by Dwyer, Jim
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: It looks like there is also an explosion in 2.
Patrick Hoey: Okay.
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: So be careful. Stay near the stairwells, and wait for the police to come up.
Patrick Hoey: They will come up, huh? Okay. They will check each floor? [loud commotion] If you would, just report that we’re up here.
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: I got you.
Patrick Hoey: And I’m on … if you need the number, it’s 5397.
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: I got you.
Patrick Hoey: Thank you.
PAPD Sergeant Mariano: All right, ’bye.
As hundreds walked past their floor, the people on 64 closed the doors and began to seal them with tape.
9
“The doors are locked.”
9:05 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
The safe spaces were disappearing as the smoke rose through seams in the buildings, as flames found fissures and created new ones. On some floors, things remained remarkably calm, even as people rifled through their dwindling lists of options. At 9:05 A.M., Peter Mardikian called his wife, Corine, using one of the few phones that still worked on the 106th floor of the north tower. An executive with Imagine Software, Mardikian had come to the trade center for the Risk Waters breakfast conference at Windows on the World.
He told his wife that the smoke was getting thicker and that he was worried about his breathing. He was going to head for the roof. There was much else to say, of course, but Mardikian told her he could not stay on the phone. Many others were waiting. Even in a time of confusion and coursing fear, small courtesies survived.
Across the high floors in each of the towers, dozens of people were reaching the same conclusion as Peter Mardikian: their next refuge would be the roof. In the south tower, Sean Rooney began climbing from the office of Aon on the 98th floor and Paul Rizza walked up from Fiduciary Trust on 90. In the north tower, Stephen Cherry and Martin Wortley and Charles Heeran started up the stairs from the office of Cantor Fitzgerald, which occupied four floors near the top of the north tower. Heeran had called his father, Bernie Heeran, a retired firefighter, a few minutes after the first plane hit, when the smoke on the 104th floor had already become unforgiving. Bernie Heeran knew his son needed a buffer of fresh air to buy a bit of time so that rescuers might have a chance to reach him.
“Get everybody to the roof,” Bernie Heeran told his son. “Go up. Don’t try to go down.”
Compared with the walk down, the climb up to the roof from a high floor seemed shorter and simpler. That was partly an illusion created by the scale of the trade center. To reach the roof required a trip that, for many, was the equivalent of climbing to the top of an ordinary office tower. In the south tower, the equity traders at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods faced a hike of more than twenty stories in smoke and dust from their offices on the 88th and 89th floors. The trading desk was heavily stocked with former college or high school athletes, and Stephen Mulderry, Rick Thorpe, and Frank Doyle, all very fit and ranging in age from their late twenties to early forties, decided it was worth a try.
Joining them at the top of the stairs in the south tower was an older man who was more familiar than most with the route. Roko Camaj had spent nearly half of his sixty years working in the towers, much of it on the roof of the south tower operating a custom-built contraption that automatically washed the windows. The rig crawled down the towers along tracks, washing a strip of windows as it descended before returning to the roof. As each strip was done, the machine rolled over to the next line of twenty-two-inch windows, pivoted, then descended 1,300 feet. It could clean seven floors of windows in a minute. But it could not do the windows on the 107th floor, which were thirty-three inches wide, one and a half times the width of the standard windows. The extra size had been demanded by a Port Authority planner to allow more expansive views for special spaces at the top of each tower. The north tower would have a grand restaurant; the south tower, an observation deck; in both places, ample windows would be vital to capturing the unmatched vistas. This order briefly touched off a snit by the height-fearing architect, who had designed the twenty-two-inch windows to comfort those similarly afflicted, but he eventually agreed to increase their width at the top of the building. That created work the automated machine could not do. So Camaj and a partner cleaned those wide windows by hand, sudsing them up as they hung from the side of the building, 1,300 feet in the air, in a basket with harnesses.
For this routine derring-do, Camaj had become part of the trade center’s folklore, a poor man’s Philippe Petit, the aerialist who had walked between the towers in 1974 on a tightrope. Camaj had been featured in a children’s book, Risky Business, and had appeared in a documentary about the building. The book captured Camaj’s fascination with the job, the sense of independence that came from working alone in an isolated setting. “It’s just me and the sky,” he said in the book. “I don’t bother anybody and nobody bothers me.” On September 11, however, as he tried to head for the roof, Camaj was traveling with a crowd.
In both towers, the people on the high floors were confronted with an unyielding reality: they had nowhere to go but up. All three staircases in the north tower had been wiped out; in the south tower, a single stairway remained open, but only a handful of people knew about it.
The Port Authority’s plan for escaping fire in the towers did not have a page for roof rescues. Indeed, the roof was off-limits. This perspective was in line with mainstream thought in emergency-management circles. Los Angeles was one of the few American cities where aerial rescues were actively contemplated. The fire department there had secured its own fleet of helicopters and had made tall buildings install rooftop helipads. In Las Vegas, during the fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in November 1980, a bucket brigade of helicopters spontaneously formed, lifting hundreds of people from the roof. Even so, most experts did not view the roof as a viable escape route from a high-rise fire. For one thing, confusion about which way to walk on the stairs could cripple a large-scale evacuation. And the only way to rescue people from the roof was by helicopter, a method that could not be counted on to evacuate masses of people, certainly not anywhere near the number that a single intact staircase could accommodate. During a debate in New York in the 1970s on the use of helicopters, Fire Chief O’Hagan had argued that the central evacuation opportunities should be written on the blueprints and then permanently built into the structure, rather than shifting this responsibility to rescuers in helicopters that might not be available in a crisis.
Despite the aversion to aerial rescues, the Port Authority did not explicitly tell the occupants of its towers that the roof was not an option. At mandatory fire drills held in the tenant offices every six months, the building fire-safety directors focused solely on safe ways to descend the stairs. While that doctrine had sound reasoning behind it—flame and smoke rise—it overlooks human nature, which drives people to get outside of a building on fire. In the trade center, getting outside either meant the street, a quarter mile down, or it meant the roof, twenty or thirty flights up. Just as the fire drills made no mention that the roof was not an option, there were no signs in the stairwells saying that, either. Even if there had been, hundreds of people still might have headed up the stairs on September 11. They faced the brutal truth that all the planners and drills had evaded. They had nowhere else to go.
The roof offered fresh air. There was no ceiling to collapse, no furniture to burn, no floors to buckle. It seemed like a place removed from the hazard, a holding station that might buy time until rescuers arrived. A rooftop had often served as a refuge in terrible New York fires. During the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory blaze of 1911, many of the survivors—including an owner of the factory—had escaped by climbing to the roof. Although the real estate industry sought to restrict access to roofs whenever the building code came up for revision, the Fire Department had resisted.
The roof of the World Trade Center had also served as an embarkation point f
or rescues after the 1993 bombing, and on September 11 the prospect of an aerial rescue lived in the imagination of many of those trapped on the upper floors. Martin Wortley of Cantor Fitzgerald told his brother over the phone that he was hoping to leave by helicopter, and would head up the stairs in the north tower. Those who had been in the towers when the bomb had gone off in 1993 had heard countless times about how the helicopters had settled softly on the roofs and carried people to safety. Bob Mattson, a banker with Fiduciary Trust International and now trapped in the south tower, had been one of those lifted to safety that day. It had been the work of Police Department pilots, but for many, it had been an earthly approximation of heavenly intercession.
This was nothing like 1993, Detective Greg Semendinger thought as he and his copilot, Officer James Ciccone, circled the buildings in Aviation 6, one of the smaller police helicopters. He had landed a police helicopter on the north tower after the bombing eight years earlier and had lifted people off the roof who could not make it down the stairs. Today, he could barely see the upper floors of either tower. Semendinger and Ciccone had arrived about 8:54 A.M., eight minutes after the first plane’s impact, scrambling from the Aviation Unit’s base in Brooklyn. The first police helicopter to arrive, Aviation 14, piloted by Detectives Timothy Hayes and Patrick Walsh, had beaten them by two minutes, arriving at the building just six minutes after Flight 11 struck. Hayes and Walsh were flying a larger helicopter, a Bell 412, capable of carrying ten people, in addition to the crew. It was equipped with a 250-foot hoist that could be used to pluck people from a roof. No one had seen any opportunity for rescues yet.
“We’re going to be unable to land on the roof due to the heavy smoke condition at this time,” Hayes radioed in from just off the north tower at 8:58. They had barely stopped talking when Hayes spotted United Flight 175 roaring toward them through the sky. “Jesus Christ, there’s a second plane crashing,” he yelled to Walsh. They pulled up quickly and the plane shot beneath them, bursting through the south tower, and sending a giant ball of flame coughing out the other side. Within minutes, the roof of that tower had also vanished behind the smoke.
Ciccone turned the controls and headed for another look at the north tower. The pilots approached from the uptown side to avoid the massive plumes of dark smoke blowing southeast, toward New York Harbor and Brooklyn. With the water and the blue sky as a backdrop, the buildings looked like the billowing smokestacks of an ocean liner—until they panned down to see the gaping holes, the leaping flames, the soot-darkened faces of people piled four and five high in broken windows, waving white cloths and gasping for breath. Semendinger could not abandon the idea of a landing, especially as he watched men and women plummet from the building. There were so many of them. They dropped in silence, fleeing horrors that were beyond speech. For a second, Semendinger felt helpless. The helicopter pulled in behind the smoke, and Semendinger noticed that a small patch of the north tower’s roof was visible, near the northwest corner. He would need to get closer to measure his options, but they were far bleaker than they had been in 1993, the last time he had flown to this building.
Back then, the south tower roof had been filled with people when Semendinger flew over, about thirty minutes after the blast in the basement parking garage. They had huddled on the outdoor patio to the trade center’s observation deck, a place where crowds typically gathered on warmer days. On February 26, 1993, it had felt like a portal to the Arctic. No one was on the roof of the north tower, with its forest of floodlights and antennas. Wisps of smoke drifted up from the higher floors. Most of the television stations in the city broadcast their signals from the roof of the north tower, and many had offices on the 110th floor just below it. Trapped inside one of the offices that February day was Deborah Matut-Perina, a thirty-four-year-old technician for WCBS-TV who was three months pregnant and asthmatic. She had been calling downstairs for help and had gotten only a busy signal while the black smoke built outside her door. The police had reports of people like her trapped on the upper floors. But as much as Semendinger wanted to help, he had a hard time finding a place to land on the north tower.
Inside the helicopter with Semendinger that afternoon eight years before had been two Emergency Service Unit cops, Sergeant Tim Farrell and Officer Bob Schierenbeck. They suggested taking down the antennas on the north tower to clear a landing zone. They dangled a thirty-foot rope out the door and just after 1 P.M. rappelled to the roof. Once they had made space for the helicopter, they cracked open the locked stairwell door, and headed down to the 110th floor. It was surprising how smoky the stairs were so far above the basement, but the explosion had set off car fires, and rubber tires burn slow, smelly, and dirty. Farrell found Matut-Perina in her office, where she and a colleague had wet clothes with bottled water and jammed them under the door. He helped her to the roof and Semendinger lifted off. She was the first of several dozen people who would be shuttled from the roof by police helicopters that day.
By nightfall, eight helicopters were ferrying ESU teams to the roofs of both towers. The cops descended through the buildings to escort the aged or infirm up the stairs. When the commander of the Aviation Unit later recorded the events of the day, he recalled the amazed faces of exhausted firefighters who had climbed for two hours and more, only to find fresh teams of police officers coming down the stairs.
About half the people who were airlifted to safety in 1993 came off the south tower. The helicopters started landing there only in the evening, after the smoke in the stairways had cleared and the crowds from the roof had descended. At one point in the day, as many as 200 people had gathered on the roof, led there by Mike Hurley, at the time an assistant fire-safety director for the building. He happened to be on the observation desk and saw the smoke in the stairs, but had no idea what had happened, or where. Communications systems were out of service, as were the elevators. All he knew was that the stairs seemed impassable. So he climbed atop a table and announced to the crowd of tourists and schoolchildren that they should head to the roof for fresh air. Tenants from the upper floors joined them. Three or four hours later, as darkness descended, Hurley led the shivering throng back down to the enclosed observation deck. He asked the concession stand to distribute free food and to give each person a few souvenir penlights, which they used to guide themselves down the pitch-dark stairways for 107 flights.
After that group headed for the stairwell, the first rescue helicopter landed on the south tower. By about 10 P.M., a dozen or so people were shuttled off the roof of that tower as well. Finally, when the building was clear, the pilot asked Hurley if he wanted a ride. He was the last civilian airlifted from the buildings.
From most perspectives, the 1993 bombing of the trade center, killing six people, had been a bleak moment, marking the arrival of terrorism in America. The rooftop rescues became one of the few bright spots in the early news coverage. The helicopter crews made the rounds on television. Nightline. CBS This Morning. While they were feted, fire officials seethed. In their view, the people atop the towers had never been in serious danger, not at least until the police helicopters scooped them off the roof in windy conditions. A month after the bombing, the New York City Fire Chiefs Association sent Mayor David N. Dinkins a letter. “This was nothing more than sheer grandstanding, a cheap publicity stunt done at the expense of public safety,” the chiefs wrote. “The people removed via helicopter were in no danger until the Police Department arrived and gravely jeopardized their safety by this stupid act.”
The tenants simply should have waited for the smoke to clear and then walked down the stairs. At least, that was how the chiefs saw it.
Ludicrous, police officials said. People were trapped. Time was of the essence. Who knew at the outset how the building would handle a major explosion at its base?
No doubt some emergency-management experts would have sided with the fire chiefs, but it was hard to see their position strictly as a matter of principle or public safety, devoid of pique over the acclaim
the cops had received just for dropping onto the building tops in plain sight, while their firefighters invisibly trudged up and around 10 million square feet of office space. The Fire Department did not own or operate helicopters. On the issue of operating a sane, coordinated response, however, the fire chiefs had a strong point. Fire rescues were supposed to be their job. The police had never bothered to tell them what they planned to do, even though fire officials were supposed to have been in charge. The fire commissioner, Carlos Rivera, said, “Communications between the Police Department and the Fire Department were a problem at this incident.” When reporters asked a police spokeswoman about communications difficulties, she replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The following year, in an effort to stop the squabbling, the city officially restated its position on the use of helicopters at fires: Rooftop rescues would be a last resort. If undertaken, they would be performed by firefighters, not the police. The firefighters would be carried to the roofs by police helicopters, which would be summoned to the scene by fire officers. There would be joint training runs so that the two agencies could work smoothly together when the time arose. Over the years, though, the commitment waned, and training became sporadic. Nevertheless, memories of that day remained vivid for veteran firefighters.
As Captain Fred Ill of Ladder Company 2 in midtown responded, he radioed the dispatcher. “I know you have your hands full with the trade center,” he said, “but keep in mind about the helicopter units that have been trained for this. They didn’t do it the last time, with the last explosion at the trade center. In case nobody prompts you on that. We do have these helicopter units that are available.” Captain Ill himself had done the training. It was the first of several reminders he sent to the dispatchers.
