by Dwyer, Jim
The 89th floor tenants posted their condolences and thanks to an online memorial site. The remains of Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz were not recovered, but when the Ortiz children held a memorial service for their father in upstate New York, Tirsa Moya and other survivors attended.
The accounts of Frank De Martini’s valor reached Italy through his cousin, Enrico Tittarelli, who had visited the trade center in 1994 and snapped a picture of him riding an inspection bucket along the side of the building, smiling, perhaps at the audacity of an open-to-the-air journey a quarter mile in the sky. Cousin Enrico brought word of Frank’s deeds to their aunt in Italy.
“In the house where I spent unforgettable days with Frank, when he was in Italy as a student, I sat in front of the fireplace with my old aunt who really loved him,” Tittarelli recalled. “Some young cousins were with us. There was silence, unusual in that room, while I was reading … what his fearless personality made him do and say in a ‘calm and collected’ way. My voice was not so much calm and collected as his.
“For some moments Frank was again among us. Alive, courageous, generous, and fatally imprudent. As we had known him.”
Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, who had escaped from the south tower, made it to the southeast corner of the trade center, stopped in a delicatessen for water, and were given a breakfast tray that had not been picked up. They walked a block to the west side of Trinity Church. They met a clergyman who invited them to come into the church, but as they walked in, Praimnath said, “You know, I think those buildings could go down.” Clark scoffed at the notion. The interior furnishings might burn, he said, but the structure was steel. “There is no way.”
At that instant, the south tower boiled into dust. They retreated into an office building, with Clark still carrying the tray of fruit and rolls and offering them to the people in the lobby. The refugees devoured them. After a half hour or so, the two headed down New Street. Praimnath slipped Clark a business card, and told him to stay in touch. In the throngs moving to the East River, they were separated and quickly lost track of each other.
Clark wandered over to Pier 11, and heard someone calling out on a bullhorn that a ferry was going to Jersey City, so he jumped on. As the boat came around the foot of Manhattan island, he saw that the south tower had not just lost the burning floors at the top, but had completely vanished. He had worked there for twenty-seven years.
On board the ferry, the unlikely steps of his flight came back to him: the people in the staircase, arguing about whether to go up or down; the calls for help that he heard from the 81st floor, diverting him from that debate. As he pulled Praimnath out of his ruined office, the people he had been with on the stairs were going up. It was Praimnath’s voice that had saved him from that fatal diversion.
But what had happened to this Stanley, this stranger whom he had pulled over the rubble and fell to the ground with in an embrace? Where had he gone? Perhaps, Clark mused, he had dreamed the whole thing. Or maybe that stranger had been an angel, some sort of spectre, a metaphysical presence. Then, in his breast pocket, he felt a small business card. On it was the name of Stanley Praimnath.
Clark reached Jersey City, found a phone to call his house and report that he was alive. Then he caught a train to his station, and from there, drove home. In front of his house, he leaned on the horn, long and loud, a blaring fanfare to declare life as loud as he could. He was smothered in the embrace of his wife, then all the family and friends who had come to console her.
Having survived a plane that flew almost directly into his window, Stanley Praimnath, a devout man before September 11, became a speaker much in demand at churches and with religious groups who wanted to see the man who saw the plane coming. As his story became known, his autumn weekends were soon booked, and he told audiences about the divine love that he believes carried him to safety.
The planning, and the bickering, over what should be done with the trade center site began before the sixteen acres had been cleared of the twisted steel and powdered concrete. Filling the void became a pressing and difficult matter. Years passed and the slow pace in settling on a blueprint, in honoring the dead, in laying some kind of foundation for a new, brighter, safer future, seemed conspicuous, in part because so much else in Manhattan seemed to revive.
When the PATH station, the remnant of the Hudson Terminal train line on which the trade center had been built, was reopened in November 2003, many found themselves for the first time in the very pit where the towers and satellite buildings once stood. Among the remnants of the old complex was a bank of escalators that had carried streams of New Jersey commuters from the PATH station into the trade center. Now the train platform, once invisible to the world and from which it was hard to see anything, was, startlingly, wide open, at the center of the remains. Everything that once sat above and around the train station had disappeared. Trains rolled in and out, but the platform, swept every moment by wind and memory, could never be merely a place to catch a train. On her way to an appointment in New Jersey, Tirsa Moya, one of the people who had escaped from the 89th floor, finally returned to the site in the spring of 2004. As she rode the escalator down to the PATH platform, she wept. She felt as though she were going to her grave. Her boss distracted her, and she completed the trip. On her return from New Jersey, however, she found herself again buried in history, in loss, in the moment of escape. She cried all the way home.
Across the street from the towers, at the Millenium Hilton, where the breakfast dishes had been fossilized in soot, the building was cleaned and ready for guests by May 2003. A year later, after making do in temporary offices, Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trading firm that lost 658 people at the top of the north tower, found a new, permanent home, four miles uptown, in the lower floors of an East 59th Street skyscraper.
Yet even as New Yorkers resumed old rhythms or struggled to shape new ones, much of what had happened that morning remained inconceivable, the depth of the disaster so stunning it took on the dreamlike quality of myth. Efforts to reconstruct a solid version of what had happened inside the towers had to navigate through the fog of pain, politics, and fear. In fact, the answers to some questions had disappeared with those who had been lost in the collapses.
Why had only eighteen people in the south tower been able to escape using stairway A, the only effective route out of the imperiled upper floors in either of the buildings?
Had others found the stairwell but were still descending when the south tower fell?
How did Battalion Chief Orio Palmer come to understand that Channel 7, the radio frequency that had been specially designed to work inside the towers, was not completely out of service, as he and other fire commanders originally thought? For much of the morning Palmer had been able to use that channel to talk to his commander in the south tower lobby, even as he climbed, floor by floor, into the higher reaches of the building to rescue the injured. Such a line of communication would have been invaluable in the north tower where the escape of so many firefighters had been impeded by poor communications.
How many people had actually jumped from either of the towers? And in many of the cases was “jumping” an accurate depiction of what bodies at 98.6 degrees do reflexively when confronted by 1,000-degree heat?
Even after the report of the 9/11 Commission, the studies by management specialists, and the sifting of evidence by investigators, journalists, and family members, the precise shape of the disaster and the texture of the final moments of many men and women remained unknown.
In 2005, though, rich new sources of information became available that sharpened some perceptions, offered fresh insights, and filled out incomplete chapters in the sprawling chronicle of the morning. In June, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies released its final draft report, a three-year engineering study primarily designed to make the next generation of skyscrapers safer.
The document amounted to a 10,000-page autopsy of the trade center’s collapse: the efficacy of the fi
reproofing, the adequacy of the original design, the efficiency of the emergency response and the evacuation that followed. In one section, the analysts found that the towers should have had four exit staircases under the 1968 New York City building code, not just the three that were in each building. The planes’ impact had destroyed those three escape stairwells in the north tower, and two of the three in the south tower. Although the Port Authority, as an interstate agency, was not bound by local codes in constructing the trade center, it had publicly pledged to “meet or exceed” the city codes. The investigators found that to have met even the newly liberalized 1968 code, the builders should have installed the fourth staircase, one specifically designed to accommodate the 1,000 people who would use the large public meeting rooms at the top of each building: the restaurant in the north tower and the observation deck atop the south tower.
“Once you go over 1,000 people on a floor, you need to have a fourth stairway,” said Richard W. Bukowski, a senior engineer with the institute. Of course, the location of that additional staircase in each tower would have determined whether they survived the crashes, and ultimately, whether they might have been useful as escape routes for the people trapped on the high floors.
The Port Authority said it believed the institute was mistaken and noted that New York City building officials, who reviewed the trade center plans in the 1960s and after the 1993 terrorist bombing, had not raised any questions about the missing staircase.
Nevertheless, the city Buildings Department in 2005 had no doubts: A fourth staircase was unambiguously required by the code, its officials said.
At the same time, the institute offered additional evidence that the Port Authority had indeed been eager to reduce the amount of space devoted to stairs in the buildings. One of the documents included in its report was a September 29, 1965, letter from Malcolm P. Levy, the authority’s chief planning engineer, to Minoru Yamasaki, the architect, in which the agency noted that it would be using the new, less restrictive building code then being drafted.
“It is my understanding that the present drawings have been prepared to permit rapid conversion to the new code,” Levy wrote. “The tower core should be redesigned to eliminate the fire towers and to take advantage of the more lenient provisions regarding exit stairs.” A few years later when city building officials took exception to those plans, arguing that they did not meet the 1938 code that was still the law, Levy and others at the Port Authority said they had decided that the buildings would comply with the less-stringent code, then in draft form, but on the verge of being enacted. The NIST investigators also located notes showing that the Port Authority saw advantages in the new code because it required fewer exits and less fireproofing.
On the question of building code compliance, the federal report had a significant, and possibly stinging recommendation: government agencies such as the Port Authority that were exempt, by law, from building code enforcement should not escape all outside scrutiny. The federal report said those agencies should not be permitted to “self-certify” that they had met the codes. That was the approach that had been used by the Port Authority in building the trade center—its own engineers and experts decided if the buildings met standards, and when they were entitled to take an exception. Now, the federal authorities suggested, even in cases where a government agency was exempt, an independent third party should review the procedures to determine if they were consistent with the code.
Asked if the Port Authority—an agency whose executives were appointed by the governors of New York and New Jersey—would now subject its building safety standards to the scrutiny of an outside expert, a spokesman replied: “It is an interesting proposal and we will consider it.”
Two months later, in August 2005, the City of New York released hours of audio tape from emergency dispatchers who had directed the Fire Department’s response, as well as 12,000 pages of transcribed interviews with 503 firefighters, fire officials, and emergency medical workers who had been at the towers that morning. The interviews had been ordered in the fall of 2001 by Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, who sought to preserve accurate recollections before they were refashioned by collective memory.
The department later made no effort to analyze the information, however, and when The New York Times asked to see the material in February 2002, the city refused to release it, saying it would interfere with the prosecution of a man accused of plotting with the September 11 hijackers. A federal judge ruled that most of the records had no bearing whatsoever on the trial. Later, city lawyers claimed that the firefighters had been promised confidentiality, but ultimately withdrew that assertion. The city finally argued that much of the oral histories were opinions and not public records. The newspaper sued, under New York’s freedom of information law, and in April 2005 the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ordered that the materials be released.
The interviews provided searing, vivid testimony, uncensored by protocol. Firefighters recalled the confusion of the day and their frustrations and struggles against the surging fire in highly personal accounts that resonated with their own residual disbelief at what had occurred. All were recorded at a time when the whereabouts of hundreds of people had yet to be determined. In many cases, the interviewers asked for any sightings of colleagues, many of whose remains had yet to be found.
Particularly informative were the accounts of 200 emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and their supervisors, whose response had been vital but whose perspective had been largely overlooked in the retellings of the day. The Emergency Medical Services, which became a division within the Fire Department in 1996, had deployed en masse to the incident and, almost from the start, had difficulty coordinating an orderly response. Crews had trouble finding supervisors. Radio communications were spotty. Each unit was forced to fend for itself. Efforts at triage were scattershot. Isolated and without clear lines of command, each crew made its own judgments and set its own priorities.
Paramedics shepherded crowds away from the towers, bandaged people inside a bank lobby, and packed their ambulances with the dazed, the bleeding, and the burned. At one point, a group of the medical chiefs met, in part by chance, at the Embassy Suites Hotel in the World Financial Center and sat down to configure a new plan. Gathered in the lobby, they began to work out the details over a tabletop and then, distracted by the arrival of more people needing care, moved into a back corridor where they fashioned a strategy to regain some semblance of order over the disaster. When they emerged, however, they found they could not communicate the plan to the entire force because their own radios could not contact the dispatchers.
Joseph Cahill, a paramedic, said the experience felt like being in an infantry unit that had been overrun. “We are scattered everywhere,” he said. “Nobody knew where anybody was. Nobody knew who was in charge. It really felt for a moment that I was in Apocalypse Now, where Martin Sheen goes, ‘Where is your C.O.? Ain’t that you? No. Uh-oh.’”
Several medical technicians had family in the burning buildings—a father, a wife, a fiancé, a close friend. Manuel Delgado, a paramedic, was standing on Church Street with another paramedic, Carlos Lillo, treating several critically injured people when Delgado noticed that Lillo was crying. It was an overwhelming moment, Delgado understood, but Lillo was a seasoned veteran.
“I go to him, ‘Carlos, what’s the matter? What’s going on?’”
“My wife’s in there,” Lillo responded, indicating the north tower.
Cecilia Lillo worked as an administrator for the Port Authority on the 64th floor. She ultimately survived after escaping with the other people from her floor. Her husband, who went looking for her, did not.
Two emergency medical technicians, Richard Erdey and Soraya O’Donnell, recounted how they were on the scene only a few moments when they were directed to help a firefighter, Danny Suhr. He had been hit by the body of a woman who had fallen from one of the towers and, after loading him into the ambulance, his condition was immed
iately clear: He had no vital signs and his injuries were catastrophic.
Erdey was certain the firefighter was dead, but two of the firefighter’s colleagues from Engine 216 had climbed into the ambulance with them for the ride to Bellevue Hospital Center. “They kept yelling, ‘Danny, Danny, Danny!’” Erdey said. He was struck by how intently they were staring at him. “I’m saying, should I tell them? Should I not tell them? How can I tell them tactfully?”
As they continued the hopeless resuscitation efforts, Erdey finally warned the firefighters there was only a small glimmer of hope for their friend. Indeed, Suhr was pronounced dead when they arrived at the hospital. Minutes later, as the crew began preparing to return to the towers, they were approached by two people from the hospital, an emergency room doctor and an Anglican nun, Sister Cynthia Mahoney. They wanted to go along to help.
Erdey looked at the nun, unsure if she knew the magnitude of what she was volunteering for. “You understand, ma’am, we might not come back from this,” he said. She understood, Sister Cynthia said, and the pair from the hospital climbed in for a trip back to the towers. When they arrived, the chaos had intensified. The towers had fallen and as they approached in their ambulance they encountered a fellow medical technician wandering, disoriented, through the smoke, holding his helmet.
“Where is your partner?” O’Donnell asked.
“I’m looking for my father,” the technician responded. “He was in the World Trade Center.”
“Why don’t you get in the back with us,” O’Donnell called out to him. “We had the nun in the back,” she said. “We figured she could talk to him.”
