102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (8 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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Officer Brady was apparently distracted by another conversation, parts of which the caller from the 92nd floor heard. The policeman returned to his conversation with the man from the 92nd floor.
Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
We’re on 92, uh, we don’t … I don’t know if the elevators are working.
PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
What building are you in?
Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
Two World Trade.
PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Two World Trade.
Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
Should we stay or should we not?
PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
I would wait till further notice, we have … Building 1, they have people that can’t get out of [
overlap
] floor.
Male Caller, 92nd Floor:
Okay, all right [
overlap
]. Don’t evacuate. [
Hangs up.
]
The doctrine—or reflex—of telling people to stay put during evacuations was not universally applied. Seated next to Officer Brady was another policeman, Officer Steve Maggett, who was receiving calls at the same moment. His advice was entirely different.
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
Port Authority Police, Officer Maggett.
Female Caller, 2 WTC:
Yes, I’m in 2 World Trade, what’s going on?
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
Uh, there was some kind of either accident or explosion in Building 1. Everybody get out.
Female Caller, 2 WTC:
It’s … shall we take the elevator?
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
Everybody … no, try to take the stairs if you can, just in case.
Female Caller, 2 WTC:
Okay.
Meanwhile, Officer Brady continued to receive calls from the south tower and advised the tenants to stay put.
PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Port Authority Police, World Trade Center, Officer Brady.
Male Caller, 87th Floor:
Yes, we’re trying to figure … we are up on the 87th floor. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.
PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
One World Trade or—
Male Caller, 87th Floor:
Two.
PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Two. Just stand by, there’s no cond— … the incident happened at 1 World Trade Center. And we have the … that’s the first … the first incident, the first emergency, as far as rescue. Just stand by.
Male Caller, 87th Floor:
Okay, thank you.
PAPD Officer Greg Brady:
Okay, thank you.
Around the same time, Officer Maggett received another call from the south tower—in this case, from Morgan Stanley, which had several thousand employees based at the trade center, though not all of them were on the scene.
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
Port Authority Police, Officer Maggett.
Al Roxo, Morgan Stanley:
Yeah, this is Al Roxo, Securities Department, from Morgan Stanley.
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
Uh-huh?
Al Roxo, Morgan Stanley:
Uh, what’s the status right now as far as [
overlap
]?
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
We’re still checking. Everybody just get out of the building, right now.
Al Roxo, Morgan Stanley:
All right. Have you guys announced an evacuation of two?
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
We are trying to do that right now.
Al Roxo, Morgan Stanley:
All right, thank you.
PAPD Officer Steve Maggett:
All right? We are just advising everybody to get out of the building.
Al Roxo, Morgan Stanley:
All right, thank you, bye-bye.
The instruction to the caller from Morgan Stanley was especially important. Morgan Stanley occupied twenty-two floors in the south tower, and over 2,000 people worked for the company. An executive for the bank, Ed Ciffone, had overseen years of intense evacuation programs, and one of his deputies, Rick Rescorla, had led the drills with a zeal that seemed near-evangelical, certainly on the eccentric side. Now it made sense. Their wardens pulled out megaphones and began to drive the Morgan staff out of the building.
Telephone calls were hardly the best way to provide guidance to large numbers of people, however. Around 8:55, nine minutes after Flight 11 had struck the north tower, the strobe lights flashed in the south tower, and the wall siren gave a few whoops. On the 84th floor, Brian Clark, an executive with Euro Brokers who also served as a fire warden, heard a familiar voice over the public-address system.
Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen. Building 2 is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building 2. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may use the reentry doors and the elevators to return to your office. Repeat, Building 2 is secure.
The announcement was most likely made by Phil Hayes, the retired city firefighter who worked at the trade center as a deputy fire-safety director, and who was manning the control station in the south tower. At 8:49, three minutes after the attack, he had been recorded on a phone call to the north tower saying that he was going to await orders before giving any instructions to the tenants of the south tower. The reasons he ended up making the announcement a few minutes later can only be guessed: the policy at the trade center, and of the Fire Department, was to reserve the stairs and lobbies for people who were in immediate danger, or for the rescuers who were going to provide help. Under prevailing theories about the modern,
“fireproof” building, the tenants on other floors were in no danger, and did not need to leave. At this moment, no floors in the south tower were on fire. Moreover, people and flaming metal were dropping onto the plaza between the two towers, a common exit point, and the crisis appeared to be confined to the north tower.
The people at the fire-command desk in the south tower lobby had no view whatsoever of the fire that raged in the north tower. They could not look directly into the gaping holes of the north tower, as tenants on the upper floor of the south tower could; they did not see people step up to the windows in the north tower and jump, some holding hands; the papers on their desks were not singed, as they were in offices on the 98th floor. And even after the crash, the air-traffic controllers at La Guardia Airport in Queens did not know about the hijacking of Flight 11, or that three other planes had been seized by terrorists, or that one of them was flying toward New York—much less Phil Hayes in the lobby of the south tower, who was trying to keep people out of harm’s way.
 
 
At the 55th floor, Stephen Miller hit a logjam in the stairs of the south tower. Until then, despite his stiff new shoes, he had made reasonable progress in his departure from the 80th-floor offices of Mizuho. Now the crowds joining the exodus from the lower floors fell in ahead of them. The delay gnawed at him, so he stepped out of the stairway. He would call home. He would use the men’s room. Then he heard the announcement: There was no danger to tower two. The problem is localized in tower one. You can return to your desks.
Some of the people who had gotten out of the stairwell with him headed for the elevators. Keiji Takahashi, the boss who had swept him out of the office, was at the elevator bank. Miller boarded a different elevator, but felt uneasy. He had a muscular skepticism about most official pronouncements, a trait he felt had been cultivated by having grown up during the Watergate political scandals in the early 1970s. He didn’t buy into a lot that came over public-address systems.
Something about staying in this elevator headed back up to the
78th floor did not sit well with Miller. He saw a friend from the office, told her that he was afraid. As more people boarded the elevator, the space seemed to shrink. He was sweating. He couldn’t stay on. He jumped off. Keiji and three other bosses went up, although not on that elevator.
Then he went off in search of a phone. While he was hunting around the floor, he could hear the people at the windows. “Oh, my God, no—they’re jumping.”
As Miller was scouting the 55th floor, another of his colleagues from the 80th floor, Michael Otten, had already gotten down to 44, where he heard something about an airplane having hit the north tower. The announcement suggested that people could go to the cafeteria or return to their desks. Like Otten and Miller, many of the people from the upper floors who had gotten down quickly were driven more by the orders of their bosses and fear of what they didn’t know than by any frightful thing they had seen. Before he had left his desk, Otten had seen the ugly gaping hole in one side of the other tower and had figured it was some kind of explosion. Now he was hearing it had been a plane crash. He assumed it was a twin engine, maybe a Cessna. The problem was taking a shape, still disturbing, but less fearsome. Now the public-address system was broadcasting that there was no problem in this tower, so Michael Otten turned back for the 80th floor.
He was delayed. The elevator doors would not shut. Otten eyeballed a man with a backpack who had pushed onto the elevator. Like people in elevators everywhere, he stared blankly ahead, waiting to reclaim his interrupted day.
 
 
In the minutes just after Flight 11 struck the north tower, a vortex had formed in the south tower, not from any precise understanding of what had happened across the plaza, but from the power of sounds and memories and sights. The voices of people like Eric Eisenberg in the offices of Aon on the 98th floor, who boomed orders to get out; the recollection of the 1993 attack; the sight of people leaping or falling from the north tower—all these forces
wrenched thousands of people from their routines. Along the upper floors, they were drawn as if in a funnel toward the 78th and 44th floors—the points of embarkation, where express elevators dropped passengers in sky lobbies.
That they came to those particular spots owed to a paradox in the construction of skyscrapers. The taller the building, the more elevators are needed to move people to the higher floors in a reasonable amount of time. Adding more elevators—with shafts, machine rooms, lobby areas—meant subtracting rentable space. The arithmetic was inescapable: as buildings rose higher, the elevator infrastructure needed to support the height actually squeezed out profitable space. When the trade center was being designed, a solution was borrowed from another New York institution, one that had decades of experience in moving large numbers of people across distances near and far—the subways. The New York underground system used two tracks, one for express trains, the other for locals, to cover longer- and shorter-haul trips. Each tower was divided into three zones: up to the 44th floor; up to the 78th; and up to the 110th. Banks of express elevators, with each car able to hold fifty-five people, ran directly to the staging points on 44 and 78. There, the passengers could catch shuttle elevators to the intermediate floors. A single passenger car in each building ran all the way from the bottom to the top, serving the restaurant in the north tower and the observatory in the south; in addition, a freight elevator also had a clear run from the ground to the top.
In all, each tower had ninety-nine elevators, all of them built and installed by Otis Elevators, the company that made the modern skyscraper into a practical reality. The project manager for Otis during the construction was a man named Harry Friedenreich. On the morning of September 11, as Friedenreich was watching reports of the airplane crash on the
Today
show, his daughter, Alayne Gentul, was on the 90th floor of the south tower, herding people down to the 78th-floor express elevators. She was among the forces that began driving people out of their offices at Fiduciary Trust as soon as the plane hit the north tower, the vortex of instinct and duty that dragged people toward the exit.
It was Gentul’s voice, in fact, that lodged in the head of Elnora Hutton, a Fiduciary employee who worked for her on the 90th floor. Shortly after the impact in the other building, Gentul ended a debate on the prudence of waiting for clear instructions. “Nora, let everyone go downstairs very quietly,” Gentul said. Hutton counted about ten people who went down to 78 and immediately got on the elevators built by Gentul’s father.
Ed Emery, another of the voices shepherding Fiduciary Trust employees out of their offices on the 90th floor, reached the 78th floor with Anne Foodim. Along the way, Foodim had tired—she had just finished a chemotherapy series for cancer, and was about to start radiation—but Emery, her boss, nudged her along. “If you can finish chemo, then you can get down those steps,” Emery said. The week before, he had given Foodim a book on tranquility to soothe the rough patches of her cancer treatment. Stephanie Koskuba, another colleague, was passing her cell phone around. Emery tapped Koskuba on the shoulder and asked to borrow the phone, drifting toward a window to make his call.

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