by Dwyer, Jim
Male: What’s the location?
Male: Eighty-eighth floor, badly burned.
Male: Eighty-eight?
Male: Tower A, south [side of] the 88th floor.
Male: Eighty-eighth floor, A tower, copy that.
For a moment or two, some people discussed waiting for help to come, invoking the refrain being heard in many offices across the two towers: the stairways had gotten so smoky in 1993, staying on the floors actually was a smarter move. De Martini and one of his managers, Mak Hanna, began to scout for an exit. During their search of the floor, they spotted the flames and smoke. There was no question now of waiting. When they got back to the southwest corner office, De Martini’s eyes were red; his hair and his eyelashes were covered with soot. “Okay, I found a stairway,” he said. Of the three stairways in the building, stairway C, the one farthest south, seemed to be the best route, although to get to it, people would have to climb over a foot or more of broken walls and ceilings that had dropped onto the floor. Hanna and two others—Frank Varriano and Pablo Ortiz—were sent ahead to try to move some of the debris.
“If anyone needs medical attention, or suffers from asthma, they should go first,” De Martini announced.
Judith Reese, accompanied by Jeff Gertler, moved first, to get her quickly away from the advancing smoke. They were followed by Elaine Duch, escorted by another Port Authority colleague, Dorene Smith. Someone had given Elaine a sweater because her clothes had been burnt. Gerry Gaeta ran down a flight of stairs to look over the condition of stairway C, as De Martini was worried that the source of the explosion had been a nearby mechanical room. The stairway below was fine, Gaeta yelled back.
Anita Serpe, an administrative assistant, walked toward the stairs. De Martini squeezed her shoulder. They were going to be fine. Nicole De Martini also headed down, with her husband promising that he would be right behind her. Between twenty-five and forty people had found their way to what seemed the only passable stairwell.
Then Frank De Martini, Mak Hanna, Pablo Ortiz, and Frank Varriano swept across the floor to make sure everyone was out of the Port Authority office. Near the end of the line was Moe Lipson, eighty-nine years old, a member of an inspection team that certified renovation projects done by tenants of the building. That morning, the group was due to make the final checks of a big retail clothing store in the concourse being opened by Thomas Pink, and Lipson would check out the electrical work. The construction team sent Lipson down the stairs and grabbed hard hats. De Martini borrowed Hanna’s walkie-talkie. Ortiz had a crowbar.
As they stepped into the stairway, they could hear pounding from above.
One floor up, on 89, the doors were jammed or unreachable. The occupants of that floor could not climb over rubble and get out the way their counterparts on 88 had. Raffaele Cava had been led into the lawyer’s office down the hall and sat on a chair with his hat in his lap. Dianne DeFontes watched in slight amazement as most of the people from MetLife migrated into her space. In the office of Cosmos Insurance, another group formed. Walter Pilipiak, the company’s president, opened the office door to stuff his jacket underneath, and the sudden shaft of light fell into the dark, smoky hallway. There, Lynn Simpson had been trying to find somewhere to go, away from the office of her public-relations firm, where the conference table had burst into flames after the plane hit. She followed the dash of light from Pilipiak’s office, then led her staff toward it. No one seemed to know one another. Everyone began making calls, both there and in the law office, where DeFontes, alone a moment earlier, now had more than a dozen people with her. Stephanie Manning from MetLife hung up the phone and reported: “They’re aware of the situation.”
“Situation? What situation?” retorted Rob Sibarium, the president of MetLife’s branch in the trade center. With more phone calls, word of the crash filtered through the room from friends and family members who were watching television. Someone switched on the radio, and a disk jockey was making jokes about how drunk the pilot must have been to crash into the trade center.
Rick Bryan, a lawyer who worked for MetLife, and others, had gone outside to investigate escape routes. They found that of the three stairways, the two closer to the north side were all but impossible to get to. The floor itself felt as if it were melting and buckling. The stairway door nearest them was wedged tightly into the frame.
“Do you have a fire extinguisher?” Bryan asked DeFontes, and she found one in the office. He took it out to the cavity where the elevator shafts had been. Ridiculous, he thought. He was sprinkling a few drops into an ocean of flame. A group of the men began throwing their shoulders and all their strength at the jammed stairway door, but had no luck. A few pounded on it, frustrated.
Back in Drinker Biddle & Reath’s office, Bryan stood with his fire extinguisher, explaining that it was useless. The smoke was advancing; more and more of the floor was burning.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Sibarium said.
“Well, do you have any other bright ideas?” Bryan asked.
People began to make phone calls home, this time to say that the situation was desperate, and to bring up matters that had been left unsaid, or to affirm what was already part of their lives. Bryan called his father. DeFontes called her boyfriend, but couldn’t reach him; then she called a girlfriend, to say she loved her and her child.
The men and women of the 89th floor had taken the small, protective steps of sensible people in smoke. They had moistened clothing to use as a filter, called for help, stuck jackets into the crevices at the bottom of office doors. Breathing through damp paper towels, men and women banged on the metal stairway door, but the act had an air of futility. Nathan Goldwasser from MetLife stood in the hallway, wondering if the world was unraveling. Suddenly, a muffled voice called out: “Get away from the door!”
A moment later, the claw tooth of a crowbar burst through the drywall, tearing around the frame. Pablo Ortiz pushed the door open. Behind him, in the stairs, were Frank De Martini and Mak Hanna. Ortiz walked to the law office and told Raffaele Cava and the other people there to move quickly to the stairs. Then he opened the door to the offices of Cosmos Insurance, where Tirsa Moya, Walter Pilipiak, and the others were huddled.
“Let’s go,” Ortiz announced.
As Walter Pilipiak entered the stairwell, De Martini and Ortiz were behind him. He thought he saw them continue up the stairs.
Having crawled away from the 90th-floor elevators just after the plane’s impact, Anne Prosser had gotten to her office and called her mother, Vi, in Nashville. One of her knees had been burned. Her mother heard a determined voice. “I’m okay,” she said. “We can’t get out. We’re all right. We’re going to get out. I’ll call you.”
The group in the office made calls but could not figure a way to escape. After twenty-five minutes, a flashlight bobbed into the room. Help had arrived and almost certainly it was Ortiz and De Martini; any official rescue parties were still mustering in the lobby. With the path to the stairway now clearly marked by the man with the flashlight, Prosser made her way to the exit and started down.
On the 86th floor, Louis Lesce had been preparing to give a career-change seminar to a group of Port Authority employees when the plane hit. He had made such a fuss about punctuality that he had set his own watch ten minutes fast. Now Lesce and the early arrivals felt the conditions in the hall were too unsafe to navigate. They would wait for a rescue, but the smoke was making breathing unpleasant, so they decided to break a window, not in the room where they had gathered, but in the next one. By their thinking, if the fresh air were to draw fire, at least it would not be into their haven. The plan worked. The gusts were so powerful that they lifted paper off Lesce’s desk in the next room, so high that he was practically able to read a résumé that had been on top of the pile. Lesce called home, as did the others. These were conversations meant to last. Then they looked up. A man in a hard hat appeared in the doorway, a Port Authority worker. He led them toward the stairs. Almost cer
tainly, it was one of Frank De Martini’s crew.
That the people in Louis Lesce’s office expected a rescue was a most unwarranted assumption for someone on the 86th floor in a building ablaze and with no working elevators. It was hardly the job of Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz and the others from 88 to go around prying open doors. Their responsibilities at the trade center during an emergency were to get themselves out of the building. The sprinklers, the fireproofing, the smoke venting systems were all supposed to kick in automatically. This network of emergency systems succumbed, one by one, on September 11, replaced by a lethal web of obstacles. Only when people like De Martini and his crew took it upon themselves to attack those barriers—broken rubble, stuck doors, disorientation—could people go free.
Above the 91st floor, the stairways were plugged solid, the collapsed drywall forming an impermeable membrane, a border line that could not be crossed, even for people on the 92nd and 93rd floors, most of which had not been touched by the plane impact. And below 92, across all or parts of ten floors, dozens of people had been unable to open doors, or walk through burning corridors to the stairs and find their way past the rubble. Then help appeared. With crowbar, flashlight, hardhat, and big mouths, De Martini and Ortiz and their colleagues had pushed back the boundary line between life and death.
7
“If the conditions warrant on your floor, you may wish to start an orderly evacuation.”
9:02 A.M.
SOUTH TOWER
From the office of Aon Insurance on the 98th floor of the south tower, Sean Rooney made a second call to his wife. The first time he called, at 8:59, was to tell her about the early moments of the crisis in the other building. Once again, he reached her voice mail. This time, as he spoke, an announcement could be heard in the background. The instructions from the lobby fire desk were changing. Twelve minutes earlier, at 8:50, the people from Mizuho/Fuji were told to go back to their office. Now a different message was being broadcast.
Rooney: Yeah, honey, this is Sean again.
P.A. Voice: May I have your attention, please.
Rooney: Uh, looks like we’ll be—
P.A. Voice: Repeating this message:
Rooney:—in this tower for a while. Um, it’s—
P.A. Voice: The situation occurred in building one. If the—
Rooney: It’s, it’s secure here.
P.A. Voice:—conditions warrant on your floor, you may wish to start an orderly evacuation.
Rooney: I’ll talk to you later. Bye.
Scott Johnson, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, also was on the phone when that announcement was made. It could be heard in the background as he left a message on the answering machine of his mother, Ann.
“Like I said, a different tower,” Johnson said. “Uh, we don’t know too much info. We may be leaving the building. As of now, we’re not.”
The announcer was starting to give an instruction about the exit route, mentioning “the concourse at the base,” as Scott signed off.
The time stamped on the calls from both Johnson and Rooney was 9:02 A.M., sixteen minutes after the attack on the north tower.
The single-minded abandon of Michael Sheehan’s departure—he had blindly run down a colleague as he fled Garban ICAP’s office on the 55th floor of the south tower—should have carried him well clear of the trade center by 9:02, but several developments managed to slow him down. In the stairs, someone had passed on a report that a private plane had hit the other building, a disturbing but not terrifying event, and a somewhat benign explanation for the smoke he had seen. Then he heard fragments of the early announcements assuring tenants that the south tower was all right. Still, he was not impressed. When he came across a heavy woman in the throes of panic at the 10th floor, Sheehan, no longer running like a football halfback, walked down with her, the woman’s anxiety replacing his own. By the time other tenants were advised by the lobby fire director that they could begin an orderly evacuation, Sheehan and the woman had made their way out of the south end of the tower, through an exit onto Liberty Street. In the riot of papers and debris scattered by the first airplane strike, Sheehan spotted a single sheet that looked interesting. He picked it up. It was an itinerary for someone traveling to Los Angeles.
The realization slammed into his mind. That had not been the crash of a little Cessna.
“Oh, my God,” Sheehan said. “It was a commercial plane.” At that moment, he and the woman he had been helping heard the roar of yet another one.
At the south tower’s 44th-floor sky lobby, Michael Otten waited for the elevator doors to close so he could get back up to his office on the 80th floor. They had all but closed when suddenly the electronic sensor read an obstruction, and the doors slid open. And then shut again—almost. And reopened again, in yet another maddening cycle. This is ridiculous, Otten thought, watching from the rear of the car. What’s with this guy with the backpack? The guy had slipped into the elevator at the last moment, his back to the doors, unaware that his luggage was jutting into the light beam and holding everyone up. The people on the elevator were not panicked, just impatient. The morning had already been frazzled enough. Now some bozo with a backpack was holding them up. Otten began to lean over. A little verbal nudge had formed on his lips, and he was just about to launch it: Hey, could you step in? It’s your bag that’s making the doors open.
At the 78th-floor sky lobby, the tides crisscrossed and swirled, as some people were returning to their desks and others deciding to go ahead and leave. Between fifty and two hundred people waited at the elevator, a figure that shifted as elevators arrived and left. A big group from the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance had lingered on the 86th floor—several of them had once been docked a day’s pay for leaving the office during a blackout, a traumatic memory for people living on civil-service salaries. Finally, many of them—particularly those with views that showed the raging fire in the north tower—decided to work their way down. At 9:02 they were on the 78th floor, waiting for the next express ride to the lobby.
Heading in the opposite direction were Donovan Cowan and Doris Torres from Fiduciary Trust, who felt encouraged by the announcements to go back up to their desks, call home, tell their folks they were okay. They stepped into a car at 78, and Cowan pushed the button for the 97th floor.
Silvion Ramsundar and Christine Sasser, both from the Mizuho/Fuji offices on 80, had come to the 78th floor, and as they waited for the express elevator to the street, were trying to call home on their cell phones, with no success.
Kelly Reyher, a lawyer with Aon, had walked down past the 78th floor, then climbed back up after hearing the announcements. About ten or twenty other people near him had done the same. He would ride up to the office, he decided, as did Donna Spera, who worked on the 100th floor, also for Aon. She was with five friends.
This assembly of people had heard three announcements since the explosion in the north tower, two encouraging them not to leave, one suggesting that they could leave if they wanted. Was this really all that serious? What about their purses and PalmPilots and briefcases? How long would they be out of the building? Judy Wein and Gigi Singer of Aon discussed going back to get their things from the 103rd floor. If they were leaving, Wein realized, she would need her pocketbook. How else would she get home? Howard Kestenbaum, another Aon colleague, told her to forget about it, that he would give her the carfare. “Let’s just go,” Kestenbaum said.
In the swarms outside the elevator doors, a number of people mentioned their eagerness to report home and check in on kids or spouses, suggesting that this entitled them to a spot on crowded elevators. One elevator was packed so tightly that Karen Hagerty, another Aon employee, had to step back, squeezed out of a spot.
“I have a horse and two cats,” Hagerty joked to her colleague Ed Nicholls.
By 9:02, the boomerang of alarm and assurance had driven Stanley Praimnath from the 81st floor to the lobby, then back again to his office. The phone was ringing as h
e returned, and he picked it up to hear the voice of a colleague from Chicago, urgently inquiring after his well-being.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked Praimnath.
“Yes, I’m fine,” he assured her.
“Stan, are you watching the monitor—are you watching the news to see what is going on?” she asked.
“Yes,” he assured her again. “I’m fine.”
As he spoke, Praimnath spun his seat around so he was facing in the direction of the window, though he was not staring out. His window looked south over New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, the light trails of froth cut in the slate-colored water by the steady traffic of ships and tugs and ferries. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed an unfamiliar shape on the horizon. Praimnath turned slightly, to look square out the window. An airplane. It was heading toward his office, toward his window, it seemed. He could see the red and blue marking and the letter U as it approached. He dived under his desk, screaming to God, as his colleague in Chicago listened on the phone and watched the television screen in horror.
In the length of a drawn breath, the ceiling collapsed. The time was 9:02:59 A.M., and United Airlines Flight 175 now plunged through the south tower of the World Trade Center, including the room where Stanley Praimnath had jumped beneath his desk. The plane had banked slightly at the last second, its wingspan running diagonally across nine floors, from 77 through 85. The Mizuho/Fuji office was at the center of it. Praimnath’s room was torn to bits. Wires and cubicles and drywall slumped into a tangle at once sinister and silent. The wing of the jet was jammed into a door, twenty feet from where Praimnath, still alive, huddled beneath his desk.
