102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

by Dwyer, Jim

  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.

  The crowd in the sky lobby continued to grow. Some were intent on leaving; others wanted to touch base with the desk that had been set up there as a combination concierge, security, and satellite command post. Around 8:55, a member of the sky lobby security staff made a local announcement—he just raised his voice, not using the PA system—advising the crowd that the fire was in the other building, and that this tower was secure. If they wanted, they could go down.

  The Fiduciary group huddled. Anne Foodim was afraid to get on the elevator. Elsie Castellanos, who had gone through the 1993 bombing, was shattered; Emery rubbed her shoulder, told her it would be all right. Were they staying, or should they go? The Fiduciary group looked to Emery.

  “Go on down,” Emery declared. “Go home. Everything’s going to be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.” They squeezed into a car, the five women from Fiduciary the last to board. Stephanie Koskuba turned to look for Emery, but could not see him. He must have been hidden in the crowded car, she would remember thinking. In fact, Emery had not gotten on. He had already headed back upstairs to Fiduciary’s office on the 90th floor, where he would meet up with Alayne Gentul. They agreed to check on the technology consultants who had come from California for disaster backup preparations and who were working on the 97th floor.

  For some coming from the highest floors in the south tower, the long descent to 78 drained the moment of its urgent steam. Scores of people waited for elevators in moods and mind-sets that ran from terrified to annoyed. Dreadful as the big fire next door was, did it really make sense to shut down the entire south tower? With the announcements that all was well in their building, the human tides now ran in contrary directions. It became harder to know what was the right thing to do. Marissa Panigrosso and Sarah Dechalus, who had been shooed out of the Aon offices on 98 when Eric Eisenberg started rounding up people, walked down the twenty flights to the 78th floor. They met a colleague, Mary Jo Arrowsmith, who was crying. Panigrosso took her hand. She also met Tamitha Freeman, another Aon employee, the mother of a toddler, who had just returned from a trip to North Carolina.

  Dechalus considered going upstairs to get her bag. She saw people turning back, but the truth was, you never could run right in or out. She pondered for a couple of minutes, then got on the elevator going down. Freeman, however, was bothered about her own bag.

  “Forget it, you don’t need it,” Panigrosso said.

  “My baby’s pictures are in it,” Freeman insisted. She turned back upstairs.

  Panigrosso, with Arrowsmith in tow, kept going. Her elevator, which could hold fifty-five people, was half-empty. It was not yet 9:00.

  On the ground, the entire emergency operation was being run from the lobby of the north tower, and the question of evacuating the south tower had stayed well in the background of what seemed like more pressing issues: locating the floors in the north tower that were on fire. Mustering the firefighters. Wrangling elevators. As 9:00 approached, the ranking Port Authority police officers on the scene decided to empty the buildings. It was, after all, their complex—the trade center was a Port Authority property, meaning it was patrolled by the Port Authority’s independent police agency, whose members responded to thefts, injuries, fires, all species of crisis large and small, almost always more quickly than the city emergency responders could get there. By plan, the PAPD checked out every report of fire; its officers were trained in at least rudimentary firefighting. In fact, one of the first people into the north tower had been Sgt. Al DeVona, who within three minutes of the plane’s impact had ordered the building evacuated. DeVona had also relayed the calls to the Port Authority police from Windows on the World to the Fire Department’s first chief on the scene, Joe Pfeifer.

  At 8:59, thirteen minutes after Flight 11 struck, DeVona issued another order. “As soon as we are able, I want to start the building evacuation, Building 1 and Building 2, until we find out what caused it,” DeVona said. As Pfeifer and the other fire chiefs were trying to size up the situation, Capt. Anthony Whitaker, the commander of the Port Authority police assigned to the trade center, had already done a quick survey of the complex. When Flight 11 hit, he had been standing in front of a Banana Republic store in the enclosed shopping mall and concourse beneath the two towers, a spot he occupied four mornings a week and where thousands of people exiting the subways could see him. Whitaker had been stunned by a fireball that ran down an elevator shaft in the north tower. He made his way to Liberty Street at the south end of the complex, which allowed him to see the damage in the north tower. A moment after DeVona issued his order to evacuate both buildings, Whitaker radioed the same instruction to DeVona: “I want to start a building evacuation, Building 1 and Building 2. [Overlap/ inaudible.] I want you to report this.”

  In telling DeVona to “report this,” Whitaker was giving yet another instruction, but also making a declaration. “Reporting” it meant that DeVona would enter the captain’s order into the log of the day’s events, so that it would be clear who had shut down the World Trade Center. Whitaker would take the weight for declaring a complete evacuation. He was clos
ing not only the two towers, with 14,000 people already at their daily business, but also the five other buildings throughout the sixteen-acre complex—the mercantile exchange, offices of major investment banking concerns and government agencies, including the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA. The consequences of such a decision would surely rattle through the highest levels of government and of the American freemarket system. A few hours after the 1993 attack had left the towers without power and forced all the businesses out, Charles Maikish, then the director of the trade center, heard, loud and clear, from an executive at Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm had a $5 billion bond trade that had not been entered onto its books when the bomb went off. Was Maikish prepared to take responsibility for the consequences of disrupting the debt market for the United States of America? Then someone from the White House called Maikish’s boss at the Port Authority, just to make sure that he got the plain-English meaning of what they were saying. Another caller reminded him that the commodities market urgently needed to reopen—otherwise the price of oil globally would be subject to dangerous fluctuation. One of the lower-tier reasons for the “defend in place” strategy, according to the National Fire Protection Agency, was to avoid disruption to businesses. Closing the trade center was not something anyone would dare order casually, as Maikish had discovered in 1993.

  Then, as now, though, there could be no argument as to the necessity of the evacuation order. The gash in the north tower, the smoke belching from the building, the people falling from impossible heights, all showed that this was a crisis new to every eye that saw it. Whitaker’s order became part of the record, but its effect was uncertain, and it was never clear if his instruction was transmitted to any tenants. The authority to order an evacuation during a fire normally rests with the Fire Department, acting through the building’s fire-safety directors. Around the time that Whitaker issued his order, the fire-safety director for the trade center, Michael Hurley, caught the attention of Chief Pfeifer.

  “Do you want me to evacuate the whole place?” Hurley asked.

  “Yeah,” Pfeifer said. “Everyone goes.”

  6

  “Get away from the door!”

  9:01 A.M.

  NORTH TOWER

  The fuel on Flight 11, some 10,000 gallons, had ignited into giant fireballs, the biggest with a girth of 200 feet, wider than the building itself. The jet fuel probably was spent within a few minutes, much of it outside the building, but also traveling through the tower via the elevator shafts. The calamity was only beginning to ripen.

  In the north tower, close to 1,000 people had survived the impact on the uppermost floors but were marooned in a distant sky without stairs or elevators. The structural engineers of the trade center had anticipated that the towers would be able to respond to the stress of an impact from the airplane. No one had designs, however, for the people inside. A strict border had formed between survival and entrapment.

  Of all the people on the border territory in the north tower—the floors nearest but below the impact zone on the 93rd through 99th floors—none had been in the trade center longer than Raffaele Cava, the old man with the hat, for whom Tirsa Moya and Dianne DeFontes had such fondness. At eighty years old, he had passed lengths of his life in Egypt as the son of a Jewish Italian civil servant, in Milan as a printer, and now in a tiny office on the 89th floor of the north tower, working for his nephew’s shipping company, Mutual International Forwarding. He arrived every morning at 6:30, after a plodding ride across New York Harbor on the Staten Island ferry. His nephew had moved the company into the north tower of the trade center in 1971, two years before the tower was officially opened, and before the upper floors were ready for occupancy. Now Raffaele Cava was in the territory just below where the plane had struck, picking himself off the ground, surveying the blown-out windows, and collecting his briefcase. He fixed his hat on his head and walked out. A few doors away, Dianne DeFontes was hoisting herself to her feet in the office of Drinker Biddle & Reath. Across the 89th floor were twenty-five other people, scattered in small numbers in the offices of a brokerage called Cosmos Insurance, a public-relations company, another law firm, and MetLife insurance.

  Above and below Raffaele Cava and the tenants of the 89th floor in this borderland, the demands on people of all ages were to make sense of places that once had been so familiar that they had long ago stopped looking at them. The hallways where they walked to the restrooms. The windows they glanced through to see the weather below. Even the lobbies for the elevators. All of these were now utterly changed. Damian Meehan, a half century younger than Cava, was on the 92nd floor at Carr Futures; his whole work life was set among friends he knew from the streets of northern Manhattan, and the playing fields of Gaelic football, and who had come to work at the trade center. He could not get through the front door of his office now.

  The people on the 91st floor had all been able to go directly to a staircase. One floor down, on 90, Anne Prosser had crawled from the elevator, which had just opened when the plane hit, to her office at Clearstream Banking. She had graduated in 1994 from Penn State with a degree in international studies and French and was due to get married in a month. The smoke was so thick that she dared not raise her head. In her office, about ten other people had arrived.

  In the encapsulated existence of the modern office tower, few of these people knew anyone outside their own offices, even though they may have been riding a quarter mile every day in the same elevators. Yet everyone on the 88th floor knew Frank De Martini, the manager of construction in the trade center. Part of the reason was that a single organization, the Port Authority, occupied the entire 88th floor. More, though, because De Martini had a gift for arguing with the universe. If someone dropped a napkin on the sidewalk, he would break every law of New York nature and point out the nearest trash can to the person—“Excuse me? Excuse me! Did you know you dropped that? And that there’s a can right there?”—unafraid of confronting a potential madman. He once chased down an armed mugger. And then there was the time firemen had gone to a house fire in Brooklyn, and radioed down: “There’s some crazy guy on the roof next door who won’t let us up.” It was De Martini, protecting his lovingly restored brownstone from the risk of a less-than-fastidious firefighting effort in the adjacent building. He thrived in chaos, a trait his Swiss-born wife, Nicole, attributed to his being reared in a family of five children. In the weeks before September 11, the Port Authority staff on the 88th floor had been roiled over the lease of the entire trade center to the private developer Larry Silverstein. What would become of their jobs, making sure that the building was kept up? Did they have to turn over all their work to the Silverstein people? Who would go with Silverstein, what about their government pensions and benefits, could they find a new niche in the Port Authority’s empire? One afternoon that summer, at the height of the anxiety, the children of two colleagues visited the 88th floor and wound up napping on the couch in De Martini’s office. Their peace inspired him to write to his colleagues, urging them to keep their cool—in a way, another of his arguments with the universe.

  Guys, we have done and are doing a great job. Keep it up. Do not let rumors get you down. They are just rumors.

  Alan is trying to resolve the Code Compliance office issue. Not knowing is difficult but it should not stop us from doing our jobs. We have a lot to be proud of.

  Earlier this week tempers flared with several people. Don’t feel badly about that. We are all human and this is a stressful time. There is no getting around it. Redouble your efforts at patience. With yourself and your colleagues.

  A prayer or a moment of silence for Jennifer’s mother and our thoughts & prayers for Tom’s wife’s recovery.

  Yesterday, Jennifer and Abdel’s daughters took a nap on the couch in my office. There, in front of me, lay the hopes of humanity. Don’t let this net lease keep us from seeing a much, much bigger and more important picture.

  —Frank

  Now, a few seconds after the plane’
s impact, Elaine Duch, a member of the Port Authority staff, wandered the 88th floor, dazed, charred, her clothes nearly burnt off her. She had been getting off the elevator when the fireball of fuel blew through the shaft, the flames shooting out of any opening to gulp oxygen. The ceilings had collapsed in the hallways. Out of their offices and cubicles, men and women were swarming. Where the elevators had been were now gaping holes. At least two of the three stairways were either in flames or filled with smoke. Who was in charge of salvaging them from this roaring hell?

  De Martini emerged from his office with Nicole. Flames were shooting along one wall. He led the rattled, the shocked, and the frightened toward an office in the southwest corner, the farthest point from the impact, though no one realized yet that an airplane had hit the building. The suspicion that it was a bomb rose when a few people remembered the man who had just wheeled cartons of documents to the real estate department, the details of the leasing arrangement that bedeviled so many of the Port Authority employees. Whatever the cause, the result was chaos. De Martini was calm as a rock.

  “Who needs medical help?” he called out.

  One woman, his secretary, Judith Reese, had severe asthma. A colleague, Jeff Gertler, went to help her. A few others stood with Elaine Duch, who was still smoldering and in shock. De Martini had a walkie-talkie. At 8:54, about eight minutes after the explosion, this exchange was taped, though the speakers were not identified.

  Male: Uh, we’re on the 88th floor. We’re kind of trapped up here and the smoke is, uh, is—

  Male: What’s your location?

  Male: The 88th floor.

  Male: Eighty-eighth floor, A tower?

  Male: Seven-seven [the code for the dispatcher], we also have a person that needs medical attention immediately.