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

by Dwyer, Jim

  When he first got stuck, Young had not been too worried. In fact, he initially blamed himself for his predicament. He’d been coming down in one of the express elevators when he decided to test out a precept from adolescent physics—the one that says if you jump up in a speeding elevator, you will somehow create a state of floating weightlessness worthy of NASA. A few jumps later, though, his spirit for adventure drained when the elevator suddenly bounced to a stop.

  Over the ensuing hour, the dust, the screams, the alarms and the other people who were stuck near him in the lobby had persuaded him that something much larger and more serious than his own antics was involved. He had no idea what that was, though, and the building staff he reached over the elevator intercom would only say there was “an emergency situation.”

  Young was similarly mystified about why the doors were suddenly so easy to open. He would find out later that the collapse of the south tower had knocked out the power in its twin, and disabled the motor that normally kept the doors from opening between floors.

  When Young looked out into the lobby, the exhilaration of escape quickly lost steam.

  There was no one there.

  No one.

  The bright, modern lobby of tan marble and polished chrome had been replaced by ruin. Debris was everywhere. As Young stepped from the elevator, his feet sank into several inches of pulverized concrete dust. It muffled his footsteps as he hustled toward the windows facing West Street, stepping out through one that was broken. Outside, he looked up, toward the offices on the 99th floor where he had been earlier that morning. Smoke and fire were shooting from the upper floors. “Oh, my God,” Young said. A firefighter grabbed him and told him to keep moving.

  Among the parties searching floors in the bottom zone of the building was a team led by Inspector James Romito of the Port Authority police. At the collapse of the south tower, Romito listened to his radio, then turned to the half dozen people accompanying him. The searches were over, he said. They were getting out of the building. Frank DiMola, a civilian Port Authority worker, had been helping Romito as he worked his way toward the command center on the 64th floor.

  “Two is down,” Romito said.

  “Building 2?” DiMola asked.

  “Building 2 is down,” Romito said.

  Romito’s search crew was at least the fourth agency to cover the same ground, for the same task: checking the floors for office workers. All those searches of floors represented another fortunate inefficiency, like the extra loads of gear that slowed the firefighters from getting higher into the building. During the evacuation from the 1993 bombing, firefighters ended up searching the millions of square feet of office space multiple times, a point of frustration noted stingingly in the reports prepared by the fire chiefs after that attack. Even so, little had changed in the eight years since then. Once again, duplicative searches were under way. Firefighters searched floors. The Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit also reported that it was searching floors. Joseph Baccellieri’s team of court officers and Port Authority police had searched all the way up to 51. And the group led by Inspector Romito also was searching floors. This time, the multiple searches had the beneficial effect of keeping many rescuers closer to the ground. Yet the lack of coordination among the agencies, particularly between the Police and Fire Departments, would have other costs.

  The word to leave finally got to Steve Modica, the aide to fire chief Paolillo, who had watched, uncomprehending, as police officers pounded down the stairs at the 30th floor. A fire captain, coming down after the police officers, shouted at him.

  “Evacuate! Evacuate! I want everyone to evacuate the building.” Then the captain continued down. Modica tried to reach Chief Paolillo, but couldn’t raise him. He switched to all three channels used by the department. He still could not get anything. He considered the circumstances, and would recall thinking: “We were doing nothing. Nothing. What’s the plan? Nobody had a plan.” He started down the stairs.

  On the street outside, the ESU police wanted more intelligence, quickly, on the status of the remaining tower. In the frenzy of radio transmissions, the dispatcher demanded attention, and with some effort, got through to the police helicopters hovering over lower Manhattan.

  “Aviation base, ESU One needs someone to, one of the aviations, to check Tower 2 and give them an update,” the dispatcher said, giving the address of the destroyed building, but with no one in doubt about the question.

  The answer came at 10:07, eight minutes after the collapse of the south tower. The pilot of Aviation 14, Tim Hayes, replied with a grim forecast.

  “Advise everybody to evacuate the area in the vicinity of Battery Park City,” said Hayes. “About fifteen floors down from the top, it looks like it’s glowing red. It’s inevitable.”

  To be certain that the message was delivered, the dispatcher repeated it, practically word for word, so that all the police officers on the air heard the warning. “All right, he said from the fifteenth floor down, it looked like the building was going to collapse and we need to evacuate everybody from the vicinity of Battery City,” the dispatcher said.

  A moment later, Greg Semendinger, the pilot of the other police helicopter, Aviation 6, also reported in.

  “I don’t think this has too much longer to go,” he said. “I would evacuate all the people within the area of that second building.”

  No matter how many times the police dispatcher repeated that message, none of the firefighters in the north tower—by a factor of ten, the largest group of rescuers in the building—had radios that could hear those reports. Indeed, many of them could not hear reports from their own commanders. The ESU police officers did spread the word as they evacuated, urging everyone they saw, firefighters and civilians and other rescuers, to leave at once.

  The tide that had drawn them all up the stairs was now slowly turning, even though the demise of the south tower, and the grave peril in the north, remained broadly unknown to the firefighters.

  For more than eighty minutes, the bridge and tunnel engineer Patrick Hoey and his Port Authority colleagues on the 64th floor had waited dutifully, as instructed, for the firefighters or the police to arrive. No one showed up. Nothing was stopping them from leaving, except the direct instructions they had gotten at 9:11 to “stand tight” and wait for the rescuers. They would get other messages, of course, from family, friends, even from Port Authority colleagues outside the building, who urged them to get out, who reported that the police were now saying people should leave. The police sergeant who first told them to stay was among those who later tried to send word to get out. As hundreds of workers from higher floors had walked past, the people on 64 wet their coats and put them under the doors to bar the smoke. They taped crevices. Many in the room had been through the exasperating 1993 evacuation, the arduous walk through biting, choking smoke. Perhaps that could be avoided this time. Staying put was official policy in a crisis—evacuate only those floors in the direct vicinity of the fire. Although the fire and Port Authority police commanders had abandoned that approach by 9:00 and ordered a full evacuation, the message did not seem to reach Hoey and his colleagues. The public-address system in the north tower had been severed by the attack. Hoey and the other Port Authority employees had lights and working phones. At one point, Hoey and his colleague Pasquale Buzzelli had traveled across the floor, looking for places where the smoke was seeping in. They found a door that was open, closed it, and then taped it shut. That had worked, for a while. Then the south tower collapsed—although they did not realize it—and in the shuddering that followed, more smoke appeared. People who had been debating for an hour whether to leave, against what they thought was the official advice, decided to make a go of it. By then, sixteen people were left on the floor.

  Hoey called the police desk first. “I’m in the trade center, tower one. I’m with the Port Authority and we are on the 64th floor. The smoke is getting kind of bad, so we are going to … we are contemplating going down the st
airway. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” the police officer replied. “Try to get out.”

  “All right,” Hoey said. “Bye.”

  It was 10:12 A.M., eighty-seven minutes after the north tower was struck.

  The message to leave spread fitfully. Warren Smith, the lieutenant who had gotten the word because he was standing near a chief on the 35th floor, found that the civilians had departed—even the people who looked most responsible and diligent, those who Smith supposed might be company fire wardens. They were the ones who had cleared their colleagues and then stayed around to hand out bottled water to the rescue teams. Yet as Smith went down, he kept coming across firefighters still carrying their heavy coils of hose, still forcing open doors. It was as if nothing had changed. Another cycle of firefighters would search the floors. They had no idea that the order had been given to get out. When Smith told them that everyone was leaving, he felt they did not believe him.

  “Listen,” Smith said. “Forget about that. Drop your roll-ups. You can get them later if you want. Just get out.”

  Those firefighters did not have any sense of urgency about complying with a secondhand order, Smith felt. He noticed them stopping to look out windows, to see what was happening in the street. Because the fire was so distant, many of them had gone up without a specific order—basically, to see what they could do—and Smith felt they were very confident about the building. He couldn’t blame them. The 1993 bombing had shown them it could stand up. It was, he thought, the Titanic mentality.

  Another lieutenant who had left the 35th floor, Gregg Hansson, was moving fast with his company. They had stopped at 27 to pick up Rich Billy, who had been with Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz. As they reached the 19th floor, a firefighter popped out into the stairway. Hansson did not recognize him.

  “I need some help,” the firefighter said. “We’ve got a lot of people on the other part of the floor who aren’t leaving.”

  Hansson had to stop, but before he went onto the 19th floor, one of his own men, the probationary firefighter Robert Byrne, told him that he had left his respirator mask back on the 35th floor. Not having the mask could slow them down if they needed to share air. Hansson, however, did not want Byrne to turn back. The trouble, vague as it was, held enormous menace. “I want you to go,” Hansson told Byrne. “Just get out of the building.”

  Then Hansson walked onto the 19th floor, and in the gloom, saw a crowd of firefighters and some civilians. In the group was Kevin Pfeifer, who had been on the 35th floor with Hansson.

  “What’s going on?” Hansson asked. “We gotta get out of here.”

  A firefighter from Rescue 3 approached Hansson and addressed him with the universal nickname for lieutenants.

  “Lieu, can I talk to you?” he said. The firefighter walked Hansson over to a window that overlooked West Street. It was Hansson’s first glimpse of the outside world. He could not see the Marriott Hotel, which stood between the two towers, but West Street seemed jumbled and strange to him. He did not even know that the other tower had also been hit with a plane, much less that it had collapsed.

  The firefighter who brought him to the window said, “I don’t think we can get out.”

  “We gotta try to get out of here,” Hansson said. “We gotta go.”

  He headed back for the stairs, calling out that people had to leave. They were moving far too slowly, he thought. They could not have heard the same urgent orders.

  Around that same time, another group had also reached the 19th floor—the court officers, Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender, coming down from 51. They had stopped there on the way up and noted the mass assembly of firefighters. Now, on their way down, they again stepped out of the staircase and into the corridors. They could scarcely believe their eyes. The 19th floor was just as full as it had been when they came up, still packed with firefighters. From end to end of the hallway, and down other corridors, so tight it would be tough to find a place to squeeze in alongside the wall with them, the place was carpeted with firefighters. Most were sitting, and had stripped off their turnout coats. Helmets off. Some were down to their blue T-shirts, maps of sweat blotting through the fabric emblazoned with the Fire Department shield. Wender saw that some were lying down. Axes leaned against the wall. Legs stretched out. Arm resting against oxygen tanks. They could not be hearing, Wender thought, what we are hearing.

  Baccellieri and Moscola took in the scene. They guessed there were at least 100 firefighters on the floor.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Baccellieri yelled. “We’ve been told we’ve got to get out of the building.”

  No one moved.

  “We’ll come down in a few minutes,” someone said.

  But all the rescue workers are bailing out, the court officers said.

  “Yeah, all right, we’ll be right there,” another firefighter replied.

  As the court officers tramped downstairs, the alarm outside the tower grew more urgent. Hayes, in police helicopter Aviation 14, broke through the jumble of radio traffic to reach the dispatcher at 10:19, ninety-three minutes into the crisis.

  “Be advised, just not one hundred percent sure—but it does appear that the top of the tower might possibly be leaning at this time,” Hayes said.

  “Tower’s leaning?” the dispatcher said. With that, he began to alert the other cars in the field that they had to “read direct,” meaning they needed to pay attention to the message, rather than waiting for it to be relayed from the central dispatch office. “Car 3, car 1, ESU 1—read direct on that.”

  Hayes came back on the air.

  “It is confirmed,” he said. “It is buckling and it is leaning to the south.”

  “Which tower is that?” asked the dispatcher. “One or two?”

  “The remaining tower, the north tower is leaning to the southwest at this time,” Hayes said. “It appears to be buckling in the southwest corner.”

  To be sure that all the officers on the air got the word, the dispatcher repeated the message.

  “The northwest tower is leaning,” he said. “And it appears to be buckling at this time at the southwest corner.”

  That was at least the fourth time police officers in helicopters had broadcast warnings of ominous conditions at the top of the towers, yet another dire message carried solely on police channels. The rescue workers of New York City did not have a system for sharing that information: no common frequencies, no practice of working together at command posts, nothing they could count on beyond the serendipity of an encounter with someone carrying the right radio.

  Fred Ill, the captain of Ladder Company 2, who had radioed dispatchers early in the crisis to remind them about getting firefighters on the helicopters, was in the north tower, rounding up his men. They could not hear the warnings from the sky.

  14

  “You don’t understand.”

  10:20 A.M.

  NORTH TOWER

  Ten minutes. Maybe longer, but nothing in the quiet, deserted stairwell around the 10th or 12th floor marked the passing time. A woman drew short, quick breaths, as if she had run a race and could not catch her breath. A man who sat near her carried a two-way Port Authority radio, but even that had fallen silent. No one else stirred. The north tower seemed more than empty. The place itself felt exhausted and depleted. The woman sat on a step, unable to face another flight.

  “We’re gonna die,” Judith Reese said between gasps.

  No, no, insisted Jeff Gertler. “Look—wet your finger, feel the fresh air coming up from the street,” he said.

  Reese had severe asthma. Everything about the long descent—the exertion, the heat, the anxiety—tightened the clamp around her tormented airways. Gertler, her colleague, tried soothing assurance, pep talks, pleading. Anything to keep her going. Another ten flights or so and they would be out of the building, and she would get help from an ambulance. She had to sit.

  It had been about twenty minutes since they had felt the quivering from the collapse of the
south tower. They had no idea what had happened, to their building or the other one.

  They had been on the move for close to an hour and a half, ever since they left their offices on the 88th floor, where Gertler worked as a project manager for the Port Authority, and where Reese worked as the administrative assistant to Frank De Martini. In the early clamor, when the people on the 88th floor debated waiting for help or leaving, it was the labored breathing of Judith Reese that helped settle the issue. No one with her chronic breathing problems could stay in a space even with small fires. She had been among the first to go, but every step taxed her, and she could move down only one or two flights before stopping. Soon, she had fallen to the distant rear of the procession. Gertler, a colleague but not a close friend, had stayed with her. As with everyone who worked in the towers, the morning’s alarm had instantly revived the memory and stories of the 1993 attack and the brutal evacuation. Gertler realized that for Reese, going down the stairs was also to walk into the dread of the evacuation eight years earlier. He had prodded her forward.

  “It’s not like ’93,” he said. “Look down the center of the stairs.” This was not empty cheerleading. The stairways were lit, the steps marked in glow-tape. They were crowded, but people moved. Prodded by Gertler, she continued. Along the way, she had gotten oxygen from rescuers, permitting her to continue, but now she had to stop.

  Spent, Reese sat on the stairs. In the silent stairway, Gertler waited for her to catch enough breath for the final leg of their trip. The time was approaching 10:20, ninety-four minutes since Flight 11 had struck.