by Dwyer, Jim
Down on the 44th floor, before Michael Otten could spit out the first word of reproach to the man with the backpack who had delayed his elevator, the car shook in a death rattle, a mouse swinging in the jaws of a cat. The woman next to him was hurled to the ground. A blanket of dust dropped over everyone. The cab swayed back and forth, left to right. Otten hopped out and ran down the hall. Now the building itself was pitching from side to side. He extended his arms for balance, like a surfer. Slowly, the building leaned back toward center. In the hallway were others from his office at Mizuho.
South Tower: The Impact
United Flight 175 also tipped its wings just before crashing into the south tower, but it hit at one of only two places in the tower where the stairs were not bunched in the center of the building. The stairwells were spread at that point so they could detour around elevator machinery that took up much of the floor space. The combination of spread stairs and the girth of the machinery that the plane plowed into meant that stairway A was left largely intact.
“I’m going to go,” Otten said. “You guys want to come? Let’s just go.” In the gloom, they found a wall and followed the hallway to a door that opened onto the stairwell they had run down a few minutes earlier. It was filled with people. No one was going up.
Because the left wing of Flight 175 had tilted down, it had cut through the 77th, 78th, and 79th floors, grazing the 78th-floor sky lobby. The plane’s speed was 545 miles per hour when it struck the building. Donovan Cowan, one finger poised at the button for his floor, was knocked from his feet. So was Doris Torres, his colleague from Fiduciary Trust. The heat burst across them in a ferocious, roasting wave that kept coming, ten or fifteen seconds of staggering intensity. The elevator car rocked so hard they could not get up. Finally, they got their balance. Doris said she couldn’t feel her feet and couldn’t walk, but she and Cowan stumbled into the sky lobby. Around them were the remains of people who had been breathing and thinking and chatting a few seconds earlier. Now they were flat on their back or torn apart, dead, or horrifically injured and alive. Inside one elevator, eighteen people were alive but sealed in.
Along the floor, at least another twenty people were alive. Of the Aon group, Judy Wein had several fractured ribs and a broken arm, but she could move. Howard Kestenbaum, who had just offered to pay her fare home, was motionless. Gigi Singer was battered but breathing, and able to move. Her colleague Richard Gabrielle was also alive, but had been partly buried by the ornamental marble torn from the walls.
The impact smacked Kelly Reyher in the back, shoving him into an elevator, and split the seams of the car. He could see fire roaring through the shaft. He considered just drawing deep breaths of the smoke, to kill himself before the flames got him, but then he saw through licks of fire in the car that the doors were still open an inch or so. He shoved a briefcase into the space, wedged it open, and climbed out. The ground was a foot deep in debris and bodies, some of them charred. Reyher crawled across them, shaking arms and legs to see if people were still alive.
The one living person he found was his colleague Donna Spera, burned and crawling along the ground, an arm broken, her face bleeding. She clutched Reyher. Another friend from Aon, Keating Crown, also found them. Crown had just happened to be walking from the south end of the building toward the north when the plane struck. The end of the building he had left was in tatters.
Ling Young, who worked in the state tax department, sat for what seemed like a long time in the rubble, then climbed to her feet. She and her coworker Sankara Velamuri pulled their colleagues Yeshavant Tembe and Dianne Gladstone out from the rubble; Tembe seemed to have badly hurt one of his kneecaps, and Gladstone had injured an ankle. Another person from the tax department, Diane Urban, was comforting a woman propped against a wall, her legs virtually amputated. A sixth colleague, Mary Jos, had been knocked cold. She then woke up with her back burning and rolled over to extinguish what felt like flames. When she did, she found herself moving over the remains of people who had been standing near her in the sky lobby.
After the impact, Christine Sasser of Mizuho, who had been trying to call home, thought her face was being burned by a wave of heat. The people who had been standing near her were now on the floor, dead. Her friend Silvion Ramsundar was behind her, banged around, but alive.
Ed Nicholls, thrown to the ground, saw a fire in the middle of the room; otherwise, the place was dark and afloat in dust and moans. His right arm from near his shoulder was nearly severed by some piece of the building or airplane that had turned into a missile. Bits of stone and cement had lodged in his abdomen. A window had broken open, and he stood there for a minute next to an older man, getting some air. Karen Hagerty, who had joked that she deserved a spot on the crowded elevator because her horse and two cats were waiting at home, was motionless on the ground. Nicholls saw his Aon colleague Gigi Singer, and they soon met up with Judy Wein. Two other men pointed them toward a staircase. Wein, Nicholls, and Singer began their descent.
On Liberty Street, just outside the south tower, Michael Sheehan had been gazing at the airline itinerary that had drifted to earth when he heard the second plane roar directly overhead. He did not see it burst into the southern face of the south tower more than 900 feet above him, but he felt the rolling explosions. Sheehan clutched the woman he had just escorted down the bottom floors of the tower, and backed against the same wall the plane had just blown through. An overhang protected them from the river of catastrophe in the sky that now overran its banks. Shards of metal spilled toward the sidewalk, falling so far that they seemed to Sheehan to be floating, dropping at a speed far out of scale to the violence above. To go back inside the building now was unthinkable; to step away from it was to enter a space where the air itself was full of peril. Yet they could not remain where they were, pressed against the wall of the trade center. What would come next?
The first moment they sensed a lull in the debris storm, Sheehan and the woman ducked into a revolving door, back into the concourse. Then they made their way to the east and north.
On the 81st floor, where part of the wing was lodged in a doorway, Stanley Praimnath crawled the length of the floor, 131 feet, through the remains of the loan department, a lounge, the computer room, a telecommunications room. He pounded on walls. He called for help. Of the others who had come back upstairs with him from the lobby, the CEO and the president and the head of human resources, of all those who had dutifully evacuated and just as dutifully gone back upstairs, he neither saw nor heard another living soul. He called out onto a dark floor where no one else was alive to hear or help him.
“Help! Help!” screamed Praimnath. “I’m buried!”
In the 84th-floor office of Euro Brokers, Brian Clark had heard the bang. A moment later, a mighty thump, perhaps from an explosion or shock wave, perhaps fuel igniting somewhere. It was the thump, the second noise, that seemed to destroy the Euro Brokers space, blowing door frames out of walls, tearing lights and speakers from the ceiling, an explosion without fire. Parts of the raised floor buckled. At least fifty of the firm’s traders, all in the southeast corner of the tower, most likely were killed at that moment: the plane had banked directly through their space.
Clark felt the building lean to the west, toward the Hudson River, the way it did in a high wind, but one that kept pushing, harder than any wind he had ever felt in the tower. He made a triangle of feet and hands to keep himself upright. The oscillations continued for four minutes, gradually ebbing. When the building first seemed to right itself, it went black. In his pocket, Clark had his fire warden flashlight, and he clicked it on. In its beam was trapped an infinity of dust, like a movie projector’s lamp. With the small group nearby—Bobby Coll, Kevin York, Dave Vera, Ron DiFrancesco—he walked to a hallway that formed a crossroads. Clark turned left, toward stairway A.
They had gotten down about three flights when they ran into a heavyset woman and a slight man, on their way up. “Stop, stop,” the woman said. “The floor below
is all in flames and smoke. We’ve got to get above it.”
An argument began. As each of the Euro Brokers workers chimed in, Clark shone the beam of his flashlight on that person. He did not take a position on which way they should go, but the vehemence of the woman retreating from the obstruction seemed to be holding sway. The group decided to help the woman go up, hands on her elbows and back, coaxing and soothing her. Both Bobby Coll and Kevin York had left the 84th floor when the first plane hit the other tower, but had come back upstairs when the announcement halted the spontaneous evacuation of the south tower. With them was Dave Vera, carrying a walkie-talkie.
At that moment, another sound came into the stairwell. A voice called out: “Help! Help! I’m buried! Is anybody there?”
Clark turned to DiFrancesco, put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Ron,” Clark said. “We got to get this guy.”
They struggled through the rubble of the Mizuho/Fuji office on 81. Against the pitch darkness, Clark played his flashlight, catching in wedges of light small clouds of suspended dust.
“Can you see my hand? Can you see my hand?” the voice called out. It was Stanley Praimnath. Clark and DiFrancesco were on one side of a wall of ruined doors, desks, and dropped ceilings. The dust was heavier than the smoke, it seemed to Clark. DiFrancesco held his backpack over his face and tried to breathe through it. Unable to get any decent air, DiFrancesco backed out of the floor, into the stairwell. He then decided to go up, to join the group escorting the heavyset woman.
Clark and Praimnath began to claw at the broken room that stood between them. Praimnath hit something and a nail went through his hand. He pounded it out by slamming his hand against a board. Then they ran out of things they could move, and Praimnath was still blockaded by rubble.
“You must jump,” Clark said. “It’s the only way. You’ve got to jump out of there.”
On Praimnath’s first effort, he did not reach Clark. He took another try. This time, Clark grabbed him and heaved him across the barrier, and they fell to the ground, hugging.
“I’m Brian,” Clark said.
“I’m Stanley,” Praimnath said.
They retreated to the stairs and began to head down.
Above them, Ron DiFrancesco had caught up with the group accompanying the heavyset woman. She was having more and more trouble breathing, so DiFrancesco gave his backpack to her. Maybe she could use the fabric to filter the air. Besides DiFrancesco, Coll, York, and the man who had come up the stairs with the woman, two other people from Euro Brokers, Michael Stabile and Brett Bailey, were also escorting her. Dave Vera, who had his walkie-talkie, was sending urgent requests for help to Jerry Banks, a colleague outside the building. They tried doors, hoping that the office floors would have air fresher than what they were breathing, but all the stairwell doors seemed to be locked. In the interests of security, the building code required only that every fourth floor be an unlocked reentry door. DiFrancesco could not open any of them. They met other people in the stairway, and the group swelled to about fifteen. DiFrancesco climbed ahead of them, getting as high as the 91st floor. Then he turned back.
A few floors down, he saw the people he had just left, sprawled on the landing. They had given all their strength over to the task of moving and were spent by it. DiFrancesco dropped down for a moment. The people around him seemed to be going to sleep. A bolt of panic shot through DiFrancesco. Would he see his wife and kids again? Confined to the stairs, unable to open a door, surrounded by people who were drifting away, he could not stay on that landing. He got up and decided to take his chances going down the stairs.
8
“You can’t go this way.”
9:04 A.M.
SOUTH TOWER
Perhaps a minute or so ahead of Brian Clark in the stairs was Richard Fern, from Euro Brokers’ computer room, who had just pushed a button inside an elevator on the 84th floor of the south tower at the instant of impact. Flung at the left wall, then the right, he landed on his hands and knees. Afraid that the doors would shut, he plunged out of the car, then scrambled to the door into the nearest stairway, a dark, smoky void. What drew his eye to the first step was the glowing line, a stripe of photo-luminescent paint that ran along the flight of stairs. He fixed his gaze on the lip of each step, defined by the glow-in-the-dark stripe, and started running. Now that he was in the stairs, nothing would slow him. Fern would navigate this line down the next 1,512 steps, give or take, that led from the 84th floor of the south tower to the lobby.
Steered by radiant paint, fueled by pure adrenaline, Fern had already survived a fistful of close calls. A few moments earlier, he had left his desk at Euro Brokers when the monitor screens flickered. He then went to the trading-desk area to look out the windows, where he saw the other building in flames, and men and women falling through the sky. Then he got onto the elevator, from which he had just escaped.
If there were lucky breaks to be had, Rich Fern caught every one of them. He had left the east side of the building shortly before the right wing of Flight 175 raked across Euro Brokers’ trading desk, most likely killing everyone there instantly. He had gotten on an elevator a moment too late to be trapped in the shaft. And as he scrambled away from the elevator car, he turned to a door. It led to what turned out to be the only intact escape route in either of the two towers.
Just as Richard Fern was making his way down the south tower, James Gartenberg was talking on the phone in the north tower, explaining why he could not get off the 86th floor. Gartenberg worked for Julian Studley real estate, where he and a secretary for the company, Patricia Puma, were the only two people in suite 8617 that morning. They called friends and family, and those people began to dial 911, then news reporters, all to sound a broad alarm of their location. Gartenberg, thirty-five, was on his last day at work for the company. Puma, thirty-three, worked there just Mondays and Tuesdays, an arrangement that suited her life as a mother of three children. Puma spoke to a reporter for The New York Times, explaining that the elevators were gone and the stairs were lost to them as well. “It looked like the explosion came up through the elevator,” she said. “It looks like the fire wall came down, and I believe the stairs are on the other side of it.”
Gartenberg got on the phone. They had thought about climbing across the debris to reach the stairs, he said, but “more debris fell, so we backed off.”
The door to another stairwell near them seemed to be blocked, and Gartenberg said that it must have been an automatic locking system activated during an emergency. Most likely, it was not—the exit doors could not be locked, even accidentally, because their cylinders had been turned to make that impossible, according to Michael Hurley, the fire-safety director for the trade center. What may have happened was that the door frame had been knocked out of alignment by the impact. “Tell the Fire Department I’m in 8617. I’m not the easiest guy to reach,” Gartenberg said. “We need air.”
As Richard Fern was beginning his escape from one burning building, James Gartenberg and Patricia Puma could do nothing but describe how they were trapped in another. The differences in their circumstances were not only a matter of luck, but also of design.
“The time and place to ensure life safety in high-rise buildings is during the period that the building is being designed,” Chief John T. O’Hagan wrote in High Rise/Fire & Life Safety, his authoritative book on the dynamics of high-rise fire. As it happened, the World Trade Center was planned at a moment of radical transformation in the construction of tall buildings, and its owner, the Port Authority, availed itself of those changes in spectacular fashion. The new approaches made it possible for the Port Authority to build higher and cheaper, with the twin towers the first skyscrapers to use virtually no masonry in their construction. The changes of this era also allowed the Port Authority to turn far more of the towers over to rentable space—as opposed to safety and service functions, like stairways and elevators—than other skyscrapers. Some of those changes also made escape impossible for people on the
upper floors after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The trade center took its shape in the 1960s, first from the particular ambitions of the brothers David and Nelson Rockefeller, members of a family powerful in politics and finance, and then from the opportunities afforded by the historic shift in building construction practices. By the middle of the twentieth century, real estate values on the southern tip of Manhattan had dwindled, and the area had lost the vigor that carried it from New York’s earliest days as a Dutch port. Chase Manhattan Bank opened a new downtown headquarters in 1960, a project led by David Rockefeller, the vice chairman of the bank. As part of his campaign to revive that part of the city, he gathered an alliance of businesses to plan a “world trade center” that, he hoped, would transform the area from a flagging, stagnant backwater to a vital mainstream. The job of building the trade center became the work of what was then known as the Port of New York Authority, an agency that had access to mighty rivers of cash—it operated many of the toll bridges and tunnels in the region—and was under the control of the governors of New York and New Jersey through a board of directors. Not coincidentally, the governor of New York then was Nelson Rockefeller, David’s brother.
The first plans for the trade center did not call for construction of the world’s tallest building, much less two of them. As originally conceived, the complex would have 5 million square feet of office space, spread across 13.5 acres on the east side of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge. Then the Port Authority moved the site to 16 acres on the west side—closer to the Hudson and above a commuter rail terminal that served New Jersey, which, after all, controlled half the Port Authority. In the move, the project doubled in size, to 10 million square feet—an entire city’s worth of office space. And not long after that, the Port Authority decided it would include the world’s tallest building. No, make that two—the world’s two tallest buildings.
