by Dwyer, Jim
“Car three,” Esposito said on the radio. “We’ve got a level three and you might want to go to a level four here, Central, all right?”
A Level 4 mobilization was the department’s highest, rarest state of alert, the police equivalent of a war footing. It meant that about 1,000 officers would be responding. As they arrived, most of the officers were given assignments outside the buildings. Some directed people leaving the trade center away from the perimeter of the complex and the streets around it. Others controlled the crowd or tried to direct the congealing traffic. The ESU cops were sent inside the building. On paper, they would work under Fire Department direction. The city had a protocol that established who did what at emergencies, which was supposed to avoid duplication of effort and to keep the chain of command clear. The Fire Department was in charge at fires, so technically the ESU teams were supposed to check in with fire officials at the lobby before they rushed to help in the building.
Some teams did check in, others didn’t, and one that did felt rebuffed by the fire chiefs to whom they spoke. That was not a surprise. The Finest, as the police were called, and the Bravest, the nickname for the firefighters, did not like each other. The saying went that the only thing the two departments could ever agree on was the date of their annual boxing match. Sometimes, they didn’t wait for that date, and fistfights broke out at rescue scenes. The corrosive nature of the relationship had far more serious consequences than a fat lip. To be completely effective, firefighters and police officers needed to share information, to act in concert, to anticipate what the other force might do as a disaster evolved. The decisions that commanders made were influenced by how quickly and accurately they sized up a situation based on what they learned both from their troops and their putative allies. But these two agencies didn’t train together often or well. They couldn’t talk to each other by radio because their frequencies did not match. And they didn’t share equipment.
The police, for example, flew helicopters, and the city had drafted a plan to let firefighters ride in them at high-rise fires. This plan was revised after the 1993 bombing, but it was rarely used and infrequently rehearsed. And on this day the cooperation was no different. The Police and Fire Departments ran brave but completely independent rescue operations. They did not bicker; they simply did not communicate. No one from the Fire Department called up to request the use of a helicopter, as envisioned by the protocol. No one from the Police Department called to find out if they were coming. And so the police helicopters lifted off without any firefighters, leaving Chief Pfeifer to wonder about the spread of fire on the upper floors 1,200 feet above him, even though, from 8:52 on, a police helicopter had a clear view of the damage. Indeed, a few minutes later, the pilot of Aviation 14 sent in a grim bird’s-eye report.
“Be advised at this time,” Detective Timothy Hayes said. “Be advised we do have people confirmed falling out of the building at this time. It looks like four sides are cut open. A lot of flames.”
That word did not get down to the fire commanders in the lobby of the north tower, not in an act of specific hostility, but because of a long-standing malaise that ran from the top of each department to the bottom. Mayors had tried for years to forge a peaceful, working relationship so that in the event of a big disaster, all the resources of the city would be coordinated. After a series of plane crashes, Mayor David N. Dinkins formed an Aviation Emergency Preparedness Working Group in 1990, with representatives from the Fire and Police Departments and Emergency Medical Services, as well as others. In a report, the group concluded that the agencies needed to practice working together and to arrange for a single radio frequency that commanders could share during emergencies. After a couple of years of drills, the group was disbanded in 1994, when a new mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, took office. Giuliani made public safety the signature cause of his administration. In 1996, he created the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), which ran a series of mock disaster drills, though none that involved an airliner crashing into a skyscraper, whether by accident or design. Indeed, despite the trade center’s status as the city’s leading terrorist target, coordinated disaster drills were extremely rare events in the life of the complex.
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 whe
n 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.
5
“Should we be staying here, or should we evacuate?”
8:55 A.M.
SOUTH TOWER
Like 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 lesson
s 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.
