by Dwyer, Jim
When the evacuees reached the escalators back up to Church Street, they were now the equivalent of two blocks away from the burning buildings they had fled. As they ascended, they passed a Borders bookstore that filled the prime retail space at 5 World Trade Center, at the corner of Church and Vesey Streets. Several Shop the World banners hung overhead, to mark the entrance to the underground mall. As the evacuees crested at street level, rescuers led the injured and weak into ambulances. To the people coming up the escalators, these officers were as essential as the railings on stairs. Sgt. Robert Vargas of the Port Authority police had not expected to see singed hair and lacerations and peeling flesh. For many, despair had set in. Now, as Vargas stood by the escalators watching the line pass, he lectured himself to stay strong. He represented order, security, even sanity, at this point. He could not show fear, he told himself, only calm and self-control.
Upstairs in each of the towers the evacuation was nearly complete, at least on the floors below where the planes had hit. Most of the middle floors were empty and the first cadres of firefighters were largely alone on the stairs as they made their way past the 30th floor. For many of the tenants, crossing paths with the firefighters was a moment of surging, sustaining emotional power. Of course, most people had gotten to the stairs and down on their own; they had relied on each other to claw colleagues out of elevators. They had, in large measure, rescued themselves. Yet the sight of the firefighters selflessly ascending to rescue those who could not leave, to save the building from whatever hell was now consuming it, was a mighty antidote to the dread so many had felt. The firefighters did not earn in a year what some baseball players got for a game, but here they were, charging into the teeth of the fire, driven by a collective sense of duty that tempered their individual fear. Firefighter Michael Otten of Ladder 35 climbed the stairs in the south tower toward an uncertain future while his brother-in-law, the stockbroker at Mizuho also known as Michael Otten, walked down, toward home and family. If the two men took the same stairs, they did not see each other as the two lines passed, firefighters to the right, evacuees to the left. People patted the firefighters on the back. God bless you. Thank you. Be careful. Some firefighters remained stoic. Others made jokes—sometimes, the same joke. Steve Charest, a broker from the May Davis Group, carried a golf club down the north tower stairs from his office on the 87th floor. A fireman noticed it as he passed.
“Hey!” he said. “I saw your ball, a few flights down.”
A few floors down, more firefighters were coming up. One of them took a look at Charest’s club. “I saw your ball,” this fireman said. And, yes, it was a few flights down.
The firefighters felt fear, of course. They just didn’t discuss it much. Worrying was counterproductive, and they generally buried their anxieties beneath a gruff jocularity that treated each job as just another hellhole. Firefighter Joseph Maffeo of Ladder 101 took the extra precaution of carrying a can of tuna with him as he reported for his assignment in the Marriott Hotel. Maffeo always carried tuna to a fire. It was his meal, he told people, if he ever got stuck in something weird, like a building collapse, and had to wait to be rescued. Capt. William Burke Jr. of Engine 21 also prepared for whatever the morning might hold. He called a friend, Jean Traina, twice from inside the north tower, assuring her that he was safe and asking her to call his sister in Syracuse and other family members to spread the word. His voice sounded calm, Jean thought, for a guy at one of the biggest building fires in history.
“Please stay safe,” she told him.
“This is what I do,” Burke replied.
As fit and focused as many firefighters were, many were overmatched by the lengthy climb with their dozens of pounds of gear. Sharon Premoli, the financial executive whose spirits had been buoyed by the security guard singing a hymn on the 44th floor, noticed the exertion on their faces as several firefighters passed her on the stairs in the north tower around the 35th floor. Many of the firefighters were flushed and sweating, and Premoli knew that they were not yet halfway to her office on 80, let alone to the fires raging above. In the steaming heat of the stairwells, the office workers had ditched their jackets and loosened their ties, but the firefighters still wore their bulky coats and leather-clad helmets. Inevitably, the radio channels rippled with reports of firemen having chest pains. Engine 9. Squad 18.
At the 19th floor, dozens of exhausted firefighters were taking a breather, a startling sight to Capt. Joseph Baccellieri of the Court Officers Academy and the two sergeants, Andrew Wender and Al Moscola, who had rushed into the building with him. On their way up, the three court officers had been hopscotching floors with firemen they met on the stairs. They’d search one floor. The firemen would take the next. Most of the floors were empty, except for stragglers who seemed incapable of leaving their computers. When the court officers got to 19, they saw crowds of firefighters lying in the hallways, jackets and helmets off—a surprising gathering, but then Baccellieri felt hot, too, wearing only a light shirt and pants. The 19th floor, it seemed, must be the place where people hit the wall when they climb stairs and are clad in fifty-six and a half pounds of coat, helmet, and boots.
On the 31st floor, a dozen firefighters slumped in the hallway. Firefighter David Weiss, a member of Rescue 1, yelled down stairway B for help. A cop, Dave Norman, heard him and called back. He’d be right up. Norman was an ESU officer assigned to Truck One and trained as an emergency medical technician. ESU cops typically did not ticket cars or make arrests. They rescued people, which made them among the most popular cops in the city—popular with everyone but firefighters. ESU rescue efforts at emergencies such as explosions and auto accidents, where firefighter rescue units thought they were in charge, were the single greatest point of friction between the two agencies. Mayors over the years had tried to iron out the differences, with little success. The jurisdictional lines were left too fuzzy to ever settle the dispute.
On September 11, though, no one was jostling in the north tower stairwell. “Norman, is that you?” Weiss yelled down the stairs. Indeed, the two men knew each other. Norman’s brother, John, was a fire chief who had once been assigned to Rescue 1. Norman pulled the medical gear from his pack. The ailing firefighters had their coats and helmets off, and their T-shirts were wet with perspiration. Some were dehydrated and were having trouble breathing. Others were having chest pains—so many, in fact, that a commander chastened them over the radio not to clog the airwaves with their complaints. Norman began administering oxygen and checking their vital signs. The setting was too somber for intramural rivalries.
Four floors below, in the 27th-floor offices of Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz were still waiting to evacuate. Nearly all the people from 27 had already left, as had nearly all the people from Empire, which had 1,900 employees spread across ten floors. Indeed, most of the lower floors of the north tower were clear by 9:30. But with the elevators apparently out and Beyea confined to a heavy, motorized chair, it would take several sets of strong hands and backs to carry him down, and the firefighters were busy now, still pushing their way upstairs toward the fire.
The broken elevators had become traps not only for people who were stuck inside them, but also for those who could not get on them, like Ed Beyea. More modern, super-tall buildings had created special refuge elevators, with more durable construction, to serve rescuers and the disabled during emergencies. That had not been part of the practice during the late 1960s, when the final details of the trade center plans were being worked out.
As they waited for help, Beyea and Zelmanowitz moved about the 27th floor. They had been to the stairwell, to the elevator banks, and to a conference room where a firefighter told them to stuff wet rags underneath the doors. Several people did what they could to make those left on the floor comfortable. Anthony Giardina, an electrician who worked in the building, passed out Snapple and water from a hallway vending machine. Firefighters poured the drinks over their heads. One firefighter looked at Zel
manowitz as they stood together in the landing for stairway C. Zelmanowitz could have left much earlier, but the fire upstairs in the north tower seemed far away, the danger distant.
“Why don’t you go?” the fireman asked.
“No, I’m staying with my friend,” he replied.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people fleeing the north tower had seen the pair as they walked past them on their way to the lobby and safety. Keith Meerholz took a long look at Beyea and Zelmanowitz when the line of evacuees paused as he approached the 27th-floor landing. Meerholz, who worked for Marsh & McLennan, had been in the 78th-floor sky lobby when the first plane hit. He had been scorched by flames that spit from an elevator door. He then raced down the stairs, unimpeded, until he hit pedestrian traffic around the 38th floor. Now, as he approached 27, he could see that the fellow in the wheelchair was younger than the man who stood with him. Maybe, Meerholz thought, he would help carry the paralyzed man down, get some help from one of the other young men in the stairway. But the firefighters seemed to have reached the 27th floor in great numbers now, peeling off to take a break and to replenish their wind. When Meerholz shuffled onto the landing, he ducked out of the stairs and onto the floor behind one of the firefighters. Perhaps the firefighters would have more solid information about what was going on—a bomb, a light plane, a helicopter—than Meerholz had picked up in the stairwell chatter.
“What happened?” Meerholz asked.
The fireman was bent over, panting.
“A plane hit each tower,” the fireman said. “But don’t tell anyone.”
Meerholz understood. The news could start panic. He felt charged with the urgency of getting out, and he turned back into the stairway, joining the slow, downward shuffle. The firefighters were on the scene. No doubt, they would take charge of the man in the wheelchair.
Downstairs, in the north tower lobby, Chief Pfeifer took an occasional glance up at the mezzanine level, where people shuffled toward the escalators. The view served as a scorecard of progress. The early, longer lines meant the floors above were still far from empty. Later, thinner lines showed progress. It was good, he thought, to see the windows on the mezzanine, which earlier had been blocked by the fleeing crowds.
A few feet away, at the fire command desk, Port Authority officials spoke into the elevator intercom system, trying to reach anyone trapped in one of the ninety-nine elevators. “Is anyone in the car?” they said. “If you can’t speak, hit the panel.” One by one, they had been trying to contact each of the cabs, using a command board designed to show them where each one was stuck. Less than 100 feet away, though, stuck at lobby level in an elevator with six other people, Judith Martin, the woman who had lingered downstairs to have a cigarette, could not reach anyone who could help her.
Martin and her fellow passengers had tried pushing the alarm buttons, talking into the intercom, screaming at the top of their lungs. All they got was a recording that told them someone would be coming soon. At first, this did not seem like cause for too much concern. The elevator, an express to the 78th floor, had shaken for just a second after they had pushed the button to ascend. Some in the car thought they had gone up briefly before falling back down, perhaps as far as the basement. Certainly the elevator had bounced a bit, but then it just sat there. Inside, cut off from the turmoil that surrounded them, the seven passengers viewed it as just a particularly rotten start to an otherwise normal day.
When their initial efforts to pry open the door were unsuccessful, the seven of them, four men and three women—Dana Coulthurst from Judith’s office at Marsh & McLennan, Mike Jacobs, Keith Ensler, Ian Robb, and a man and a woman whose names didn’t stick with Martin—sat on the floor, trying to talk over the wailing alarm. One man read their horoscopes aloud from a newspaper. Another sat quietly and read his book. Martin eyed the coffee that one of the other women was carrying and joked that it was always nice to share. A trickle of water and white dust seeped into the car from the ceiling. Every once in a while, someone would get up and start yelling for help. No one seemed to hear them, though, except for Chris Young, a man who was alone in another express elevator that was also stuck, doors closed, in the north tower lobby. Through the walls Martin, Young, and the others exchanged what little information they had with each other. They promised that whoever got out first would make sure that rescuers knew someone else was trapped.
Young had been on his way down from 78 when his elevator suddenly shook and bounced to a halt, knocking him to the floor. His intercom system was working, however, and after fifteen minutes someone said that help was on the way. No one had come for the people in either elevator, though, and by 9:30, forty-four minutes after their ordeal had begun, their anxiety was deepening.
In Martin’s elevator the mood had darkened considerably after the second plane hit the south tower. Martin and her colleagues in the elevators had no sense of what was actually happening outside. But they felt the second jolt, and it shattered the notion that this was some routine mechanical slipup. “Whatever it is, it’s bad,” said Keith Ensler, an ex-Marine who had been reading a book. From outside the cab, Martin heard sharp clanging sounds and small booms, as if they were at a construction site. Her fear rose with the noise. It was time, everyone decided, to get serious about opening those doors.
Ensler, who was wearing hiking boots, gave the doors a mighty kick. Mike Jacobs, an investment banker, saw a faint light in one of the cracks of the doors and began to pry them a bit. Working in tandem now, the men opened them wide enough to realize that they were in the lobby. Finally, the interior doors released. The second set was slightly easier then the first, and when they pushed them apart and walked out into the lobby, they found it humming with police and firefighters. Jacobs’s first thought, when he saw so many emergency personnel within spitting distance of their elevator, was to raise a little hell. “What’re you doing?” he asked an emergency worker in a blue T-shirt and green hard hat. Then the enormity of what had happened began to seep in. “Keep going. Keep going,” the officials said. So the group started walking out of the building. But first a few of the people stopped to tell officials about Chris Young. He was still stuck behind them, in an elevator right near them, in the lobby. The rescuers nodded, okay, okay. But ten minutes later, Young was still alone in the car, trying to keep himself occupied and calm. It was disturbing, though, that no one answered when he called out to the other car.
Just before 9:30, a new note of alarm swept through the north tower lobby. Richard Sheirer, the director of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, came hustling across the floor, holding his radio and yelling in the direction of Thomas Von Essen, New York’s fire commissioner.
“Tommy,” he called out. “We got report of a third plane.”
In the skies above the trade center, Greg Semendinger, the police pilot who was circling the buildings in his helicopter, told his dispatcher the same thing.
“Central,” he radioed, “be advised there may be another aircraft inbound. There may be another aircraft inbound. La Guardia is tracking a fast-mover moving inbound.”
More terror. Federal aviation officials had already closed the airspace around New York to civilian traffic, but thousands of planes were still in the air across the country. It was impossible to say which of them might also be turned into missiles. Moreover, air-traffic-control officials in New York knew no more about the attacks than anyone watching television—and sometimes, less. Controllers at La Guardia Airport, unaware of the hijackings, had continued to send out flights until 9:07, five minutes after the second plane had struck the south tower, and nearly an hour after the first plane had been hijacked. The air-traffic-control system was highly balkanized, with little interaction between one region and another, so as the airborne siege spread across the skies from New England to the Midwest, word of what was unfolding did not spread.
Communications were also poor between the Federal Aviation Administration, which controlled air traffic, and the military
guardians of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.
Air controllers did not realize that at that moment military jets were racing down the Hudson, in pursuit of the first two hijacked planes; they knew only that streaks on their radar screens showed an aircraft moving at extraordinary speed. Thus, the warning that La Guardia was tracking a fast-mover, heading inbound. That the report was false was of no moment. To those at the foot of the gaping, roaring buildings, nothing was beyond belief.
A strike by a third plane would slaughter the rescuers who had gone up the stairs and the tenants coming down, Deputy Chief Hayden thought as he stood in the lobby. The buildings might even fall. Some police officers who had been preparing to go inside paused, as commanders sought a better read on just what was going on. Rescuers inside just looked at one another and kept working. Many cleared out of the lobby, some of them relocating to West Street, where the Fire Department had set up a command post that would oversee the response in both buildings.
“I need the military,” Sheirer barked into his radio to a subordinate. He also wanted a message sent to the police helicopters circling overhead. Tell the pilots, he said, that under no circumstances could they allow another plane to hit the towers. Since the helicopters were not loaded with weaponry that could actually bring down a 767, what was Sheirer actually asking them to do? Fly into the path of a jumbo jet? Later, he would cite the order as a mark of the desperation that swept through the lobby in those moments. Just a few feet away, the stress was visible on the face of the Rev. Mychal Judge, a Fire Department chaplain. His clerical collar and white fire helmet made him stand out in the crowd as he paced the floor, his lips moving in prayer as if to gain additional potency by speaking the words aloud. In his face, a certain remoteness had taken hold, as if he were engaged in a dialogue that was taking place outside the burning building.
