102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (27 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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Keep moving, Jonas whispered. They were clogging the stairway, so they pulled aside at the landings to let other exiting fire companies speed past. Hurry, said Jonas. Harris groaned, not from a shortage of willpower, but from the agony that knifed from her feet through her body. You will see your family, Butler said. Come on, Josephine, said Jonas. Another company went by, dashing toward the lobby. Go, said Jonas. At the 4th floor, though, Josephine Harris could not. Her fallen arches had collapsed. They were so close to getting out.
“Stop,” she cried. “Leave me alone. I can’t go any farther.”
Jonas peeled off from the stairwell to find an office chair, a solution: They would put her in it and run down the stairs. He saw a couch and a stenographer chair with no arms. Surely, there was a regular desk chair somewhere on the 4th floor. For crying out loud.
It was a mechanical floor, with nothing obvious that would serve. Jonas headed for the other side of the floor, then decided that, no, they would leave now and just drag her down the stairs. Maybe there was time to find a better way, but maybe there wasn’t. He turned, and fast-stepped toward the door to stairway B, but the floor beneath him shuddered in waves.
It was a mechanical floor, with nothing obvious that would serve. Jonas headed for the other side of the floor, then decided that, no, they would leave now and just drag her down the stairs. Maybe there was time to find a better way, but maybe there wasn’t. He turned, and fast-stepped toward the door to stairway B, but the floor beneath him shuddered in waves.
It is now 10:28, 102 minutes since the nose of American Airlines Flight 11 shot into the 98th floor of the north tower. The bangs are distant, then grow nearer and louder, and in stairway B, Josephine Harris and the men hear the approaching collapse: a bowling ball rolling down the steps. They curl in corners, or grab doors to use the frame as shelter, but the doors are hard to budge. The building is twisting. So are the door frames. Jonas pulls at the door from inside the 4th floor. It will not open.
He yanks again, and it springs open, and the wind blasts ahead of the collapse—not a gust, but a raging storm of a wind. As each floor drops, one upon the other, it is as if a giant accordion is being squeezed, pushing 55 million cubic feet of air. Behind the rush of air comes the screech of the failing trusses, the slap of tons of metal columns against other tons of metal, percussive bangs, end sounds.
From the street, the building seems to spill out of itself, the dust boiling up, then pouring down the four facades toward the ground. Those who had escaped the collapse of the south tower know the impossible is happening yet again, twenty-nine minutes later. A team of men hurry north, carrying a chair that holds the slumped form of Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain, who died during the flight from the lobby of the north tower as the south tower fell.
Now, as the north tower crumbles, another fire chaplain, John Delendick, runs toward the Hudson River. Next to him is a police officer.
“Father, can I go to confession?” the cop yells.
The priest thinks for a moment. “This is an act of war, isn’t it?” Delendick replies.
“Yeah, I believe so,” the policeman says.
“Then I’m giving general absolution,” Delendick declares, never slowing down.
He speaks at the moment of death, particularly for those at the top of the north tower, the 1,000 or so people who survived the crash of Flight 11 at 8:46 but have not been able to find an open staircase. Their fate was sealed nearly four decades earlier, when the stairways were clustered in the core of the building, and fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space. The top floors of the north tower, weakened by the unabated, uncontained fire, now crater in a tremendous rush.
As the floors fall, they pick up speed: ten stories in a single second. They sweep through a tower that seems empty, because 99 percent of the people who worked below the fire floors are now out of the tower. But this building is not empty. Still inside are Pablo Ortiz and Frank De Martini, who freed scores from the upper floors. Perhaps a dozen or so firefighters have climbed into the 40s, some a bit higher; other officers are wandering the halls and stairs to round up members of their companies who got separated during the ascent.
Lower in the building, probably still on the 27th floor, is Capt. William Burke, who saw the collapse of the south tower, ordered his company out, but stayed with Ed Beyea in his wheelchair. No doubt, so is Abe Zelmanowitz, who stood by Beyea through the long morning, as thousands of people marched down the stairs, as rescuers came and went from the 27th floor, until only Captain Burke remained with them.
Of uncertain status are the firefighters—perhaps as many as 100—last seen resting on the 19th floor by the three court officers, apparently unaware of the dire situation. Few could have made much progress to safety.
Mike Warchola, the lieutenant from Ladder 5, on his last day of work, is on the 12th floor, helping a woman who cannot breathe. Possibly, it is Judith Reese, who was resting in that area when Jeff Gertler turned her over to a group of firefighters and Port Authority police officers. She remains under their care. They are trying to get her the last few steps to safety, but the building is coming at them faster than she can move.
And most of the firefighters and police officers who carried John Rappa, the heavy man, to safety across the plaza have now ducked
under the overhang of 6 World Trade Center, the building to the north, and they are starting to make their way inside. The two ESU officers, Michael Curtin and John D’Allara, however, wait outside, by the door of the building. The tower is falling at them.
under the overhang of 6 World Trade Center, the building to the north, and they are starting to make their way inside. The two ESU officers, Michael Curtin and John D’Allara, however, wait outside, by the door of the building. The tower is falling at them.
In the Marriott Hotel, where people on one side of a debris wall have been speaking to those trapped on the other side, even passing a flashlight across, this second collapse again spares the lobby area protected by the reinforced beam. It decimates the area where the people were trapped.
Under the center of the plaza, Port Authority police officer Dominick Pezzulo has been trying to free two other officers, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, trapped by the first collapse. As Pezzulo lifts the rubble, he is struck and crushed by debris falling from the collapse of the north tower.
In stairway B, among the firefighters who have taken on the cause of Josephine Harris and her fallen arches, there is a prayer or two for a swift end. The impossible collisions of floor, steel, glass are belting toward them. Even stronger than the noise is the wind. Sal D’Agostino tries to open a door to leave the stairwell, but it flies out and throws him against the wall. The wind lifts the engine’s chauffeur, Mike Meldrum, off his feet and heaves him one floor down; it carries Matt Komorowski down three floors.
As the floors drop, the air has nowhere to go. So much of a skyscraper is nothing but air, empty spaces filled by people in buildings like 1 and 2 World Trade Center, putting little pieces of their daily lives onto these platforms.
Here is a desk drawer where Dianne DeFontes keeps her sensible shoes. The rack where Raffaele Cava first hung his hat, thirty years earlier. The couch in Frank De Martini’s office where his aides’ children nap on their afternoon at Daddy’s job. The big table up in Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, where the wealthy young men and women dine out of paper bags on Junk Food Fridays. The flower vases in Windows on the World that Christine Olender checks, so that the well-set tables of crystal and linen are as pleasing to the eye as the forty-mile vista of city and harbor, river and road.
Now the lights have gone out. The giant platters of air plunge past the people in the north tower and hit bottom. The wind seems to be bouncing back up stairway B, whipping tons of crushed building particles along the shaft. The people stretched up and down the lower floors of that stairway—the ones with Josephine Harris, a couple of the stragglers who had stayed in Pat Hoey’s office on the 64th floor all morning—can see nothing. They pry open a door, but it goes nowhere: they huddle, alive, in the last intact stub of the World Trade Center. Above them is only sky.
Epilogue
11:00 A.M.
GROUND ZERO
GROUND ZERO
S
ome time later, Will Jimeno found himself buried but alive, pinned below the burning ground at the center of the trade center plaza. A load of concrete had fallen onto his lap, and a cinder-block wall rested on one of his feet. The oxygen tank strapped to his back also was wedged into rubble, fixing him in a semblance of a seated position, bent at a forty-five-degree angle. Of the four other Port Authority police officers who had been running with him through the concourse, pushing a cart full of rescue gear, only one, Sgt. John McLoughlin, was still alive. Two members of their group had been killed immediately by the collapse of the south tower. A third officer, Dominick Pezzulo, had managed to free himself and was picking at the rubble around Jimeno when the collapse of the north tower killed him.
ome time later, Will Jimeno found himself buried but alive, pinned below the burning ground at the center of the trade center plaza. A load of concrete had fallen onto his lap, and a cinder-block wall rested on one of his feet. The oxygen tank strapped to his back also was wedged into rubble, fixing him in a semblance of a seated position, bent at a forty-five-degree angle. Of the four other Port Authority police officers who had been running with him through the concourse, pushing a cart full of rescue gear, only one, Sgt. John McLoughlin, was still alive. Two members of their group had been killed immediately by the collapse of the south tower. A third officer, Dominick Pezzulo, had managed to free himself and was picking at the rubble around Jimeno when the collapse of the north tower killed him.
Now Jimeno was slumped in the hole, talking occasionally with McLoughlin, who was even deeper in the heap than Jimeno. The two men had no view of each other.
“Can you see sky?” McLoughlin asked.
“No sky, but light,” Jimeno replied.
The sergeant worked his radio. No one answered. McLoughlin, who over the years had led elevator rescues at the trade center and rappelled into the blind shafts, told Jimeno that the rescue operations would have to pull back for a day, until the scene was stable. They were on their own.
All across the northeastern United States, people were essentially on their own, stepping into the first minutes of a new epoch without the protections of an old world order whose institutions and functions seemed to have turned instantly decrepit. So a consideration of the events of September 11, 2001, could begin at any one of numerous spots across the globe, at almost any moment over the preceding four decades: the end of the Cold War; the collapse of the Soviet Union; any hour of any year in the unfinished history of the Middle East; in the often empty and petty exercise of authority in the capital of the world’s only superpower; at the boiling, nihilistic springs of religious fundamentalism that not only have endured but have thrived as forces in opposition to globalism, capitalism, modernism.
Those historic currents, and others, merged and crashed on the morning of September 11 at the two towers of the World Trade Center, and at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. The particulars of the era that had just passed—the expectations of protection, the habits of defense, the sense of safety—seemed to have fossilized from one breath to the next. What happened in New York City that morning was replicated through all the arms of government, differing only in details, duration, and cost.
For nearly the entire period of the Cold War, in the second half of the twentieth century, the air defense system, while rarely seen, existed in public consciousness as an invisible web to block nuclear attacks. During the September 11 crisis, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed that rogue planes be shot down. The order, it turned out, was never transmitted to the fighter pilots, a failure that, in any event, proved to be of little relevance: the national air defense and civil aviation authorities had been unable to pool their resources to
track even one of the hijacked planes during the two-hour siege. So the order to shoot was not heard, and the planes to shoot at were not seen. The suicidal zealots on three of the four hijacked planes hit their targets—the twin towers and the Pentagon. They were stopped from diving the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, into the Capitol or the White House only because the passengers learned of the events in Washington and New York from cell phone calls. They stormed the cockpit. The pilot of a passing airliner saw the wings of the United plane wiggling, apparently an attempt by the hijackers to defeat the onrushing passengers. The plane went down in rural Pennsylvania, 125 miles from Washington.
track even one of the hijacked planes during the two-hour siege. So the order to shoot was not heard, and the planes to shoot at were not seen. The suicidal zealots on three of the four hijacked planes hit their targets—the twin towers and the Pentagon. They were stopped from diving the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, into the Capitol or the White House only because the passengers learned of the events in Washington and New York from cell phone calls. They stormed the cockpit. The pilot of a passing airliner saw the wings of the United plane wiggling, apparently an attempt by the hijackers to defeat the onrushing passengers. The plane went down in rural Pennsylvania, 125 miles from Washington.
As with events in Washington, in the air-traffic-control towers of the Northeast, and inside the twin towers, large institutions could scarcely begin to cope with one attack, much less four of them simultaneously. Little of that reality emerged in the early days following September 11. In the haze of grief, the nation simply was staggering from the loss of life and the shock of realizing that it was now the single most desirable target for terrorists. In a world where zealots could see only icons to smash, the attacks made sense; in a world where people like Dianne DeFontes sat alone in an empty law office, eating yogurt and answering phones, the idea that the attack had fallen on the representatives of a superpower seemed hallucinatory.
At scores of funerals for firefighters and police officers, Mayor Giuliani declared that the police officers and firefighters had saved the lives of 25,000 people, “the greatest rescue ever recorded.” On occasion, the estimate of those “rescued” rose to 50,000. The mayor created a special charitable fund for the families of the city’s uniformed rescuers, and later expanded it to include Port Authority police officers; a grateful nation poured $216 million into it. In the first telling of the story of the trade center rescue, civilians played little role, except as helpless victims who were saved by the police and firefighters. That civilians had collaborated in the rescue—and indeed had been instrumental in saving many people on the high floors—simply did not make the early chronicles.
It was an incomplete history, though not uncommonly so. Every calamity casts its own long shadows of confusion. Myth is always embedded in the early drafts. A few months after the
Titanic
went down, George Bernard Shaw commented that the disaster had led to an “explosion of outrageous romantic lying.”
Titanic
went down, George Bernard Shaw commented that the disaster had led to an “explosion of outrageous romantic lying.”
More than a year after the attacks, Congress created an independent national investigative commission under pressure from families who lost husbands, wives, and children, and against the wishes of President George W. Bush and Giuliani, who was no longer the mayor of New York but had become an iconic figure in politics and in business, thanks to his graceful deportment in the hours after the attacks.
The commission documented years of difficulties in intelligence gathering and coordination, in border control, in airline security, and in emergency response. These were painful revelations. The attacks were hardly the bolt from the blue that they seemed in the early days: the hijackings were only the latest and most lethal link in a chain of events that stretched back years and had been foretold, in one fashion or another, during the months before them. In fact, the commission found that the threat reports were more clear, more urgent, and more persistent than the government had acknowledged. Some intelligence reports had focused on Al Qaeda’s plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. While some pieces of the intelligence had been gathered in the mid-1990s, warnings that Al Qaeda soldiers had infiltrated the United States, and seemed interested in hijacking a plane, were delivered to the president on August 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks, under the headline, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”
The diagnostic postmortems by the press and by the commission threw light into the long shadow of secrecy, dissembling, and myth that had surrounded the events of September 11, 2001. That said, no level of American government had practice for such ferocious attacks on civilians. Neither New York nor the United States
had any muscle memory of sustained attacks on the homeland, and given the speed of events that morning, there was no time to invent new moves. In New York, the two towers stood for 102 minutes—less than two hours—before they collapsed. That gives no hint of the morning’s velocity. One plane crash. Sixteen minutes later, another plane crash. Twenty-five minutes later, word of a third plane approaching—untrue, but certainly not outside the freshly staked borders of the plausible. Then, about thirty minutes after that, the first building falls. Twenty-nine minutes later, it was over. It was as if a car going ninety miles per hour were making a ninety-degree turn every few minutes. Each moment brought fresh demands, fresh hell.
had any muscle memory of sustained attacks on the homeland, and given the speed of events that morning, there was no time to invent new moves. In New York, the two towers stood for 102 minutes—less than two hours—before they collapsed. That gives no hint of the morning’s velocity. One plane crash. Sixteen minutes later, another plane crash. Twenty-five minutes later, word of a third plane approaching—untrue, but certainly not outside the freshly staked borders of the plausible. Then, about thirty minutes after that, the first building falls. Twenty-nine minutes later, it was over. It was as if a car going ninety miles per hour were making a ninety-degree turn every few minutes. Each moment brought fresh demands, fresh hell.
Speed does not, however, explain everything. A cascade of lapsed communications—much like the undelivered Cheney shoot-down order—cost lives. The police helicopters reported the deterioration of the two towers and specifically predicted the collapse of the north tower. The fire commanders had no link to those helicopters or reports, but for that matter, they had few or no links to their own troops. The interagency radios were sitting on shelves and in the trunks of cars, unused. It is likely that as many as 200 firefighters were inside the north tower when it collapsed. Most of them had been in striking distance of safety when the south building fell. This gave them twenty-nine minutes to go down no more than thirty or forty flights of stairs, and many people did, including eighty-nine-year-old Moe Lipson, who was walking down from his office on 88 and had reached the 27th floor when the south tower fell. Few of the people inside the north tower, even those who had heard the evacuation orders, knew that the other building had collapsed. Virtually none of them—apart from some police officers and those they encountered—realized that helicopter pilots were predicting the imminent failure of the one they were in. For no good reason, firefighters were cut off from critical information. This was as much a matter of long and bad habit as it was of the extreme circumstances.
At a hearing in the spring of 2004 on the emergency response, Giuliani spoke with great passion about the firefighters who did not
leave the north tower. “The reality is that they saved more lives than I think anyone had any right to expect that any human beings would be able to do. Done differently with different people and people maybe unwilling to be as bold as they were, you would have had much more serious loss of life.”
leave the north tower. “The reality is that they saved more lives than I think anyone had any right to expect that any human beings would be able to do. Done differently with different people and people maybe unwilling to be as bold as they were, you would have had much more serious loss of life.”
Moreover, Giuliani said that the firefighters had indeed heard the warning that it was time to leave, but asserted that they had “interpreted the evacuation order” to mean that they should make sure the civilians got out. “Rather than giving us a story of men, uniformed men fleeing while civilians were left behind, which would have been devastating to the morale of this country; rather than an
Andrea Doria,
if you might remember that, they gave us an example of very, very brave men and women in uniform who stand their ground to protect civilians,” Giuliani said. “Instead of that we got a story of heroism and we got a story of pride and we got a story of support that helped get us through.”
Andrea Doria,
if you might remember that, they gave us an example of very, very brave men and women in uniform who stand their ground to protect civilians,” Giuliani said. “Instead of that we got a story of heroism and we got a story of pride and we got a story of support that helped get us through.”
If history is to be a tool for the living, it must be unflinchingly candid. The full chronicles of D-Day in World War II note that a number of landing boats opened in deep water, sending troops to drown, a fact of vital importance to those who would someday follow the D-Day soldiers onto another beach. The evidence shows conclusively that in the critical final minutes of the north tower, firefighters were indeed helping civilians, but that involved no more than a fraction of the rescuers. There can be no doubt that the firefighters’ purpose in going into the building was to help, and that a number, like Captain Burke, stayed behind even when the future took its fearsome shape. Even so, there is substantial reason to discount Giuliani’s assertion that specific duties—rather than widespread ignorance of the peril—kept the bulk of those 200 firefighters inside during the time they might have escaped.
Nearly all of the 6,000 civilians below the impact zone had left the north tower by the time of its collapse, a fact hard to square with the notion that most of the approximately 200 firefighters who died in the north tower could not get out because they were busy helping civilians. In the oral histories collected by the Fire Department, numerous firefighters recalled that they were unaware of how
serious the situation had become in those final minutes. This does not mean that the firefighters were not a welcome and uplifting presence; indeed, teams were helping people like Josephine Harris, and had stopped to offer aid to Judith Reese, and had opened stairways after the collapse of the south tower. Yet those efforts do not explain why so many firefighters died in a building they could have escaped and where there was scarcely anyone left who could be helped.
serious the situation had become in those final minutes. This does not mean that the firefighters were not a welcome and uplifting presence; indeed, teams were helping people like Josephine Harris, and had stopped to offer aid to Judith Reese, and had opened stairways after the collapse of the south tower. Yet those efforts do not explain why so many firefighters died in a building they could have escaped and where there was scarcely anyone left who could be helped.
On the 19th floor of the north tower, scores of doomed firefighters were seen—by, among others, the court officers Joseph Baccellieri, Al Moscola, and Andrew Wender—taking a rest break in the final minutes, coats off, axes against the wall, soaked in sweat. As an explanation for why that group did not escape, a lack of “situational awareness,” to use the military term, seems far more likely than the mayor’s position that firefighters were tied up helping civilians. That shortcoming was not simply a consequence of being overwhelmed by the new epoch in terror that had arrived. The Fire Department’s reports after the 1993 trade center bombing had highlighted the poor coordination and communication among the emergency agencies. Even so, when questions were raised in 2004 by the 9/11 Commission about the Fire Department’s tactics, planning, and management, past and present city officials responded with outrage, demanding to know how anyone could challenge the bravery or sacrifices of the firefighters. No one had.
At first glance, the collapse of both towers hardly seems startling or complicated, given the nature of the attacks on them. Important columns were destroyed. The structural elements that initially survived—most importantly, the floors and ceilings—were then subjected to intense fires, unlike anything considered in the design of ordinary buildings. Indeed, federal investigators concluded that it had been primarily the impact of the planes and, more specifically, the extreme fires that spread in their wake, that had caused the buildings to fall, and nothing that they termed a “design” flaw. After the planes hit, the towers shuddered for four minutes. Much of the spray-on fireproofing in the impact zone was dislodged, leaving the structural steel exposed and mortally vulnerable to the intense heat.
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