102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (17 page)

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Authors: Jim Dwyer,Kevin Flynn

BOOK: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
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John Griffin, whose height had been so essential to opening the doors, moved to a bank of pay phones and tried to make calls. Over a walkie-talkie, Trapp thought he heard a transmission that firefighters had arrived on the 78th floor.
Griffin decided that he would go look for them.
“Do you want me to come with you?” asked Trapp.
No, Griffin said, he should stay.
Griffin disappeared down corridors, scouting around the oneacre
floor, in search of the firefighters. He came back a few minutes later. Perhaps they had heard wrong.
 
 
Trapped in another elevator, on the 50th floor of the north tower, the six men in car 69A had been working steadily, urgently, for more than a half hour to get out. So far, they had torn and punched through nearly three inches of drywall. One more gouge, and surely they would be free.
Just as the towers were cut off from the outside world, even deeper levels of isolation were nested inside the buildings. About one-quarter of the space in each tower consisted of the core, which contained the shafts for the elevators. Deeper still were the elevator cars: cloistered boxes inside the shafts inside the towers.
The array of ninety-nine elevators in each of the towers had been the engines of wonder, making the impossible height of the trade center simply another few minutes tacked on to the workday commute. This morning, the flaming balls of fuel, in pursuit of oxygen, raced up and down the shafts in the two buildings, burning many people in the cars, killing some immediately. The concussions blew off elevator doors and shaft walls on the top thirty to fifty floors of each building. Even in the ground-floor lobbies, doors flew off. In the north tower, in the shaft for the express elevator dedicated to serving Windows on the World—and thus one of the few that ran uninterrupted from the bottom of the building to the top—the burning fuel seemed to hurtle through like a bullet in the barrel of a long rifle. The lobby doors shot off their frames. The elevator system that had made the trade center and buildings like it possible had become the carrier of devastation.
More than a century earlier, as New York City’s population was exploding, the contours of Manhattan Island meant that the city could grow in only one direction—up, the same direction that many other cities, for one reason or another, would also take. Before tall buildings could become part of the landscape, New Yorkers had to be convinced that they could reach high floors without climbing;
conversely, they also had to believe that any machine that carried them to a high place would not simply plunge to the ground if it failed.
In 1854, Elisha Graves Otis, standing on a platform, was hoisted by a rope higher and higher above a crowd that had gathered at New York’s Crystal Palace for an exhibition organized by P. T. Barnum. The platform rode along tracks at either side. At the top, Otis drew a knife and slashed the hoist rope, presumably all that kept him from falling back to earth. Instead, the car dropped, then came to a halt, thanks to the automatic safety braking system Otis had devised from a ratchet and the spring of a wagon wheel.
Over the decades, engineers developed multiple elaborations of the Otis principle: to make falling all but impossible, one system stopped the car if a cable was cut, and another returned it peacefully to its lowest floor and opened the doors. These features were naturally incorporated into the elevators at the trade center.
The most necessary innovation for the twin towers, however, was the creation of the express and local systems, with the sky lobbies at the 44th and 78th floors serving as transfer points. This cut down on the number of elevators. It also created one final depth of isolation, as the experience of the six men in car 69A showed.
 
 
At 8:46, just seconds before the first plane hit, the six men—Jan Demczur, George Phoenix, John Paczkowski, Shivam Iyer, Colin Richardson, and Al Smith—had boarded the car at the north tower’s 44th-floor sky lobby, most of them having just stopped at a cafeteria on 43 for breakfast. Phoenix, a Port Authority engineer, was carrying coffee, milk, and a Danish pastry. Demczur, a window washer, had an old green bucket, its rectangular mouth perfect for his squeegee. Car 69A was a shuttle that picked up passengers at 44 and then made stops between 67 and 74.
The car rose, but before it reached the first landing, the men felt a muted thud. The elevator swung from side to side, like a pendulum. Then the car seemed to plunge. Someone punched an emergency stop button, and the car halted. They got a recorded response
telling them that their message had been received, and that help was on the way. No one knew what was going on; the men in the elevator were as cut off 500 feet in the sky as if they had been trapped 500 feet underwater.
After ten minutes, a live voice delivered a blunt message over the intercom. There had been an explosion. Then the intercom went silent. Smoke began seeping into the cabin. One man cursed skyscrapers. Phoenix, the tallest, poked for a ceiling hatch. Others pried apart the car doors, propping them open with the long wooden handle of Demczur’s squeegee. There was no exit. They faced a wall, blank other than a stenciled number 50. That particular elevator bank did not serve the 50th floor, so there was no need for an opening.
The six men were trapped by a feature of the trade center most cherished by its designers, and thoroughly despised by firefighters: the long elevator shafts devoted to express service. The firefighters’ objection was not to quick travel or efficient use of space; the problem was that the towers had no provisions for getting into the shafts anywhere but on the floors where the cars made regular stops. So for hundreds of vertical feet, the shafts ran “blind,” entirely closed by gypsum wallboard. To remove people from a car stalled in one of those shafts posed an enormous challenge: first, to find them—there were fifteen miles of elevator shafts in the towers—and second, to reach them. After the 1993 bombing, the United States Fire Administration collected reports from the supervising chiefs, and all expressed frustration with the design. “The blind shafts in the WTC extended 78 stories,” Deputy Chief Steven C. DeRosa wrote. “Firefighters had to open the shaft every five floors to locate a car—it was impossible to see more than six floors into the blackness. Some local building codes require openings into blind elevator shafts at three-floor intervals; this feature was not provided in the case of the WTC.”
Now, inside car 69A, Demczur felt the wall. His fingertips told him it was drywall. Having worked in construction after he first arrived in the United States from Poland, he knew that it could be cut with a sharp knife. A quick survey of the car found that no one
had a knife. From his bucket, Demczur drew the only available sharp edge: his squeegee. He slid its metal edge against the wall, back and forth, over and over. He was spelled by the other men, and they scored deeper and deeper. Blinking and coughing in the smoke, they breathed through handkerchiefs moistened in the container of milk that Phoenix had just picked up in the cafeteria.
Sheetrock comes in panels about one inch thick, Demczur recalled. The men cut an inch, then two inches. Demczur’s hand ached. As he carved into the third panel, his hand shook; he fumbled the squeegee and dropped it down the shaft. Now he had one tool left: a short metal squeegee handle. The men carried on, with fists, feet and handle, cutting a jagged rectangle about twelve by eighteen inches. Finally, they breached the last layer of Sheetrock, only to hit a layer of white tiles. A bathroom. They broke the tiles. Smith squeezed out first, then went into the hallways—where, remarkably, he immediately boarded another elevator that brought him down from 50 to the 44th floor sky lobby. There, catching his breath, was Mike McQuaid, the electrician who had been on the 91st floor installing fire alarms when the plane hit. McQuaid rode back up to 50 with Smith. In the bathroom the other men were still squirming, one by one, through the opening, headfirst, sideways, popping onto the floor near a sink. Demczur turned back. “Pass my bucket out,” he said. By then, about 9:30, the 50th floor was already deserted. They hustled into the staircase.
On the single-file descent, someone teased Demczur about the battered old bucket he insisted on bringing. “The company might not order me another one,” he replied.
 
 
Not all the elevators stopped in blind shafts. For that matter, not all the elevators stopped. An instant before Flight 175 hit the south tower, an express elevator left the 78th floor, bound for the lobby, packed with passengers including people from the research department of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, and others from Aon. The plane’s impact severed the cables to that car, and it began what felt like a free-fall, plunging toward the lobby. Here was a nightmare that
long ago seemed to have been written out of the myth of tall buildings. The people inside dropped to their knees. As the car fell through the shaft, screeching, it slowed, then rumbled to a halt, when one last emergency system kicked in: a brake that stopped them about ten feet above the lobby.
Inside, about twenty-five men and women lay in a tangle of twisted metal, in absolute darkness. Someone, they were sure, would realize they were stuck and get them out. They waited. One person pulled out a laptop, switched it on to provide some light. The box that had been the elevator car seemed crushed. Maybe five or ten minutes later, when flames began to lick into the bottom of the cab, a keening began.
“In the name of God,” a voice wailed. “In the name of God. In the name of God.”
Then, with a shift in smoke, or less dust, they could see something: a little shaft of light. At the base of the car, the violence had peeled back the remnants of the door ever so slightly, revealing a glimpse of the lobby beneath them. Alan Mann, an executive with Aon, climbed to the front across people sprawled on the floor, and used his left hand to yank at a piece of metal. In some order, three people were able to get out of the car. Linda Rothemund of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods squeezed through, lowered by the people inside. She saw no one in the lobby, then ran into the concourse for help. Mann tried to go headfirst through the hole, and could not, but was able to wiggle through feetfirst, dropping into the lobby with his pants in shreds, his shoes gone, his left hand cut deeply on the metal. He saw few people in the lobby, then wandered into the concourse, spotting four firefighters, and led them back to the car. Then he stumbled out toward Church Street.
Finally, Lauren Smith, also of KBW, pushed through the same hole, but when she hit the ground in the lobby, pitched into an exposed elevator shaft. Her fall was broken by a beam in the shaft, fracturing five of her ribs and puncturing a lung. Her drop into the elevator shaft entered the annals of the catastrophe at 9:39, thirty-seven minutes after Flight 175 had hit the south tower, fifty-three minutes into the crisis.
PAPD Officer Thomas Grogan:
Two World Trade Center, probably 3-10 level [the lobby], a female fell through the shaft. They need somebody to see if they can get her.
PAPD Officer Ray Murray:
Two World Trade Center, fell through the shaft.
PAPD Officer Thomas Grogan:
Two World Trade Center, I don’t know what car, though.
PAPD Officer Ray Murray:
Okay.
In a few minutes, Linda Rothemund returned. Help was gathering. Ron Hoerner, a supervisor for the private security guards, peered into the elevator shaft. Eight or ten feet down, Smith grabbed a cable and pulled herself up high enough so that the people in the lobby could reach her. She remembered being hoisted by a “human ladder.”
Another message went out over the radio.
PAPD Officer Thomas Grogan:
She’s in the lobby, they … they actually have her, they need EMS. They [
inaudible
]
PAPD Officer Ray Murray:
Okay, lobby, she’s in the … all right, Tom, I’ll tell them.
Smith moaned. Hoerner summoned James Flores, a Summit Security guard who usually served as quartermaster for the operation, distributing the blue blazers and clip-on ties to the 300 guards who worked at the trade center. After the plane hit the south tower, Flores had gone to the mezzanine, where two of the stairways terminated, and was among the volunteers and rescuers who had steered the evacuating people toward the escalators that would bring them to ground level.
Hoerner beckoned Flores to Smith’s side.
“Hold her hand,” he ordered. “Don’t let go.”
In search of help Hoerner hustled over to a silver door that led down a few flights to a basement communications center, and Flores glanced at him vanishing behind the door. A moment or two later, a paramedic appeared, but he had no gurney. Everyone agreed
that Smith needed a backboard of some kind. A few Port Authority police officers appeared. Flores watched as one of them, a man with powerful arms, walked over to the concierge table. Covering the tabletop was a long, sturdy piece of glass. The officer picked up the glass and brought it to the elevator bank. The paramedic slipped it behind Smith, then had her roll onto it. Atop a piece of glass that rested at its four corners on the shoulders of three Port Authority officers and the paramedic, with James Flores lending a hand to keep it in balance, Lauren Smith left the World Trade Center for the last time, traveling through the concourse that took her east, to Church Street, where ambulances were waiting. Back at the elevator, firefighters were struggling to open the doors of the elevator she had managed to slip from.

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