by Dwyer, Jim
Many of the people working for the bank had been in the building in 1993, so the memory of calamity ran just beneath the surface. The lesson had not been pleasant, but it could not be forgotten: They were very high in a building where the path to safety was narrow and most likely would be crowded. That experience had helped turn emergency preparations into a near-religion among the bank’s staff. Clipped to the back of every chair was a plastic bag filled with tools to help in an evacuation—a glow stick, a breathing hood, and a flashlight. The employees learned where the real staircases were, so they would not mistake the interior stairs that just carried people between the bank’s floors.
Perhaps more important than the drills, or the mechanics of stairwells, or the emergency kits, was the corporate culture of the bank, which also operated in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and London. In 1996, not long after Michael Otten had arrived at the trade center, the Provisional Irish Republican Army set off a colossal bomb at the Canary Wharf development in the City of London. After that, one of the bank’s leaders sent out a memo to make its policy clear. The bank’s assets, the memo said, were its people—more valuable than any reports that were being written, more important than tickets for trades that were outstanding, more vital than any project that would be disrupted. In an emergency, they were to drop their work and go.
Now, less than a minute after some vague but plainly serious problem had struck the north tower, bank managers were ordering people out of its south tower offices. Miller obeyed, as did nearly all his colleagues. Just when he stepped into the stairway, he realized he had forgotten the evacuation pack. So had Otten. In fact, it seemed hardly anyone from the bank remembered to bring along the kit.
One floor up from Miller and Otten, Stanley Praimnath, an assistant vice president for the bank, had walked out with a woman working as a temporary assistant. They immediately caught a local elevator that took them to the 78th floor. There, they boarded an express for the lobby.
When the trade center had opened in 1973, and for years after, few private concerns took up space there. The tenant rolls were dominated by public agencies, like the Port Authority—the building’s owner—and the downstate office for the governor of New York, and those of other state agencies that had little say in the matter. Not only were the towers two of the tallest buildings in the world, but they also amounted to the largest collection of government offices ever built. In time, though, the market for office space in lower Manhattan evolved. Beginning in 1980 with the deregulation of the banking industry, a new breed of financial services company emerged, often leaner and faster than the traditional Wall Street investment banking firms. The revised laws and more flexible regulatory postures freed small regional banks, once fairly staid businesses, to deal in a much broader range of investments, and to operate across state lines. One collateral effect was an increase in the need for floor space in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street.
Another effect was that dowdy smaller banks suddenly became glamorous candidates for acquisition. That created an opening spotted by, among others, Herman Sandler, a senior executive with Bear, Stearns. He saw that the task of bringing the stock shares of small banks to the market, and of analyzing that market, did not get the full attention of the large investment banking concerns that served as midwives to expanding businesses. In 1988, Sandler left Bear, Stearns in a dispute over compensation. Joined by a group of five friends and colleagues, he started Sandler O’Neill & Partners to cater to medium- and smaller-sized banks. Some of the partners had known each other since childhood. They began operations in ramshackle space on lower Broadway, and joked that to run the copying machine, they had to unplug the coffeepot. As the business grew, the prospect of more space and cheap rents at the World Trade Center led them to the 104th floor of the south tower. They arrived on a Monday, February 22, 1993. On Friday, the bomb exploded in the basement. In company lore, the people who left endured an agonizingly slow walk down 104 flights, in the dark, with choking smoke belching from the car tires ignited in the garage. Another group went to the roof and shivered in the February cold, with the wind off the harbor even more biting at that altitude. Most of those on the roof eventually turned back and headed downstairs. Those who had the easiest time of all waited in their offices until rescuers reached them hours later, after the smoke had cleared.
On the morning of September 11, eighty-three people had arrived for work in Sandler O’Neill’s office when the north tower was struck. Jennifer Gorsuch came out of the women’s bathroom in time to see Sandler—the balding, six-foot-two-inch founder—step from his office exclaiming “Holy shit!” Another Sandler employee told Gorsuch about the stairway she had used in 1993, and the two women set off. The company had no special plan for an emergency, other than trying to use common sense. So the employees turned to Sandler—a man prized for his counsel, who had made a fortune by listening and then offering advice that seemed to make solid-gold sense. He told an investment banker that he thought the safest place to be was right in the office. But one of his partners, Jace Day, heard Sandler say that anyone who wanted to leave should go, and Day decided to do just that. Of the eighty-three people in the office, seventeen left immediately. The bond traders and most of the people working on the equity desk remained.
They began to call home, to alert their families that they were okay. For people outside the trade center, it was hard to keep track of which tower was 1—the north building—and which was 2, the south tower. To these outsiders, any commotion in the complex automatically became a pandemic, afflicting everyone, since the whole place could seem like a blur of aluminum and glass. The Sandler people wanted to make it clear to their families that the problem was in the other building.
Nearly 200 feet below, in a company very much like Sandler O’Neill, similar conversations were unfolding on the 88th- and 89th-floor office of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, another small firm founded by partners who had seen an opportunity serving the finance needs of the banking industry. KBW hired circles of friends and family, giving them demanding jobs. They worked and played hard. The custom at many Wall Street firms was to bring in lunch for the traders, so that they would be able to eat without missing a sale. At KBW, lunch was served for the entire company, not just the traders, every day. On Junk Food Fridays, the meals were entirely built around Whoppers and Big Macs and Kentucky Fried Chicken, huge orders sent up from fast-food joints in the neighborhood. A fair number of the people at work had played college football, basketball, baseball, and not surprisingly, remained competitive weekend athletes. One of these was Rick Thorpe, a star quarterback who had led his high school team to an undefeated season. He called home from KBW immediately after the plane hit.
“I’m sick to my stomach,” he told his wife, Linda Perry Thorpe. The board of KBW had been having merger discussions with Banque Nationale de Paris/Paribas, and Linda thought the deal had fallen through.
“What happened with the deal?” she asked.
“No, no,” Thorpe said. “I just wanted you to know that a plane hit the other tower. I’m okay—but here we go again.”
A veteran of the 1993 bombing, Thorpe was looking at a long, disruptive haul. “I want you to turn on the TV, because it’s going to be the top story of the day,” he said. They hung up.
“You wouldn’t believe what I’m watching,” Brad Vadas said from a desk nearby. “I just saw a guy rip his shirt off because it was on fire and jump.”
Vadas had just called his fiancée, Kris McFerren, to report that he was okay, and to tell her what he was seeing. He and McFerren had been dating for nine years, and after going to a friend’s wedding on Labor Day weekend, they had finally decided it was their turn. They would marry in May. McFerren was a physical therapist; Vadas had graduated from Boston College, a fine athlete, a competitive baseball player, and by age thirty-nine had gotten himself a waterfront home in Westport, Connecticut, and an apartment in Manhattan. Like his colleague Rick Thorpe, he too had been working at the trade center in 1993. The events o
f this morning were fresh horrors.
“Don’t watch,” McFerren pleaded.
“Listen, I really got to go. Could you call my mom?” Vadas asked.
McFerren would. Even though Vadas’s title was senior vice president, he worked on a trading desk—a position that afforded little privacy, a world of the heavily armored humor of men, hardly the venue for expressions of tenderness. This morning, though, he had more to say to McFerren.
“Let me tell you something,” Vadas said. “I just want you to know how much you mean to me.”
Across the two floors of KBW, decisions to go or stay were made one at a time. Virtually the entire 88th floor cleared out, mostly people from the investment banking and research departments. A particularly loud voice came from J. J. Aguiar, an investment banker, who swept across the floor yelling at people to leave. On the 89th floor, where the KBW trading desk was located, there was less certainty. Will DeRiso, a salesman, had always been anxious about working in the trade center, though his colleagues would often rib him for his worries. The night before, he had switched desks, moving to one near the door. A few moments after the explosion, he heard pounding on the door. Two women from the information technology department stood outside, frozen with fear. DeRiso decided it was time to go.
Joseph Berry, the chief executive of the firm, stood outside his office, trying to figure out the best next move. He was yet another veteran of the 1993 attack, having spent hours trapped in an elevator when the electricity failed, and he knew about the painfully slow and sloppy descent of those who had gone down the stairs. Moreover, another reality kept KBW staff in their chairs. The traders made their money by staying on the phone, by being ready to move quickly. They did not leave for lunch. They barely stopped to go to the bathroom. Now Bob Planer, a vice president in sales, saw that some of the traders were peering out the windows. He heard other traders holler at them to get back to their seats. Planer left for the stairs. Bradley Fetchet, a twenty-four-year-old equities trader, called his father at work, then his mother, getting her answering machine.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Brad. Just wanted to call and let you know. I’m sure that you heard there was … or maybe you haven’t heard that a plane crashed into World Trade Center 1. We’re fine. We’re in World Trade Center 2. I’m obviously alive and well over here. But obviously … a pretty scary experience. I saw a guy fall out of probably the 91st story … ah … all the way down … so”—he paused and cleared his throat—“you’re welcome to give a call here. I think we’ll be here all day. I’m not sure if the firm is going to shut down for the day or what. But … ah … give me a call back later. I called Dad to let him know. Love you.”
One of those who got back to the KBW trading desk was Stephen Mulderry. Of the eight Mulderry children, Stephen was the sixth, an All-American basketball player at the Division 3 level for the University of Albany. He took a call from his brother Peter, who had seen the news on TV at his own office.
“What’s up, brother?” Stephen said, giving Peter his usual salutation.
“Are you all right?” Peter asked.
“Yeah, I was just over at the window, but, my God, I don’t know if people were falling or jumping, but I saw people falling to their death,” Stephen said.
“Oh, my God,” Peter said.
“They’re human beings,” Stephen said. As he spoke, a public-address announcement was coming over. Stephen was being summoned, less noisily, but just as insistently, by his telephone on the trading desk. Since the traders all worked elbow to elbow, the phones lit up, rather than rang, to signal an incoming call.
“I gotta go,” Stephen declared. “The lights are ringing and the market is going to open.”
All of KBW’s New York traders were at or near their chairs, ready for the 9:00 opening.
3
“Mom, I’m not calling to chat.”
8:48 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
On the 91st floor of the north tower, Mike McQuaid and his crew of five electricians hunted for a stairway. They were two floors below the bottom of the impact zone of Flight 11, in a wholly ordinary space that had been transformed in the last two minutes into a warren of collapsed ceiling tiles and fallen walls. Even so, the materials that made up the rubble were light and the corridors to the exits in the center of the building remained passable. The stairwells, though, were another story entirely. Two of them had been reduced to smithereens. The remaining one, toward the northwest side of the building, was open. So they would be able to get out, after all. One of the electricians forgot his cell phone, and he hustled back to get it. As the others waited, McQuaid stuck his head into the offices of the American Bureau of Shipping, and hollered, “Anybody there?”
Most of 91 was empty—the American Bureau of Shipping was the only commercial tenant on the floor, occupying about a quarter of the space—and it happened to be on the northwest side, near the open stairway. Already, most of the eleven people in that office had collected themselves and started down.
Now a woman in a red hat came their way.
“I’m the last one,” she declared.
Then they heard two other people from an area near the elevators. Vanessa Lawrence, a Scottish-born artist who worked on the floor, had just had taken one step out of the elevator when the concussion ran through the shaft. Gerry Wertz, a purchasing manager for Marsh & McLennan, was still in the elevator, on his way to the 93rd floor for a meeting. Someone had dropped a hand grenade on the roof of the car, he thought. He pitched forward and jumped from the car onto the ground. The ceiling and wallboards had collapsed. Behind them, the elevator seemed to disintegrate. At the height of the shock, Wertz could not quite understand what Lawrence was saying through her Scottish burr.
A moment later, the electricians hollered to them, leading them by voice toward a center corridor. One of the electricians was trying to make a two-way radio work, but could not get through.
“We’ve just got to get down,” Wertz said, and the electricians led them toward the open stairwell.
The worker in McQuaid’s crew returned with his phone, and they were ready to go, the last of the eighteen people on the 91st floor. As they stepped into the dark, surviving staircase, they were at a borderline. Three or four inches of drywall had been blasted off the stairwell walls above them, exposing the structural steel, and plugging the stairs that led up. Every single person had gotten off the 91st floor, but no one from the higher floors was coming down: the stairs to the 92nd floor were blocked tight, just like the stairs that Gerry Wertz would have encountered in the Marsh & McLennan office on the 93rd floor, had he not leapt and been thrown from the elevator on 91.
Just above them, on the 92nd floor, Damian Meehan of Carr Futures was discovering the same boundary, from the other side. He called his brother Eugene, a firefighter in the Bronx.
“It’s really bad here,” Damian said. “The elevators are gone.”
“Get to the front door. See if there is smoke there,” Eugene told him.
Eugene heard his brother put down the phone, then followed the sounds drifting into his ear. Yelling. Commotion, but not panic. Damian reported back a moment or two later. Yes, there was smoke.
“Get to the stairs,” Eugene said. “See where the smoke is coming from. Go the other way.”
Damian did not linger. “We’ve got to go,” Eugene heard his brother say. Or maybe, “We’re going.” Whatever he said, none of the seventy people on the 92nd floor had access to an open staircase.
Garth Feeney did not work in the trade center but had gone there to attend the Risk Waters breakfast at Windows on the World. He phoned his mother, Judy, in Florida, who was just watching the first broadcasts about the crash.
“Hi, what’s new?” she said, when she heard her son’s voice.
“Mom, I’m not calling to chat,” Feeney said. “I’m in the World Trade Center and it’s been hit by a plane.”
“Please tell me you are below it,” his mother said.
�
��No, I’m above it. I’m on the top floor,” he said. “There are seventy of us in one room. They have closed the doors and they are trying to keep the smoke out.”
The building had barely stopped shuddering when smoke first appeared in Windows on the World, so thick and noxious that one man told his wife a bomb had gone off in the bathroom. Actually, the restaurant was well above the impact zone in the north tower: The fuselage of Flight 11 had entered between the 95th and 97th floors, and the tip of its right wing—the highest point of impact because the aircraft had banked—cut into the 99th floor. That was still seven stories, about eighty-five feet, beneath the restaurant. As easily as the roaring jet had knifed through the steel face of the tower, smoke now relentlessly, swiftly, seeped into the top of the building, finding paths through and around the concrete floors, emerging in billowing, ghastly clouds. Doris Eng, who had spent the first part of the morning welcoming people to the 106th and 107th floors, now was trying to figure out how to save their lives. In the restaurant were 170 men and women—diners, restaurant workers, and people attending the breakfast conference sponsored by Risk Waters. She kept calling emergency numbers, unsure where the damage was, but that almost did not matter. People in the restaurant could barely see or breathe.
In theory, any one of the floors between Windows on the World and the crash site should have stopped the spread of the fire and smoke. Each floor was designed as a fire-tight compartment able to contain a surge of flames and smoke, just as the hull of an ocean liner is divided into multiple chambers, so that if the ship springs a leak, the water will be trapped in a single chamber, blocked from flooding the entire hull and sinking the ship. In a thousand voices, the word came loud and clear that fire containment was not working. During the first ten minutes after the crash, the 911 system would log some 3,000 calls, many of them from people on the upper floors of the north tower. They would report the explosion, and that the stairs were cut off—destroyed outright, or blocked with rubble, or filled with smoke or fire. Downstairs, at the Port Authority police command desk for the trade center, the phone never stopped ringing. Officer Steve Maggett answered one of the lines, and heard from Christine Olender at Windows on the World.
