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

by Dwyer, Jim

  During this dizzying, almost stupefying expansion of the plans, another drastic change was taking place, as vital to the Port Authority’s building program as the political muscle of the governor and his banker brother. The New York City building code was being torn up. Ever since the city began writing codes for skyscrapers at the end of the nineteenth century, its requirements—typically, steel skeletons wrapped in masonry to resist fire—demanded the construction of dense, heavy buildings. Because the Port Authority was a public corporation, formed by a pact between New York and New Jersey, it did not have to comply with the local building laws. Even so, the Port Authority decided in May 1963 that the trade center would be built according to the city code that had been in effect since 1938. Had that code actually been used, it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built. In fact, it is likely that no one at the Port Authority expected the old code to be law when the work actually began.

  In April 1962, a year before the Port Authority pledged itself to the 1938 code, Mayor Robert F. Wagner appointed the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to overhaul the code. The New York Building Congress, a trade organization of construction unions and real estate interests, paid $200,000 toward the costs of the revisions, for which it had long lobbied. The industry had argued for years that the 1938 code did not anticipate improvements in technology, particularly the availability of lightweight materials that, they believed, would serve just as well for many purposes as the much heavier masonry prescribed by the law. Another agenda, less spoken but just as important to the economics of building, was to reduce the amount of space demanded for escape-ways. If real estate in the tight confines of Manhattan Island had a soul, it certainly was vertical in shape; there simply was not enough land to spread out, only up. To turn over some of that precious floor space to outsize-seeming safety requirements surely was an imprudent and uneconomical regulation of business. The new code would quietly turn back some of that real estate lost to evacuation routes to the moneymaking side of the ledger.

  The draft code was unveiled by city officials and the task force at a triumphant press conference in the summer of 1965. In an unabashed display of the power of the industry in writing the new document, the event was held in the offices of the Building Congress. Although that new code was still only in draft form, the executive director of the Port Authority, Austin J. Tobin, wasted no time. The World Trade Center design team would build to the standards demanded in the proposed code, he said. Indeed, articles and an editorial in The New York Times noted that the trade center was an example of precisely the innovative architecture and engineering envisioned by the new code. The reason the Port Authority turned to the new code for its big project was simple: it would make the trade center much cheaper to build.

  “The projected world trade center is designed for use of materials and engineering principles which will be found in the proposed code,” the city building commissioner, Harold Birns, explained in a speech to the New York Building Congress. “The fact that the Port Authority of New York is not bound by the requirements of the present City Building Code makes possible the savings involved. Our existing building code does protect the public safety and welfare but it most certainly does not allow for all the efficiency and economy that industry and enterprise find necessary.” As an example, he said the 1938 code specified wasteful amounts of fireproofing, beyond what was needed for safety. “The proposed code more accurately evaluates the hazards and need for fire protection,” he said. An article in the Times took note of the flexibility the new code would permit, citing the example of a fire-resistant wall. The old code demanded specific bricks and masonry; the new code would require only that the wall “must withstand flames for a stated number of hours. The wall can be made of brick, specially treated wood—or shredded wheat—so long as it can resist fire.”

  Although the article did not mention it, the new code significantly lowered the requirements for fire resistance in office buildings. The 1938 code had required that the columns of tall buildings be able to stand against fire for four hours; the new code reduced that to three hours. For the floors, the earlier code had demanded three hours of fire protection; the new code cut that to two hours. And while the old code had ordered concrete cladding or other masonry to provide fire resistance for the structural steel, the new code left that decision up to the owners. The cardinal sin of the old code, in the view of many in the real estate industry, was that it forced buildings to be far sturdier and heavier than needed. “Overdesigning is the equivalent of cracking a walnut with a ten-pound weight rather than a nutcracker,” said Frederick G. Frost, an architect who guided part of the code study. Office buildings, in particular, did not need so much fire resistance, he said; they had been stuck too long with the same burdens as far more hazardous places, like factories.

  The outcome of the code revision was that tall structures were “softened,” in the description of Vincent Dunn, an author and analyst of fire-safety practices, and a former chief in the New York Fire Department. In 1995, he wrote an article in Fire Engineering magazine that cataloged the hazards of high-rise fires, and the illusion of safety. “After fighting high-rise fires in midtown Manhattan, New York City, for the past ten years, it is my opinion that the fire service has been lucky,” Dunn wrote. Chief Dunn and Chief O’Hagan noted that New York City abandoned the heavy, dense masonry that had defined the interiors of the old-style skyscrapers, epitomized by the Empire State Building, and had provided protection in fire. Now gypsum board and spray-on fireproofing would be used. Less weight meant that less steel would have to be used. The new code, which ultimately became law in 1968, made it cheaper to build taller buildings. These were changes that other cities across the country had already adopted. A new day was coming in New York, too. “The antiquated towers of commerce will fail,” predicted Robert Low, chairman of the City Council’s buildings committee and the council’s official shepherd of the 1968 code. “And a new colossus, more pleasing to the eye, more pleasant to the ear, and more reflective of our dreams for the future will rise one day in their place.”

  Besides making high-rises cheaper to build, the new code also made them more profitable to own, because it increased the floor space available for rent. It did this by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit. Councilman Low pointed out that if the new code had been available for the design of one recent skyscraper, the Pan Am building in midtown, the owners would have had 2 percent more rentable space on each floor. That was worth about $1.8 million annually in 1968.

  The previous generation of skyscrapers in New York was required to have at least one “fire tower”—a masonry-enclosed stairwell that was entered through a 107-square-foot vestibule. When people entered the vestibule, any smoke that trailed them would be captured and vented. Then to enter the stairway, they had to pass through a second doorway, so that they could flee down the stairs without bringing along trails of smoke. These reinforced stairwells were the residue of an age of mass catastrophes. In March 1911, about two miles from where the World Trade Center would be built, 146 people died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A locked exit door had trapped scores; a rickety fire escape collapsed, killing others. The image of young girls, leaping to their death from ninth-floor windows because they had no other way to escape the flame and smoke, was seared into the consciousness of that generation and the next. In January 1912, the Equitable Building—thought to be a “fireproof” structure—collapsed during a fire. Six people died. A few months later, the Titanic sank, with the lack of escape mechanisms once again the cause of mass death. The Titanic had space in its lifeboats for fewer than half the ship’s passengers. (Despite what seemed in retrospect like a glaring shortcoming, the ship’s owners had sailed with more lifeboats than were required under British law—as oceangoing ships grew larger and carried more passengers, no one had gotten around to increasing the number of lifeboats to keep up with the capacity.) In th
e first half of the century, when New York revised its building codes, the memories of the Titanic and the fires at the Equitable Building and the Triangle Factory remained strong. The heavy-duty stairwells demanded for high-rise towers by the 1938 code served as psychic life rafts. Thirty years later, these structures were seen as artifacts of an earlier, more plodding age, and the 1968 code eliminated the need for reinforced staircases and vestibules.

  Not only the fire towers disappeared. So did half the staircases. The 1968 code reduced the number of stairways required for buildings the size of the towers from six to three. When those provisions were still a draft proposal, the Port Authority engineer in charge of construction, Malcolm P. Levy, ordered them incorporated into the plans. “The tower core should be redesigned,” he wrote on September 29, 1965, “to eliminate the fire towers and to take advantage of the more lenient provisions regarding exit stairs.” Moreover, those three stairwells would have less protection, as the new code lowered the minimum fire resistance for walls around the shafts from three hours to two, and permitted them to be built from much less sturdy material. All these changes offered significant financial opportunities. They would increase the space available for rent by getting rid of stairways and make the building lighter by eliminating the requirements for masonry. When New York City building officials pointed out in 1968 that the towers, as planned, did not meet the existing code, the Port Authority’s representatives replied that they would satisfy the new code—the one that would become law in December. At the time, no city regulator noted a feature of the towers that would have required a fourth staircase, even under the less stringent requirements of the new code: atop each tower was a “place of assembly” for more than 1,000 people—the Windows on the World restaurant in the north tower, and an observatory in the south.

  Fewer Stairwells

  A change in the New York City building code in 1968 reduced the number of stairwells required in tall buildings. The World Trade Center, completed in 1970, had fewer escape routes than the Empire State Building, completed in 1931.

  Sources: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; Empire State Building; Carol Willis, the Skyscraper Museum The New York Times

  The signature building of New York in the first half of the twentieth century—the Empire State Building, which opened in 1931—had nine staircases at its broad base, six in its tapered middle, including the fire tower. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, which received their first tenants in 1970, had just three.

  Another safety issue that would be of great consequence on September 11—the distance between the stairways—was all but ignored by the 1968 code. In 1959, a fire in a stairwell at Our Lady of Angels school in Chicago killed ninety-six children and three nuns. Around the country, building codes were quickly changed to require that exits be spread out, to create a second chance if one was somehow disabled. New York passed a law taking effect in 1961 that required exits in school buildings and other “places of assembly” to be on “opposite sides of the floor or space.” Less than a decade later, the 1968 code did not press the standard for office buildings. The new code, and real-estate economics, encouraged the use of a single core in the center of the building. There, bunched as tightly as possible, would be shafts that housed essential services, including elevators, mechanical conduits, and, most important, stairs—all elements that did not directly produce rent revenue. The 1938 code generally required that exits on each floor be “remote” from each other, so that a single problem could not obstruct all the ways out. The new code amended that language in a small but significant way: each exit now had to be “as remote from the others as is practicable.” New York would not explicitly demand remote stairways in office buildings until 1984, long after the trade center was open.

  Finally, just as the Titanic was required by the British Board of Trade to have the same number of lifeboats as a ship one-quarter its size, the building code generally required the same number of exit stairways—three—for a building 75 feet tall as for one 1,350 feet high. So a 110-story skyscraper had to provide no more capacity for escape than a six-story building. The building code’s limited stairway requirements not only embraced the implausibility of a total building evacuation for very tall buildings, but enshrined it.

  The trade center was a marvel for the building trade in dozens of ways, but its singular triumph was in its use of space, the tight bundling of the building systems that made it possible for the Port Authority to offer for rent fully three-quarters of each floor. That was 21 percent higher than the best yield achieved in older skyscrapers, which were forced to commit that much more space to exit routes and so forth.

  The Stairwells in the South Tower

  Impact 9:02 A.M. Collapse 9:59 A.M.

  Building code reform hardly makes for gripping drama. A few feet chiseled here and there from stairwells by getting rid of fire towers. The elimination of masonry reinforcement around stairwells. Exits bunched together in the core of the building. And yet from the balcony of history, the new standards yield a dramatic view of contrasts. While the foundation of the trade center was being wrapped in a stupendous girdle of concrete, to stand against time and tide—it was three feet thick, more than half a mile long, and seventy feet deep—the stairways in the sky would be clad in a few inches of lightweight drywall. These stairways, bunched together, built for only a few hundred people at a time to walk three or four stories, would now have to carry out of the buildings the 12,000 people beneath the airplane impacts on September 11, 2001.

  Richard Fern looked ahead to the stripes in stairway A of the south tower. They had been applied to the stairs after the fiasco of the 1993 evacuation, when thousands of angry, choking people emerged to describe pitch-black staircases, unlit because the emergency lights had failed when the power went out. Since then, the Port Authority had spent $2.1 million on emergency lighting and exit signs lit with light-emitting diodes. The emergency lights now had batteries that would stay on for at least ninety minutes if the building lost power. The stripes helped, too. Fern flew down the flights, nine steps a landing, then a turn, another nine steps. Coming from the 84th floor, he was going directly past the heart of the devastation in the south tower. Here again, he had the benefit of yet another stroke of luck. Only in two places in the towers were the stairs not bunched in the center of the building. At those spots, the stairwells had to detour away from the middle of the building because elevator machinery took up half the space on the floor. One of these detours ran from the 82nd to the 76th floors, just below where Fern had entered the stairs—and at the exact area where most of Flight 175 had hit. Because stairway A was about fifty-four feet northeast of its regular path in the center of the building, it survived in at least passable condition. The machine room may also have helped deflect damage from the plane.

  Unlit and smoky, stairway A seemed possessed by gloom. Fern, however, was possessed by yet another chance. Beginning at 84, he ran through the smoke, finding it bad but bearable. A few floors down, most likely on the 82nd floor, he was shocked to discover that stairway A seemed to come to an end; this was in fact a corridor that led people coming down stairway A in the core of the building to the continuation of the staircase, along the periphery. He reached against the wall, found a door handle, and opened it. Some daylight fell on his eyes, and he felt a surge of relief.

  “Do not go down that staircase,” someone shouted. “Use this one.” Fern walked quickly toward the voice, passing a bleeding woman who was being helped by a man. They seemed okay. He found the continuation of stairway A, and headed down. He hustled past the people ahead of him in the stairs. As soon as he made the next turn in the stairs, he saw another man and another woman, stopped dead. One of the wallboards had collapsed into the staircase, and they could not get by.

  “Don’t go this way,” one of them said. They were ready to turn back.

  Fern did not speak to them. He lifted the wall off the ground and rested it on the banister, creating a triangle that w
as just big enough for him to crawl under. At the next floor, a smaller piece of the wall had collapsed. This time, Fern simply jumped from the stairs onto it, rolled onto the landing, and kept going. A few flights down, he caught up with Peter, another man who worked at Euro Brokers. Fern was about to blow past when Peter stopped him.

  “We should stay together,” Peter said.

  “Okay, but you will have to keep up with me,” Fern said. He resumed his fast pace, but the initial surge of his flight had subsided. He noticed that few people seemed to be in the stairwell. He switched on his walkie-talkie radio and heard a member of Euro Brokers’ security department, who was outside the building, speaking with Dave Vera, who was with the other group from Euro Brokers, higher up in the building. By the time Fern got to the 30th floor, his legs were shaking. He thought he would collapse. At the bottom of the building, he met a phalanx of Port Authority police officers and security guards, who steered him and Peter out of the south tower, through the concourse and east to Church Street, where he came out near Borders.

  A few people found the same staircase that Richard Fern had discovered, and they also met a man and a woman who were stymied by the fallen wall. But stairway A would prove to be a path out of the destruction for those in the south tower’s 78th-floor sky lobby, where the ground was carpeted with the silent, fallen bodies of scores of people who had been standing there a few moments earlier. Perhaps two dozen people were alive. Keating Crown of Aon had gotten to stairway A with his colleagues Kelly Reyher and Donna Spera, who also had been waiting for the elevators. Reyher had used his briefcase to wedge apart the doors of a burning elevator car after the impact, and Spera and Crown had both been badly burned; Spera also had multiple broken bones. The three managed to stumble to stairway A at the northwest corner of the building. They hollered into the dusty, dying sky lobby that they had found a way out. A few others followed their voices to the door.