by Dwyer, Jim
More than a century earlier, as New York City’s population was exploding, the contours of Manhattan Island meant that the city could grow in only one direction—up, the same direction that many other cities, for one reason or another, would also take. Before tall buildings could become part of the landscape, New Yorkers had to be convinced that they could reach high floors without climbing; conversely, they also had to believe that any machine that carried them to a high place would not simply plunge to the ground if it failed.
In 1854, Elisha Graves Otis, standing on a platform, was hoisted by a rope higher and higher above a crowd that had gathered at New York’s Crystal Palace for an exhibition organized by P. T. Barnum. The platform rode along tracks at either side. At the top, Otis drew a knife and slashed the hoist rope, presumably all that kept him from falling back to earth. Instead, the car dropped, then came to a halt, thanks to the automatic safety braking system Otis had devised from a ratchet and the spring of a wagon wheel.
Over the decades, engineers developed multiple elaborations of the Otis principle: to make falling all but impossible, one system stopped the car if a cable was cut, and another returned it peacefully to its lowest floor and opened the doors. These features were naturally incorporated into the elevators at the trade center.
The most necessary innovation for the twin towers, however, was the creation of the express and local systems, with the sky lobbies at the 44th and 78th floors serving as transfer points. This cut down on the number of elevators. It also created one final depth of isolation, as the experience of the six men in car 69A showed.
At 8:46, just seconds before the first plane hit, the six men—Jan Demczur, George Phoenix, John Paczkowski, Shivam Iyer, Colin Richardson, and Al Smith—had boarded the car at the north tower’s 44th-floor sky lobby, most of them having just stopped at a cafeteria on 43 for breakfast. Phoenix, a Port Authority engineer, was carrying coffee, milk, and a Danish pastry. Demczur, a window washer, had an old green bucket, its rectangular mouth perfect for his squeegee. Car 69A was a shuttle that picked up passengers at 44 and then made stops between 67 and 74.
The car rose, but before it reached the first landing, the men felt a muted thud. The elevator swung from side to side, like a pendulum. Then the car seemed to plunge. Someone punched an emergency stop button, and the car halted. They got a recorded response telling them that their message had been received, and that help was on the way. No one knew what was going on; the men in the elevator were as cut off 500 feet in the sky as if they had been trapped 500 feet underwater.
After ten minutes, a live voice delivered a blunt message over the intercom. There had been an explosion. Then the intercom went silent. Smoke began seeping into the cabin. One man cursed skyscrapers. Phoenix, the tallest, poked for a ceiling hatch. Others pried apart the car doors, propping them open with the long wooden handle of Demczur’s squeegee. There was no exit. They faced a wall, blank other than a stenciled number 50. That particular elevator bank did not serve the 50th floor, so there was no need for an opening.
The six men were trapped by a feature of the trade center most cherished by its designers, and thoroughly despised by firefighters: the long elevator shafts devoted to express service. The firefighters’ objection was not to quick travel or efficient use of space; the problem was that the towers had no provisions for getting into the shafts anywhere but on the floors where the cars made regular stops. So for hundreds of vertical feet, the shafts ran “blind,” entirely closed by gypsum wallboard. To remove people from a car stalled in one of those shafts posed an enormous challenge: first, to find them—there were fifteen miles of elevator shafts in the towers—and second, to reach them. After the 1993 bombing, the United States Fire Administration collected reports from the supervising chiefs, and all expressed frustration with the design. “The blind shafts in the WTC extended 78 stories,” Deputy Chief Steven C. DeRosa wrote. “Firefighters had to open the shaft every five floors to locate a car—it was impossible to see more than six floors into the blackness. Some local building codes require openings into blind elevator shafts at three-floor intervals; this feature was not provided in the case of the WTC.”
Now, inside car 69A, Demczur felt the wall. His fingertips told him it was drywall. Having worked in construction after he first arrived in the United States from Poland, he knew that it could be cut with a sharp knife. A quick survey of the car found that no one had a knife. From his bucket, Demczur drew the only available sharp edge: his squeegee. He slid its metal edge against the wall, back and forth, over and over. He was spelled by the other men, and they scored deeper and deeper. Blinking and coughing in the smoke, they breathed through handkerchiefs moistened in the container of milk that Phoenix had just picked up in the cafeteria.
Sheetrock comes in panels about one inch thick, Demczur recalled. The men cut an inch, then two inches. Demczur’s hand ached. As he carved into the third panel, his hand shook; he fumbled the squeegee and dropped it down the shaft. Now he had one tool left: a short metal squeegee handle. The men carried on, with fists, feet and handle, cutting a jagged rectangle about twelve by eighteen inches. Finally, they breached the last layer of Sheetrock, only to hit a layer of white tiles. A bathroom. They broke the tiles. Smith squeezed out first, then went into the hallways—where, remarkably, he immediately boarded another elevator that brought him down from 50 to the 44th floor sky lobby. There, catching his breath, was Mike McQuaid, the electrician who had been on the 91st floor installing fire alarms when the plane hit. McQuaid rode back up to 50 with Smith. In the bathroom the other men were still squirming, one by one, through the opening, headfirst, sideways, popping onto the floor near a sink. Demczur turned back. “Pass my bucket out,” he said. By then, about 9:30, the 50th floor was already deserted. They hustled into the staircase.
On the single-file descent, someone teased Demczur about the battered old bucket he insisted on bringing. “The company might not order me another one,” he replied.
Not all the elevators stopped in blind shafts. For that matter, not all the elevators stopped. An instant before Flight 175 hit the south tower, an express elevator left the 78th floor, bound for the lobby, packed with passengers including people from the research department of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, and others from Aon. The plane’s impact severed the cables to that car, and it began what felt like a free-fall, plunging toward the lobby. Here was a nightmare that long ago seemed to have been written out of the myth of tall buildings. The people inside dropped to their knees. As the car fell through the shaft, screeching, it slowed, then rumbled to a halt, when one last emergency system kicked in: a brake that stopped them about ten feet above the lobby.
Inside, about twenty-five men and women lay in a tangle of twisted metal, in absolute darkness. Someone, they were sure, would realize they were stuck and get them out. They waited. One person pulled out a laptop, switched it on to provide some light. The box that had been the elevator car seemed crushed. Maybe five or ten minutes later, when flames began to lick into the bottom of the cab, a keening began.
“In the name of God,” a voice wailed. “In the name of God. In the name of God.”
Then, with a shift in smoke, or less dust, they could see something: a little shaft of light. At the base of the car, the violence had peeled back the remnants of the door ever so slightly, revealing a glimpse of the lobby beneath them. Alan Mann, an executive with Aon, climbed to the front across people sprawled on the floor, and used his left hand to yank at a piece of metal. In some order, three people were able to get out of the car. Linda Rothemund of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods squeezed through, lowered by the people inside. She saw no one in the lobby, then ran into the concourse for help. Mann tried to go headfirst through the hole, and could not, but was able to wiggle through feetfirst, dropping into the lobby with his pants in shreds, his shoes gone, his left hand cut deeply on the metal. He saw few people in the lobby, then wandered into the concourse, spotting four firefighters, and led them back to the car. Then he stumbled out toward
Church Street.
Finally, Lauren Smith, also of KBW, pushed through the same hole, but when she hit the ground in the lobby, pitched into an exposed elevator shaft. Her fall was broken by a beam in the shaft, fracturing five of her ribs and puncturing a lung. Her drop into the elevator shaft entered the annals of the catastrophe at 9:39, thirty-seven minutes after Flight 175 had hit the south tower, fifty-three minutes into the crisis.
PAPD Officer Thomas Grogan: Two World Trade Center, probably 3-10 level [the lobby], a female fell through the shaft. They need somebody to see if they can get her.
PAPD Officer Ray Murray: Two World Trade Center, fell through the shaft.
PAPD Officer Thomas Grogan: Two World Trade Center, I don’t know what car, though.
PAPD Officer Ray Murray: Okay.
In a few minutes, Linda Rothemund returned. Help was gathering. Ron Hoerner, a supervisor for the private security guards, peered into the elevator shaft. Eight or ten feet down, Smith grabbed a cable and pulled herself up high enough so that the people in the lobby could reach her. She remembered being hoisted by a “human ladder.”
Another message went out over the radio.
PAPD Officer Thomas Grogan: She’s in the lobby, they … they actually have her, they need EMS. They [inaudible]
PAPD Officer Ray Murray: Okay, lobby, she’s in the … all right, Tom, I’ll tell them.
Smith moaned. Hoerner summoned James Flores, a Summit Security guard who usually served as quartermaster for the operation, distributing the blue blazers and clip-on ties to the 300 guards who worked at the trade center. After the plane hit the south tower, Flores had gone to the mezzanine, where two of the stairways terminated, and was among the volunteers and rescuers who had steered the evacuating people toward the escalators that would bring them to ground level.
Hoerner beckoned Flores to Smith’s side.
“Hold her hand,” he ordered. “Don’t let go.”
In search of help Hoerner hustled over to a silver door that led down a few flights to a basement communications center, and Flores glanced at him vanishing behind the door. A moment or two later, a paramedic appeared, but he had no gurney. Everyone agreed that Smith needed a backboard of some kind. A few Port Authority police officers appeared. Flores watched as one of them, a man with powerful arms, walked over to the concierge table. Covering the tabletop was a long, sturdy piece of glass. The officer picked up the glass and brought it to the elevator bank. The paramedic slipped it behind Smith, then had her roll onto it. Atop a piece of glass that rested at its four corners on the shoulders of three Port Authority officers and the paramedic, with James Flores lending a hand to keep it in balance, Lauren Smith left the World Trade Center for the last time, traveling through the concourse that took her east, to Church Street, where ambulances were waiting. Back at the elevator, firefighters were struggling to open the doors of the elevator she had managed to slip from.
Even cars whose cables were severed by the planes behaved normally, at least in part: they came to a stop, just as Otis and his successors had planned. Two other safety features—one that failed, and one that worked—cost lives. By law in New York City, elevators are equipped with sensors that are designed to return elevator cars to their lowest floor, and open the doors. Cars did return to their original floors, but in many cases, perhaps most, the doors did not open. Others simply stopped in blind shafts.
Perhaps the most lethal safety features were the resistors, which prevented doors from opening if the car stopped more than four inches from a landing. After gruesome elevator accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, the city codes required that resistors be installed on all doors, beginning in 1987. The requirement was updated in 1996. The elevator mechanics who worked at the trade center felt they were dangerous because they were so unforgiving, often requiring a mechanic to go to the roof of the cab to unlock the device if the elevator could not be moved back to level. Still, the Port Authority had promised after the 1993 catastrophe that it would strictly abide by building codes, and after internal debate, the resistors were installed, along with less controversial items like backup battery power for the lights and communications systems.
The two buildings were staffed by eighty elevator mechanics, but all of them left the trade center after the second plane hit. Initially, in the early moments of the attacks, they had started assembling in the lobby of the south tower, but when that building also was struck, they moved their meeting point to a spot across the street from the trade center, and then even further clear of the chaos, to the South Street Seaport, several blocks away. Many of the same mechanics had been part of the laborious 1993 evacuations, going to machine rooms, where they slowly moved the counterweights on cars stuck in blind shafts by the loss of electrical power. Now, however, that cadre of skills had moved outside the buildings—just as they had in 1993. The mechanics planned on reentering when the situation stabilized, as they had in the 1993 crisis, but events were moving too fast this time for any civilians to get back in.
Those who remained in the building improvised. On his way down from the 91st floor, shortly after Flight 11 had hit the north tower, Mike McQuaid, the electrician, heard the voices of two men in an elevator on the 82nd floor that had not stopped properly. The doors were shut tight by a resistor. McQuaid and his partner, Tony Segarra, managed to wedge it open a few inches. The men inside fretted that McQuaid and Segarra would dislodge the car and make it fall, so they slapped their hands away. They preferred, McQuaid would remember, to wait for rescuers to come up and get them.
To protect people in the long blind shafts, a city task force in the early 1970s required that consoles be set up in lobbies that would permit tracking of the location of the elevators. Francis Riccardelli, the chief elevator manager for the towers, was in the south tower lobby, answering a stream of intercom messages from people who were trapped in the cars and looking for help. As he worked, a fire alarm went off in the building, with a piercing, whooping noise. He sent a radio message to the command center in the basement.
Riccardelli: Maybe we can turn off that alarm, people are in there crying for help, everybody is, like, stuck.
Male: Copy, what alarm is that?
Riccardelli: The fire alarm!
Male: Copy. [pause]
Riccardelli: Copy, they haven’t been getting out at all! [echoes] We’ve got people trapped above the 89th floor, we’re trying to [inaudible] right now.
Some people trapped in the cars managed to get calls to the 911 system, the staccato messages recorded by the operators not even specifying which tower was involved.
Female caller states they are stuck in the elevator. States they are dying. Between 84th and 87th floors. Fire Department notified. Need respirator.
On the 71st floor of the north tower, Bob Eisenstadt and Frank Bucaretti, from the Port Authority’s architecture team, were trapped in an elevator car. A group gathered outside, including a man from Bank of America and nine other Port Authority employees. Despite all their efforts, the resistor would not allow the door to budge more than a few inches. They jammed a paper puncher into that tiny space to keep it open. Eisenstadt knew where tools could be found—in the architectural model shop a few steps away.
“I can see a cable up here that’s holding—if I can cut it, it will open,” Eisenstadt said. “Go to the model room, get me a wire cutter or a cable cutter.” Mark Jakubek and a few others went to the model room. High and low, they hunted but could not find the toolbox Eisenstadt had in mind. Instead, Jakubek found a post from an office partition, and brought that over—maybe, he thought, that would give them another lever. Even that turned out to be not much use against the powerful resistors. Jakubek returned to the model room but still could not find the toolbox. Back at the elevator he stood on a couch to work on the upper part of the doors, which seemed to be the spot where they were most tightly bound. Then out of nowhere, it seemed, a stranger appeared and tapped Jakubek on the shoulder. He held a wire cutter with red handles. Jakubek p
assed it to the men inside the car.
Someone warned that the job had to be done carefully, because the cable might be under high tension and could snap. Eisenstadt made the cut, the door slid open, and he and Bucaretti emerged to great jubilation. It had taken a squad of strong men, with access to a toolbox, nearly half an hour of pushing, searching, and snipping to open just one stuck elevator. The complex had 197 others.
Farther up in the north tower, having freed Tony Savas from the 78th-floor elevator, Frank De Martini and his men kept finding tasks requiring their attention. Around 9:38, fifty-two minutes after Flight 11 hit, Pete Negron began hunting down a Port Authority colleague, Carlos DaCosta, who had stayed behind on the 88th floor. DaCosta had been reluctant to leave the Port Authority office, thinking the safer course was to await rescuers to bring everyone downstairs. To clear the smoke, he had smashed open an office window, cutting himself badly.
After most of the people had left the 88th floor, DaCosta apparently changed his mind about staying, because he made his way down to the 87th floor, where he was involved in this exchange:
Pete Negron–Environmental 96: Environmental, 9-6, Carlos DaCosta.
[alarms, noise]
Carlos DaCosta: Go, please, Pete!
Pete Negron–Environmental 96: Carlos, your location?
Carlos DaCosta: I’m up by 87, with a couple people! Trapped in the, the elevator! In the 92 area!
While the transcript could be read to suggest that DaCosta himself was trapped in the elevator, that is highly unlikely, since he had been seen by at least a dozen people on the 88th floor, well after the plane had struck. Moreover, his reference to the “ninety-two area” appears to be elevator car 92, which did not stop on the 87th floor. At that point, car 92 ran in a blind shaft, and the shaft itself was within the walls of a bathroom. Because so many people had been trapped in blind shafts during the 1993 attack, the Port Authority had installed alarm bells, to provide some way of audibly signaling the location from inside those shafts. The people inside the 92 car may well have rung their bell, which would have permitted DaCosta to hear them.
