden down from the Cantor Fitzgerald office to meet his guests, after ending the conversation with his wife about the newspaper delivery. Just a few steps out of the elevator, he heard a tremendous crash and what sounded like elevator cars free-falling. Then he saw a fireball blow out of a shaft. Around him, people dived to the ground. Kravette froze and watched the fireball fold back on itself.
She dropped the phone, Louis Massari would remember thinking. His wife, Patricia, had been reporting to him that she had bought a second home pregnancy test. The first one, that morning, had been positive, a surprise. Patricia worked as a capital analyst on the 98th floor of the north tower for Marsh & McLennan, an insurance and financial services concern; at night she took college courses. The pregnancy test was on her mind; it trumped, naturally, the test she was due to take that evening in her class and had been fretting over. So they had plenty to talk about.
“Oh, my God—” she said, and then Louis heard nothing. She had slipped, somehow, he was sure, and had pulled the cord out of the jack.
Higher still in the building, on the 106th floor, Howard Kane, the controller for Windows on the World, was speaking by phone with his wife, Lori. Kane dropped the receiver, or so it seemed to his wife, because the sounds of clamor and alarm, the high notes of anxiety if not the exact words, filled her ear. Maybe he was having a heart attack. Then she could hear a woman screaming, “Oh, my God, we’re trapped,” and her husband calling out, “Lori!”
Then another man picked up the phone, and spoke. “There’s a fire,” he said. “We have to call 911.”
From the Risk Waters conference in Windows on the World, Caleb Arron Dack, a computer consultant, called his wife, Abigail Carter, on a cell phone. “We’re at Windows on the World,” Dack said. “There was a bomb.” He could not get through to the police emergency line. He needed Abigail to call 911 for him. The bomb may have been in the bathroom.
At another breakfast, in a delicatessen a quarter mile below Windows on the World, the former director of the world trade department, Alan Reiss, had not heard, felt, or seen a thing. He sat with his back to the window that overlooked the plaza. Suddenly, one of the other Port Authority managers, Vickie Cross Kelly, looking past Reiss’s shoulder to the window, called out.
“Something must have happened,” she said. “People are running around on the mall.” Reiss turned. He saw terrified people, sprinting in every direction. A person with a gun had set off the chaos, he guessed.
“I’ve got to go,” Reiss said, tossing a five-dollar bill on the table, then headed for the trade center police office, one floor above them, in the low-rise building known as 5 World Trade Center. Through big plate-glass windows that faced east toward Church Street, he could see a blizzard of burning confetti. This was not as straightforward as someone with a gun. Another bomb?
In 1993, Reiss had just opened the door to his basement office when the terrorists’ truck bomb exploded 150 feet away. Afterward, he had been part of the team that refitted the towers for better evacuation. As a matter of doctrine at the trade center, bombs were seen as a threat that could cause harrowing but local damage. They were unlikely to bring cataclysm.
In the weeks and months following the 1993 attack, the danger from a powerful bomb attack on the trade center, especially the two towers, had been considered by the Port Authority and its security consultants. Most experts agreed that while the towers could be hurt by a bomb, they could not be destroyed. Anyone might, in theory, sneak a bomb onto a floor, but the damage would largely be confined to 1 floor out of 110—or looked at another way, 1 acre out of 110. In general, bombs are as powerful as they are big. The larger the bomb, the bigger the explosion, the greater the damage. The 1993 terrorists had driven 1,200 pounds of explosive into the basement. Even so, the base of the towers, the strongest part of the buildings, easily deflected the explosion. Compared with the powerful load absorbed by the face of the towers from winds that blew every hour of every day, the truck bomb in the basement was puny.
Moreover, there was no simple way of getting 1,200 pounds of explosive to the upper floors, where the structure was not as dense as the base. If the monumentalism of the towers made them a natural target, their very height added protection, not vulnerability. Gravity was part of the built-in defense to the devastation of a big bomb.
From what Reiss could see, he was sure that someone had set off a big bomb. While it is true that small bombs—explosives fitted into a tape recorder or hidden inside a suitcase—can blow an airplane out of the sky, that destructiveness has less to do with the bomb than with the altitude. What rips apart the aircraft is not the size of the bomb but a rupture in the fuselage at 35,000 feet, with the lethal force coming from the difference between the cabin pressure and the atmosphere. Those forces are not present even at the top of skyscrapers as tall as the twin towers, limiting the destructive energy of a conventional bomb to its size.
By the time Reiss had run up one flight on the escalator, he guessed that a truck bomb must have blown up somewhere around the trade center.
Reiss no longer worked in the basement, as he had in 1993, and he wondered, fleetingly, who in his old department had arrived for work on the 88th floor of the north tower. Up there, no one had illusions about a truck bomb. The moment arrived as a powerful fist rocking the building. As soon as Gerry Gaeta, a member of the team that oversaw construction projects at the trade center, could find his words, he hollered, “It’s a bomb, let’s get out of here.” And he was sure he knew how it had gotten up there. Moments earlier, a messenger had arrived with a trolley of documents for Jim Connors in the real estate department. Surely that was how the bomb had been wheeled in, Gaeta thought; the boxes of “documents” had been a Trojan horse.
Down the hall, Nicole De Martini had just drawn the last sip of her coffee and had risen to leave her husband’s office to go to hers, in the south tower, when she and Frank heard a boom from overhead and felt the building lurch. Nicole watched a river of fire spill past the window in Frank’s office. It was a bomb, they both thought.
Or maybe the machine room had exploded, burning diesel fuel. Nothing else could explain the force they felt, one that seemed directly above them.
The elevators had rocked, swinging like pendulums. Pasquale Buzzelli, a Port Authority engineer going to his office on 64, felt the car right itself, then slowly descend to the 44th floor, where he had started from. Smoke began to pump through the shaft. No one seemed to understand what was happening, so he got back on the elevator, which now was working just fine, and rode up to the 64th floor. There he met his boss, Patrick Hoey, the engineer in charge of the Port Authority’s bridges and tunnels, who was just as puzzled.
“What happened, Pat?” Buzzelli asked.
“I don’t know, but it near knocked me out of my chair,” Hoey replied.
The tower had miles of elevator shafts. In one that served the middle of the building, six men were in a car bound for the upper floors. They felt the jolt, then a swoop. A window washer named Jan Demczur punched the emergency stop button. In a moment, fingers of smoke crept into the car, rising past the cuffs of the men in the car, pushing down from the roof. They rang the intercom. No one answered. On board another elevator, which had just left the north tower lobby, was Judith Martin, the secretary who had lingered outside for a cigarette. She and six other people were now stuck, pressing the alarm and calling for help.
In the Marriott Hotel, tucked between the two towers, the Rev. Paul Engel, naked except for a cross dangling on a chain around his neck, had just gone to the lockers after working out when he heard an impossibly loud screech of metal on metal, like the squeal of train brakes. A Catholic priest, Engel went every morning to the health club atop the hotel. Normally, he finished his exercise with some laps in the pool, but had skipped that part of his routine today. Now he quickly pulled on the nearest garment, his swimming trunks, and peeked at the pool. It was on fire.
From a window on the 61st floor in the north tower, Ezra Aviles had seen everything. He knew it was no bomb. His window faced north, and he saw the plane tearing through the skies, heading
straight for the tower. It had crashed into the building over his head—how far, he was not sure. In fact, its lower wing cut the ceiling of the 93rd floor, and its right wing had ripped across the 98th floor, at the very moment that Patricia Massari was speaking to her husband about her home pregnancy test.
Aviles worked for the Port Authority. He dialed five numbers, leaving identical messages, describing what he saw, and telling everyone up the chain of command to begin the evacuation. He called one colleague, John Paczkowski, but reached his voice mail. “It seems to be an American Airlines jetliner came in from the northern direction, toward—from the Empire State Building, toward us,” Aviles said. He ticked through a list of notifications—he had called the police and the public affairs office, and had beeped the chief operating officer for the agency. “Smoke is beginning to come, so I think I’m gonna start bailing outta here, man … . Don’t come near the building if you’re outside. Pieces are coming down, man. Bye.”
Then he phoned his wife, Mildred, who was at home with two of their three children. “Millie, a plane hit the building,” he said. “It’s going to be on the news.”
By then, the havoc was escalating, even if the cause was not apparent. In the police bureau at the base, Alan Reiss heard talk of a missile having been fired from the roof of the Woolworth Building, just a couple of blocks east of the trade center.
As Reiss was listening to this, a Port Authority detective, Richie Paugh, arrived.
“We’re going out onto the plaza to let you know what’s going on,” Reiss told the desk. He and Paugh walked down the hallway from the plaza, past an airline ticket counter. A revolving door put them under a soffit, an overhang sheltering the entrance to 5 World Trade Center. They peered out. Debris had rained onto the plaza—steel and concrete and fragments of offices and glass. Above them, they could see the east side of the north tower, and also its northern face. Instead of the waffle gridding of the building’s face, they now saw a wall of fire spread across ten or fifteen floors. Then they saw the people coming out the windows, driven toward air, and into air. The plane had struck not two minutes earlier.
North Tower: The Impact
By tipping its wings just before impact, Flight 11 cut a swath through seven floors, severely damaging all three escape staircases. The three staircases were clustered in the central core of the building as the building code permitted.
Sources: National Institute of Standards and Technology; Weidlinger Associates
On the ground, they saw an odd shape. Reiss looked closer. It was the nose gear of an airplane, missing the rubber tire, but with its wheel still connected to the hydraulic elbow that retracts into the bottom of the plane. Paugh began to take notes on its shape and location. Reiss protested. “There’s crap falling on us,” he said. “I don’t have a hard hat on or anything, let’s just drag it in.”

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