by Dwyer, Jim
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.
“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 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 redraf
ted 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.”
The operators for the 911 system were giving callers similar instructions: Stay put. The firemen are coming to get you.
Ivhan Carpio, a worker at the restaurant, left a message on his cousin’s answering machine. “I can’t go anywhere because they told us not to move,” he said. It was Carpio’s twenty-fourth birthday and his day off, but his extended family in Peru depended on Carpio’s paycheck, and he had agreed to cover someone else’s shift to earn extra money. “I have to wait for the firefighters,” he told his cousin’s machine.
Christine Olender now called the police desk again, as instructed.
“Right now,” she told Officer Ray Murray, “we need to find a safe haven on 106, where the smoke condition isn’t bad. Can you direct us to a certain quadrant?”
“All right,” Murray responded. “We’re sending … we’re sending people up there as soon as possible.”
“What’s your ETA?” she asked.
“As soon as possible. As soon as it’s humanly possible.”
To do any good for the people upstairs, Chief Pfeifer needed a quick way to reach them, and reliable information from the high floors. Neither was available. Even as the firefighters ascended single file, the shape of the situation upstairs remained a mystery, if one with increasingly desperate overtones. The messages from Christine Olender had been relayed from the Port Authority police desk in 5 World Trade Center to Sergeant Al DeVona, a Port Authority police officer who had gone to the lobby of the north tower to coordinate his department’s work with the firefighters. DeVona passed word to Pfeifer that people at Windows were trapped. The chiefs at the command post were sent word of other calls for help that had gone to the 911 system or to the building staff, who were answering the intercom phones.
The console at the fire command desk held few of the answers that Chief Pfeifer needed. Where was the fire? How fast was it spreading and where? Which stairwells were clear? The chief, it turned out, knew less than the people he was trying to rescue. They were being briefed on the phone by family and friends who were watching TV. He had no TV and the fire chiefs were getting only snatches of information from colleagues who walked outside and craned their heads, trying to fathom what was happening 1,200 feet in the sky. Few departments equal the rigor of New York City’s basic firefighter training, but its commanders went through little formal planning for complex events. The concept of “situational awareness”—using modern tools to provide information needed by people making life-and-death decisions in fast-moving environments—had become a foundation for military maneuvers, air-traffic control, power-plant operation, and advanced manufacturing. That concept had not taken hold at many fire departments, including New York’s. Though the FDNY rarely lacked for resources—indeed, it had prospered over the previous ten years, as its budget increased by $253 million above the inflation rate, even as the number of fires was dropping by 46 percent—it operated without video feeds, computer laptops with building plans, or strong communication links. Battalion Chief Pfeifer was junior to other arriving commanders, including his boss, Deputy Chief Hayden, and Assistant Chief Callan. (In the Fire Department’s nomenclature, a hybrid glossary of civil service and tradition, a battalion chief is outranked by a deputy chief, who is in turn subordinate to an assistant chief.) The chiefs hoped to get better information when firefighters reached the upper floors and sent back reports, or when tenants from those floors started reaching the lower floors and could pass along their firsthand observations. Whether the intelligence came from descending civilians or ascending firefighters, the radios had to work. In high-rises, fire radios had a poor record because the mass of the building often prevented radio signals from penetrating, and chiefs lost touch with firefighters on upper floors. One of the more infamous episodes had occurred after the trade center bombing in 1993. Hundreds of firefighters had responded, overloading the radio frequencies. Messages were lost. Commanders had to rely on human messengers to transmit critical information. Afterward, in a report on the attack and the response, Anthony L. Fusco, the chief of department, said: “A major detriment to our ability to strengthen control of the incident was Fire Department on-scene communications.”
In the days before portable radio technology, New York City firefighters used hand signals to communicate or sent runners to carry messages. Often they just shouted. By the mid-1940s, the department was using shortwave pack sets, similar to the ones employed by soldiers on the battlefields of Europe. In the 1960s, individual firefighters were given their own radios. Four decades after that innovation, however, and thirty years after men on the moon beamed live television pictures across the cosmos, firefighters were still having a hard time using their radios in high-rise buildings.
To communicate consistently in a tall building, an emergency agency needed two things: a reliable handheld radio and an amplifier to boost the radio’s signal so that it could reach the upper floors. No matter how hardy a handheld radio was—Motorola salesmen used to drop the Saber radios on the floor in a cocky demonstration of their ruggedness—its signal was generally too weak to reliably penetrate multiple floors without a booster.
The New York Police Department had figured this out many years earlier. Its officers could communicate effectively in high-rise buildings even though a police officer’s radio, the one that dangled from the belt, was much like a firefighter’s radio. The difference was that, unlike the Fire Department, the police had installed boosters in 350 locations across the city to amplify their signals. The Fire Department had only a handful of boosters in place.
Part of the disparity in the use of boosters was found in how the two agencies used their radios on a daily basis. Police officers needed to be in touch with a distant central base or dispatcher, requiring a system designed to communicate over great distances. The situation was reversed for firefighters, who were more concerned with keeping track of a colleague lost in the smoke of an adjoining room. Amplification was generally not needed to talk at the scene of the average house fire. And though tourist postcards portrayed New York City as a forest of skyscrapers, most of its tall buildings really were in two pockets, lower Manhattan and midtown. The chiefs in those two neighborhoods complained long and hard when their radios malfunctioned inside office towers. For the rest of the department, working in neighborhoods where buildings seldom topped six stories, the problem of high-rise radio reception did not outrank other issues facing the FDNY.
Moreover, to install a booster system would have represented an entirely new way of doing things—never an easy sell in a department that resisted technological change. At the Fire Department, the loyalty of one firefighter to another, a soldierly bond, was at times extended to an attachment to gear and the old way of doing things. Technological ruts became enshrined as customs. Still, over the years, the Fire Department had boosters installed in a few critical buildings like train terminals and the trade center. In a city with a signature skyline, where more than 2,000 buildings in Manhattan alone rise higher than twenty stories, this was not a major achievement. But it was better than nothing, which was what many urban fire departments had when it came to such boosters.
At the trade center, the booster, also known as the repeater, had been part of $80 million in safety improvements made by the Port Authority after the 1993 bombing. The repeater—and its antenna—were installed at 5 World Trade Center, but it was turned on and operated from consoles at the fire command desks in both of the twin towers, across the plaza. When it was on, the device could capture messages from the firefighters’ handheld radios and rebroadcast them at greater strength. That would allow fire commanders in a lobby to stay in touch with their troops working on the upper floors.
Earlier in 2001, the Fire Department had also issued new handheld radios, the Motorola XTS3500R. It employed the latest in digital technology, fire officials said, an improvement over the existing, aging, analog Motorola Saber radios, and would be better able to penetrate multiple layers of concrete and steel at high-rises.
Just days after the new radios were introduced, however, a firefighter lost in a house fire called for help and could not be heard by his colleagues outside. Other complaints soon surfaced, and the new radios were pulled from service amid a debate over whether the problem was a hardware glitch or a lack of training on how to use the new equipment.
As a result, the department was forced to reissue the Motorola Saber radios it had just withdrawn, some of them fifteen years old. On September 11, many of the firefighters marched into the towers with these old radios, the identical ones they had carried eight years earlier when the bomb went off. This time, though, they had the powerful repeater. It had been tested only a few months earlier and had worked well. Even with the old radios, the prospects for communicating within the tower looked brighter than they had in 1993.
Truck 1, an elite team of rescue specialists from the Emergency Service Unit of the New York Police Department, arrived at 8:52 A.M. and set up a command post at the corner of Church and Vesey Streets, about two blocks from the lobby where Pfeifer and the fire chiefs were directing their operation. The ESU cops, forty or so officers organized in six teams, were trained to help people who had been taken hostage, or were dangling from bridges or, as was the case here, trapped by fire. They were followed to the scene by hundreds of fellow New York police officers summoned at 8:56 A.M. by the chief of the department, Joseph Esposito.
