by Dwyer, Jim
News of the open stair did not reach Vera, or the people in Keefe, Bruyette & Woods or Fiduciary Trust, or Jack Andreacchio, the Brooklyn cowboy, or the scores of workers in the offices of Aon, Sandler O’Neill, the state tax department. Those who took that open stairway did not realize that it was the only way out. Collecting this information did not seem to be anyone’s job. And even if the intelligence had been gathered, the building’s public-address system apparently had been knocked out by the impact of the plane. The people on the upper floors had adapted quickly, fashioning their own communication network with cell phones and with phones plugged into the backs of computers. They dialed the city’s 911 operators, many of whom tried, but could not dispel, their anguish. The operators did not know about the open stairway and advised people to stay put. The city’s 911 operation had been in turmoil since the early 1990s, when the city began plans to overhaul it; in its daily operations, the 911 system was run by the Police Department. The people who answered the phones were civilians, among the lowest-paid workers in city government, relegated to the bottom caste in a world of uniforms. So poor was the coordination with other emergency agencies that fire dispatchers actually had to dial back into 911 themselves in order to reach police dispatchers.
And so the people inside the south tower remained unaware of the open staircase. They spoke to their families, who watched the towers burn on television, but also did not know about the stairway. The word had not gotten back to the fire commanders, to the 911 call center, or to broadcasters, so the information that stairway A was available did not circle back to the places where it might have done some good. Like the lifeboats that left the Titanic half-empty, stairway A remained little used.
Not only were the rescuers unable to communicate with the people they were trying to help, they often could not communicate among themselves. A number of city agencies sent representatives to 7 World Trade Center, the headquarters of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, about 300 yards from the main fire command post on West Street.
By the time John Peruggia, the Fire Department’s delegate, reached 7 World Trade Center, that building was being evacuated because of worries that a third plane was bound for New York. So instead of using the mayor’s bunker, the emergency-response officials huddled in the lobby. Over the next few minutes, Peruggia heard a warning that he could scarcely believe, but did not dare to dismiss.
An engineer from the Department of Buildings reported that the structural damage appeared to be immense. The stability of both buildings was compromised. In particular, the engineer was worried about how long the north tower would stand.
This was an astounding possibility. Like many others, Peruggia was a veteran of the 1993 bombing, and after that attack, he had heard the presentations about the strength of the two towers. No one could forget the claim by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer, that the towers were designed to stand up to the impact of a Boeing 707.
The Buildings Department engineer did not care what had been promised a decade earlier, or three decades earlier. In glimpses when the flow of smoke parted, he could see the damage.
Peruggia summoned an emergency medical technician, Rich Zarillo, who was working for him as an aide. He was to go immediately from 7 World Trade Center to the command post where the senior fire commander, Chief of Department Peter Ganci, was located, on West Street, across from the north tower.
“You see Chief Ganci, and Chief Ganci only,” Peruggia said. “Provide him with the information that the building integrity is severely compromised and they believe the building is in danger of imminent collapse.”
Peruggia could not communicate with the chief by radio. He simply did not have the means. The emergency operations center had been shut because of fears that terrorists would fly a third plane into it. The expensive 800-megahertz interagency radios were all in the trunks of cars, unused, because no one with clout in the city government ever got around to pressing the issue. Peruggia himself was not carrying a fire ground radio that morning, because his ordinary assignment did not call for it. In the world capital of communications, he had only one way to get the engineer’s assessment to the chief of the Fire Department: to send a messenger dodging across acres of flaming debris and falling bodies. He would have to deliver this warning in person.
As he reached higher ground, Orio Palmer’s voice rang with the exertion of the moment, and the conviction that he was getting close to the mouth of the fire. After climbing thirty floors, he accelerated, moving at a pace of thirty-six seconds per floor.
“Where are you, Chief?” Lieutenant Leavey asked.
“Seventy-four,” Palmer responded at 9:45.
“We’re making our way up behind you,” Leavey said. “We took our coats off.”
Palmer covered the next flight in twenty-one seconds. He reported that he saw no smoke or fire problems in stairway B, but some walls had been damaged at the 73rd and 74th floors. “Be careful,” he said. And he had run into fire marshal Ron Bucca, who had rushed into the building with his partner, Jim Devery. At the point where Devery turned back to escort Ling Young out of the building, Bucca kept climbing. Bucca was a registered nurse, a reservist in the United States Army Special Forces. He kept a set of blueprints of the trade center in his locker, concerned that terrorists would return to attack the building.
“I found a marshal on 75,” Palmer reported, a few seconds later, no doubt pleased to have some company as he neared the fire. They were leaving stairway B, he reported. As many others had found, it was hard to pass. After some scouting, he discovered that stairway A was open, the proven portal out of the calamity. From the 75th floor, Palmer radioed back to the trailing firefighters, telling them they should head for stairway A.
Behind him, Joe Leavey had made it to the 70th floor by 9:50. He found some of the people hurt by the plane, who had crept down a few floors, but apparently were unable to move much lower. The elevators were essential. He knew that Tom Kelly had shuttled one group of the injured to the lobby, and had come back to the 40th floor to collect more of the walking wounded.
“Tommy, have you made it back down to the lobby yet?” Leavey asked Kelly.
“The elevator’s screwed up,” Kelly replied.
“You can’t move it?” Leavey asked.
“I don’t want to get stuck in the shaft,” Kelly said.
Kelly’s caution was hardly excessive. Yet to Leavey, thirty floors above Kelly, the situation was too dire for hesitation. Injured people had reached the 70th floor, and no doubt those people were telling him about the devastation on the 78th floor and above.
“All right, Tommy,” Leavey said. “It’s imperative that you try to get down to the lobby command post and get some people up to 40. We got injured people up here on 70. If you make it to the lobby command post, see if they can somehow get elevators past the 40th floor. We got people injured all the way up here.”
One minute later, at 9:51, Palmer’s voice came across the radio in a short, urgent burst. He had last been heard from two minutes earlier, on the 75th floor, where he had met Marshal Bucca.
Now, Palmer did not say where he was, but he was trying to reach Donald Burns, the chief in charge of the south tower. His words conveyed less than his tone. His voice sounded a higher pitch. Most likely, Palmer had reached the 78th floor, the first uniformed rescuer to reach the impact zone. Because of radio traffic, it would take another minute before he was able to contact other firefighters on the radio. At 9:52, he spoke with Joe Leavey, who was to relay the message down.
“We’ve got two isolated pockets of fire,” Palmer said. “We should be able to knock it down with two lines.”
The next part of his message was a report not about fire or broken walls, but about the condition of the people. In radio transmissions, the Fire Department avoids the term “civilians,” referring to them as “10-45s,” and does not describe anyone as “dead,” but as “Code One.” He stammered, just slightly, perhaps from exertion, perhaps fro
m what he, the first person from the outside, was seeing.
“Radio, radio, radio that—78th floor, numerous 10-45 Code Ones,” Palmer said.
On the 78th floor, he was saying, there were many dead civilians.
“Floor 78?” asked Leavey.
“Ten-four,” Palmer replied. “Numerous civilians. We’re gonna need two engines up here.”
“We’re on our way,” Leavey said.
In the lobby, Ed Nicholls had emerged from Tom Kelly’s elevator, bleeding from the head, the arm, the abdomen, uncertain of where to go next. He would have little recollection of how he got out, but a photographer snapped a picture as he emerged from the concourse onto Church Street. In the photo, a young policewoman, Moira Smith, puts one hand under Nicholls’s elbow, another on his shoulder. She is wearing blue disposable gloves. Her blond hair is pulled back from her face; she had left her police hat on the seat of the van in which she and her partner drove down to the trade center from Greenwich Village. Smith had not been dispatched to the trade center; she had been filling out forms when she saw the van loaded and ready to go. She jumped on. No ordinary city patrol officers were sent inside the buildings, an assignment left to the ESU teams, and to the Port Authority police, trained in firefighting. In this division of labor, no one had the quotidian task of shepherding people from the buildings to the ambulances. Moira Smith, policewoman, joined the security guards, firefighters, and Port Authority bureaucrats who had taken that job upon themselves. Smith escorted Ed Nicholls through the concourse of the trade center, leading him out to Church Street on the east side of the complex, where ambulances were staged. Then she returned to the lobby of the south tower.
By now, about ten minutes to ten, nearly fifty minutes after the south tower had been hit, a line of molten aluminum was pouring from a window on the corner of the 80th floor: the airplane was melting. The 83rd floor appeared to be draped across windows on the 82nd floor, and was gradually drooping even lower. These were details on photographs, analyzed in depth months later. From the inside, though, the people on the high floors narrated the rapid undoing of the building. On the 80th floor, where the Brooklyn cowboy Jack Andreacchio and his boss, Manny Gomez, were trapped, the smoke and heat had all but engulfed the men and those with them. A colleague who had made it outside, Bobby McMurray, reached Gomez by radio. “It don’t look too good, Bobby Mac,” Gomez said. Kevin Cosgrove from Aon had walked down twenty flights from the 99th floor, only to be turned back by smoke at 79. He walked back up to the 105th floor, where so many people had gone in hopes of escape to the roof. He called his brother, Joe. “I’m not getting out of this, I need you to take care of my kids, tell my wife I love her,” Cosgrove said. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up.
The voices from the 105th floor, twenty stories above the top of the impact zone, grew more urgent. One woman called 911 and said the floor was collapsing. A moment later, a man called from 106 and said a floor below was collapsing. From the 88th floor, Rick Thorpe of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods told 911 that people were passing out, and that he would break the windows.
Calling from the 93rd floor, Greg Milanowycz spoke to his father and then to a colleague of his father’s, Marcia De Leon.
“The ceiling is caving,” Milanowycz said. “The ceiling is caving.”
On the street, Rich Zarillo had arrived at the West Street command post with the message from the Buildings Department engineer that the towers were near collapse, and told Chief Ganci’s aide, Fire Marshal Steve Mosiello.
The aide turned to his boss, a few steps away, involved in other business.
“Chief, these buildings are in imminent danger of collapse,” Mosiello reported.
Ganci looked stunned. “Who would tell you something like that?” he asked. After thirty-three years in the Fire Department, Pete Ganci had risen to chief of department, and he knew full well that skyscrapers do not collapse from less than an hour of fire.
Mosiello turned to the messenger.
“Richie, come over here and tell the chief what you just told me,” Mosiello said.
In the south tower elevator, Tom Kelly, sent back down to the lobby, had not gotten very far: his worries about the balky car turned out to be justified.
“Stuck in the elevator, in the elevator shaft,” Kelly reported on the radio. “You’re going to have to get a different elevator. We’re chopping through the wall to get out.”
Palmer, on the 78th floor, heard Kelly. “Radio lobby command with that,” he said.
Strangely, the 78th floor was quiet. On all the radio transmissions from firefighters lower in the building, the whooping of the building’s alarm could be heard in the background. Behind Palmer’s voice from the 78th floor, there was no alarm, no clamor. By now, Palmer had caught his breath, and his voice was fully composed.
He sent one group of firefighters up to the 79th floor: the 78th and 79th floors were connected by an escalator, and the fire on 79 was visible from 78. The firefighters had made it to the border territory between life and death, just as Frank De Martini and his men had in the north tower an hour earlier. The sky lobby floor was carpeted with the dead, but also the immobilized living, perhaps in despair of ever getting any help. Yet here was Palmer, organizing the troops, alongside Bucca, a registered nurse, a soldier, a firefighter, all in one.
They discovered, when they reached the floor, that the people had not been entirely alone: a security guard was on the scene. A few months earlier, twenty-four-year-old Robert Gabriel Martinez had left his job at McDonald’s and gone to work as a security guard at the trade center, finding a pay hike in the $11.61-an-hour salary. Normally, Martinez did not work on the 78th floor. But he had stayed up late the night before, watching the New York Giants on Monday Night Football, and he had overslept that morning. When he got to the trade center, he learned that his regular assignment—in a loading dock on the north end of the complex—had been given to someone else. So he was headed for the south tower’s upper sky lobby. “They sent me to the 78th floor,” he told James Flores, the quartermaster for the security guards. Flores issued him the blue-and-gray striped clip-on tie that all the security guards were issued, and the heavy-duty portable radio that allowed them to communicate throughout the complex.
When Palmer and Bucca arrived on the 78th floor, the evidence suggests that they found Martinez, a big, burly man. Somehow, he had survived the impact of Flight 175. He had not left his $11.61-an-hour post. He had stayed in the slaughterhouse. At 9:57, the voice of the 78th-floor security guard burst onto the airwaves. His messages rang with desperation, but also, it seemed, a gust of exhilaration and hope.
An entire elevator car full of people had been trapped on the 78th floor, stuck for nearly fifty-five minutes, ever since the second plane had hit.
Central, please be advised, I need EMS at 78 sky lobby, 2 World Trade Center. I’ve got people coming out of the elevator banks. Listen, please be advised, I’ve got, like, eighteen passengers stuck on the 78th sky lobby elevator. They’re trying to get them out, we need EMS over here! ON THE DOUBLE! TWO WORLD TRADE CENTER!
The dispatcher tried to calm him down.
“Is that an elevator entrapment, sir?” she asked.
“That’s a ten-four,” the guard said. “The firefighters have eighteen passengers stuck, and they’re going to try to get them out!
“They’re trying!”
Fourteen floors up, a man on the 102nd floor was speaking to a 911 operator. He was a young man, he said. He had children. He did not want to die. He pleaded his case over and over: He did not want to die. He did not want to die. Suddenly, his words were drowned out by crashing noises, a terrible scream, an even worse silence.
At that moment, at the command center on West Street, Chief Ganci had just finished hearing the message delivered by Rich Zarillo about the threat of an imminent collapse. A gathering rumble filled the air.
“What the fuck is that?” Ganci asked.
A glance at the south tower, its top dis
solving into smoke, answered his question.
13
“We’ll come down in a few minutes.”
9:59 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
“Mom,” asked Jeffrey Nussbaum. “What was that explosion?”
Twenty miles away, in Oceanside, New York, Arlene Nussbaum could see on television what her son could not from the office at Carr Futures on the 92nd floor of the north tower.
“The other tower just went down,” Mrs. Nussbaum told her son.
“Oh, my God,” Jeffrey said.
Decades earlier, before the towers rose to altitudes nearly out of sight, each one had been bolted to bedrock seven stories below the street, a depth virtually out of sight. At their nearest point, the buildings were separated by 131 feet. For twenty-eight years, in weather fair and foul, they kept their distance, parallel lines that could not cross, no matter how high the towers rose into the sky or how deep they sank into the earth. In a span of ten seconds, the south tower pulverized itself and became a mammoth cloud of dust that blasted into the base of the north tower, curling up the shafts and stairways of its twin. Geometry dissolved, the two buildings had met.
