by Dwyer, Jim
Panes of glass from the upper floors, near where the plane had hit, kept shattering in the plaza outside the lobby of the north tower. Each time, the noise was startling, like a cymbal shot, and with each crash, several firefighters in the lobby looked up anxiously at the ceiling. Many of the fire companies now arriving were from outside Manhattan and, to them, the trade center was an unfamiliar place, a maze of exits and entrances and buildings that looked alike. Some of the companies assigned to Tower 2, the south tower, were mistakenly reporting to Tower 1, so Chief Pfeifer told his aide to write the words Tower 1 with a marker on the command desk in the north tower. Indeed, so many companies went to the wrong building that the commanders in the south tower ultimately ordered another whole set of companies to respond from their firehouses.
Inside the north tower lobby, around 9:15, about a half hour after the first plane struck, someone asked Pfeifer if he had put the helicopter plan into effect, and Pfeifer began looking for one of his radios. Although the city had bought radios that were supposed to make it possible for the Fire and Police Departments to communicate, the agencies could not agree on which one was in charge of the frequencies. So they remained unused. Instead, the fire commanders had to contact their own dispatchers, who would forward the request to the police. The police helicopter crew would then arrange to pick up the firefighters at a landing zone. But Pfeifer couldn’t find the radio he needed to talk to the dispatcher, so he tried the phone. Some of the lines were dead. When he finally found a live line, he got a busy signal. Cell phones weren’t working, either. With his options declining and other crises tugging at his sleeve, Pfeifer moved on to the next task. He figured that the commanders outside, the bosses who were running the department’s overall operations, had probably ordered up the helicopter already. In fact, they had not.
The police aviation team had been anticipating a call from the firefighters, but when they did not hear from them, they just flew on. The Police Department’s team of high-rise experts mustered to a landing zone near the building, preparing in case they were ordered to rappel down to the roof. But the chief of the department, Joseph Esposito, decided that the smoke and heat were too much. At 9:08 he had spoken over the police radio. “I don’t want to see anybody landing on either one of these towers,” he said.
It was a decision that would be revisited, but not revised, that morning. “Did we get anybody on the roof of either building?” an ESU cop asked over the radio about twenty minutes later. “Negative,” responded the dispatcher. “Nobody is landing on the roof up there.”
“Well,” the cop continued, “as soon as that clears up, we need people on that roof.”
The need for intervention was horribly apparent to Semendinger, Hayes, and the other pilots watching the fires advance through the upper floors and seeing people on those floors hanging out of the windows. One pilot, Officer Yvonne Kelhetter, hovering off the north tower, got on the radio at about 9:30. “About five floors up from the top,” she said, “you have about fifty people with their faces pressed against the window trying to breathe.”
Ten minutes later, an officer in the field sent a radio message to one of the teams that were trained to drop from a helicopter: “You’re on your way to rig the helicopter. We need you on the roof as soon as possible.”
In the north tower, where the plane’s wingspan had spread from the 93rd to the 99th floor, the heat and smoke were far more intense than in the south tower, where the impact zone was fifteen to twenty floors lower, from the 77th to the 85th floor. The people had hurled chairs and computer monitors and anything they could find to break the windows to get air, with the unfortunate effect of drawing fire closer to them and to others above them. On the 110th floor, Steve Jacobson, a broadcast engineer for WPIX-TV, had a breathing pack in his office, a piece of precautionary equipment distributed after the 1993 bombing. But in a telephone call to a colleague at the station, Victor J. Arnone, he said he could not make it to the roof.
“It’s too hot in the hallway,” he said. “I can’t leave the room. Get me out of here. Send help.”
The first people had been seen falling from the north tower at 8:48 or 8:49, two or three minutes after the crash of Flight 11, men and women at the seat of the inferno of jet fuel. The early plunges were less deliberate, more reflexive, like a person recoiling from a hot stove. To get away from the heat, they did not have to fight their way through fire and flame. The side of the building had been ripped open. Alone or holding hands, they climbed onto windowsills, the only refuge from heat and smoke.
A man. A woman. A man and a woman together.
Later, the people on the upper floors of the north tower retreated into rooms and sealed the doors, but the smoke was relentless, pushing them against the windows—windows that could not be opened. As the smoke and flames moved through the buildings, scores of people called 911 to ask permission to break the windows. No, the operators said, that would make matters worse. Then the people called again, to say that matters were getting worse. On the other side of the room, they said, people had already broken windows. And they were jumping.
When the smoke parted for a moment, Richard Smiouskas could see that not everyone was consciously jumping. Smiouskas, a fire lieutenant and departmental photographer, had climbed to the roof of a building across West Street from the trade center and was watching the developments through a long lens. He saw a man standing in a window frame on a high floor in the north tower. Around him were five or six other faces, crowded into the same narrow window frame. Then the man pitched forward, nudged, it seemed to Smiouskas, by others crowding for a mouthful of air. As the desperation rose, it was impossible not to remember that a drowning person will push a lifeguard under water if it means one more gulp of air.
So urgent was the need to breathe that people piled four and five high in window after window, their upper bodies hanging out, 1,300 feet above the ground. They were in an unforgiving place.
On one of the top floors—104 or 105—two men, one of them shirtless, stood on the windowsills, leaning their bodies so far outside that they could peer around a big intervening column and see each other. On the 103rd floor, a man stared straight out a broken window toward the northwest, bracing himself against a window frame with one hand. He wrapped his other arm around a woman, perhaps to keep her from tumbling to the ground.
That people were falling and jumping from the north tower was evident, not only to onlookers but also by the accounts of callers from within that building. Conversely, there is evidence that only a few people jumped or fell from the south tower. Why people would jump in greater numbers from one building than the other reflects the different paths that the crisis followed in each place. Both towers had similar volumes of smoke and heat, but because of where and when the planes hit, the impact zone in the south tower was not as crowded. Flight 175 had hit the south tower roughly seventeen floors lower than Flight 11 had hit the north tower. And because evacuation had started in the south tower before the plane hit there, fewer people remained in the impact area. In the north tower, about three times as many people were confined to roughly half the space.
From the 101st through the 107th floors of the north tower, nearly 900 people were trapped in the office of Cantor Fitzgerald, and just above it, in Windows on the World. In the restaurant, at least seventy people crowded near office windows at the northwest corner of the 106th floor, according to accounts they gave relatives and coworkers. “Everywhere else is smoked out,” Stuart Lee, the Data Synapse vice president, quickly typed in an e-mail to his office in Greenwich Village. “Currently an argument going on as whether we should break a window,” Lee continued a few moments later, “Consensus is no for the time being.” Soon, though, a dozen people appeared through broken windows along the west face of the restaurant.
By now, fires were rampaging through the impact floors, darting across the north face of the tower. Since most of the space was open, the flames consumed the furnishings—about 20 minutes for eac
h area—then moved on to the next reservoir of fuel. Coils of smoke lashed the people braced around the broken windows.
In Cantor Fitzgerald’s northwest conference room on the 104th floor, Andrew Rosenblum and fifty other people temporarily managed to ward off the smoke and heat by plugging vents with jackets. “We smashed the computers into the windows to get some air,” Rosenblum reported by cell phone to Barry Kornblum, a colleague who was not in the office.
Rosenblum called his wife, Jill, calmly discussing the situation. He did not mention that people were falling past the windows, but in the midst of speaking to her, he suddenly interjected, without elaboration, “Oh, my God.”
Many of those who did not jump or fall from the windows were heaped in stacks along the frames, just as another generation had at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire ninety years earlier. This time, helicopter pilots broadcast descriptions of what they were seeing.
Kelhetter: Aviation 3 has a couple of people hanging off the windows about five floors from the top. There’s at least fifty people hanging on.
An officer on the ground radioed the helicopters. They could see a man poised on a high ledge.
Ground: Definitely outside the building. Do you have an eyeball on him?
[inaudible]
Ground: He’s the one with the white shirt. We’ve been watching him for about a good five minutes, he’s … completely outside of the yellow line.
Kelhetter: All right, let me go pass one more time.
Ground: Right about the center of the building, looks like he’s got on black pants and a white shirt.
Kelhetter: Is he below the fire line?
Ground: Affirmative … . You see where that white flag is … . He’s directly below that white flag but several floors below it.
Kelhetter: We’re about 1,200 feet. Have him in view from 1,200 feet from the ground, whatever floor that would be.
Ground: But you definitely see him, he’s there by himself, correct?
Kelhetter: He’s standing there by himself.
Ground: All right, 10-4. Thank you. I’m going to go over to … and try and let them know inside.
From his helicopter, Greg Semendinger saw just the highest order of desperation. Get to the roof, he wanted to yell, as he flew closer to the building. Another order came from the ground, this time from an ESU lieutenant, Steve Reardon:
Reardon: Be advised that no one is to rappel onto the top of the building.
The dispatcher had a hard time repeating his words precisely.
Dispatcher: Units … no one is to compel [sic] on top of the building, no one is to compel on top of the building.
But Semendinger held out some hope. From his vantage point, the northwest corner of the north tower roof was pretty clear of smoke. Unfortunately, the automatic window-washing machine had stopped on its rooftop track at that precise location, making a landing impossible. The ESU cops would not be able to climb down on ropes, as they had done in 1993. It was too dangerous, given the smoke and heat. The only remaining option, and it was a long shot, would be to lower the hoist and perhaps pull up a few people from the roof. It would take patience. Only two people at a time could be lifted because of the 600-pound weight limit. And the group would have to be orderly, to police itself. Even then it would be difficult. The cable might snag one of the rooftop antennas, tethering the ship to a burning building. Or the heat rising from the inferno might thin the air, weakening the updrafts that helicopters need to fly.
Semendinger knew that if anyone did make it to the roof, imploring him for help, he would face a torturous choice. His life. The lives of his crew. Those of the people on the roof. As it turned out, the decision was made for him.
Locked. The doors were locked. They had traveled all the way to the roof, in the smoke, up the stairs, and it was a blind alley. Sean Rooney from Aon; Roko Camaj the window washer; Frank Doyle, Rick Thorpe, and Stephen Mulderry from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Dozens of people in the south tower had tried to get to the roof, only to find their way blocked.
The situation was identical in the north tower, where a man trapped in the stairwell at the 103rd floor exploded over the radio. “Open the goddamn doors,” he yelled into his walkie-talkie.
In the south tower, Sean Rooney pounded on a door. It wouldn’t move, he told his wife, Beverly, by phone. She told him to try it again while she waited on the line. They had been high school sweethearts and had just celebrated turning fifty together with special vacations to Vermont, to mark Sean’s birthday, and Morocco, for Beverly’s. When Sean returned to the phone, he told Beverly the door still wouldn’t move. “Tell me what you see on TV,” he said. He needed her to figure out how the flames were advancing in the building. He was on the 105th floor on the north side of the building, he told her calmly. That was seven flights above his office. He had already tried to go down without success. Now he couldn’t fathom why the doors leading up would not open.
While she listened, Beverly dialed 911 on another line. The operators who fielded her calls and others’ said that emergency crews were on their way. Hang in there. No one had told the operators that stairway A in the south tower—the one that Richard Fern and his Euro Brokers colleagues had gone down—was open, so they could not tell anyone inside the building to use it. Instead, while they spoke, the operators typed shorthand versions of what they were hearing onto a computer screen.
2 World Trade, 105th Floor. People trapped. Open Roof to Gain Access.
The Port Authority had been locking the roof doors for decades. Agency officials said that controlling access to the space allowed them to thwart vandals, daredevils, and suicides. True, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the two towers had cast a magical aura on what had been seen as dour architecture, but the Port Authority did not want its roofs turned into permanent stages for people with grievances, exhibitionist impulses, or a desire to hurt themselves. Some managers for companies on the upper floors clearly understood the off-limits policy. Many people, inside the building and out, did not. The ex-firefighter Bernie Heeran had couseled his son, Charles, to go to the roof. After all, the city building code required that people be able to get onto roofs during an emergency. The roof access doors had to be left unlocked. If they were connected to a buzzer system, they were supposed to be fail-safe—meaning that they would automatically unlock if power failed or calamity struck.
The trade center, however, was exempt from the code. The Port Authority had decided to lock the doors and the Fire Department had chosen to go along with that decision, believing that such a policy would reinforce its message that down was the proper way to evacuate in a high-rise fire. As a result, three sets of doors blocked access to the roof in each tower. A person who climbed to the top of the stairs at the 110th floor needed an electronic swipe card to get through the first two. That put the person in a tiny vestibule facing a third door that opened to the stairs leading to the roof. To get through the final door, a person had to be buzzed in by security officers who watched on a closed-circuit camera from their offices on the 22nd floor of the north tower.
Marie Refuse, one of the security officers on duty in the 22ndfloor center, was still at her desk at 9:30. She spoke with Ed Calderon, a supervisor, whose radio code was S-5.
Marie Refuse: Would you like me to release all doors and gates?
Ed Calderon: That is affirmative. This is the S-5, that is affirmative.
Marie Refuse: That’s a copy, we’re doing it now.
There was a problem: the computer that operated the doors was not working properly. ACCESS DENIED, the screen blared. The security agents on 22 could not open the doors to the roof, or to the floors just below it, which were mechanical rooms and also required electronic access. For that matter, they could not even open their own door, from the inside. A deputy security director, George Tabeek, led a team of firefighters up to the 22nd floor in hopes of getting them out.
George Tabeek: We’re on 16 right now.
Marie Refuse: That’s a co
py. We can’t use the software right now to try to release the doors.
Roko Camaj, the window washer, had both the authorization and the swipe card, but he couldn’t make it onto the roof, either. He told relatives by phone that he was stuck on the 105th floor with 200 other people. He never specified why he could not get to the roof. Perhaps Camaj and the others had gotten as far as the 110th floor, but the first floor they could call from was the 105th because that was the nearest stairwell door that would open. Camaj used his radio to call down to a colleague at the Port Authority operations desk. The colleague, John Mongello, told Camaj they needed his exact location. The 105th floor, Camaj told him.
“You coming up here?” Camaj asked.
“I don’t think so, Roko,” John said. “I’m going to talk to someone. They may have to find another way to get you.”
“A lot of people up here, and big smoke,” Camaj responded.
John told Camaj he should get down as far as the 98th floor. The stairwell was clear from there down. Somehow the operations desk knew about stairway A, which had not been severed by the plane, the one that a few others had been using to flee. The information had otherwise not circled back upstairs. Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath and Rich Fern, among others, had escaped down stairway A of the south tower from above the crash zone. While some people in the command center at the trade center seemed to know about it, and spoke about it on their walkie-talkies, they could not communicate with the ordinary tenants on the upper floors. Those people did not know that there was a way out by going down—that there was, in fact, a passable staircase. Most of them were dialing not into the basement command center but into the city’s 911 call center—and no one there was aware of the escape route.
