by Dwyer, Jim
“Roko, take your time,” John said. “You are going to have to make your way down the stairwell.” Camaj’s response was inaudible.
Many others who had climbed to the roof of the south tower were also heading down, though not because they knew of a stairway that would carry them past the smoke and flames. They were simply trying to find a suitable place to make their last stand. Frank Doyle and the some of the other traders from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods struggled back to a conference room on the 88th floor. Doyle called his wife, Kimmy, from a working phone.
“Hi, sweetie,” he said. “We need your help. We’ve tried getting out on the roof but the doors are locked.”
More than a dozen people from the firm were with Doyle, including Rick Thorpe and Stephen Mulderry, who had been on the phone with his brother, Peter, just before the south tower was hit. Only one phone worked and each person used it to make his essential calls. Stephen called Peter again.
“Hey, brother,” he said.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” Peter responded.
“I’m really not,” Stephen said.
He recounted their failed attempts, both up and down, to escape. He asked for his mother’s phone number because she had recently moved, and he had not committed the new number to memory. And he told Peter he loved him.
“Are you sure there’s no way out of that room?” Peter asked.
“No, like I told you, we tried everything,” Stephen said. “We’re just going to wait for the firemen to come get us. But it’s a long way for them to come, and the smoke’s really bad. Some people are talking about throwing the fire extinguisher through the window, but I know that will be the end of us. But if someone panics and does it, there’s nothing I can do.”
A few minutes later, the phone was passed to Rick Thorpe, who called his wife, Linda, at a neighbor’s house. Earlier in the day, after the second plane had hit, Rick and Linda had agreed that she would go there with their baby, Alexis. He would call when he knew more. But when the phone rang this time, for some reason, Rick could not speak.
“Hello—Rick—Rick,” Linda called into the phone.
There was no response, but Linda and her neighbor could hear the ambient noise from the conference room. People were coughing as it filled with smoke. They were having trouble seeing across the room.
“Where is the fire extinguisher?” someone said.
“It already got thrown out the window,” came the reply.
“Is anybody unconscious?” asked someone else.
Linda and the neighbor could not hear an answer.
The voices of some of the people sounded calm. Others trembled with strain. One man began screaming, the words lost to anguish. Another man tried to console him.
“It’s okay,” the man said, soothingly. “It’ll be okay.”
10
“I’ve got a second wind.”
9:15 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
The street screamed. Fire trucks rolled in, and ambulances, and police cars, each with its siren spinning alarm into the sky. Another irregular wall of sound came from two-way radios, with hundreds of voices crashing through the aural pipelines. In the middle of the commotion, Gerry Drohan, a construction inspector from the Port Authority, stood on a sidewalk outside the trade center with an ear to his walkie-talkie, and immediately recognized one voice the moment he heard it: a slightly nasal tone, scented with the accents of a youth in south New Jersey, near Philadelphia, and adulthood on the streets of Brooklyn. In a riot of sound, Frank De Martini’s voice was calm and collected. “Construction manager,” he said, identifying himself. “The elevator … the express elevators could be in jeopardy of falling. Be prepared for that. Do you copy?”
The words were calibrated precisely to the task. De Martini was issuing a warning; then he continued what he, Pablo Ortiz, and a few others had been doing for the past half hour, methodically freeing scores of people trapped from the 90th floor down, in offices and elevators just below the impact zone in the north tower. They had been efficient, De Martini and Ortiz, working with a crowbar and a long flashlight, as if rescuing people were the jobs that they had been hired for. The truth was that neither man had a role in the official evacuation or emergency plans for the buildings. Their regular job was to oversee tenant renovations, with De Martini supervising a team that made sure all changes met Port Authority standards. Both men knew the building, how it worked, and in some ways, they loved it. They were trying to leave, but kept stopping to clear floors. Now De Martini and his crew had reached the 78th floor and its sky lobby.
De Martini got no response to his warning about the express elevators, at least none that could be transcribed from the radio tapes. Around the same time, he issued another request. “Any construction inspector at ground level,” De Martini called out.
Drohan was at ground level, having left the 88th floor of the north tower before the first plane hit, thinking he had just enough time to run a simple errand. His daughter had given him a couple of rolls of film to get developed, and he hoped to drop them off, then make it back by 9:00 for an inspection in the south tower of renovations done in the offices of Aon Insurance. All his plans had come to a halt at 8:46, when the first plane struck.
From the street, with no access to television, Drohan assumed that something had exploded in a mechanical room. Then, for one of the few times in his life, he was paged by his wife, who told him that a plane had struck the tower. She was glad to find him already outside. A few minutes later, the second plane crashed into the south tower. Around 9:15, Drohan heard De Martini over the walkie-talkie.
“Any construction inspector at ground level.”
Drohan acknowledged that he was on the street.
“Can you escort a couple of structural inspectors to the 78th floor?” De Martini asked.
De Martini had seen something in the steel—Drohan was not sure what—that he did not like. The drywall had been knocked off parts of the sky lobby, exposing the elevator shafts, and revealing the core of the building. That had prompted his first radio alert, warning that the elevators might collapse. Now De Martini wanted inspectors from a structural engineering firm to come up to the 78th-floor sky lobby and take a look. He thought Drohan could bring them into the building.
“I can’t get back into the building,” Drohan replied. “There’s a police line.”
De Martini did not settle easily. This, after all, was a man who had once stood on the roof of his restored brownstone in Brooklyn to make sure firefighters did not damage it when they were attacking a blaze next door; a man who had chased down litterbugs on the street to reproach them and point out the error of their ways. He had even faced down a burglar in his own house.
“Let me talk to a police officer,” De Martini said. “Can you give the radio to one of them?”
For Frank De Martini to be worried about the structural integrity of even a small part of the World Trade Center was a giant leap. At his most expansive, De Martini could hold forth to young and old on the wonders of the place, the mighty machines that moved fresh air around the buildings, the giant pipes that carried water from the Hudson River for the cooling plant, the emergency generators that would keep computers running should all else fail. A group from his old high school in New Jersey had visited earlier in the year, and he gave them the tour of a proud insider. He also had been interviewed for a documentary about the trade center for the History Channel. Many of the old-timers at the trade center had not been interested in being filmed—perhaps they were tired of telling their stories—but De Martini relished the opportunity to show off the buildings. He had a fresh eye for the towers, and was himself a newcomer by Port Authority standards, having first worked at the trade center on a three-month assignment after the 1993 bombing. His job was to assess the damage and the progress of repairs, a task he performed for the Port Authority’s consulting engineer, Leslie E. Robertson, who had been part of the team that did the original structural design for the towers dur
ing the 1960s. Given the conditions at the trade center after the bombing, De Martini had to make a standing start from chaos, a posture that he relished.
In those months after the 1993 bombing, De Martini, like many others, also absorbed some of the reassuring, even comforting lessons that were drawn from that first attack. The towers had proven their resilience. The bomb parked in the basement had done tremendous damage all through the confines of the garage, of course, but each tower had proved itself an unflinching colossus. Leslie Robertson was so taken with the strength of the buildings he had helped design in his youth, he arranged to ship a 14,000-pound steel brace that had been blown off the base of the building to his weekend home in Connecticut. There he mounted it on a pedestal in the yard. The point of this industrial sculpture was not the salvaged metal, but its evocation of the Olympian indifference of the structures to a blast that had been powerful enough to tear off a seventy-five-foot column. It was as if the Titanic had hit the iceberg and still steamed on to New York.
On the morning after the 1993 bombing, Robertson explained to a reporter that the bombers had parked the truck against the base of the north tower, on its south side—a spot that a layperson might have thought just right for knocking the north tower onto the south. The engineer had made a point that morning of reiterating one of the most striking claims about the strength of the towers, and it was one that Frank De Martini would recall nearly eight years later, when he was interviewed in January 2001 for the History Channel documentary about the towers. “The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it,” De Martini said. “That was the largest plane at the time.”
Videotaped at his desk on the 88th floor of the north tower, where he was flanked by a series of framed photographs showing the towers as they rose during the 1970s, De Martini offered a simple but illuminating analogy to explain how that could be true. The answer, he said, was the pinstriped columns around the outside of the towers.
“I believe the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door, this intense grid,” De Martini said. “And the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing the screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.”
That interview had been recorded in January. Now, eight months later, and thirty minutes into the crisis on September 11, De Martini wanted the structural inspectors up to the sky lobby, to look into the gaping holes. And if Gerry Drohan could not talk his way past a police officer, De Martini was ready to give it a try from the 78th floor. As it should happen, standing directly in front of Drohan was a senior police officer—an inspector, Drohan guessed, from the white uniform shirt.
Drohan approached the officer, told him about De Martini, and handed him the radio. The policeman talked to Frank, for a moment. Then he handed the walkie-talkie back to Drohan. No way was he getting across the line.
“We’ll have the Fire Department take care of it,” the officer said.
Rather than being rebuffed, De Martini appeared to have been reminded of something. He had to warn firefighters that the elevators looked extremely fragile. Fifteen minutes after his first warning, De Martini broadcast another.
De Martini: Construction manager to base, be advised that the express elevators are in danger of collapse. Do you read?
Male: [inaudible]
De Martini: Relay that, Chris, to the firemen, that the ele—
Male: Express elevators are gonna collapse? … Advise … What elevators? … All express elevators? Which specific … specific ones? [pause]
Male: [inaudible]
Far from the clamor on the street, De Martini faced another crisis on the 78th floor. Still trapped in an elevator was Tony Savas, a seventy-two-year-old inspector who worked on De Martini’s construction team. Savas’s predicament had been discovered early, since many of his colleagues from the 88th floor had passed through the 78th-floor sky lobby during their descent, and a number of them had made futile attempts to open his elevator doors. Savas had sent a message over his radio that was cool in syntax but urgent in content: there was smoke coming in. Word of his trouble had gotten back to De Martini and Ortiz while they were still prying open doors on the upper floors and leading people to safety. They made their way down to 78.
Among the other people on the 78th floor was a young security guard, Greg Trapp, who had moved to New York after serving in the army, to pursue a life in acting and to make his own movies. Earlier in the summer, he had started working as a guard at the trade center, catching any available shifts. That morning, he drew a post at the sky lobby, where he steered people transferring to an elevator for Windows on the World. (The elevator that ran directly from the ground to the restaurant was out of service, necessitating a transfer at 78 for the last leg of the journey.) Hundreds of people were expected for the Risk Waters conference at the restaurant, but only eighty-one had arrived when the first plane hit. In those early minutes, Trapp and a tenant had gone up to about the 84th floor, the first reentry floor from the stairway, and rousted some people from an office.
When he returned to 78, Trapp saw a group of three Port Authority employees at work on the doors to the elevator where Savas was trapped. Trapp peered into the small gap and saw Savas, a man with thinning white hair, seemingly serene. The Port Authority workers all knew him, Trapp noted. That was not surprising: Savas loved coming to work, rising at 5:45, and every couple of years, he promised his wife that he would retire—in a couple of years. Now the colleagues who knew him so well would try to get him out.
Unlike others who had passed through the floor and made a few fleeting efforts to pry open the doors, this group was consumed with the task of opening them. The project challenged their brains and brawn. They managed to move the doors an inch or two, but they knew that the safety locks would not yield easily. Tough as it was, this was work they could do. What could they use for tools? A few feet away was a sign, directing visitors to the elevators for the lobby. It stood on a metal easel. To hold the doors apart, one of the men grabbed the easel and wedged the legs into the little opening. That did not solve the problem: spreading the doors from the bottom, where they seemed to have the greatest leverage, had the opposite effect at the top of the doors, which seemed to pinch tighter. The doors also had an electronic lock at the top that kept them from opening if the car stopped more than a few inches from the landing.
John Griffin, who had started work during the summer as the trade center’s director of operations for Silverstein Properties, the new leaseholder, came over to the elevator bank. At six feet eight inches tall, Griffin had no problem reaching the top of the elevator door to apply pressure as the others pushed from the bottom, and to manipulate the locking device. The doors popped apart.
Out came Savas, who was surprised to find Griffin, his new boss, involved in the rescue. Rubbing his hands together, Savas appeared exhilarated, possessed of a sudden burst of energy, or so he seemed to the security guard.
“Okay,” Savas said. “What do you need me to do?”
One of the other Port Authority workers shook his head. “We just got you out—you need to leave the building.”
No, Savas insisted. He wanted to help. “I’ve got a second wind.”
The identities of the three Port Authority employees who freed Tony Savas are uncertain, but a number of circumstances—including subsequent photo identifications by Greg Trapp—suggest that Frank De Martini was definitely among the three. Trapp also remembered a man with an earring. Pablo Ortiz wore an earring. The third person may have been Pete Negron, a Port Authority employee who worked on the 88th floor but had not been there when the plane hit.
John Griffin, whose height had been so essential to opening the doors, moved to a bank of pay phones and tried to make calls. Over a walkie-talkie, Trapp thought he heard a transmission that firefighters had arrived on the 78th floor.
Griffin decided that he would go look for them.
“Do you wa
nt me to come with you?” asked Trapp.
No, Griffin said, he should stay.
Griffin disappeared down corridors, scouting around the oneacre floor, in search of the firefighters. He came back a few minutes later. Perhaps they had heard wrong.
Trapped in another elevator, on the 50th floor of the north tower, the six men in car 69A had been working steadily, urgently, for more than a half hour to get out. So far, they had torn and punched through nearly three inches of drywall. One more gouge, and surely they would be free.
Just as the towers were cut off from the outside world, even deeper levels of isolation were nested inside the buildings. About one-quarter of the space in each tower consisted of the core, which contained the shafts for the elevators. Deeper still were the elevator cars: cloistered boxes inside the shafts inside the towers.
The array of ninety-nine elevators in each of the towers had been the engines of wonder, making the impossible height of the trade center simply another few minutes tacked on to the workday commute. This morning, the flaming balls of fuel, in pursuit of oxygen, raced up and down the shafts in the two buildings, burning many people in the cars, killing some immediately. The concussions blew off elevator doors and shaft walls on the top thirty to fifty floors of each building. Even in the ground-floor lobbies, doors flew off. In the north tower, in the shaft for the express elevator dedicated to serving Windows on the World—and thus one of the few that ran uninterrupted from the bottom of the building to the top—the burning fuel seemed to hurtle through like a bullet in the barrel of a long rifle. The lobby doors shot off their frames. The elevator system that had made the trade center and buildings like it possible had become the carrier of devastation.
