102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

by Dwyer, Jim

  His friend Pete Negron—somewhere downstairs, quite possibly with De Martini and Ortiz—decided to give DaCosta a hand.

  Pete Negron: What floor are you on?

  Carlos DaCosta: I’m on 87 right now, Pete.

  Pete Negron: All right, I’m on my way up.

  Carlos DaCosta: Roger, thank you!

  By now, the 78th floor was quiet. The tenants from the upper floors were no longer passing through the sky lobby on 78 as they switched stairwells. One of the Port Authority workers turned to the security guard, Greg Trapp.

  “Why are you up here?” he asked.

  “I’m with Summit Security,” Trapp said. “They told us to hold our posts. I figured I might as well do something.”

  “You get on your radio and find out if they need you up here,” the Port Authority worker said.

  “Okay with me,” Trapp said.

  Greg Trapp: Hey, 63, this is security officer on 78 sky lobby. [alarms heard in background]

  Female: Mr. [inaudible], where’s your [inaudible]?

  Greg Trapp: Seventy-eight sky lobby. Seventy-eight sky lobby!

  Female: That’s a copy. Are you okay, sir?

  Greg Trapp: Yes, I am. Yes, I am. What do you want me to do?

  Female: If it’s possible, 10-6, try to keep your air clear, and we’ll send somebody up to you as soon as possible, you copy?

  After some consultations, the dispatcher came back to Trapp. They would not be sending someone up to get him.

  “Mr. Trapp, can you go to a stairway and walk down?” she said. “If you have a stairway to walk down, please take the stairway down, do not take the elevator.” As she spoke, the claxon alarm bellowed in the background of the 78th floor. Someone else chimed in with another piece of advice.

  “A and B stairways,” the dispatcher said. “You can take them, it’s clear.”

  And one final instruction came: “Sky lobby, if he has someone with him, tell him to take those people with him.”

  With that, Greg Trapp turned for the stairs. It was now 9:49, sixty-three minutes since the first plane had struck the north tower.

  For practically everyone still in the towers, including the men on the 78th floor with Trapp, who knew the buildings as well as anyone, the notion that they might collapse would have seemed farfetched indeed. As the towers deteriorated, people who chose to stay—as opposed to those trapped in elevators or on the upper floors—did so for many reasons. Almost universally, it seemed, they did not think the buildings could fall.

  Whatever worries Frank De Martini and his crew had about the building, they most likely concerned local problems they saw on the 78th floor, not its survival. De Martini had heard the founding dogma about the strength of the trade center: planes could hit them, and they would still stand. He, too, believed it.

  As the security guard Greg Trapp walked into the stairs, he saw the Port Authority workers heading toward the other end of the hall, in the direction of another staircase. The evidence suggests that Tony Savas, having been rescued from the elevator, stayed some few minutes longer, as did John Griffin, before both men began to descend toward the lobby.

  There was no further word or sightings of Pete Negron, thirty-four, father of two; or of Carlos DaCosta, forty-one, father of two; or of Pablo Ortiz, forty-nine, father of two; or of Frank De Martini, forty-nine, father of two—four men who worked anonymously for a faceless government bureaucracy. On the morning of September 11, 2001, they tore open walls with crowbars and shined flashlights and pried apart elevator doors on the 90th, 89th, 88th, 86th, and 78th floors, saving the lives of at least seventy people in the north tower. When last heard from, they were on their way to try to free more, no doubt believing that the building they were in would last long beyond their own old age.

  11

  “I’m staying with my friend.”

  9:20 A.M.

  SOUTH TOWER

  Eighty floors later, walking in the new shoes he had retrieved from under his desk in the Mizuho offices, Stephen Miller glimpsed the outside world again. Sunlight dulled by smoke filtered through the windows of the mezzanine, the spot where he and thousands of others emerged from the stairs of the south tower. Two of the building’s three staircases ended at the mezzanine, and after spending more than half an hour in the stairwell, much of it waiting for the line to move, Miller hoped for a quick exit from the burning building. Instead, traffic slowed.

  The mezzanine overlooked the lobby like a choir loft, running along the perimeter of the building. From the mezzanine, there were only two ways out. One set of doors opened in several places onto the plaza of the complex, the public square of the trade center where on sunny days people gathered for concerts and al fresco lunches. Now, however, it was filled with flaming debris and bodies, which were continuing to drop from the upper floors of the buildings. One Port Authority police officer thought he saw thirteen people jump in just a matter of seconds. Minutes before, a firefighter, Danny Suhr of Engine 216, had been struck and killed by a body falling from the upper floors.

  A Critical Juncture in the Escape

  Sources: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; survivor and rescue worker statements

  The mezzanine doors led into that killing rain of people, fire, and debris. That left one other way out: an escalator that ran from the mezzanine to the lobby at street level. The motorized stairs quickly became the choke point of a funnel. The escalator was only wide enough for two, so the line of evacuees stretched back in an orderly but tense queue. No one this close to safety wanted to dillydally, including Miller, who felt quite satisfied with his intuitions at this point. He had almost gone back upstairs with the others when the public-address system in the south tower said that it was safe. But he had not felt completely right about it, so he turned around and left. As a result, he had been on the 55th floor when the second jet ripped through the offices of his company on 80. Now, with his feelings proving 100 percent reliable, Miller had another one. He felt like clapping his hands, and so he did, rhythmically. It was nervous energy. He wasn’t trying to tell anyone to hurry up, at least not consciously. He was just having a hard time keeping himself occupied while he waited.

  Someone yelled, “Shut the fuck up.” A man glared at him and he stopped. In New York you could do a lot of unusual things in public places and people barely noticed. At a time of crisis you waited quietly in line.

  This was the rapid, full-building evacuation that had never been written into the trade center’s design or into the manual of its daily operations. Total evacuations were not part of life in tall buildings in the United States, so the plans did not envision thousands of people weaving down the three staircases in each tower. Yet it worked. Security guards and Port Authority workers and police officers rose to the moment to serve as human guideposts, to steer the evacuating tenants down what was not so obvious at all, the last few hundred yards toward safety. There had been no drills for this. No one had the duty of running such a full-scale evacuation because it was never supposed to take place. In a wave of improvisation, people had gone to these critical spots and saved lives by simply pointing their fingers.

  Taking an Underground Route to Escape

  The shopping concourse below the World Trade Center served as an essential escape route that allowed for the quick evacuation of both buildings. Two of the three stairwells in each tower ended at plaza level where the exit doors opened onto falling debris and carnage from the buildings. To avoid a logjam, rescuers directed people down and through the concourse, an underground route that offered protection from the dangers on the plaza above.

  Sources: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; LZA Technology; survivor and rescue worker statements

  That did not mean there were not lingering, frustrating delays. The injured could walk only gingerly or with the help of others. The stairwells had twists and turns that no one had anticipated because, as in most buildings, tenants had never actually been required to make a practice traipse down the
stairs. And in each lobby, the exits were taxed by the sheer volume of people trying to leave. Still, in comparison with 1993, when the evacuation down the dark and smoky stairs had dragged on for hours, from noontime into night, this one moved at lightning pace.

  The people fleeing in 2001 did not face oily smoke from the burning garage on the lower floors, as those in 1993 had. And the tenants had the advantage of the stairwell improvements made by the Port Authority. As a result, in less than an hour’s time, thousands of people, including many who had stared at their fingernails during fire drills, had successfully climbed down the stairs. That was the good news. Now they had to be routed down the escalators from the mezzanine to the lobby, and to do that, they had to get past the windows that looked out onto the plaza. The view froze many of them. The stairs had been windowless, the roaring fires unseen, the anxiety powerful but lacking shape. Now the evacuees found that however terrible the pictures playing in their heads on the way down may have been, the reality on the plaza turned out to be worse. Charred body parts. Shoes. Pieces of plane. Flaming debris. Luggage. A windowpane covered in blood. Red garments that looked as if they had been quickly discarded. In fact, they were what was left of people from the upper floors of the north tower. The impact on the evacuees was palpable. Some gasped. Cops at the top of the escalators thought they could see panic in their faces.

  “Don’t look. Keep moving. Keep moving,” yelled Capt. Tim Pearson of the NYPD as the crowd streamed by in the mezzanine of the north tower. He wanted to spare people the sights but he also wanted them to keep going. If everyone started rubbernecking, they would never clear the building. Ordinarily, Pearson supervised cops who patrolled housing projects in Brooklyn. His unit had been among those called in to lower Manhattan when the Police Department went on full alert. He had pulled up in a Ford Explorer at about 9:20, thirty-four minutes into the crisis, and had made his way into the north tower, where he found an eclectic collection of people helping with the evacuation. The group included police officers and firefighters, both off duty and on; people who knew the building well and people like him who did not really know it at all; civilians who felt compelled to get involved and ten-dollar-an-hour security guards who decided they could not just leave. Sue Keane, a Port Authority police officer, had been among the first to arrive at the mezzanine after running to the towers from her assignment at a Manhattan courthouse. Ken Greene, the Port Authority’s assistant director of aviation, had stayed behind to help after escaping from the 65th floor. Nelson Chanfrau, a risk manager for the agency, had raced in from New Jersey.

  Standing alongside Tim Pearson was another cop, his friend John Perry, whom Pearson had met by chance as he ran toward the buildings. Pearson and Perry had once worked alongside each other, pursuing cops with disciplinary problems. Within the Police Department, they were birds of a feather, independent types who stood out in a culture where conformity thrived. Pearson could be outspoken, a trait generally not viewed as a plus within the agency. Perry was an activist and an actor, a man who spoke five languages and had already earned his law degree. He was friendly with Norman Siegel, a former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and one of the department’s most vocal critics. Perry had only recently decided to leave the department to pursue a career in the law. Indeed, that morning he had been blocks away, literally handing in his retirement papers at Police Headquarters, when news spread that a plane had hit the trade center. Perry, in street clothes, asked the clerk for his badge back. He rushed downstairs to a police supply shop on the first floor, bought a thirty-five-dollar golf shirt with an NYPD logo and raced to the scene.

  Now Perry and Pearson were directing people as they came off the stairs toward the escalator. Some needed more assistance than others. A middle-aged woman seemed to suffer an asthma attack as she left the stairs. Her breathing became labored and she clutched at her chest. Perry and a few others picked her up and began carrying her as Pearson collected her belongings. They headed toward the escalator. There were medics in the lobby just one flight down. Help was only 100 feet away.

  When people reached the lobby of the north tower, they found their trip had one more leg that they had not counted on. The lobby doors that opened to West Street, to fresh air, indeed, to the very rest of their lives, beckoned. But just beyond those doors was a shower of debris, too much to make West Street a safe exit route. Instead, many people were directed south, through doors that led into the adjacent Marriott Hotel. There, hotel staff members steered people through the lobby and into the hotel’s Tall Ships Bar and Grill. An exit from the bar opened south onto Liberty Street, where a police officer stood at the door, watching overhead for falling debris. “Okay,” he’d say, and a few people would dash across the street. “Okay. Now,” he’d shout, and a few more would follow.

  While a thousand people moved through the hotel, most of the evacuees from the north tower were sent not into the hotel or onto West Street, but through a third set of doors. These led east, into the underground shopping concourse that stretched two blocks beneath the plaza of the trade center. Thousands of evacuees from the south tower were sent into the same concourse. Both groups were directed away from the buildings, through a maze of corridors and shops, by lines of cops and security guards stationed along the route, a human rope that people followed to the far side of the mall. Then they ascended on escalators into the bright sunlight of Church Street, the eastern edge of the trade center complex.

  The trip brought people past the landmarks of their daily lives: the newsstands where they bought breath mints; PATH Square, where commuters from New Jersey descended each night to commuter trains; a Warner Brothers store, where plastic statues of Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil greeted passersby. Most of the seventy-five stores had closed soon after the planes hit, giving the windowless concourse an eerie, tomblike quality as people sprinted through the corridors and sloshed through water that was ankle deep at points. Nonetheless, the mall served as a sanctuary, a tunnel that allowed people to flee, safe from the flaming debris and hurtling bodies that were pelting the plaza, just above their heads. The evacuees were like prisoners of war who burrowed far enough under the guard towers and barbed-wire fences of their camp to emerge in the safety of the forest beyond. This route was their Great Escape.

  That so many people were able to get out that way may have been due to revelations from the 1993 bombing. After the attack, a computer study showed that people had to travel too far to reach exits from the concourse, at least when measured against the requirements of the New York City fire code. To keep the promise of “meeting or exceeding” the code, the Port Authority’s executive director, Charles Maikish, and its chief engineer, Frank Lombardi, took over space occupied by a record store, a five-and-dime, a restaurant, a bankrupt department store. These were demolished and turned into corridors, part of $34 million in improvements to the concourse. They had done underground what could not be done to the towers themselves: given more people better chances to get out.

  Traveling against the flow of people in the concourse were five Port Authority police officers, wheeling a canvas laundry cart filled with Scott Airpaks, helmets, axes, and other tools. Sgt. John McLoughlin and four colleagues—Will Jimeno, Dominick Pezzulo, Christopher Amoroso, and Antonio Rodriguez—had collected the equipment in emergency-gear closets and were taking it to the north tower for officers waiting to go upstairs. Their supervisors were concerned about sending the officers in without the proper equipment. Some of them remembered how smoky the stairs had been in 1993 and did not think the rescuers would be much good without breathing apparatus. Four of the men walking with the cart were assigned to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown and had just arrived by bus at the trade center. The fifth, Amoroso, had started his day at the trade center and had already helped shepherd people from the building. He ran into Jimeno, his friend from the academy, as they passed each other in the concourse. McLoughlin, their leader, was a veteran of the trade center, a rescue specialis
t who had won a medal of valor for his conduct during the bombing and its aftermath in 1993. Now, as he led his team through the concourse toward the north tower, they had to weave through the great tide of people rushing in the opposite direction, toward safety.

  For all its activity, the scene in the concourse was still measurably calmer than it had been when the first plane hit. The corridors had been filled with people at 8:46—it was the middle of rush hour and thousands of people were arriving for work—and the noise and descending smoke when the fireball shot down the elevator shafts sent the crowd scurrying in all directions, as if a man waving a gun were walking the halls. A feeling of order, of composure, had settled in during the ensuing forty-five minutes. Some people were now so relaxed that police officer David Leclaire had to pull them off pay phones. There was no time for that. At PATH Square, an open space in the center of the shopping concourse, cops waved people past the escalators that descended to the PATH lines to New Jersey. Service on PATH and the city subway lines had already been shut down, the trains rerouted or canceled. The few PATH trains already en route at 8:46 had simply sped through the trade center station and headed back out without ever opening their doors, thanks to quick reflexes by the dispatcher.