by Dwyer, Jim
In the stairwell, Crown wanted to carry Spera on his back, but Reyher said, “That’s not a very good idea,” pointing out that they had a long way to go. Spera then slung her arms over Crown and Reyher, and they began to walk down. Very soon, they encountered a man and woman—quite possibly, the same people encountered by Fern—who reported that the stairwell was blocked. “You can’t go this way,” one of them said.
Fern’s temporary solution to the collapsed wall near the 76th floor—propping up the drywall—apparently had not held. Crown had run ahead and seen that the wallboard had been knocked out by an elevator car, which ran in a shaft adjacent to the stairs. With Reyher, Crown could see the struts that had once held the wall, and they could see a conduit that had been running in the shaft, and it was all down in a heap. There was more discussion in the stairway about going back up, but Reyher and Crown, having just left the horrors of the 78th floor, were not turning back. They began to pick up junk from the floor and shove it aside, and they pushed the wall into place, but it quickly fell back onto the stairs. Then Crown realized that the wall could rest on the fallen conduit, which was relatively secure, and still leave space. A third man helped lift the board. Among them, they had cleared enough room to get by.
Crown traveled with a woman for a few flights, thinking it was Donna Spera, before suddenly realizing it was someone else. Another man stepped in to walk with that woman. Crown continued down on his own. His own left leg was broken. He was bleeding from the back of the head and from cuts on his arm. Another man took off a shirt, soaked it in water, and dabbed the back of Crown’s head. Crown took off his own shirt to wrap around his wrist. As he caught up with people from the lower floors, the word was passed ahead that an injured person was coming, and the double line of evacuating people immediately folded into a single file. Some gasped or shrieked when they saw him, but Crown plodded on. A woman passed him the last ounce of a can of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi. It was mostly backwash, Crown figured, but it cleared his throat. He kept going. When he got to street level and an ambulance, a paramedic checked his bleeding head and pulled out a metal spring that somehow had gotten lodged in his scalp. Behind him a few flights, Reyher and Spera made steady progress. When she wanted to rest, Reyher gave no quarter. “Keep going,” he insisted.
Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath found light and fresh air around the 68th floor. They also met Jose Marrero, the administrative jack-of-all-trades for Euro Brokers who already had herded a group off the 84th floor, escorting them down into the 40s. Now he was walking back up.
“Jose,” Clark called. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to help Dave Vera,” Marrero said. “I can hear him on the walkie-talkie.” Vera was with the group that had gotten disoriented and dropped to the landing in exhaustion.
Clark tried to dissuade him. Next to him stood Praimnath, battered and bruised by his escape from the 81st floor. “I’m getting this man from Fuji Bank out,” Clark said. “Dave’s a big boy, he’ll fend for himself. Come on down with us.”
Marrero, whose insistence had helped sweep the floor at Euro Brokers, would not be turned back. Vera was in trouble. “I can help him,” Marrero said. “I’ll be along.”
“All right,” Clark said.
At the 44th floor, Clark and Praimnath left the stairs for a break. They had come onto the lower sky lobby, and all the lights were on. The place was deserted, except for a security guard in the blue blazer of the building staff. Before Clark could speak, the guard asked for help.
“Do you have phones?” the guard asked.
“No, why?” Clark asked.
“I am with this man who’s injured,” the guard said.
He gestured behind the guard’s stand, where a man lay on the ground, moaning. He had a massive head wound. The phones on the 44th floor were not working.
“I’ll stay with this guy, but you’ve got to promise that you’ll get a stretcher and medical attention for him,” the guard said.
“We’ll do our best,” Clark said.
At the 31st floor, Clark and Praimnath again stopped. This time, they found an open conference room in the offices of Oppenheimer Management Corporation. They each called home—Praimnath left a message, and Clark spoke briefly to his wife, telling her that he was okay. Then Clark called 911. He passed along the information about the injured man on the 44th floor, then was told he had to speak to someone. He waited a long time on hold, then related the story again. Just a moment, he was told. Yet another person had to hear his account. Someone picked up, and Clark spoke immediately.
“I am only telling you once. I am getting out of the building,” Clark said. “Write it down.” A 911 operator typed up a summary:
Another call. Male caller states EMS badly need on the 44th floor, tower 2. EMS notified. Male caller states he will keep searching. Hung up.
Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath departed for the lobby.
The trade center’s three exit stairways satisfied the requirements of the 1968 code, but as was apparent in the 1993 bombing, three stairways were not sufficient to accommodate a rapid, full-building evacuation of each tower. Complicating matters, two of the three stairwells in each tower did not bring people out to the street, but actually deposited them in the mezzanine lobby, which was “a major building design flaw,” Chief Donald Burns of the Fire Department had noted in a report about the 1993 bombing. These exits to the mezzanine required people to get on escalators to bring them to the street level, causing backups in the stairwells that stretched tens of floors up.
Perhaps as important, the three stairways in each tower were all in a triangle, with no exit more than forty-five feet away from another—except in those few circumstances where they took detours to accommodate elevator machinery, as with the south tower’s stairway A. The folly of permitting buildings like the trade center to bunch their exits together became inarguable in the years following the adoption of the 1968 code. After a November 1980 fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas killed eighty-seven people, many of them trapped by poor exits, the Fire Department seized the moment to fix a law it had long opposed. The city set a new formula that doubled the required space between exits in tall buildings. The changes in the New York code did not take effect until 1984, more than a decade after the towers opened, and of course, the law was not retroactive; to put new exits in existing buildings would be very difficult. As Chief O’Hagan had said, the time for ensuring life safety was during the design. People would just have to live with the results.
If the survivors nearest the points of impact moved with cold determination, the people lower in the south tower knew nothing but the mysterious, terrifying shudder of the building when the plane hit. Nat Alcamo, a fifty-six-year-old former Marine who worked for Morgan Stanley, had gotten from the 60th floor to the 44th floor when Flight 175 struck. For the first time, he felt intense fear. People wept. Women threw high-heeled shoes into the corners of landings. Katherine Hachinski, a seventy-year-old architect, had left her office on the 91st floor after the first plane hit the north tower, despite the reassuring public-address announcement. My foot, it’s under control, she recalled thinking. After the stairway rocked from the second impact, she prayed. A stranger handed her a paper breathing mask.
Steven Salovich had been herded off Euro Brokers’ 84th floor by Jose Marrero before the second plane hit. As usual, the Wall Street guys were kidding in the stairs as they went down, comparing the event to 1993. His phone rang with his wife calling in a panic to tell him what she was seeing on television. They all kept going, but considered turning back when the announcement came that evacuation was unnecessary. As Salovich and his colleagues Andy Soloway and Dennis Coughlin discussed their choices, they felt the crash. The line moving along the stairs immediately resumed a fast, but not reckless pace, “as if a high-speed assembly line was thrust into motion from a flat start,” Salovich recalled. Soloway took the arm of a woman having a panic attack; Salovich carried the bag of another woman, h
olding her arm, hearing about her two children. “Thirtieth floor,” Salovich called out. “It’s all downhill from here.”
Richard Jacobs, a thirty-four-year-old loan administrator who worked on the 79th floor for Fuji, noticed that people started running when they felt the lurch. By then, the group he was with had made it to the 42nd floor; they reached the ground in less than fifteen minutes. Edgardo Villegas, thirty-one years old, who worked in the Oppenheimer mail room on the 32nd floor, saw the stairs filled with confused people, crying and clinging to each other even before Flight 175 hit. Robert Radomsky, a systems administrator for Aon who had come from the 101st floor, saw cracks in the stairwell wall. Traffic slowed as people entered from floors in the 60s. Everyone walked shoulder to shoulder. Sean Pierce, twenty-eight, who worked on the 73rd floor for Morgan Stanley, grabbed the hand of a colleague, Kristen Farrell. Around them, some people chatted casually and sipped their morning coffee, but others had difficulty making their way down. Louis A. Torres, a member of Morgan Stanley’s administrative staff, came upon a woman from the firm who was being half carried down the stairs by a man struggling beneath her. The woman used crutches to walk. Torres picked her up at the 54th floor, put her over his shoulder, and carried her right down to the street. Around the 15th or 20th floor, someone from the building or one of the rescuers had urged Torres to put her down, saying that they were past the danger, but he carried her clear out of the trouble, and into a vehicle going to the hospital.
Terence McCormick, who worked for Kemper Insurance on the 36th floor of the south tower, had been in the trade center since 1978, and as he ran toward the stairs, he practically did not feel his feet touching the ground. He thought he was flying. He found the stairwell full, and slow; worried that the fire might be below them, he felt a sprinkler standpipe, fearful of finding that the heat was rising. No, it was cool to the touch. That was a trick he had learned from his father, who had been a top chief in the city’s Fire Department. In fact, twenty-three years earlier, when McCormick was first starting work in the trade center, his dad had implored him to find a job elsewhere. Chief McCormick believed that the towers were among the most dangerous buildings in the city. The son regarded his warning as alarmist. Now the father was dead, and the son was trying to avoid looking at the floor numbers, averting his eyes as he moved at shuffle speed, praying that when he looked up he would discover progress. God, he whispered, please let me get to the 25th floor. Then: God, please let me get to the 20th floor.
In the north tower, after he was escorted from his 86th-floor office by Frank De Martini’s crew, Louis Lesce wanted to move more deliberately than the people around him. He was sixty-four years old and had recently undergone a quadruple cardiac bypass. Someone carried his briefcase; another person took his coat. Norma Hessic, who worked on the 82nd floor for a state agency, was relieved that the stairway lights had stayed on, unlike in 1993, and that people kept good order. Richard Wright, a fifty-eight-year-old engineering inspector, moved from the 82nd floor to the 42nd, where he stopped for a break from the heat in the stairwell. A few people cracked open vending machines, and bottles of water and other drinks were passed along the lines. Michael Hingson, fifty-three, who worked on the 78th floor for a firm that specialized in disaster recovery of data, walked down with his guide dog, Roselle, a three-year-old yellow Labrador. Hingson had been blind since birth. He and Roselle brought David Frank, a guest from California, down with them. All three were offered water.
Sharon Premoli, an executive with Beast Financial Systems, prayed for much of the walk down the stairs from her office on the 80th floor. When she got to 44, she asked the security guard in the blue blazer whether they were going to be all right. He assured her they were. “I’m praying for you,” he said. “Do you like to sing? Let’s sing a hymn.” He started and she heard his voice for several flights, supporting her, as she continued down the stairs.
Bill Hult, from a mortgage trading concern on the 51st floor, took note of the calmness in the stairs: people moving double file, instantly collapsing into single file to let injured people from the upper floors pass. Elaine Duch, who had been burned on the 88th floor and was one of the people led to freedom by the Frank De Martini–Pablo Ortiz team, was escorted down by her colleagues Dorene Smith and Gerry Gaeta. Around the 40th floor, a firefighter saw them and poured some of his extinguisher on the burnt woman, which shocked Gaeta and appeared to hurt Duch. Another ailing person from the 88th floor, De Martini’s secretary, Judith Reese, was having a terrible time breathing because of her asthma, and she and Jeff Gertler, who was with her, had to stop to rest every flight or so. After nearly a half hour, they had gotten to the 51st floor, and Gertler used his two-way radio.
The Stairwells in the North Tower
Impact 8:46 A.M. Collapse 10:28 A.M.
Sources: Interviews with survivors and people who had contact with victims; Leslie E. Robertson Associates; FEMA; Port Authority; N.Y. Fire Department dispatch records
Gertler: Fire Command. This is Jeff Gertler.
Voice 1: Copy.
Gertler: I have a medical emergency in stairway B, we are on the [audio cuts out] floor. We have an individual who cannot walk down.
Voice 1: Copy. We are working our way up B stairwell right now.
Voice 2: What floor was that on the B stairwell?
Gertler: Well, we’re walking down from 51. We are going to do the best we can. But we do have a medical emergency. We have one individual who cannot walk down, has asthma.
Voice 1: Copy. We are on the 11th floor, working our way up. [alarms in background]
Gertler: Copy, we’re heading down.
A moment later, Gertler realized that not only did Judith Reese need help, but so did Moe Lipson, the eighty-nine-year-old electrical inspector who was being helped down from the 88th floor by Mak Hanna.
Gertler: We are in the B staircase, 51st floor heading down. We have two people with a medical emergency, elderly people, they cannot walk down.
Female Voice: That’s elderly people, what staircase … what tower is that? [sirens in background]
Gertler: That’s Tower 1, staircase B.
Female: Tower 1, staircase B. That’s a copy.
John Labriola came down from the 71st floor in the north tower, where he had a temporary contract job with the Port Authority. The steps had become slick with the sweat. Everyone, it seemed, had cell phones out, but no one was getting calls through. “We should buy stock in the first company whose service works,” Labriola joked. An amateur photographer, he carried a Nikon camera, and when he got farther down the stairs, he snapped pictures, including several of firefighters coming up one side and the line of office workers on the other. Theresa Leone, who worked in a law firm on the 51st floor, was working the rosary beads she had gotten from the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. She had not eaten breakfast, and was perspiring heavily in the heat. A group of five or six firemen stood at one of the landings, fixing their gear, and one of them noticed how warm she seemed. He offered her a sip from a bottle of water. She was about to say no, thanks, then changed her mind. “God bless,” she said. Michael Benfante and John Cerquiera, who worked for Network Plus, a communications firm on the 81st floor, saw Tina Hansen in a wheelchair, waiting at the 68th floor for a chance to go down. Hansen, a marketing analyst for the Port Authority, was in an evac-u-chair, a lightweight chair that the Port Authority had bought by the hundreds for the building after the 1993 bombing, and her motorized chair stood by. Cerquiera, twenty-two, recently graduated from college and in the full flush of life as a young man in New York, and Benfante, thirty-six, his boss, picked up Hansen. They went one flight. They had sixty-seven more to go.
Three flights below, as a parade of people moved down the stairs, a group inside offices on the 64th floor was not sure whether they really should be leaving. Not surprisingly, this uncertainty had settled on an office with many people who had been in the towers for the 1993 bombing, and who worked for the Port Authority. The senior m
anager was Patrick Hoey, the engineer in charge of bridges and tunnels who had told his colleague Pasquale Buzzelli that he had been nearly knocked out of his chair by the plane’s impact. Hoey was one of those invisible and necessary citizens who keep the city moving. In his office, he could see video monitors that broadcast live pictures of all the spans that ringed New York. Ordinarily, they were the kinds of images that might capture Hoey’s attention. He was a bridge buff. Now he wished he could refocus the cameras on the exterior of the building. How badly was it damaged? Did they need to leave immediately? Many people on his floor had left immediately. But some remained, including Buzzelli, one of his engineers. There wasn’t much smoke on their floor. So at 9:11, twenty-five minutes after Flight 11 had hit the building, Hoey called the Port Authority police desk in Jersey City.
Patrick Hoey: I’m on the 64th floor.
PAPD Sergeant John Mariano: Okay.
Patrick Hoey: In Tower 1.
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: All right.
Patrick Hoey: I’ve got about twenty people here with me.
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: Okay.
Patrick Hoey: What do you suggest? [loud commotion] Staying tight?
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: Stand tight. Is there a fire right there where you are?
Patrick Hoey: No, there is a little bit of smoke on the floor.
