by Dwyer, Jim
“Do you have any idea where a fire extinguisher might be?” the man in the bandanna asked. Wein pointed out one she had seen earlier, but the man found that it was useless. He pointed the way to the stairs.
“Anyone who can walk should leave now,” he said. “If you can help others to leave, help them.” Wein and Singer moved to the stairs, followed closely by Nicholls. All three of them were hurt but able to move. Paramsothy, who was in similar shape, decided to stay. Of the five Aon employees still known to be alive, Paramsothy and Rich Gabrielle, pinned under the marble, remained on the 78th floor.
By 9:30, most of the 6,000 people who had passed through the south tower turnstiles on their way to work had reversed course and left the building, or were about to. The evacuation from the south tower had been under way since 8:46. The evidence suggests that by this moment, about 9:30, fewer than 1,000 of the trade center workers had not yet left the building; of these, 600 would never leave. Perhaps 200 were already dead, killed when the plane hit. A few people, well below the fires, were still making their descent. Eighteen men and women who had been at or above the impact zone were making progress down from the 78th floor and higher—everyone from Brian Clark from Euro Brokers on the 84th floor, and Stanley Praimnath, from Fuji on the 81st floor, to the people who had been waiting on the 78th floor, Mary Jos and Ling Young and Keating Crown and Kelly Reyher and Donna Spera. Considering the trauma and their injuries, those eighteen moved at a strong clip.
The floors above the impact zone teemed with urgency. Even on the floors where the plane hit, pockets of survivors were struggling to find a way out, or to comfort people around them. On the 78th floor, despite the wholesale carnage of those waiting for the sky lobby elevators, survivors were creeping into the stairwells. The witnesses account for about a dozen people, alive but injured or tending to the injured. Farther above them were Jack Andreacchio and Manny Gomez, stuck in the 80th floor, in the offices of Fuji with three others. From the 88th and 89th floors came calls to 911 and to family members, reporting that at least one hundred people were alive, with sixty-seven of them employees of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, most of them traders. Some, like Linda Rothemund and Lauren Smith and their colleagues in the elevator that had nearly plunged to the ground, were trapped in the lobby.
Of the eighty-seven people who had come to work at the trading firm of Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor that morning, only twenty had left the building, or had gotten far enough down to have a clear path out. At Aon, 176 were still inside.
Around this time, Alayne Gentul of Fiduciary Trust, whose father had helped to build the trade center’s elevators, phoned her husband, Jack, who worked at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” Jack said.
“Well,” she said, “we came up to 97 to get tech support out. There’s smoke coming in, and it’s really hot out there.”
Before the second plane hit, Gentul and her colleague Ed Emery had ordered everyone off the Fiduciary floors. Emery had escorted crowds of them to the 78th-floor sky lobby. Then Emery climbed back up to the 90th floor, meeting Gentul. That very morning, a group from Fiduciary’s parent corporation, Templeton Strong, had come to the 97th floor for disaster backup planning. Before the second plane hit, Gentul and Emery had gone up there to lead that group out. Then they became trapped.
Emery climbed onto a table, trying to block smoke by stuffing the vents with a new jacket he had bought just that weekend. From his office in Newark, Jack Gentul called to members of the school’s security and engineering staff. They advised hitting the sprinklers, with a shoe or anything at hand. Nothing seemed to work. Jack Gentul also called the minister of their church, and they began a prayer chain.
Another Fiduciary employee on the 97th floor, Shimmy Biegeleisen, phoned his wife, Marion, at their home in Brooklyn. He was desperate. He told her that a group had tried to go upstairs, but found the way unpassable. Marion passed the phone to David Langer, one of a group of friends who worked in the neighborhood and had gathered at the Biegeleisen house. He patched in a local doctor, who advised wetting his clothes and using the dampness to filter the smoke. Biegeleisen was due to travel to Israel four nights later with his oldest son, to observe Rosh Hashanah. In the first several phone calls, he had been calm, but as the smoke advanced, his messages sharpened in focus, and rose in intensity: there was a clock running. He asked a friend, Jack Edelstein, to attend to some of his personal business. With every breath becoming a struggle, he asked Edelstein to pray with him.
“Why don’t you say it and I’ll listen and say it along with you?” Edelstein said.
“Of David. A psalm,” Biegeleisen began, speaking in Hebrew. “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it, the world and those that live in it … .”
Biegeleisen was using a phone plugged into back of a computer, bypassing the central phone systems that relied on the building’s electrical power, and he had to share it with others in the room. Ed McNally, the director of technology for Fiduciary, called his wife, Liz. He wanted to tell her some things. She and the children had meant the world to him. The papers for his insurance were in this file; other important documents could be found in another file. He had to go. He hung up, then called back a few minutes later. Liz’s fortieth birthday was coming up, and he had made plans to surprise her.
“I feel silly,” he said. “I booked a trip to Rome. Liz, you have to cancel that.”
His wife tried to shake that entire line of thinking.
“Ed,” Liz said, “you’re getting out of there. The firemen are coming up to get you. You are a problem solver. You’re going to get out of there.”
Over the radio, the fire dispatcher sprayed buckshot of information about the south tower onto the airwaves.
“Okay,” he announced. “The 82nd floor, west side; the 88th floor; 73rd floor, west side; 10th floor, east side; 104th floor, east side; 47th floor; 73rd floor, west office; 83rd floor, room 8-3-0-0; and 80th floor, northwest. That’s what we have at this time.”
These were not just numbers in a big skyscraper with metal pinstripes down the sides: these were pulse beats of people who had called 911 to report that they were present, alive, in trouble. To Orio Palmer climbing the stairs, the particular floor numbers did not tell him what he needed to know. As the chief leading the way up, he had a single task: to find out where the fire was, then to set up a command post two floors below it. From there, he would send firefighters to put water on any fires they could reach, and to clear a way for the trapped people. This was the Fire Department textbook on fighting high-rise fires, and Palmer knew it backward and forward. (As a sideline, he ran a small business tutoring other fire officers who were going to take the test for chief.) Some months earlier, a number of battalion chiefs had been reassigned, and Palmer was sent to the Bronx. He quietly lobbied to go back to Manhattan. After all, he had researched and practiced high-rise firefighting. He had made a study of the radio system inside Pennsylvania Station, the railroad depot where trains set off from New York for the whole nation. He got his wish, and was sent to Battalion 7, based in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.
Coming up the stairs was Ladder 15, a company based on Water Street, in the South Street Seaport district, and led by another officer devoted to skyscrapers, Lt. Joseph Leavey.
“Fifteen Irons to 15.”
The “irons” firefighter carries tools for prying open doors, and is always among the first up the stairs. That morning, the irons man for Ladder 15 was Scott Larsen.
“Go ahead, Irons,” Leavey said.
“Just got a report from the director of Morgan Stanley,” Larsen said. “Seventy-eight seems to have taken the brunt of this stuff, there’s a lot of bodies, they say the stairway is clear all the way up, though.”
“All right, 10-4, Scott,” Leavey said. “What, what floor are you on?”
“Forty-eight right now,” Larsen replied.
“All right, we’re coming up behind you,” Leave
y said.
The director of Morgan Stanley mentioned by Larsen was most likely Rick Rescorla, the firm’s director of security, who was instrumental in planning and then leading the firm’s mass evacuation from the south tower. Morgan Stanley had some 2,700 people based in the south tower, between the 44th and 74th floors, and Rescorla, who had served in Vietnam and was featured in the book and feature film We Were Soldiers Once … and Young, had been fixed on the trade center as a possible terrorist target. During the early part of the evacuation, someone took a photograph that showed him standing in the stairway at the 10th floor, with a bullhorn shouting encouragement. By the time firefighter Larsen crossed paths with Rescorla, all but a handful of the Morgan Stanley workers had left the building. Orio Palmer, moving up quickly, was not part of that exchange, but no doubt had tracked it on his radio. A moment later, he heard from Tom Kelly, the firefighter assigned to run the elevator that was shuttling fire companies from the lobby to the 40th floor.
“I got an engine company on 40, do you want them up there?” Kelly asked.
“Tell them we’re going to have to try to get the high-rise bank of elevators into operation,” Palmer said. “Until we verify the fire floor, we can’t do that.”
The process was logical. Before he could send up elevators, Palmer needed to find out where the fire was. Once he had confirmed the location, someone could tinker with whatever cars were still in running condition, and perhaps bring the teams up to the floors just below the fire. Palmer himself had been an elevator mechanic before he joined the Fire Department, but it was the kind of job that could be done by any number of firemen who were well versed in how things worked.
A few seconds later, Palmer called Kelly back. The chief apparently had gotten information from people in the stairways. He wanted to set up his command post on the 76th floor.
“Try to get down to the lobby and find out what bank of elevators terminates below the 76th floor,” Palmer said. “That’s the bank we’re going to want to use.”
“Ten-four,” Kelly said.
By 9:32, almost precisely thirty minutes after Flight 175 had struck the south tower, Ed Geraghty, the chief of Battalion 9, also had taken the elevator to the 40th floor, and was preparing to deploy his firefighters. He checked in with Palmer.
“What floor should we try to get up to, Orio?” Geraghty asked.
Palmer told him what he had just told Kelly: they needed to find elevators that would get them to the 76th floor. Otherwise, it was thirty floors or so of walking.
“I’m up to 55,” Palmer reported. He had covered twelve floors in his first ten minutes of climbing after riding the freight car as far as 40. At home, his favorite time to run in Hendrickson Park was the hottest part of the hottest days of the year; now he was climbing in turnout coat, boots, and helmet, with oxygen tanks strapped to his back. Even so, as he rose, Palmer seemed to find a new burst of speed in his legs, and after he reached the 55th floor, his radio transmissions mapped an ever-faster ascent. People were starting to come down the stairs, with word of a hellish sprawl of destruction on 78.
By about 9:35, Ling Young had gotten down to the 51st floor, then stood at the landing, her burned arms extended from her burned body. Her eyes were closed. Coming up the stairs were two fire marshals—Ron Bucca, trailed a few floors behind by Jim Devery, who had gotten into the building within minutes of the plane hitting, and had not used the elevator, but had walked up the steps. Devery noticed Young on the 51st-floor landing. She seemed ready to faint, but then launched herself toward the stairs. Devery, exhausted by the climb, decided to go down the stairs with her, to make sure she got out.
Not far behind them were Judy Wein, Gigi Singer, and Ed Nicholls from Aon. Around the 50th floor, they saw the first firefighters.
“What floor did you come from?” one of the firefighters asked.
“Seventy-eight, and there’s a lot of people badly hurt up there,” Wein answered.
Just those three people had enough injuries among them to keep a trauma ward busy: Ed Nicholls, with his nearly severed arm; Wein, with her collapsed lung, broken ribs, and torn arm; Singer, with serious burns.
The firemen looked at them. “Go to the 41st floor, there’s firemen there,” one of them said. “There’s an elevator to take you to the ground.” In fact, the elevator was on the 40th floor, but they would find it.
Even more people were coming down behind the Wein group. Lieutenant Leavey got on his radio. He wanted to make sure that Tom Kelly had the elevator ready.
“Tommy, listen carefully,” Leavey said. “I’m sending all the injured down to you on 40. You’re going to have to get them down to the elevator, there’s about ten to fifteen people coming down to you.”
“Okay,” Kelly replied.
“Ten civilians coming down,” Leavey said.
“Got that, I’m on 40 right now, Lieu,” Kelly said.
“All right, Tommy,” Leavey said. “When you take people down to the lobby, try to get an EMS crew back.”
“Definitely,” Kelly said.
The radios crackled with messages, the humming of a crisp high-rise rescue operation, all business from the mouths of Palmer, Geraghty, Leavey, Kelly, Larsen. Scott Kopytko was designated “roof man,” a title that at the trade center meant he would be trying to get up as high as possible, as quickly as possible. Douglas Oelschlager was the can man, bringing up extinguishers. They kept pace with the hard-driving Palmer.
They soon got bad news about the elevators: the people on the ground could not find working cars that would bring them above the 40th floor. “We’re going to have to hoof it,” Palmer said. “I’m on 69 now, but we need a higher bank.” It was 9:42. It had been ten minutes since the last report of his location, and he had moved even faster. He had covered fourteen floors in those ten minutes. They were going to get to the fire.
The elevator ride from the 40th floor to the lobby lasted no more than thirty seconds, so for Ling Young, Judy Wein, Ed Nicholls, and Gigi Singer, it was just another leg in their flight from the devastation of the 78th floor. They would remember little of the ride, or of the man who brought them down. Firefighter Tom Kelly struck people as the classic, ordinary working stiff. No one mistook him for a mythic fireman of steel. He did not run marathons in his spare time, but played outfield for a bar’s softball team. During television commercials, he did not do sit-ups, but often enjoyed working on a beer or two. After eighteen years as a firefighter, he had not climbed the promotional ranks, but put spare time and energy into a second job, as a construction worker. He had worked his entire career at the firehouse in the South Street Seaport, and knew the drill on high-rise fires. Now, a week before he was to turn fifty-one, he was among the oldest firefighters to go up in the south tower. As it happened, his knowledge of the trade center stretched back decades, to its beginnings.
On a late September night in 1971, he had taken a young woman from his Brooklyn neighborhood out for their first big date. Her name was Kathleen, known to everyone as Kitty. He brought her to the Copacabana, the storied nightclub in midtown Manhattan. To make the night even more special, they caught a cab and rode downtown to West Street, to the construction site where Kelly worked as an apprentice steamfitter, welding pipes and joints. It was long after regular work hours, of course, but he wanted to give Kitty a private tour of the colossus he was helping build. It was called the World Trade Center. He slipped a twenty-dollar bill to the security guard, who waved them inside. Then the guard thought of something.
“Hey!” he called. “Put a hard hat on your young lady.”
They took a construction elevator to the 40th floor of the south tower, and stepped into the steel skeleton. To leave a swanky nightclub for a raw, unfinished building hardly seemed like the classic gondola ride to romance. Yet from there, on the 40th floor, the world and all in it were spread before them. To the north, the sky was stenciled by the night-lit forms of office towers; to the west, the low plains of New Jersey glowed against the hor
izon; to the east and south, bridges twinkled. They were one hundred feet higher than the torch of the Statue of Liberty, just below them in New York Harbor. Kitty was nineteen. Tom had just turned twenty-one. They had become part of the city’s candlelight, in a building that was still being born. Six months later, they married. When construction slumped, and jobs for junior steamfitters were scarce, Kelly took a test to join the Fire Department, the better to support his family and two growing children. The firefighting schedule allowed ample time for a second job, so he continued to work steamfitting shifts whenever they were available.
Now, three decades after his big night out with Kitty, he was back in the trade center, once again on the 40th floor, collecting an elevator full of people—bleeding, broken, battered. The building he had come to in muscular youth was dying. Kelly’s lieutenant had sent word that ten injured people were coming down. He brought the first four to arrive, Ling Young (accompanied by Marshal Devery), Ed Nicholls, Gigi Singer, and Judy Wein, to the ground. Then he went back up.
The four people in the elevator were among eighteen people making their way down from the 78th floor and above; the fourteen others were moving at a remarkably strong pace that would bring them out of the building. Still others were trailing, but at a slower pace. Those first eighteen people, as they reached the lower floors and the lobby, brought hard-won intelligence on the state of the stairways. They had found a way past, a seam in the destruction. Above the fire were hundreds of people who were not on their way, who believed they were stranded—some had gone to the roof, others believed the stairs down were fraught with danger.
Richard Fern, one of the first to escape from the upper floors, had raced down stairway A from the 84th floor, through the concourse and out of the east side of the trade center. He continued east to Park Row, and by 9:45 had wound up outside his regular barbershop. He all but collapsed into a chair, and one of the barbers brought him cold wet towels. As he sat there, his Euro Brokers walkie-talkie was capturing transmissions from inside the south tower. Dave Vera was sending word for help. The last place Vera had been seen was in stairway A, just below the 84th floor, in the company of a half dozen other people. The group had been going down the stairs, but were turned back by the heavyset woman and skinny man coming up, insisting that the smoke below them was too intense. That, as it turned out, was the same stairway used by Fern and the seventeen other people. Inside the building, one of Vera’s colleagues, Jose Marrero, who already had gone well below the fire, had turned back and had started climbing the stairs to help him, crossing paths with Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath along the way.
