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

by Dwyer, Jim

  “Don’t hang up,” she pleaded.

  “I gotta get down on the floor,” he said.

  With that, the phone connection faded out.

  It was 10:26, 100 minutes from the time the plane hit.

  For most of the evacuation, the tenants of the north tower had largely taken themselves as far as the lobby or the concourse, and then been steered to safety. Most of those left in the building now were the people who could not move without help. It was around the 7th floor of stairway B that the cause of John Rappa, a heavy man, exhausted, unable to walk, first intersected with the rescue workers scrambling to leave the building. “Help me,” he said, and two Port Authority police officers, Patrick Lucas and Barry Pikaard, gave him oxygen, then carried him down a few flights. They could not bring him any farther. Lucas would remember that firefighters ran past, screaming at him to just drop the man and go, but the next documented hand on Rappa belonged to Pat Kelly, a firefighter from Squad 18. At the fifth floor, Lt. Greg Hansson of Engine 24 came on the scene, on his way down from the 35th floor. Already he had stopped twice, at the 27th floor to round up Rich Billy and then at the 19th floor, where he had tried to prod the congregation of resting firefighters into leaving. And now, on the 5th floor, he was waylaid for a third time by Pat Kelly, who was unable to move John Rappa.

  “You can’t get out that way,” Kelly said. “I need help with this guy.”

  Upon meeting this latest crisis, Hansson sent his men down ahead: they had been lugging gear up the stairs, while he had been traveling with the lighter load of an officer. Now that they all were going down, he felt he had more strength in reserve to grapple with the job of moving the disabled man sprawled on the floor. Someone found a chair, and they tied him into it with a belt and managed to wheel him back into the corridor and toward stairway A. The chair barely squeezed through a hallway. Just keeping Rappa perched on it was exhausting. Then the belting arrangement broke down. Around that moment, a group of Port Authority police officers arrived. The chair no longer made any sense. Rappa was again on the floor. They would drag him down the stairs. Hansson and James Hall, one of the police officers, grabbed him by the legs and pulled him. Those steps ended at a door that was propped open, onto the mezzanine.

  There, they met the trio that had opened the door a few minutes earlier—Bill Spade, the firefighter, and Mike Curtin and John D’Allara, the two ESU officers. Together, they would make a run for the plaza, propelling John Rappa and themselves.

  The building was unstable, the ESU officers told Hall.

  “We better get out of here,” Curtin said. “Hurry.”

  But how? All morning, a committee of the willing—self-selected civilians and self-assigned uniformed rescuers—had stationed themselves on the mezzanine, to make sure that people coming down stairways A and C did not try to use the doors that led directly from the mezzanine to the plaza. Not only that, they urged the people not to even look at the plaza, for death was raining there. They sent them down the escalators to the lobby, and through the concourse to the east.

  Now most of that group of steerers was gone. And going down the escalator, to the broken lobby, did not seem much of an alternative. For the group carrying John Rappa, the best way seemed to be a dash onto the plaza, directly from the mezzanine—to take their chances on the plummeting bodies and the peels of aluminum skin of the building that seemed to float and wobble toward the ground, giving the illusion of delicacy. And they would be carrying a large man unable to move.

  Spade, the firefighter, took a count. They were seven. No, they were eight. Nine, counting Rappa.

  “We go together, we stay together,” Spade said.

  At the north end of the mezzanine was a door. Across a few open feet of the plaza was an overhang jutting from 6 World Trade Center, the Custom House.

  D’Allara dashed first, reaching the overhang. He gazed up at the top of the tower, smoke and flame ripping from its crown, nothing and no one coming down just that second. A body could emerge from the billowing cloud of blackness at any instant.

  “It’s clear,” D’Allara yelled.

  It was now 10:27, 101 minutes since the first plane struck. Hall and Hansson and the others grabbed Rappa. In as close to a sprint as they could manage, they broke for the overhang of the Custom House.

  Fourth floor. Almost there. If only she could move.

  Jay Jonas, the captain of Ladder 6, knew the south tower had fallen—he was with Capt. William Burke on the 27th floor of the north tower when Burke saw it from the window. This one would fall, too, Jonas suspected, so he was driving his people out. Around the 12th floor, they had spotted Josephine Harris, age sixty, in agony from fallen arches and from a sixty-story walk. She was now hanging onto Billy Butler and Tommy Falco, firefighters from Ladder 6. Even with their help, she moved slowly: In the time she would take two steps, someone else could travel an entire flight. Her bad feet were now setting the pace of escape for eight people who were helping in some way, the Ladder 6 crew of six firefighters—Jonas, Butler, Falco, Michael Meldrum, Matt Komorowski, and Sal D’Agostino, along with a lieutenant from another company, Mickey Kross of Engine 16, and a Port Authority police officer, David Lim.

  Keep moving, Jonas whispered. They were clogging the stairway, so they pulled aside at the landings to let other exiting fire companies speed past. Hurry, said Jonas. Harris groaned, not from a shortage of willpower, but from the agony that knifed from her feet through her body. You will see your family, Butler said. Come on, Josephine, said Jonas. Another company went by, dashing toward the lobby. Go, said Jonas. At the 4th floor, though, Josephine Harris could not. Her fallen arches had collapsed. They were so close to getting out.

  “Stop,” she cried. “Leave me alone. I can’t go any farther.”

  Jonas peeled off from the stairwell to find an office chair, a solution: They would put her in it and run down the stairs. He saw a couch and a stenographer chair with no arms. Surely, there was a regular desk chair somewhere on the 4th floor. For crying out loud. It was a mechanical floor, with nothing obvious that would serve. Jonas headed for the other side of the floor, then decided that, no, they would leave now and just drag her down the stairs. Maybe there was time to find a better way, but maybe there wasn’t. He turned, and fast-stepped toward the door to stairway B, but the floor beneath him shuddered in waves.

  It is now 10:28, 102 minutes since the nose of American Airlines Flight 11 shot into the 98th floor of the north tower. The bangs are distant, then grow nearer and louder, and in stairway B, Josephine Harris and the men hear the approaching collapse: a bowling ball rolling down the steps. They curl in corners, or grab doors to use the frame as shelter, but the doors are hard to budge. The building is twisting. So are the door frames. Jonas pulls at the door from inside the 4th floor. It will not open.

  He yanks again, and it springs open, and the wind blasts ahead of the collapse—not a gust, but a raging storm of a wind. As each floor drops, one upon the other, it is as if a giant accordion is being squeezed, pushing 55 million cubic feet of air. Behind the rush of air comes the screech of the failing trusses, the slap of tons of metal columns against other tons of metal, percussive bangs, end sounds.

  From the street, the building seems to spill out of itself, the dust boiling up, then pouring down the four facades toward the ground. Those who had escaped the collapse of the south tower know the impossible is happening yet again, twenty-nine minutes later. A team of men hurry north, carrying a chair that holds the slumped form of Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain, who died during the flight from the lobby of the north tower as the south tower fell.

  Now, as the north tower crumbles, another fire chaplain, John Delendick, runs toward the Hudson River. Next to him is a police officer.

  “Father, can I go to confession?” the cop yells.

  The priest thinks for a moment. “This is an act of war, isn’t it?” Delendick replies.

  “Yeah, I believe so,” the policeman says.


  “Then I’m giving general absolution,” Delendick declares, never slowing down.

  He speaks at the moment of death, particularly for those at the top of the north tower, the 1,000 or so people who survived the crash of Flight 11 at 8:46 but have not been able to find an open staircase. Their fate was sealed nearly four decades earlier, when the stairways were clustered in the core of the building, and fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space. The top floors of the north tower, weakened by the unabated, uncontained fire, now crater in a tremendous rush.

  As the floors fall, they pick up speed: ten stories in a single second. They sweep through a tower that seems empty, because 99 percent of the people who worked below the fire floors are now out of the tower. But this building is not empty. Still inside are Pablo Ortiz and Frank De Martini, who freed scores from the upper floors. Perhaps a dozen or so firefighters have climbed into the 40s, some a bit higher; other officers are wandering the halls and stairs to round up members of their companies who got separated during the ascent.

  Lower in the building, probably still on the 27th floor, is Capt. William Burke, who saw the collapse of the south tower, ordered his company out, but stayed with Ed Beyea in his wheelchair. No doubt, so is Abe Zelmanowitz, who stood by Beyea through the long morning, as thousands of people marched down the stairs, as rescuers came and went from the 27th floor, until only Captain Burke remained with them.

  Of uncertain status are the firefighters—perhaps as many as 100—last seen resting on the 19th floor by the three court officers, apparently unaware of the dire situation. Few could have made much progress to safety.

  Mike Warchola, the lieutenant from Ladder 5, on his last day of work, is on the 12th floor, helping a woman who cannot breathe. Possibly, it is Judith Reese, who was resting in that area when Jeff Gertler turned her over to a group of firefighters and Port Authority police officers. She remains under their care. They are trying to get her the last few steps to safety, but the building is coming at them faster than she can move.

  And most of the firefighters and police officers who carried John Rappa, the heavy man, to safety across the plaza have now ducked under the overhang of 6 World Trade Center, the building to the north, and they are starting to make their way inside. The two ESU officers, Michael Curtin and John D’Allara, however, wait outside, by the door of the building. The tower is falling at them.

  In the Marriott Hotel, where people on one side of a debris wall have been speaking to those trapped on the other side, even passing a flashlight across, this second collapse again spares the lobby area protected by the reinforced beam. It decimates the area where the people were trapped.

  Under the center of the plaza, Port Authority police officer Dominick Pezzulo has been trying to free two other officers, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, trapped by the first collapse. As Pezzulo lifts the rubble, he is struck and crushed by debris falling from the collapse of the north tower.

  In stairway B, among the firefighters who have taken on the cause of Josephine Harris and her fallen arches, there is a prayer or two for a swift end. The impossible collisions of floor, steel, glass are belting toward them. Even stronger than the noise is the wind. Sal D’Agostino tries to open a door to leave the stairwell, but it flies out and throws him against the wall. The wind lifts the engine’s chauffeur, Mike Meldrum, off his feet and heaves him one floor down; it carries Matt Komorowski down three floors.

  As the floors drop, the air has nowhere to go. So much of a skyscraper is nothing but air, empty spaces filled by people in buildings like 1 and 2 World Trade Center, putting little pieces of their daily lives onto these platforms.

  Here is a desk drawer where Dianne DeFontes keeps her sensible shoes. The rack where Raffaele Cava first hung his hat, thirty years earlier. The couch in Frank De Martini’s office where his aides’ children nap on their afternoon at Daddy’s job. The big table up in Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, where the wealthy young men and women dine out of paper bags on Junk Food Fridays. The flower vases in Windows on the World that Christine Olender checks, so that the well-set tables of crystal and linen are as pleasing to the eye as the forty-mile vista of city and harbor, river and road.

  Now the lights have gone out. The giant platters of air plunge past the people in the north tower and hit bottom. The wind seems to be bouncing back up stairway B, whipping tons of crushed building particles along the shaft. The people stretched up and down the lower floors of that stairway—the ones with Josephine Harris, a couple of the stragglers who had stayed in Pat Hoey’s office on the 64th floor all morning—can see nothing. They pry open a door, but it goes nowhere: they huddle, alive, in the last intact stub of the World Trade Center. Above them is only sky.

  Epilogue

  11:00 A.M.

  GROUND ZERO

  Some time later, Will Jimeno found himself buried but alive, pinned below the burning ground at the center of the trade center plaza. A load of concrete had fallen onto his lap, and a cinder-block wall rested on one of his feet. The oxygen tank strapped to his back also was wedged into rubble, fixing him in a semblance of a seated position, bent at a forty-five-degree angle. Of the four other Port Authority police officers who had been running with him through the concourse, pushing a cart full of rescue gear, only one, Sgt. John McLoughlin, was still alive. Two members of their group had been killed immediately by the collapse of the south tower. A third officer, Dominick Pezzulo, had managed to free himself and was picking at the rubble around Jimeno when the collapse of the north tower killed him.

  Now Jimeno was slumped in the hole, talking occasionally with McLoughlin, who was even deeper in the heap than Jimeno. The two men had no view of each other.

  “Can you see sky?” McLoughlin asked.

  “No sky, but light,” Jimeno replied.

  The sergeant worked his radio. No one answered. McLoughlin, who over the years had led elevator rescues at the trade center and rappelled into the blind shafts, told Jimeno that the rescue operations would have to pull back for a day, until the scene was stable. They were on their own.

  All across the northeastern United States, people were essentially on their own, stepping into the first minutes of a new epoch without the protections of an old world order whose institutions and functions seemed to have turned instantly decrepit. So a consideration of the events of September 11, 2001, could begin at any one of numerous spots across the globe, at almost any moment over the preceding four decades: the end of the Cold War; the collapse of the Soviet Union; any hour of any year in the unfinished history of the Middle East; in the often empty and petty exercise of authority in the capital of the world’s only superpower; at the boiling, nihilistic springs of religious fundamentalism that not only have endured but have thrived as forces in opposition to globalism, capitalism, modernism.

  Those historic currents, and others, merged and crashed on the morning of September 11 at the two towers of the World Trade Center, and at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. The particulars of the era that had just passed—the expectations of protection, the habits of defense, the sense of safety—seemed to have fossilized from one breath to the next. What happened in New York City that morning was replicated through all the arms of government, differing only in details, duration, and cost.

  For nearly the entire period of the Cold War, in the second half of the twentieth century, the air defense system, while rarely seen, existed in public consciousness as an invisible web to block nuclear attacks. During the September 11 crisis, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed that rogue planes be shot down. The order, it turned out, was never transmitted to the fighter pilots, a failure that, in any event, proved to be of little relevance: the national air defense and civil aviation authorities had been unable to pool their resources to track even one of the hijacked planes during the two-hour siege. So the order to shoot was not heard, and the planes to shoot at were not seen. The suicidal zealots on three of the four hijacked planes hit their targets—the twin towe
rs and the Pentagon. They were stopped from diving the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, into the Capitol or the White House only because the passengers learned of the events in Washington and New York from cell phone calls. They stormed the cockpit. The pilot of a passing airliner saw the wings of the United plane wiggling, apparently an attempt by the hijackers to defeat the onrushing passengers. The plane went down in rural Pennsylvania, 125 miles from Washington.

  As with events in Washington, in the air-traffic-control towers of the Northeast, and inside the twin towers, large institutions could scarcely begin to cope with one attack, much less four of them simultaneously. Little of that reality emerged in the early days following September 11. In the haze of grief, the nation simply was staggering from the loss of life and the shock of realizing that it was now the single most desirable target for terrorists. In a world where zealots could see only icons to smash, the attacks made sense; in a world where people like Dianne DeFontes sat alone in an empty law office, eating yogurt and answering phones, the idea that the attack had fallen on the representatives of a superpower seemed hallucinatory.

  At scores of funerals for firefighters and police officers, Mayor Giuliani declared that the police officers and firefighters had saved the lives of 25,000 people, “the greatest rescue ever recorded.” On occasion, the estimate of those “rescued” rose to 50,000. The mayor created a special charitable fund for the families of the city’s uniformed rescuers, and later expanded it to include Port Authority police officers; a grateful nation poured $216 million into it. In the first telling of the story of the trade center rescue, civilians played little role, except as helpless victims who were saved by the police and firefighters. That civilians had collaborated in the rescue—and indeed had been instrumental in saving many people on the high floors—simply did not make the early chronicles.