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

by Dwyer, Jim

  If the twin towers could be thought of as two shoeboxes stood on end, then the Marriott Hotel was like a child’s shoebox that lay flat between the two big ones. For much of the morning, the hotel lobby had served as an exit ramp from the north tower, which it abutted. By using the hotel, people were able to leave the north tower without walking outside, emerging on Liberty Street, at the south end of the trade center complex. Close to a thousand people had done just that, steered by a team of hotel employees who had gathered in the lobby in the early moments of the crisis. A few of the hotel workers, like Abdu A. Malahi, an audiovisual engineer, had gone upstairs, to make sure the rooms were empty; others, like Joe Keller, the thirty-two-year-old executive housekeeper, had formed a cordon in the lobby. This kept people from using the doors onto West Street, where a lethal rain of glass and building parts and people were falling from the high floors.

  The hotel lobby also became a launchpad for the arriving firefighters, many of whom had never worked in that part of Manhattan and knew little of the layout of the trade center. The hotel had a sweeping entrance on West Street, the approach taken by many of the companies. It was the most obvious way into the trade center, even if it required dodging the plummeting debris and bodies. A chief sent a few companies upstairs to check the rooms; others milled around in the lobby, trying to find a route to their assigned building.

  By 9:59, the evacuation had slowed to a trickle, and the lobby, no longer taken over with the urgent task of evacuation, now was occupied mostly by hotel workers who lingered at their stations, and firefighters and police officers who were mustering to go upstairs. Then it came: a rumble, the crashes, the blotting out of light, as if a cosmic drain had suddenly been opened, sucking away the ordinary, familiar shapes of everyday life.

  Joe Keller, the executive housekeeper, vanished. He had been less than ten feet from Rich Fetter, the hotel’s resident manager. In an instant, he was gone. Fetter pressed himself under and against a column as dust whipped through the lobby. He put his hand out for a second and was smacked with a piece of flying debris. The place went pitch black. Fetter’s glasses disappeared. His eyes and nose clogged. Then, suddenly, it seemed to him impossibly quiet. Through the haze, he could make out a group of hotel workers huddled near the Tall Ships bar, along with some firefighters. They began to climb out onto the street.

  Fetter knew if he could get near the concierge desk, he could find a walkie-talkie. He felt around, then put his hands on it. Coughing out dust, Fetter called for Keller over the walkie-talkie, knowing that Keller usually carried one. He had been standing in chatting range. How could he have disappeared?

  Suddenly, Keller’s voice came back.

  “Rich, I’m fine—I’m in a void by the bell-stand area,” Keller said. “I’m on a ledge, there’s a big hole and I can see down to the lower levels of the hotel. There’s two firemen in here with me and they seem to be hurt bad.” The collapse of the south tower had cleaved the hotel from top to bottom, as if a giant scissors had snipped the building in two.

  The two men were separated by a wall of debris. Fetter assured Keller they would get him out. Part of the lobby turned out to be a safe zone shielded during the collapse by reinforced beams that had been installed after the 1993 bombing. Fetter was in the safe area of the lobby, while Keller was caught in the area that collapsed, but in a space that had been sheltered from direct impacts. Also with Fetter on the safe side were seven or eight firefighters, looking for openings in the debris wall because they, too, were missing colleagues. Whole companies had disappeared—at least forty firefighters were either in the part of the lobby that was crushed, or on the severed floors upstairs. Fetter told the ones who had escaped serious injury about the two firefighters trapped with Keller, and they tied a rope to mark the spot, then climbed out through holes and intact passages to get more help. When Deputy Chief Tom Galvin made it onto West Street, he saw a fresh crew from Ladder 113 and told them about two companies that were trapped inside, Engines 58 and 65. Ladder 113—Lt. Raymond Brown and Firefighters Dennis Dowdican, Willie Roberts, Rich Nogan, Bob Pino, Tom Feaser, and Bill Morris—had pulled up just a few minutes before the south tower collapsed. Now, the ladder company headed into the husk of the Marriott, following the rope line. They met two of the firefighters from 58, Mike Fitzpatrick and John Wilson, who happened to be standing in the safe area of the hotel and now wanted to get the rest of their team out, including their lieutenant, Bob Nagel.

  Brown and Fitzpatrick crawled through a void and began to cut at the debris. They were able to speak through the debris to Lieutenant Nagel, caught on the wrong side of the debris wall. “I’m okay,” Nagel said. “There are two chiefs and another company behind us.”

  The rescue group began working with power saws. Someone passed a flashlight through to Nagel.

  Trapped behind the same wall, Joe Keller of the hotel housekeeping department watched the activity to free Nagel. He spoke to Fetter. “I can see the sparks, I can see where you’re working,” Keller said. “You’re twenty or thirty feet away from me.”

  About 100 yards east of the hotel, in a collapsed hole at the center of the trade center, other voices called across dark crevices to one another.

  “Sound off!” the sergeant, John McLoughlin, hollered.

  “Jimeno,” said Will Jimeno.

  “Pezzulo,” said Dominick Pezzulo.

  They waited for an answer from Officers Antonio Rodriguez and Chris Amoroso, but heard none.

  The five Port Authority police officers had been fifteen or twenty feet underground, not far from a globe sculpture that rested on the plaza. The officers had been running through the concourse, a small arsenal of tools clanking around each man’s waist: Guns. Ammunition. Flashlight. Handcuffs. Their task was to collect safety and rescue gear for the climb into the buildings, and they had stopped at security closets to gather Scott Airpaks, helmets, axes, piling it all into a canvas laundry cart. Then they ran the cart toward a meeting point with other officers. With the fall of the south tower, part of the plaza had caved in, trapping them.

  Jimeno called for Rodriguez, a friend: “A-Rod. A-Rod.” McLoughlin yelled for Amoroso. They got no answer. Pezzulo, a powerful man who lifted weights, began to plow his way out of the rubble, lifting concrete. He had joined the Port Authority police about a year earlier, just making the age-thirty-five cutoff; before that, he had taught shop at a high school in the Bronx, and had spoken about going back to that. He could handle tools, he could fashion his own, and he certainly could handle heavy weights. He struggled to his feet, and turned to the rubble that pinned Jimeno. Sergeant McLoughlin was buried beyond Jimeno, deeper in the rubble.

  On the mezzanine of the north tower, where the two police officers Tim Pearson and John Perry had been helping to carry an ailing woman, the debris storm from the south tower separated Pearson from the woman and Perry. Pearson crawled along the floor, shouting out for Perry, for Port Authority people, for anyone who might know the way out. No one answered. The woman and Perry did not seem to be there anymore. The mezzanine was intact, but was no longer a promenade around a proud marble-lined lobby. Instead, it was now a ledge on a cavern, dark and silent. A light appeared—someone must have had a flashlight—and with the emergence of that single beam came sounds: groans and coughs and people saying, I’m over here. One voice found another, then more, aural links that became a hand on a shoulder that led to a hand on yet another shoulder: a sputtering human chain that shuffled toward where the escalator had been. They found it by groping, the smooth skin of the handrail familiar and steadying. Still unable to see one another’s faces, they started walking down from the mezzanine to what had been the lobby. As they got lower, the way became clearer. The lobby was lit by fires.

  All morning, making the last few hundred yards out of the trade center, drawing clear of the falling bodies and the shredding structure, had been the most arduous and delicate portion of the escape. With the collapse of the south tower, the lowest floors of th
e north tower now had a new web of obstacles. Rubble blocked the last few feet of stairways. The air had been fouled with smoke and dust. The pace of departure drastically slowed.

  Leaning against those snags, pushing everyone toward the exits, however, was the momentum built up over the previous hour and a half. Michael Benfante and John Cerquiera from the communications company Network Plus had carried the Port Authority marketing analyst Tina Hansen from the 68th floor in an evacuation chair, a rolling buggy that can slide down stairs for adults who normally use wheelchairs to get around. Along the way they received help from a shifting cast of strangers. At the 21st floor, firefighters suggested leaving Hansen with them. She insisted that they go on. Around the 5th floor, the stairway had become clogged with traffic backing up from the broken lobby. A pair of firefighters led the Hansen entourage out of the stairway, into the dark corridors. They sloshed through the puddles of water from sprinklers or broken pipes, and then found another stairway. It was blocked, too.

  “What are we going to do?” one firefighter asked the other.

  “I have no idea,” his partner replied.

  A bolt of fear ran through Cerquiera. They kept searching and found an intact exit. Benfante, Cerquiera, and Hansen continued, making their way to the bottom. Long ago—when they had started the journey—they had hoped to find a working elevator along the route so that Hansen could ride down. Now, in the lobby, they saw elevator doors blown out of their tracks, security turnstiles torn from their moorings, the frames of the great soaring windows twisted. Any glass that was not in bits on the ground stood in shards. On the street seemed to be a fresh fall of snow. Over this terrain of ruin, Benfante and Cerquiera lifted Hansen out of the building. They spotted an ambulance and delivered her to its doors. She was unhurt, Benfante explained, but she could not walk. The two men turned north, uptown, toward safety.

  John Abruzzo, a quadriplegic from a diving accident, had come down from the 69th floor in an evacuation chair flanked by ten of his colleagues from the Port Authority—Michael Ambrosio, Peter Bitwinski, Phillip Caffrey, Richard Capriotti, Michael Curci, Michael Fabiano, Wilson Pacheco, Tony Pecora, Gerald Simpkins, and Peggy Zoch. They had taken turns at the head and foot of the chair, or holding jackets and briefcases. They teased Abruzzo, telling him that he would have to lose a few of his 250 pounds before they would carry him out of another skyscraper.

  Like Tina Hansen before him, John Abruzzo caught the attention of the firefighters on the 21st floor, who offered his coworkers the opportunity to leave him with them. Like Michael Benfante and John Cerquiera, Abruzzo’s colleagues declined. They thought they could handle the rest of the trip. They did.

  In the dim, soundless landing, the approaching footfall grabbed the attention of Jeff Gertler and Judith Reese, whose breathing problems had not eased. Moving quickly down the stairs, but not galloping, was a group of people in uniforms—Gertler thought he saw a Port Authority police officer, a firefighter or two, maybe a city officer.

  “What’s going on?” the Port Authority policeman asked.

  Gertler explained Reese’s condition—her asthma, the descent from the 88th floor, the exhaustion that had marooned them on the landing. The officer turned to one of the others.

  “Get a chair,” he said, and a moment or two later, one of the men came back with a desk chair from the 10th floor.

  “Go ahead,” the cop said to Gertler. “We’re going to carry her down.”

  “I’ll walk down with you,” Gertler said.

  “This is police business,” the cop replied. “We will carry her down. You need to leave now.”

  “You carry her, I’ll just walk with you,” Gertler said.

  The policeman stepped closer to Gertler, and whispered into his face.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “The building is going to collapse.”

  That sounded like madness to Gertler, but having been told twice to get out, he turned and headed down the stairs.

  Susan Fredericks had gotten as far as the 2nd floor, a long way from the offices of Beast Financial on 80, then found traffic on the stairway at a standstill. Behind her, twenty or thirty people were packed in two lines, backing up the stairs a few floors. As word spread that the stairway was impassable, the lines began a slow retreat, turning back. In the throng was a firefighter, Bill Spade, who eventually found two police officers from the Emergency Service Unit, Sgt. Michael Curtin and Officer John D’Allara. Shoving mightily, the three of them forced open the door at the bottom of the stairs. Minutes later, word was passed up the line: “Come back down. We found a way out.”

  A faint hint of daylight drifted into the staircase, revealing the mezzanine and the plaza beyond it.

  “Come this way—move quickly!” Spade yelled. “Hold hands. Don’t let go. We’re almost out.”

  He lit the path with his flashlight. Back up the stairs, ESU officers and firefighters were standing in pitch-black corridors with flashlights, their beams pointing the way from blocked stairs toward ones that were open. As Fredericks and the others moved out of the building and onto the plaza, near the Custom House at 6 World Trade Center, she glanced at her watch. It was 10:24, ninety-eight minutes since the first plane struck. Spade did not exit with her. He turned to the two police officers, and they began to steer the line of people behind her to the concourse. Those who navigated the shattered mezzanine and lobby included Michael Hingson, the blind man who had left the 78th floor with Roselle, his Labrador guide dog, and his visitor from California, David Frank. Moe Lipson, the eighty-nine-year-old man from the 88th floor, had gotten out, escorted down by Mak Hanna. Dianne DeFontes, who had started the day in the law office on the 89th floor, had been separated from her friends on the last leg of the trip, but she made it to the street. So had Raffaele Cava, the elderly man with the hat who came and sat in DeFontes’s office when the plane first struck, helped to the street by Tirsa Moya, the young woman who worked on his floor at the insurance company. Cava had been one of the very first tenants to move into the building, before it was even completed. Now he was one of the last to leave. Some of the oldest people in the building, from the highest open floors, were getting out.

  As the two cops, Curtin and D’Allara, stood with Spade, they joked mildly about the circumstances. Is this what it takes, Spade joshed, to get cops and firemen to work together?

  A moment or so later, Jeff Gertler got to the lobby, bypassing the mezzanine because he had taken stairway B, the only one of the three that went all the way to the bottom. He had thought about waiting for Judith Reese and the people carrying her in the chair, but the sight of the shattered lobby left him bewildered. He looked around, trying to figure out what had happened. A voice yelled to him.

  “Run this way.” It was a fireman. He pointed to a cavity that once held a floor-to-ceiling window. “We’re going that way,” the firefighter said. They climbed onto West Street, and someone turned them to the right, going north. Gertler looked to the south, toward the Marriott Hotel, which seemed to have been split open. He could see inside the rooms. How could that be? The south tower he could not see. But it had to be there.

  Iliana McGinnis finally heard from her husband, Tom. She had been dialing his number all morning, but each time the call had gone into his voice mail. She knew there had been a catastrophe at the towers, but he worked across the trade center plaza, in the Mercantile Exchange. This morning, though, he had been summoned to the special early meeting at the Carr Futures office on the 92nd floor in the north tower. The firm was cutting commissions for McGinnis and his group of traders, and they were getting the news at the meeting. It was to have broken up at 8:30 so that the boss could get on a conference call, and the traders could get to the exchange in time for the opening of the markets.

  Iliana had not been able to get through to him at his desk, but she expected that he had long since left the trade center. Still, she waited by her desk for him to call as her colleagues huddled around a television set. Finally, the phone
rang, at 10:20.

  “This looks really, really bad,” he said.

  “I know,” said Iliana. “This is bad for the country; it looks like World War Three.” Then something in the tone of Tom’s answer alarmed her.

  “Are you okay, yes or no?” she demanded.

  “We’re on the 92nd floor, in a room we can’t get out of,” he said.

  “Who’s with you?” she asked.

  Three old friends—Joey Holland, Brendan Dolan, and Elkin Yuen, people he had known for years.

  “I love you,” Tom said. Then he mentioned their daughter. “Take care of Caitlin.”

  Iliana was not ready to hear a farewell.

  “Don’t lose your cool,” she urged. “You guys are so tough, you’re resourceful. You guys are going to get out of there.”

  She was right: these were men who had grown up in the city, gone right from high school to Wall Street, and made their livings not on credentials from fancy colleges, but on nerve and guile.

  “You don’t understand,” Tom said. “There are people jumping from the floors above us.”

  It was now 10:25. The 92nd floor seemed to be safely below the plane crash. In the ninety-nine minutes since Flight 11 had struck, the 92nd floor had not been afflicted with unbearable smoke or flame—the worst of that had been six or seven floors above them for much of the time. The sprinkler system had gone off or the pipes had burst; water had risen to the ankles. The big problem was getting out: seventy people were on 92, sixty-nine of them with Carr, and none of them could open the doors. McGinnis and his group were stuck in a conference room where the door had jammed. Over time, the flames had spread along the 93rd and 94th floors, even down to the 92nd floor, and were now bearing down on the pockets of refuge. The people who had survived for the terrible hour and a half, unable to find an escape route, found themselves forced to the windows for air. More and more people began to fall. As the fire raged along the west side of the 92nd floor, forty-one-year-old Tom McGinnis, who had met Iliana when they were kids in Washington Heights, again told her he loved her and Caitlin.