102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (20 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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Martin and her fellow passengers had tried pushing the alarm buttons, talking into the intercom, screaming at the top of their lungs. All they got was a recording that told them someone would be coming soon. At first, this did not seem like cause for too much concern. The elevator, an express to the 78th floor, had shaken for just a second after they had pushed the button to ascend. Some in the car thought they had gone up briefly before falling back down, perhaps as far as the basement. Certainly the elevator had bounced a bit, but then it just sat there. Inside, cut off from the turmoil that surrounded them, the seven passengers viewed it as just a particularly rotten start to an otherwise normal day.
When their initial efforts to pry open the door were unsuccessful, the seven of them, four men and three women—Dana Coulthurst from Judith’s office at Marsh & McLennan, Mike Jacobs, Keith Ensler, Ian Robb, and a man and a woman whose names didn’t stick with Martin—sat on the floor, trying to talk over the wailing alarm. One man read their horoscopes aloud from a newspaper. Another sat quietly and read his book. Martin eyed the coffee that one of the other women was carrying and joked that it was always nice to share. A trickle of water and white dust seeped into the car from the ceiling. Every once in a while, someone would get up and start yelling for help. No one seemed to hear them, though, except for Chris Young, a man who was alone in another express elevator that was also stuck, doors closed, in the north tower lobby. Through the walls Martin, Young, and the others exchanged what little information they had with each other. They promised that whoever got out first would make sure that rescuers knew someone else was trapped.
Young had been on his way down from 78 when his elevator suddenly shook and bounced to a halt, knocking him to the floor. His intercom system was working, however, and after fifteen minutes someone said that help was on the way. No one had come for the people in either elevator, though, and by 9:30, forty-four minutes after their ordeal had begun, their anxiety was deepening.
In Martin’s elevator the mood had darkened considerably after the second plane hit the south tower. Martin and her colleagues in
the elevators had no sense of what was actually happening outside. But they felt the second jolt, and it shattered the notion that this was some routine mechanical slipup. “Whatever it is, it’s bad,” said Keith Ensler, an ex-Marine who had been reading a book. From outside the cab, Martin heard sharp clanging sounds and small booms, as if they were at a construction site. Her fear rose with the noise. It was time, everyone decided, to get serious about opening those doors.
Ensler, who was wearing hiking boots, gave the doors a mighty kick. Mike Jacobs, an investment banker, saw a faint light in one of the cracks of the doors and began to pry them a bit. Working in tandem now, the men opened them wide enough to realize that they were in the lobby. Finally, the interior doors released. The second set was slightly easier then the first, and when they pushed them apart and walked out into the lobby, they found it humming with police and firefighters. Jacobs’s first thought, when he saw so many emergency personnel within spitting distance of their elevator, was to raise a little hell. “What’re you doing?” he asked an emergency worker in a blue T-shirt and green hard hat. Then the enormity of what had happened began to seep in. “Keep going. Keep going,” the officials said. So the group started walking out of the building. But first a few of the people stopped to tell officials about Chris Young. He was still stuck behind them, in an elevator right near them, in the lobby. The rescuers nodded, okay, okay. But ten minutes later, Young was still alone in the car, trying to keep himself occupied and calm. It was disturbing, though, that no one answered when he called out to the other car.
 
 
Just before 9:30, a new note of alarm swept through the north tower lobby. Richard Sheirer, the director of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, came hustling across the floor, holding his radio and yelling in the direction of Thomas Von Essen, New York’s fire commissioner.
“Tommy,” he called out. “We got report of a third plane.”
In the skies above the trade center, Greg Semendinger, the police
pilot who was circling the buildings in his helicopter, told his dispatcher the same thing.
“Central,” he radioed, “be advised there may be another aircraft inbound. There may be another aircraft inbound. La Guardia is tracking a fast-mover moving inbound.”
More terror. Federal aviation officials had already closed the airspace around New York to civilian traffic, but thousands of planes were still in the air across the country. It was impossible to say which of them might also be turned into missiles. Moreover, air-traffic-control officials in New York knew no more about the attacks than anyone watching television—and sometimes, less. Controllers at La Guardia Airport, unaware of the hijackings, had continued to send out flights until 9:07, five minutes after the second plane had struck the south tower, and nearly an hour after the first plane had been hijacked. The air-traffic-control system was highly balkanized, with little interaction between one region and another, so as the airborne siege spread across the skies from New England to the Midwest, word of what was unfolding did not spread.
Communications were also poor between the Federal Aviation Administration, which controlled air traffic, and the military guardians of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.
Air controllers did not realize that at that moment military jets were racing down the Hudson, in pursuit of the first two hijacked planes; they knew only that streaks on their radar screens showed an aircraft moving at extraordinary speed. Thus, the warning that La Guardia was tracking a fast-mover, heading inbound. That the report was false was of no moment. To those at the foot of the gaping, roaring buildings, nothing was beyond belief.
A strike by a third plane would slaughter the rescuers who had gone up the stairs and the tenants coming down, Deputy Chief Hayden thought as he stood in the lobby. The buildings might even fall. Some police officers who had been preparing to go inside paused, as commanders sought a better read on just what was going on. Rescuers inside just looked at one another and kept working. Many cleared out of the lobby, some of them relocating to West Street,
where the Fire Department had set up a command post that would oversee the response in both buildings.
“I need the military,” Sheirer barked into his radio to a subordinate. He also wanted a message sent to the police helicopters circling overhead. Tell the pilots, he said, that under no circumstances could they allow another plane to hit the towers. Since the helicopters were not loaded with weaponry that could actually bring down a 767, what was Sheirer actually asking them to do? Fly into the path of a jumbo jet? Later, he would cite the order as a mark of the desperation that swept through the lobby in those moments. Just a few feet away, the stress was visible on the face of the Rev. Mychal Judge, a Fire Department chaplain. His clerical collar and white fire helmet made him stand out in the crowd as he paced the floor, his lips moving in prayer as if to gain additional potency by speaking the words aloud. In his face, a certain remoteness had taken hold, as if he were engaged in a dialogue that was taking place outside the burning building.
In the helicopters, the pilots now got word that the inbound aircraft was most likely a military jet, scrambling to protect the skies over New York. “Is that a U.S. military, Central?” Detective Semendinger asked, just to make sure. Yes, he was assured, it was. The fire chiefs downstairs, however, had already begun to order their people out of the buildings, at least until the situation cleared up.
“All units in Building 1,” Assistant Chief Callan said into his radio as he stood in the lobby at 9:32 A.M. “All units in Building 1, come out, down to the lobby.”
Radio communications with the upper floors remained feeble. More than 1,000 firefighters were now fighting for airtime on the same four or five channels, breeding considerable interference. Worse, the channels they were using in the north tower did not benefit from the amplification of the repeater, which had been abandoned because the chiefs had decided it was malfunctioning.
“Everybody down to the lobby,” Chief Callan repeated again.
It did not matter how many times he said it. No one answered his call.
“Tell the chief what you just told me.”
9:22 A.M.
SOUTH TOWER
 
A
ll morning, Anthony Bramante had been dialing his brother, Jack, who worked in the south tower for Mizuho. Time and again, his call ended before it began, in fast busy signals or a taped announcement that the circuits were overloaded. Finally, he dialed just as a gap opened momentarily in the electronic pileup, and the signals pulsed from his office in Brooklyn to his brother’s desk on the 80th floor. Bramante listened to the rings. He wanted the call to get through, but he did not want it to be answered. The phone rang on. Please, he thought, don’t let him pick up. Six rings. Ten. Thirteen. Let him be out of there.
“Hello?”
The voice jolted Bramante, dashing the illusion that everyone had left. But the person answering was not his brother. No, the man said, Jack Bramante was not there. He was gone.
“The floor is on fire! Help us! The floor is on fire!”
After a few seconds, Bramante realized he was speaking to Jack Andreacchio, who normally changed lightbulbs and wired computers
and ran the grab bag of errands essential to any corporate bureaucracy. Bramante had met Andreacchio on visits to his brother in the south tower.
Andreacchio reported that he was trapped with Manny Gomez, his boss. Both men had been part of the Fuji evacuation team that had herded people off the bank’s floors. Andreacchio had even started downstairs and had gotten as far as the 70th floor, but turned back, apparently on hearing the announcement that the building was safe. In most circumstances, Andreacchio was famously amiable. An Italian American from Brooklyn, he had taken an extravagant liking to country music and became an energetic line dancer who wore a cowboy hat and vacationed in Nashville.
Now he was stuck with Manny Gomez and three other people in an office on the 80th floor. Bramante talked him through the options. What about the stairs? Destroyed, said Andreacchio, or blocked by rubble.
“Have you called 911?” Bramante asked.
“No,” Andreacchio said. He was not getting a dial tone when he picked up the phone, so he could not make calls out. This did not make clear sense to Bramante, who had just dialed into the office, but he used a three-way-call function on his telephone and connected Andreacchio to 911. The call was logged in at 9:23 in the 911 center.
ROOF TOP ANOTHER CALL—TRAPPED ON 80 FLOOR—HOT AND SMOKY—FD 403 NTFD—STAIRWAYS BLOCKED—NW CORNER—CONF CALL—BRAMANTE ANTHONY 32 COURT ST
“I think we should break the window,” Andreacchio said.
Bramante and the operator hollered at once that he should not do that. The oxygen would draw the fire into their refuge.
The operator explained that the Fire Department was mounting a big response, and speaking in the jargon of the dispatchers, rendered the department’s abbreviation—FDNY—as a word.
“Fidnee is on their way,” the operator said. “They have it. People are on their way to you, okay?”
“You’ve gotta help me,” Andreacchio said.
“Fidnee is on the way,” the operator assured him.
 
 
The impact zone of the south tower was closer to the ground than the ruined floors of the north; the nose of Flight 175 had entered at the 81st floor, sixteen floors lower than Flight 11 in the north tower. Moreover, a single escape route—stairway A—remained open, though this was known to only a few people, and the city’s emergency-response program had no mechanism for communicating any live information, as opposed to canned scripts, through its 911 call centers.
The conditions in the south tower had become so bad, so quickly, that sixteen minutes after the plane had hit, at 9:02:59, people despaired of escape or rescue. Two of the young men at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Brad Vadas and Stephen Mulderry, made calls from the 88th floor of the south tower. At 9:19, Vadas left a message on the answering machine of his fiancée, Kris McFerren. “Kris, there’s been an explosion. We’re trapped in a room. There’s smoke coming in. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I want you to know my life has been so much better and richer because you were in it.” He added that he would do his best to get out. “I love you,” he said. “Good-bye.” Mulderry, the former college basketball star, called a friend, and on her tape said that whatever might happen, he would be okay. He had said all the prayers his mother had taught him. Five floors above them, Greg Milanowycz, an insurance broker for Aon, reached his father, Joseph, at work. “Can you call someone, can you tell them we are here in the northeast corner of the 93rd floor?” he asked. His father reached 911 on another line. The dispatcher sounded cool, calm, wise.
“Okay, this is what you have to tell them,” the dispatcher said. “Get as close to the floor as possible, don’t talk to conserve oxygen, and if they are in a room and have access to water or something, try
to wet clothing or towels and wedge them under the doorways, to try to stop smoke from getting in there.”
Joseph Milanowycz meticulously tracked the instructions. The words lifted his heart.
“We have set up a command post already down there,” the dispatcher said. “We are on our way up. We will get him out of there.” The father passed this message on to the son, who shouted to the room of people: “They are coming. My dad’s on the phone with them. They are coming.”
It was true, as the dispatcher said, that command posts had been set up at the trade center, but the more that fire commanders could see, the grimmer their outlook. At the main post, across West Street from the towers, Deputy Fire Commissioner Tom Fitzpatrick watched people falling or jumping from the high floors of the north tower and concluded that the firefighters simply could not get to the hundreds trapped above the fires. At the same post, Lt. Joseph Chiafari heard dispatcher reports—a blur of floor numbers and trapped workers, thirty people in a conference room somewhere, another group elsewhere—as a roll call of places that the firefighters would not get to anytime soon. His boss, Deputy Assistant Chief Al Turi, began to think about how long the buildings would stand up to the uncontrolled fires before they had partial collapses on the upper floors. Three hours of fire resistance, Turi figured. They were just a half hour into the fight.
The catastrophe could be seen for miles with the naked eye, across oceans and continents on television. To rescuers at the very base of the towers, the fires appeared to be in another world. They blazed so far beyond them, 1,000 vertical feet in the north tower, 800 in the south, they might have been looking at the light from distant, dying stars.
Yet in the lobby of the towers, the view was not as bleak—in large part because there was no view whatsoever of the raging fire overhead, but also because the impulse to try, to make an effort, had a momentum more powerful than the sense of futility. And at 9:18, a piece of electrifying news had come across the radio
frequency used inside the towers. Just when Brad Vadas and Stephen Mulderry were making their farewells on the answering machines of loved ones, and as Deputy Commissioner Fitzpatrick was reluctantly concluding that people like Vadas and Mulderry were lost, and as Chief Turi was wondering if firefighters would get near the fires before the three hours of fire protection were up, the first group of firefighters climbing skyward had started to change the calculus of doom.
“This is Battalion 7 on floor 40 of Tower 2,” Chief Orio J. Palmer reported. “We got one elevator working up to the 40th floor staffed by a member of Ladder 15, ’kay.”
At that moment, the gap between the rescuers and the trapped people had narrowed from the implausible to the possible. One elevator—apparently car number 48, a freight car that served the lower zone of the south tower—had continued to function. Car 48 ran up to the 40th floor. By taking it, Palmer was already halfway to the border territory of the south tower, the area where Frank De Martini and his group had been so effective in the north tower.
Orio Palmer wore the traditional chief’s helmet, a durable white shell that was part modern gear, part homage to tradition, with its Maltese cross. He often added a few custom alterations. Tucked into the band of his helmet were little chocks of different widths and angles, in case he needed to prop open a door; these were firefighter tools that he had kept on hand as he advanced through the ranks. Another item clipped to his helmet was a small, powerful light. Strapped to his back was a Scott Airpak, a portable supply of air; on one of his earliest days as a chief, he had been laid low by a dose of carbon monoxide poisoning, and a picture in the
Daily News
showed him as he was helped out of a fire in downtown Manhattan.
In one potentially critical area, the fire operations in the south tower differed from those in the north. Somehow, with enough fiddling, Palmer had been able to speak over his portable radio with his commander in the lobby of the south tower, using the specially amplified “repeater” channel. The chiefs in the other tower were having no similar success in communicating, although the same
repeater served both buildings; in fact, the north tower commanders had stopped using the channel boosted by the repeater, believing that it was not working.
Like the chocks carried in his helmet, Palmer’s ability with radios was no accident. While working full time as a firefighter, he had earned an associate degree in electrical engineering, and had written technical articles about the use of two-way radios inside high-rise buildings and subways. Still, none of the clever equipment or advanced study would mean a thing unless he could get higher in the building, another forty floors above the first forty.
Before they could fight fire, the firefighters would have to take on gravity, with each man wearing or carrying fifty-six and a half pounds of boots, coat, helmet, oxygen tank, and mask—plus tools. Here, too, Palmer was ready. As a young man, he had all but worn a path on the sidewalks around Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, regularly running miles past the graves of Herman Melville and Joseph Pulitzer, Duke Ellington and George M. Cohan, Adm. David Farragut and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. After he married, he and his wife, Debbie, moved out of the Bronx to a small Long Island suburb, into the only house they could afford. Palmer rebuilt the place, plank by plank. On breaks from the renovation project, he ran. About a half mile from home was Hendrickson Park, with a three-mile running track around Valley Stream Pond. Trees leaned over the path. Swans glided across the water. A white gazebo, utterly useless and perfectly lovely, was set back from the water’s edge. He wore his Walkman—Van Morrison was a favorite, and he called his wife the Brown-Eyed Girl—and would knock off three or four circuits, depending on how much time he had. He had run the New York City Marathon in 1988, and every year after that, ran at least a half-marathon on Long Island. When the family watched TV in the basement he had rebuilt, he would do stomach crunches during the commercials. Not surprisingly, he had won the department’s top fitness medal four or five times. With chocks in his hat, a good head on his shoulders, and the memory of hundreds of miles in the muscles of his legs, he now started up the stairs from the 40th floor, halfway to his destination.
At that moment, all the promises the dispatchers made to people trapped above and around the flames, the assurances from friends and family to the Brooklyn cowboy Jack Andreacchio, to Greg Milanowycz and his father, no longer were empty words, palliatives dosed out to the frantic and doomed. Help was not only on the way, it was getting there. At least some of it was. In the lobby, Deputy Chief Donald Burns heard Palmer’s report that an elevator was running to the 40th floor.
“All right,” said Burns, “but I got no units yet. There are no units here yet.”
Many firefighters, coming from firehouses far outside lower Manhattan, simply could not find their way into the south tower, and had gone into the north tower instead.
Palmer, who had brought a company with him to the 40th floor, did not seem to hear what Burns was saying.
“Yeah, we’re just starting them up,” Palmer said. He led the way.
 
 
As Palmer was climbing stairs in the south tower, a wounded, struggling band was gathering at the building’s 78th-floor sky lobby. Minutes before, the sky lobby had bustled with office workers unsure whether to leave the building or go back to work; now it was filled with motionless bodies, moans from people hidden in clouds of pulverized dust. The ceilings, the walls, the windows, the information kiosk, even the marble that graced the elevator banks—everything was smashed.
Mary Jos crawled across the ground, not sure how she had gotten to the 78th floor from her office in the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance on the 86th floor, or how she had ended up on the floor of the sky lobby, searing pain in her back, her clothes on fire, until she had rolled over and smothered the flames. About ten feet away in the smoldering darkness was her friend Ling Young. They had gone to college together, and now, at midlife, worked for the state tax department. At this grim moment, the two old friends had no idea they were only a few feet apart.
Not far away, Jos knew, was a door into a stairway. A colleague had the habit of getting exercise by walking up from 78 to 86, and Jos often saw her use a set of stairs in the northwest corner of the building. She headed in that direction. The door was still there. She stood and pushed it open. Her watch and left shoe had been blown off. She did not care: she was leaving.

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