by Dwyer, Jim
No one had heard from Chuck Sereika, and by midmorning, the messages had piled up on his telephone answering machine and in his e-mail. Can’t believe it. Hope you’re okay. Our hearts are with you.
Sereika woke up. He had slept through everything, not a whisper of trouble in his apartment in midtown Manhattan. The e-mails told him something awful had happened, then news on his computer spelled it out, and as he blinked into the new world, he heard the messages on his answering machine. His sister had called.
“I love you,” she said. “I know you’re down there helping.”
Actually, he had been moping. In his closet, he found a paramedic sweatshirt and a badge he had not used for years. He had lost his paramedic license, let it lapse after he squandered too many days and nights carousing. He had gone into rehab programs, slipped, then climbed back on the wagon. He had fought his way back to sobriety, but the paramedic work was behind him. He still had the sweatshirt, though, and no one had taken the badge away. Maybe he could do some splints and bandages. He walked outside. Midtown Manhattan was teeming with people, a stream of humanity trooping in the middle of avenues, the subways shut down and scarcely a bus to be seen. The only way to move was on foot, and by the tens of thousands, people were walking north, or over to the river for ferries, or into Penn Station for a commuter train that would take them east to Long Island or west to New Jersey.
Sereika walked a few blocks from his apartment to St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center. Then he hitched rides on ambulances going downtown.
Seven World Trade Center—a forty-seven-story building—collapsed at 5:20 that afternoon. The firefighters had decided to let the fire there burn itself out. There was no one inside. Against all that had happened, the loss of even such an enormous building seemed like a footnote.
David Karnes had arrived downtown not long after its collapse, and as far as he could see, the searches were confined entirely to the periphery of the complex, picking through the rubble at the edges for signs of life. Other structures were now burning—the low-rise building at 4 World Trade Center was shooting flames—and all hands were staying clear of the ruins of the two towers and the plaza between them.
Karnes had started the morning in a business suit, working as an accountant for Deloitte and Touche in Wilton, Connecticut. After the attacks, he drove from Connecticut to Long Island and went to a storage facility where he kept his Marine kit. His utility trousers and jacket were freshly pressed, though his commitment had ended months earlier. Trim as a whip, he slipped into them, drove to a barber, and ordered a high and tight haircut. He stopped at his church and asked for prayers with the pastor, then with the top down on his new convertible, drove straight for lower Manhattan.
He found the rescue workers in shock, depressed, doing little by way of organized searches. Karnes spotted another Marine, a man named Sergeant Thomas, no first name.
“Come on, Sergeant,” Karnes said. “Let’s take a walk.”
Not another soul was around them. They swept across the broken ground, yelling, “United States Marines. If you can hear us, yell or tap.”
No one answered. They moved forward, deeper into the rubble. The fires roared at 4 World Trade Center. They plowed across the jagged, fierce ground.
Lost in thought, waiting for release, Will Jimeno listened to the trade center complex ripping itself apart. He had gotten tired of shouting at phantoms. He asked McLoughlin to put out a radio message that Officer Jimeno wanted his newborn baby to be named Olivia. The sergeant was in excruciating pain, his legs crushed. There was nothing to do, Jimeno thought, except wait until they sent out rescue parties in the morning. If they lived that long.
Then came the voice.
“United States Marines. If you can hear us, yell or tap.”
What? That was a person.
Jimeno shouted with every bit of strength he had.
“Right here! Jimeno and McLoughlin, PAPD! Here!”
“Keep yelling,” Karnes said.
It took a few minutes, but Karnes found the hole.
“Don’t leave,” Jimeno pleaded.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Karnes said.
Karnes pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911, but the call did not go through. He tried again, without success. How could he get help, without leaving Jimeno and McLoughlin? Maybe the problem was with phone lines downtown, and he could find an electronic bridge via someone outside the city. He dialed his sister in a suburb of Pittsburgh and got through. She called the local police. They were able to reach the New York police. The message had traveled 300 miles from the pile to Pennsylvania, then 300 miles back to police headquarters, but the NYPD finally learned that a few blocks away, two cops were buried in the middle of the pile, and a United States Marine was standing by to direct the rescuers.
Chuck Sereika had been wandering the edge of that pile as evening approached, when he heard people yelling that someone had been found in the center of the place. Sereika set out, walking part of the way with a firefighter. They could see the flames roaring from the remains of 4 World Trade Center, an eight-story building. The firefighter peeled away. By himself, Sereika stumbled and climbed, until he found Dave Karnes standing alone. From the surface, he could see nothing of Will Jimeno, but he could hear him. Sereika squeezed his way into a crevice, inching his way down the rubble, finally spotting Jimeno’s hand.
“Hey,” Sereika said.
“Don’t leave me,” Jimeno said.
Sereika felt for a pulse. A good, strong distal pulse, a basic in emergency care.
“Don’t leave me,” Jimeno said.
“We’re not going to leave you,” Sereika said. He pawed at the rubble and found Jimeno’s gun, which he passed up to Karnes. Then he sent word for oxygen and an intravenous setup. Two emergency service police officers, Scott Strauss and Paddy McGee, soon arrived, and Sereika handed rocks and rubble back to them. A fireman, Tom Ascher, arrived with a hose to fight off the flames. They could hear McLoughlin calling out for help.
We will get there, they promised.
The basics of trauma care are simple: provide fluids and oxygen. Simple—except that in the hole at the trade center, they could not take the next step in the classic formula: “load and go.” First they had to extricate Jimeno, a highly delicate proposition.
Sereika could hear 4 World Trade Center groaning to its bones. To shift large pieces off Jimeno risked starting a new slide. There was room in the hole only for one person at a time, and Sereika was basically on top of him. It was not unlike working under the dashboard of a car, except the engine was on fire and the car was speeding and about to crash. The space was filled with smoke. Strauss and McGee were carefully moving the rubble, engineering on the fly, so that they could shift loads without bringing more debris down on themselves or on Jimeno and McLoughlin. Tools were passed from the street along a line of helpers. A handheld air chisel. Shears. When the Hurst jaws of life tool arrived, the officers wanted to use it to lift one particularly heavy section, but they could not quite get solid footing on the rubble. Sereika, the lapsed paramedic, immediately sized up the problem and shimmed rubble into place for the machine to rest on.
The work inched forward, treacherous and hot and slow.
After four hours, at 11 P.M., Will Jimeno was freed. They loaded him into a basket, slid him up the path to the surface. That left only John McLoughlin, deeper still, but none of the group in and around the hole could go on. They called down a fresh team that would work until the morning before they finally pulled him out, not long before the last survivor from stairway B, Genelle Guzman, would also be reached.
Aboveground, the men who had gone into the hole with Will Jimeno found they could barely walk. Smoke reeked from the hair on their heads, soot packed every pore on their skin. Sereika stumbled up from the crevice in time to see Jimeno in his basket being passed along police officers and firefighters who had set up a line, scores of people deep, across the jagged, broken ground.
&nbs
p; He could not keep up with his patient. He could just about get himself to the sidewalk. He had worked for hours alongside the other men, first names only, and Sereika was employed by no official agency, no government body. Once they left the hole, the men lost track of each other. Just as people had come to work by themselves hours earlier, at the start of the day—an entire age ago—now Chuck Sereika was starting for home on his own. His old paramedic shirt torn, he plodded north in the late-summer night, alone, scuffling down streets blanketed by the dust that had been the World Trade Center.
High above
Manhattan:
The Twin Towers
Authors’ Note
For 102 minutes on the morning of September 11, 2001, 14,000 men and women fought for life at the World Trade Center. This book aims to tell what happened solely from the perspective of the people inside the twin towers—office workers, visitors, and the rescuers who rushed to help them. Their accounts are drawn from 200 interviews with survivors and witnesses, thousands of pages of transcribed radio transmissions, phone messages, e-mails, and oral histories. All sources are named and enumerated.
No single voice can describe scenes that unfolded at terrible velocities in so many places. Taken together, though, the words, witnesses, and records provide not only a broad and chilling view of the devastation, but also a singularly revealing window onto acts of grace at a brutal hour.
The immediate challenges these people faced were not geopolitical but intensely local: how, for instance, to open a jammed door, or navigate a flaming hallway, or climb dozens of flights of stairs. Civilians or rescuers, they had to take care of themselves and those around them. Their words inevitably trace a narrative of excruciating loss; they also describe how the simplest gestures and tools were put to transcendent use—everything from a squeegee in a stuck elevator to a squeeze on the shoulder, from a voice booming an order to get out to a crowbar smashing Sheetrock around a jammed door. As chapters in the history of human valor and frailty and struggle, these are matters of first importance. They brought us to this book.
That the crises in the two buildings had identical beginnings and endings—suicidal attacks by terrorists in airliners, followed by raging fire and total collapses—evokes the parallel shape and size of the buildings, suggesting one more way in which the towers were twins. Yet the events in each tower ran on different clocks and took different courses, each separately instructive. The north tower was hit first, at 8:46:31, sixteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds before the strike against the south tower at 9:02:59; this gap between crashes afforded some opportunity to begin an evacuation in the south building before the second plane flew into it. Conversely, the south tower, though hit second, was the first to fall, collapsing at 9:58:59, twenty-nine minutes and twenty-six seconds before the north tower, which fell at 10:28:25—in effect, giving notice that total calamity was not only possible but also imminent, and thus providing a chance for rescuers to pull out of the north building.
In heartbreaking measure, many people could not take hold of those fleeting opportunities. During those two intervals, and ultimately, across the entire 102 minutes, decades of struggle over safety in skyscrapers and over the sensible operation of New York’s emergency services would come to shattering ends.
Nothing can diminish the culpability of the hijackers and their masters in the murders of September 11, 2001, which stand beyond mitigation as the defining historical truth of the day. The ferocity of the attacks meant that innocent people lived or died because they stepped back from a doorway, or hopped onto a closing elevator, or simply shifted their weight from one foot to another. That said, simply to declare that the hijackers alone killed all those people gives them far more credit as tacticians than they are due. The buildings themselves became weapons, apparently well beyond the designs of the hijackers, if not their hopes; so, too, did a sclerotic emergency response culture in New York that resisted reform, even when confronted again and again with the dangers of business as usual.
At least 1,500 people in the trade center—and possibly many more—survived the initial crashes but died because they were unable to escape from their floors or elevators while the buildings stood. Those people were not killed by the planes alone any more than passengers on the Titanic were killed by the iceberg. With 102 minutes in the north tower, and 57 minutes in the south, thousands of people had time to evacuate, and did. Those who did not escape were trapped by circumstances that had been the subject of debates that began before the first shovelful of earth was turned for the trade center, and that continued, at a low volume, through the entire existence of the towers. Could the buildings withstand the direct impact of an airplane? Was the fireproofing adequate? Were there enough exits?
The willingness of firefighters, police officers, and medical workers to serve others, never in question, was indelibly established on September 11. Stark and towering as their sacrifices are, they do not stand alone in history. We have now obtained many records documenting the emergency response that both the City of New York and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have tried to keep secret. These records show that for all the aggressiveness of the response, emergency workers suffered the same failures of communication, coordination, and command that they had experienced on February 26, 1993, when terrorists first tried to knock down the trade center. This time, those failures came at terrible cost. Indeed, for 102 minutes, success and failure, life and death, ran parallel courses—as did effort and selflessness, infighting and shortsightedness.
Finally, the fate of all the men and women inside the towers during those 102 minutes was specifically, and intimately, linked to decisions about the planning and construction of, and faith in, colossally tall buildings. Approximately 12,000 people—nearly everyone below the crash zones—got out, creating an encyclopedia of survival: the towers stood long enough, the office workers formed a mass of civility, the responders helped steer and steady them.
And then there is the brutal calculus of death. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City reports that 2,753 people died in the attacks on New York. Of these, 147 were passengers or crew members on the two flights; in the buildings, no more than 600 people were on floors where the planes hit, close enough to be killed immediately. Another 412 of the dead were rescue workers who came to help. The rest, more than 1,500 men and women, survived the plane crashes, but were trapped as far as twenty floors from the impact. Like the passengers on the unsinkable Titanic, many of the individuals inside the World Trade Center simply did not have the means to escape towers that were promised not to sink, even if struck by airplanes. In the struggle to live, those who survived and those who did not sent out hundreds of messages. They gave us the history of those 102 minutes.
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
September 2004
New York City
367 People at the World Trade Center
1 WORLD TRADE CENTER (NORTH TOWER)
The 89th floor
Rick Bryan
Raffaele Cava
Dianne DeFontes
Nathan Goldwasser
Akane Ito
Stephanie Manning
Harold Martin
Tirsa Moya
Walter Pilipiak
Rob Sibarium
Lynn Simpson
Beast Financial Systems
Susan Fredericks
Sharon Premoli
Cantor Fitzgerald
Stephen Cherry
Charles Heeran
David Kravette
Andrew Rosenblum
Martin Wortley
Carr Futures
Brendan Dolan
Joe Holland
Tom McGinnis
Damian Meehan
Jeffrey Nussbaum
Jim Paul
Elkin Yuen
Clearstream Banking
Anne Prosser
Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield
Ed Beyea
Irma Fuller
Abe Zelmanowitz
Julian Studley
James Gartenberg
Patricia Puma
Marsh & McLennan
Dana Coulthurst
Judith Martin
Patricia Massari
Keith Meerholz
Ian Robb
Gerry Wertz
Chris Young
May Davis Group
Steve Charest
Mike Jacobs
Network Plus
Michael Benfante
John Cerquiera
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 88th floor
Jim Connors
Patricia Cullen
Carlos DaCosta
Frank De Martini
Nicole De Martini, guest
Elaine Duch
Gerry Gaeta
Jeff Gertler
Mak Hanna
Moe Lipson
Pete Negron
Pablo Ortiz
Judith Reese
Anita Serpe
Dorene Smith
Frank Varriano
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, elsewhere in building
Ana Abelians
John Abruzzo
Michael Ambrosio
Lenny Ardizzone
Ezra Aviles
Peter Bitwinski
Frank Bucaretti
Pasquale Buzzelli
Phillip Caffrey
Richard Capriotti
Nelson Chanfrau
Michael Curci
Frank DiMola
Gerry Drohan
Bob Eisenstadt
Michael Fabiano
Ken Greene
Genelle Guzman
Tina Hansen
