102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (7 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 consequences of a plane’s striking one of the towers had been envisioned many years earlier, even before the towers were built, by opponents of their construction who ran an ad in
The New York Times
with a lurid—and, as it turned out, prescient—illustration of an airliner striking the north face of the north tower. The Port Authority quickly responded: calculations by its engineers and computer simulations showed that an airplane crash would wreak destruction across seven floors, but the building itself would stand. On Sunday, November 7, 1982, officials replicated a plane crash
high in one of the towers, a “disaster” to which city Police and Fire Departments, Emergency Medical Services, and the Port Authority all responded. The drill followed a real near-disaster that had made news the year before: an Argentine airliner came within ninety seconds of hitting the north tower when it had problems communicating with air traffic controllers. No terrorism was involved.

After the 1993 bombing, a retired director of the World Trade Center, Guy Tozzoli, told a legislative hearing that the city should probably prepare for such a catastrophe, citing the drill from 1982. His suggestion was ignored. None of the city newspapers gave the idea even a sentence of coverage, and it did not appear in the legislative committee’s report. A new administration took over the city government, and Mayor Giuliani, in the classic fashion of New York mayors, attacked the Port Authority for shortchanging the city on various financial arrangements. Giuliani raised the temperature on the customary mayoral critiques, decrying everything from the salaries the Port Authority paid to its police officers—higher than what the city paid to NYPD officers—and what he claimed was poor airport snow removal. For all the spears launched, however, the city did not organize a single joint drill involving all the emergency responders at the trade center in the eight years after the 1993 attack. The last joint drill appears to have been the one held in 1982, preparations for a plane crash that did not come for nineteen years.

If the city’s Office of Emergency Management did not have the history or clout to forge an effective partnership between the Fire and Police Departments before September 11, as some critics believed, it certainly had no opportunity that morning. Just minutes after Flight 11 hit the north tower, the agency was forced to evacuate its own offices, a $13 million emergency “bunker” at 7 World Trade Center, a forty-seven-story building at the northern edge of the complex. The bunker had been conceived a few years earlier as a place where emergency officials and Mayor Giuliani could preside during a crisis, coordinating the response. Some emergency-response experts and politicians suggested that the location of the bunker was unwise, given the trade center’s status as
a terrorist target, but the mayor brushed off the critics as people mired in the “old ways” of thinking. His aides described the bunker as state of the art and imagined it as impregnable. A defiant response to the 1993 terrorist attack, the bunker was, intentionally or not, a barely veiled monument to the iron will of the mayor, and during his brief campaign for the United States Senate in 2000, it served as an occasional backdrop for Giuliani’s meetings with the press.

Now, the first time the bunker was truly needed, the agency and its officials were homeless. They arranged to relocate to a specially outfitted command bus that had been prepared as a backup headquarters. The redundancy in the planning, however—to use a phrase popular in emergency-management circles—only served to reinforce the misjudgment of the original arrangement.

Indeed, the arrangements were being made by OEM over radios broadcasting at 800 megahertz. In 1996 and 1997, dozens of these radios had been distributed to select police and fire commanders so the agencies could communicate, an important recommendation from the 1990 Aviation Emergency Preparedness Working Group. There was a hitch, though. Who would be in control of the interagency frequency? Who would decide when it should be used and how? Representatives of the Police and Fire Departments had met for months to settle these questions, but the talks had broken down over unresolved issues of protocol. The radios were new and ready to use. It was just that no one outside OEM was willing to talk on them yet. The fire chiefs kept them in the trunks of their cars. As for the police chiefs, the radios never left the shelves.

A few minutes before 9:00, after getting his bearings in the lobby of the north tower, Chief Pfeifer turned to Lloyd Thompson, the civilian safety director at the fire command desk for the building. “Turn the repeater on,” he said. Thompson began fiddling with something on the desk in front of him. Then he looked over to his left, he would recall later, and saw that the repeater was already on. The repeater was controlled by a console that looked like a phone set
with several buttons. One button, when depressed, turned it on. A second button activated a handset that looked like a telephone. It was supposed to carry the voice of the chief to all the radios that had been tuned to the repeater channel, channel 7. Pfeifer was depending on the repeater to keep him connected to the companies he was sending upstairs, to make sure it amplified the radio signal so that the firefighters could hear his words, so they wouldn’t get trapped like the people they were trying to save. But before being used, the chief thought, the repeater should be double-checked.

Pfeifer and another chief, Orio J. Palmer, stood several yards apart in the lobby and began trying to talk to each other over the repeater channel. Palmer could not hear Pfeifer. Pfeifer could hear Palmer over the radio, but not through the handset, as he was supposed to. “I don’t think we have the repeater,” Pfeifer said aloud. “I pick you up on my radio, but not on the hard wire,” he said, referring to the handset.

When it came to radio communication, Orio Palmer was among the most knowledgeable people in the department. A chief in Battalion 7 in Manhattan, he also held an associate’s degree in electrical technology and had written a training article for the department on how to use repeaters to boost radio reception at high-rise fires. On this morning, though, he did not have any magic answers. The repeater, which previously had worked so well, did not seem to be working properly, and the chiefs decided there was no time to start fussing with it.

Palmer went outside to a battalion car and turned on a portable repeater. It did not seem to work, either. The fire chiefs concluded they would have to muddle through with the same, unaided normal channels they always used when fighting fires in smaller buildings. For all the talk and effort at improving things, it might as well have been 1993 all over again. Armed only with his handheld radio, Pfeifer resumed trying to make contact with units making their way upstairs. The moment was charged, and the north tower lobby was loud, with shouting, the crackle of competing radios, the wailing sirens of arriving trucks—an ambience that, while not deafening, was relentless, stressful, jarring. Worst of all were the thunderous,
percussive claps as bodies hit the building canopy. So many people from the upper floors were jumping, even now, just minutes after the crash, that the chief went over to the public-address system, not realizing it had been rendered inoperable by the plane.

“Please don’t jump,” he spoke into the dead microphone. “We’re coming up for you.”

The handheld radios were at least working, but communications were still very much hit-and-miss. Pfeifer held his two-way radio to his ear. He tried to edge away from the louder talkers. Still no good. Company after company was trudging up the stairs, where some people awaited their arrival, like Ivhan Carpio at Windows on the World, trapped above acres of flaming offices. Already Pfeifer and his boss, Deputy Chief Hayden, were losing touch with the ascending companies.

“We have no communication established up there yet,” Hayden told one of the other chiefs as he arrived in the lobby.

Some messages got through. Many went unanswered. After a while it became frustrating to keep calling out the names of the companies, one by one, and getting little response. Finally Chief Callan, the assistant chief who was Hayden’s boss, tried to establish a baseline. Just how bad was this communication gap? He got on the radio, using code to identify his rank.

“Four David to any unit Tower 1, upper floor,” he called out. “Four David to any unit Tower 1, upper floor.”

If there was an answer, he could not hear it.

“Should we be staying here, or should we evacuate?”

8:55 A.M.
SOUTH TOWER

L
ike a black hole, the gaping, blazing wound in the north tower had a gravitational pull, absorbing the attention of pedestrians, rescuers, and camera crews for miles. That left the people in the south tower largely on their own. Thanks to all those drills, a group from the Fuji/Mizuho offices on the 80th and 81st floors had made it to the lobby of the south tower nearly as fast as anyone in that building. Stanley Praimnath and seventeen others, most of them the senior executives, had dutifully gotten off their floors, just as they had been taught. Praimnath, for instance, boarded a local elevator at the 81st floor, then switched to the express at 78. That floor was a “sky lobby,” a way station that allowed elevators to whisk passengers for the upper floors past the intermediate stops, and where they could catch local shuttle elevators to their floors. The sky lobby normally was a crowded place during the morning and evening rush hours, but the Fuji/Mizuho folks had responded so quickly to the emergency that they had little competition for space on the elevators. On his way down, Praimnath ran into most of the bank’s high-ranking executives. They made it downstairs in no more than ten minutes after the plane had struck the other building.

As they approached the security turnstiles in the south tower, a guard waylaid them.

“Where’re you guys going?” the guard asked.

“We saw fireballs coming down,” Praimnath said.

“No, no,” the guard said. “All is well here. You can go back to your office. This building is secure.”

For most of the group from the Japanese bank, the authoritative voice of the guard reversed the momentum of the drills that had brought them so quickly to the lobby. The same dutiful, responsive approach to emergencies was simply being flipped around. The group turned to go upstairs as fast as they had come down. Still, Praimnath was uncertain. He spoke, for a moment, to the temporary employee he had brought downstairs.

“Delise, why don’t we take the rest of the day off?” he suggested. Delise agreed and went on her way, but Praimnath and the others headed back upstairs. Praimnath felt that some of the bosses gave him odd looks for his suggestion to Delise, as though he had exercised poor judgment. During the ride up, he turned to one colleague, the company’s human resources director, Brian Thompson, and said, “It’s a good time to take relocation.” The others ribbed him about his anxiety. The bank president got off at 80. Praimnath got off at 81. Thompson continued to 82.

So quickly had they left their desks, gotten downstairs, and been sent back that they were well settled while hundreds of people were still approaching the sky lobby on 78, or shuffling down the stairways, trying to figure out which way to go. During the uncertain moments after the north tower was struck, the tenants of the south tower relied on habits, if they had any, or training, if they had taken any, or on the instructions of the authorities who had responsibility for safety in the towers.

For decades, firefighters and others responding to a high-rise fire trusted the building itself to protect the occupants. As the strategic thinking went, evacuation posed greater hazards than remaining on a floor that was free of fire and smoke. All the technical literature
on high-rise fires stressed that most of those inside should stay put. “As soon as possible,” said the Fire Department’s manual, “begin the process of controlling evacuation.” It warned, “Occupants of numerous floors may have self-initiated evacuation, causing almost a mob scene or near panic in stair shafts or building lobby.” The overall cause of safety would be served if departing crowds did not get in the way of emergency workers. And among the lessons of the 1993 bombing, when the emergency-communications and public-address systems failed, was that an uncontrolled evacuation could create a huge amount of work. People had cleared out of the trade center of their own accord, and the firefighters ended up having to search some 10 million square feet of office space to see if everyone had indeed left.

Moreover, the World Trade Center was not built for total evacuation. Few modern American high-rise towers are. There would never be a need for everyone to leave at the same time. A fire or similar emergency would be contained on its floor by sprinklers and the fire-resistant materials. So the escape structures in the buildings—the number of staircases, their placement, their width—reflected the view that in the event of a fire, the building would be able to put the fire out itself, or certainly contain it. This was not simply a whim adopted in New York for the trade center. The major fire departments and the National Fire Protection Association, an organization funded by the insurance industry to study fire safety, all advocated a strategy called “defend in place.” In general terms, this meant that only people on the same floor as the fire, or on the floor directly above it, should evacuate. The Port Authority had adopted this strategy as part of its official, published fire plan.

Indeed, the prospect of a total evacuation in a high-rise seemed so remote that in the months before September 11, two of the most influential design groups—a national association of code officers and the insurance industry’s fire-safety group—suggested that stairways actually could be made narrower than some codes required. Stairs are not rentable space. By squeezing a few inches out of them, developers could add several thousand rentable square feet.

At the moment Stanley Praimnath and his colleagues were sent back upstairs by the security guard at the lobby turnstile, not ten minutes after Flight 11 struck, the official map of the crisis did not yet include a single foot of the south tower. The massive explosion and the giant fireballs all had emerged from the other building, the north tower. So they should go back to their desks. The problem was contained.

The dogma of Fuji/Mizuho—get out, go quickly—was overcome by the assurances of the security guard that no evacuation was needed. Perhaps that instruction was a reflexive reaction, or maybe it was the doctrine of high-rise firefighting—stay put, stand by—being applied at a moment of a bewildering and fast-moving crisis. In either case, it reflected the belief that high-rise buildings were bigger and more resilient than just about any problem that might beset them, including the crash of a commercial airliner next door. Encoded in all the plans for the trade center—the original architecture, the structural engineering, the day-to-day operations—was confidence that the towers would be able to stop their own fires. Without that faith, the complex never could have opened its doors. And yet at the trade center, fire resistance had been a matter of intense doubt, going back nearly four decades.

Long before September 11, the Port Authority’s promotional literature for the trade center had boasted: “This is a building project like no other—in size, in complexity, in revolutionary concepts.” From its earliest days, though, serious questions were raised about the prudence of constructing such behemoths with untested technology. A founding principle of the modern skyscraper is the presumption that it will resist and contain fire. No one can stream a hose of water at the 60th floor of a tower, more than 700 feet above the ground. Tall buildings have to be capable of putting any fires out, or at least come close to it. The lives of the people inside rely on that principle. The continued existence of the structure depends on it. Flames must not move from floor to floor, but be stopped by the fireproofing; the steel structure of the building must be protected
from the distorting effects of fire for at least two hours; the floors, for three hours.

Here was a rich and not at all fanciful source of anxiety for the engineers and architects working for the Port Authority in the 1960s. They did not know if the innovative floors proposed for the towers—thin, lightweight webs of steel built into trusses—would survive a fire. Those floors helped hold the walls of the tower in place. That they weighed so little, compared with traditional beam-and-column construction, and did not cut into tenant space, helped make the towers economically feasible to build to such heights. Yet no one had experience in fireproofing those webbed trusses, known as “bar joists,” with the techniques proposed and ultimately used in the trade center—a spray-on mixture of mineral fibers and adhesive. Both the architect and the structural engineer for the project refused to vouch for the ability of the floors to withstand fire. The Port Authority has no records of any tests to determine if the lightweight structural steel was adequately protected, an assurance the city code requires. While not legally bound by the code, the agency had announced that it would “meet or exceed” the code’s requirements. The reasons the agency never did the fireproofing tests can only be guessed at, since the principal figures had died long before September 11, but negative results could have forced a new design—one that might have increased the construction costs so much that the towers could not have been built, at least on the scale that was planned.

Yet these were issues of prime concern during design and construction. In 1966, Emery Roth & Sons, the New York architecture firm that was the local representative for Minoru Yamasaki, the lead architect, stated that the fire rating of the floor system could not be determined without testing. Even so, a federal investigation found no evidence that such tests were done—not in 1966, when the buildings were still being planned, or in 1975, when the towers’ structural engineering firm, Skilling Helle Christiansen Robertson, made similar statements. By that time, the towers had already opened, and small fires set by an arsonist in February 1975 had caused parts of floors to buckle. The fire damaged sections of the ninth through sixteenth floors.

In 1969, a Port Authority executive had ordered that the steel be protected by the sprayed-on fireproofing materials, a half inch thick. Why a half inch? No one can say. Would it be possible to apply the material to such skinny parts and make it stick in buildings that would be in constant motion from the wind? Again, the records are bereft of any tests.

Also in 1969, an architect from Emery Roth noted that Port Authority officials had deleted a requirement that the steel in the towers be able to stand up for three or four hours of fire, depending on the part of the structure. That deletion had turned the carefully drawn specifications for the buildings into a “meaningless document,” the architects complained, for which they renounced responsibility.

Once the towers were open, the Port Authority refused to permit natural gas lines in the building, concerned for what a fire supplied with potent fuel might do to the structure. The chefs at Windows on the World, one of the nation’s highest grossing restaurants, had to cook using electricity.

Over the three decades that the towers stood, endless rounds of remedial, if not penitential, reconstruction took place to address fire-safety vulnerabilities, some of them endemic to buildings that rose under the 1968 building code, others—most prominently, the fireproofing—unique to the trade center.

In a breathtakingly dense litigation, the Port Authority sued the manufacturer of one of its fireproofing products because it contained asbestos, viewed as a serious health hazard. Expert witnesses reported that hunks of the fireproofing, whether asbestos based or not, had fallen off the steel, leaving it exposed. In some cases, they said, it appeared never to have been applied at all. The Port Authority received a judgment of $66 million for its claim that asbestos was an unsafe product.

With the lawsuit over, the Port Authority was forced to confront the documentary evidence that large sections of its structural steel were not protected against fire. In 1995, Frank Lombardi, who had recently become the agency’s chief engineer, began to consider how to improve the situation. By 1999, he had ordered the density of the
fireproofing tripled, increasing it from a half inch of coating to an inch and a half. The work would be done only as tenants renovated their floors, when the floors and ceilings could be exposed for the messy work. The Port Authority would pick up the cost, about $1 million per floor. Just as in the 1960s, however, the adequacy of the new fireproofing for the trusses was not tested, a federal investigation found in 2003. Few people could have imagined that the fire-resistance system of two of the world’s tallest buildings had never undergone a trial by fire.

Despite the gravity of these doubts, the evacuation policies at the trade center assumed that the towers were sturdy and fire-resistant. And now the towers and the people inside were going to be tested by a fire greater than what any building code had anticipated.

Among the buildings that hovered around the two towers, like pilot fish around a pair of whales, was 5 World Trade Center, where the Port Authority Police Department fielded hundreds of calls from the tenants of the towers. Within minutes of the attack on the north tower, the people in the south tower got drastically different instructions, depending on which police officer answered the phone. To one officer, who understood that the trouble was entirely in the north tower, that meant people in the south tower would be better off staying put.

Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
Hello?

PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Yeah, Port Authority Police.

Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
This is … yeah, we’re on 92, World Trade Center, Two World Trade.

PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Two World Trade?

Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
We need to know if we need to get out of here, because we know there’s an explosion, I don’t know which building.

PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Do you have any smoke … smoke conditions up in your location at two?

Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
No, we just smell it, though.

PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Okay.

Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
Should we be staying here, or should we evacuate?

[
simultaneous conversations and other noise heard in background
]

Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
I’m … I’m waiting …