102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (5 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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“You get one, I’ll get the other one,” he told her. “We’ll get rid of them and get the hell out of here.”
He picked up the phone. “Greg Trevor here.”
“Hi, I’m with NBC national news. If you could hold on for about five minutes, we’re going to put you on for a live phone interview.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t. We’re evacuating the building.”
“But this will only take a minute.”
“I’m sorry, you don’t understand. We’re leaving the building right now.”
The caller seemed stunned. “But, but, this is NBC national news.”
Apparently, Trevor thought to himself, it was okay to save yourself from a burning building if only a local affiliate was calling. But this was The Network.
He politely hung up and headed for the stairwell. Even now, as they started down, Trevor and his colleagues knew only that a plane had hit the building. And even that didn’t make sense. How could a plane hit a 110-story building on such a clear day? He tried to call his wife, Allison, several times by cell phone, but couldn’t get through. He reached a colleague, Pasquale DiFulco, through his BlackBerry communicator.
DiFulco had started the day on vacation and was home watching CNN. He began to give Trevor updates using digital haiku. His first message flashed: “AA 676 from boston crashed into 1wtc. fbi reporting plane was hijacked moments before crash.” He had mistyped the 767’s model number, but Trevor understood.
At a stairway landing on the 27th floor, Ed Beyea watched the people streaming past him, a fixed point in a river of humanity. He was going nowhere, for now. Nothing below his neck moved. He
had broken his neck twenty years earlier in a diving accident in upstate New York, where he grew up, and had come to the city for rehabilitation shortly thereafter. He never left. Now forty-two years old, he lived in an apartment on Roosevelt Island, a spit of land in the middle of the East River that was covered with high-rise buildings and was home to a hospital that served people with spinal cord injuries. The island’s subway station had a modern elevator, making it possible for him to commute to the trade center without a car. He worked as a computer analyst for Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, traveling to and from the office with his aide, Irma Fuller. She had accompanied him on the elevator up to 27, hung up his jacket, and set him up with the mouth stick that he used to type. When the first plane hit, she had been upstairs ordering breakfast at a 43rd floor cafeteria. By the time she came down, Beyea had already gone onto the stairwell landing.
had broken his neck twenty years earlier in a diving accident in upstate New York, where he grew up, and had come to the city for rehabilitation shortly thereafter. He never left. Now forty-two years old, he lived in an apartment on Roosevelt Island, a spit of land in the middle of the East River that was covered with high-rise buildings and was home to a hospital that served people with spinal cord injuries. The island’s subway station had a modern elevator, making it possible for him to commute to the trade center without a car. He worked as a computer analyst for Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, traveling to and from the office with his aide, Irma Fuller. She had accompanied him on the elevator up to 27, hung up his jacket, and set him up with the mouth stick that he used to type. When the first plane hit, she had been upstairs ordering breakfast at a 43rd floor cafeteria. By the time she came down, Beyea had already gone onto the stairwell landing.
With Beyea was Abe Zelmanowitz, another Blue Cross computer analyst who worked one cubicle over, separated by an aisle on the south end of the floor. Considering the distances between them—physical, cultural, religious—that they were now inches from each other in the stairwell might have seemed peculiar.
Beyea came from a small town in upstate New York and had converted to Catholicism as an adult; Zelmanowitz, thirteen years his senior, was an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn. Beyea laughed from a capacious belly, swollen by kidney problems and years of inactivity. He weighed 280 pounds. Zelmanowitz was soft-spoken and slim.
They had worked together for twelve years and had become close friends. Zelmanowitz made a reading stand that Beyea could use in bed. Beyea shot jokes that were irresistible to Zelmanowitz. Once or twice a month they went to a restaurant after work, always with Fuller, often with others from their office. If Beyea picked, he made sure the restaurant was kosher. If Zelmanowitz selected, he made sure it was wheelchair accessible. One favorite was Mr. Broadway, a kosher restaurant in midtown that served a nice rib-eye steak. Zelmanowitz lived with his older brother and his brother’s family. Beyea, who had been briefly married and was separated, lived by
himself. The two men had built a friendship on the solid footings of the everyday: joking, eating, and the minutiae of work in a small office, drawing them from the cloisters of their own lives.
himself. The two men had built a friendship on the solid footings of the everyday: joking, eating, and the minutiae of work in a small office, drawing them from the cloisters of their own lives.
The two men knew right away that their situation was serious. They had felt the jolt when the plane hit and had watched the debris fall past their windows. Still, the building had survived a bombing before and there was little smoke on their floor. Moreover, both of them knew that friendship alone would not carry Beyea down the stairs. They needed three or four strong men to do it safely, so they were waiting for help. In the meantime, Zelmanowitz told Fuller that she should go ahead and leave the building.
“I’ll stay with Ed,” he told her. Beyea also told her to go. Find someone downstairs, they told her, and tell them where we are. As Fuller started down, Zelmanowitz yelled a final note down the stairs: “Irma, we are on 27C.”
A few minutes later, he called his brother, Jack, at home, who was watching the tower burn on TV. Zelmanowitz spoke calmly. The fire was above them.
“We’re getting ready to go,” he said. “We’re just waiting for assistance.”
“Is everything okay?” Jack asked. “You know, you have to get out of there.”
“Don’t worry,” Zelmanowitz responded. “I’m here with Ed. We’re just waiting for medical help, and firemen will come and help us go down. Don’t worry. Everything looks like it’s going to be okay.”
Zelmanowitz then held the cell phone while Beyea called his mother, Janet, in Bath, New York, the town in the Finger Lakes where, as a young man, Beyea had tended bar at the Moose Club and waterskied on Keuka Lake. The conversation was short. Beyea told his mother that they were still in the building but they would be leaving soon.
“Mom,” he said, “I’m all right.”
4
“We have no communication established up there yet.”
8:50 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
NORTH TOWER
I
n the lobby of the north tower, Lloyd Thompson stood at a console, answering calls on the building’s intercom system and trying to make sense of what people and the console were telling him about the smoke and fire on the upper floors. As the deputy fire safety director for the building, Thompson had often stood at the same spot during an emergency, and the console would quickly show him where trouble was: a red light, one for each floor, lit up when someone called for help. It was rare for more than one light to come on. Now Thompson faced a board of red lights.
n the lobby of the north tower, Lloyd Thompson stood at a console, answering calls on the building’s intercom system and trying to make sense of what people and the console were telling him about the smoke and fire on the upper floors. As the deputy fire safety director for the building, Thompson had often stood at the same spot during an emergency, and the console would quickly show him where trouble was: a red light, one for each floor, lit up when someone called for help. It was rare for more than one light to come on. Now Thompson faced a board of red lights.
Though the shape of the disaster was barely forming in his mind, Thompson knew enough about its scale to pick up the public-address microphone and order an immediate evacuation of the building. His message went nowhere: the plane had destroyed the building’s public-address system.
At the police desk in 5 World Trade Center, the low-rise building just northeast of the north tower, Alan Reiss, the former director of the world trade department, was also answering a flood of calls for help. Reiss had run straight from his breakfast meeting in the concourse to the police desk to help answer the phones. He knew the
people who worked in Windows—he had a membership in a club there, and a meal in the restaurant was one of the pleasures in his routine. He, too, could do little but tell them to hold on. Rescue workers were on their way. Even the simplest advice, to wet towels and stuff them in the doorsills, became another avenue of frustration. The plane had severed the pipes, so there was no water pressure upstairs, for drinking, putting out fires, or dampening cloths. When Jan Maciejewski, the waiter, called his wife from a cell phone, he told her that he would check the flower vases for water.
people who worked in Windows—he had a membership in a club there, and a meal in the restaurant was one of the pleasures in his routine. He, too, could do little but tell them to hold on. Rescue workers were on their way. Even the simplest advice, to wet towels and stuff them in the doorsills, became another avenue of frustration. The plane had severed the pipes, so there was no water pressure upstairs, for drinking, putting out fires, or dampening cloths. When Jan Maciejewski, the waiter, called his wife from a cell phone, he told her that he would check the flower vases for water.
In trucks and cars and commandeered buses, on foot and by air, a fresh wave of men and women—on duty, off-duty, and no duty—were heading straight toward a catastrophe from which thousands of others were fleeing. The urge to help was powerful. Several blocks away at the Court Officers Academy, Capt. Joseph Baccellieri grabbed two of his sergeants, Al Moscola and Andrew Wender, and began running toward the trade center. They sprinted west across Fulton Street, weaving through crowds running east. Baccellieri, who was forty-one, had been sorting through a new shipment of uniforms when he heard the shattering noise of the plane’s impact. He understood that he had no official role as a rescuer at a crash, or whatever this was. His job at the academy was to train the court officers who kept order in New York State’s courts. But he had training as a first responder and a simple moral precept that he clung to: “You want people to come for you, you’ve got to help them.” He also had a good deal of experience with the World Trade Center.
As a younger man, Baccellieri had driven a truck for his father’s company, JLB Transport, which made deliveries once a month to the trade center, many of them loads of paper used by printing businesses in the towers. Baccellieri would have to navigate the subterranean maze of the garage to figure out which of the freight elevators served the north tower, the south, and the five other buildings that made up the garden of high-rises. Along sharp corners
and dead ends, he would steer the big truck, known as a straight-through, struggling to bring it close to the tight delivery bays.
and dead ends, he would steer the big truck, known as a straight-through, struggling to bring it close to the tight delivery bays.
It was always confusing, he recalled, though nothing like the mayhem he was witnessing now as he ran toward the complex. People streamed from the buildings. The gash where the plane had entered the north tower was clearly visible. Already, just minutes after the crash, people were falling from the building while others screamed. Two police officers held open the doors into 5 World Trade Center, where the complex’s police desk was located, and urged people to keep moving, to get away. As Baccellieri and his two colleagues walked in, one of the cops told him he was crazy.
Chief Joseph Pfeifer took a mental snapshot of the damage as he strode into the north tower lobby in his thick rubber boots. Shattered windows. Tan marble cracked and collapsed from the wall. Severely burned people being helped from the building. The fireball of exploding jet fuel had shot down the elevator shafts, reaching as far as four levels below the lobby. It had announced itself in the lobby with an explosion that had blackened a stretch of wall near one of the elevator banks, and blown the doors off the cars.
Pfeifer, a battalion chief, was the first fire commander to arrive at the scene, getting there at 8:50 A.M., just four minutes after the plane hit. He had heard Flight 11 screeching directly overhead as he stood on Lispenard Street in lower Manhattan, where he and firefighters from Engine 7 were investigating a gas leak. They watched as the plane blew into the upper floors of the north tower. Jules Naudet, a French documentary maker, was taping Pfeifer that day, and he pulled his camera up to record the plane as it burst into the north face of the north tower. They rushed into Pfeifer’s battalion car, and sped south with Engine 7. “That looked like a direct attack,” Pfeifer said in the car.
As they drove, Chief Pfeifer used his car radio to call in the first and second alarms simultaneously, alerting dispatchers to send
nineteen fire trucks to the building. His first message began at 8:46:43, twelve seconds after the impact.
nineteen fire trucks to the building. His first message began at 8:46:43, twelve seconds after the impact.
“We just had a plane crash into upper floors of the World Trade Center. Transmit a second alarm and start relocating companies into the area.”
Not enough, he knew. Ninety seconds after the plane struck, he added a third alarm.
Battalion 1 to Manhattan.
We have a number of floors on fire. It looked like the plane was aiming toward the building. Transmit a third alarm throughout; the staging area at Vesey and West Street. As the third alarm assignment goes into that area, the second alarm assignment report to the building.
By having the firefighters responding to the third alarm go to Vesey and West Streets, the northwestern boundary of the trade center, Pfeifer was trying to manage the flood of arriving troops. It was good to have manpower, but not if it all showed up at once.
Standing on the sidewalk outside the north tower, the chief pulled his black-and-yellow turnout coat over his white shirt and tie. He tossed his white chief’s hat on the dashboard, picked up his fire helmet, and tugged on his boots. He glanced at the high side of the building before he entered. It belched white smoke, but no flames were visible yet. That would be Pfeifer’s last good look at the job he and hundreds would be taking on.
Trailing him throughout was the filmmaker, Jules Naudet, who rarely shifted the camera off Pfeifer even as the flames roared above them. For months, Naudet and his brother, Gedeon, had been making a documentary about the progress of a rookie firefighter as he grew into the job. The brothers had become regulars at the firehouse, even pitching in with kitchen chores. The preparation and consumption of meals was a central event on many a day at the firehouse, particularly since there were far more big dinners than big fires. The routine made for hearty fellowship, though not necessarily gripping documentary film. “By the end of August,” Gedeon would say in an interview, “we knew that we had a great cooking show.”
Now Jules Naudet recorded the first arrivals at what would become the largest rescue operation in New York City history. More than 225 fire units would go to the trade center, half of all the companies working that day. So many trucks showed up that parking became difficult. The trucks themselves were crowded with off-duty firefighters, most of whom had just gotten off the overnight shift and felt compelled to go along. Other firefighters heard the news at home or at their second jobs, grabbed their car keys, and headed in. In the brave, pell-mell rush to help, more than 1,000 firefighters would report. Among them were seventeen rookies, people like Christian Regenhard from Engine 279 in Brooklyn, a former Marine just six weeks out of the Fire Academy. Also there was Chief Pfeifer’s brother, Kevin, a lieutenant who was on duty with Engine 33. The brothers spotted each other in the north tower lobby when Kevin’s company arrived. They were both low-key commanders whose slow-to-ignite temperaments served them well in the high-octane situations they encountered. They lived only a few blocks apart in Middle Village, Queens, a neighborly patch of the city with small, tidy lawns, and little resemblance to the vertical clamor of Manhattan. Joe, a slim man with a thin mustache and the factdriven manner of an accountant, was older by three years. He had spent two decades in the department and, as a chief in Battalion 1, was responsible for lower Manhattan. Calls to the trade center were part of his routine, and he knew the safety staff at the complex. Kevin was adventurous, without being loud. Unmarried, he was the uncle in the family who flew a Cessna, sailed a catamaran, and gave parties by the beach in Queens. Quickly, without ceremony, Joe, senior to Kevin not only in age but also in rank, ran down what he knew. Kevin didn’t say much in reply, but Joe noticed the concerned look on his face. Then Kevin turned and took his company, David Arce, Michael Boyle, Robert Evans, Robert King Jr., and Keithroy Maynard, up the stairs.
From the first view of the gaping hole and flames, many fire officials would later say, they knew that they would not be able to put out
the fire. It would be strictly a rescue operation. The FDNY could fight a fire on one floor, maybe two. They could not handle what confronted them now—at least five floors fully engulfed. The limitation was a matter not of bravery or skill or brawn, but of simple physics. Each hose could shoot 250 gallons of water a minute, enough to douse a fire spread across 2,500 square feet. With multiple hose lines, they might be able to battle a fire that stretched across a single trade center floor of 40,000 square feet, but not five floors, and certainly not, as it turned out, without water. So the three chiefs in charge at the lobby—Pfeifer, joined by Deputy Chief Peter Hayden and Assistant Chief Joseph Callan—decided that the companies would not extinguish the fire, but would concentrate on helping people evacuate. If they needed to knock down a patch of flames to open a stretch of stairs, that was OK, but otherwise they would just let the fire burn itself out. Whatever their eyes told them about the scale of the blaze, they would follow the fundamentals of high-rise firefighting doctrine, first by setting up a command post near the fire. But where was this fire? No one in the lobby knew. The building fire-detection system had been badly damaged. Pfeifer would remember hearing speculation by members of the building staff that the fire was at the 78th floor, which was actually twenty stories below the center of the impact. Small fires burned on many floors below the main conflagration, including 78. Pfeifer told his first units to head for the 70th floor, a spot safely beneath the fire, the customary position for setting up forward operations. If all went as expected, the fire would burn upward, not downward. Other companies were assigned to respond to specific distress calls. Still others were assigned floors and told to make sure everyone had gotten out.
the fire. It would be strictly a rescue operation. The FDNY could fight a fire on one floor, maybe two. They could not handle what confronted them now—at least five floors fully engulfed. The limitation was a matter not of bravery or skill or brawn, but of simple physics. Each hose could shoot 250 gallons of water a minute, enough to douse a fire spread across 2,500 square feet. With multiple hose lines, they might be able to battle a fire that stretched across a single trade center floor of 40,000 square feet, but not five floors, and certainly not, as it turned out, without water. So the three chiefs in charge at the lobby—Pfeifer, joined by Deputy Chief Peter Hayden and Assistant Chief Joseph Callan—decided that the companies would not extinguish the fire, but would concentrate on helping people evacuate. If they needed to knock down a patch of flames to open a stretch of stairs, that was OK, but otherwise they would just let the fire burn itself out. Whatever their eyes told them about the scale of the blaze, they would follow the fundamentals of high-rise firefighting doctrine, first by setting up a command post near the fire. But where was this fire? No one in the lobby knew. The building fire-detection system had been badly damaged. Pfeifer would remember hearing speculation by members of the building staff that the fire was at the 78th floor, which was actually twenty stories below the center of the impact. Small fires burned on many floors below the main conflagration, including 78. Pfeifer told his first units to head for the 70th floor, a spot safely beneath the fire, the customary position for setting up forward operations. If all went as expected, the fire would burn upward, not downward. Other companies were assigned to respond to specific distress calls. Still others were assigned floors and told to make sure everyone had gotten out.
The next task for the chiefs was transporting the companies upstairs. They discovered that nearly all the building’s ninety-nine elevators were out of service. Many were stuck between floors with people trapped inside. At least two that had descended to the lobby were shut tight. The people inside were screaming, just a few yards from the fire command desk, but no one could hear them in the din.
The lack of working elevators meant the fires high in the tower would have a galloping, destructive head start. To get to the upper floors, the companies would be walking. Among the most experienced chiefs to arrive was Donald Burns, who had been a commander at the 1993 bombing and had written a thoughtful commentary on the event. “Without elevators,” he had noted, “sending companies to upper floors in large high-rise buildings is measured in hours, not minutes.”
In the stairwells, gravity ruled. A firefighter’s turnout coat, pants, boots, and helmet weigh twenty-nine and a half pounds. The mask and oxygen tank add another twenty-seven pounds, bringing the basic load to fifty-six and a half pounds. Firefighters in engine companies also carry fifty feet of hose, called a roll-up, with aluminum fittings on each end. That weighs thirty pounds, increasing the load to eighty-six and a half pounds. Even though fighting the fire was out of the question, the reflex to bring the gear held: many companies lugged the bulky hose roll-ups into the stairs, already packed with people trying to flee.
In the ladder companies, some firefighters carried an extinguisher and hook, thirty-eight pounds, while others toted an ax and the Halligan tool, an all-purpose pry bar, with a weight of twenty-five pounds. One firefighter from each unit also carried a lifesaving rope, 150 feet long and weighing twenty-two pounds.
They all carried one more piece of equipment: a radio, the Motorola Saber, which weighs one pound, seven ounces.
Traveling through the ventilation system the smoke from the fire ten stories below was taking over both floors of Windows on the World. With the guests herded onto the lower floor, the 106th floor, Doris Eng, Christine Olender, and the rest of the staff were following their emergency-training instructions—to assemble everyone in a corridor near the stairs and to call the fire safety director in the lobby. The evacuation policy for the towers, which had been redrafted several years earlier, relied on assurances that a fire on
one floor could be contained for a period of hours. The first priority was to evacuate the floor on fire and the one above it. People farther away were to leave only when directed by the command center or, as the training brochure blandly put it, “when conditions dictate such actions.”
one floor could be contained for a period of hours. The first priority was to evacuate the floor on fire and the one above it. People farther away were to leave only when directed by the command center or, as the training brochure blandly put it, “when conditions dictate such actions.”
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