102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (21 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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“There’s an exit here,” she called out. A few paces into the stairs, she yelled. “Can somebody help me?” One flight down, a man named Eric Thompson heard her and came to escort her.
Young had not seen Jos on fire, nor had she noticed Jos crawling across the floor. Her glasses covered in blood, Young saw that the people nearest her had been injured, but were alive. The woman who appeared to have lost her legs had gone into shock, leaning against an elevator door. As Young looked around, she saw that her colleagues from the tax department also were hurt, though not so catastrophically as the woman by the elevator: Dianne Gladstone might have broken an ankle, and Yeshavant Tembe might have fractured his knee.
Young herself was badly burned, though she did not realize it until she tried to lift Gladstone. When Gladstone put her arms around Young’s neck, pain shot through her. They all wanted water, but did not dare move, afraid that the floor would collapse beneath them. The lights were gone; fire banked and ebbed; a man walked past, pleading for help. “I’m on fire,” he said, but Young recalled no one helping him. She was not sure why.
Perhaps twenty minutes or so after the plane hit, another young man appeared.
“I’ve found an exit,” he said, and he led them to a door in the northwest corner, the same stairwell that Mary Jos had found right after the impact. Young walked to it, the pain shut down by the task of leaving. She saw a thin man behind her in the stairs. Gladstone, with her bad ankle, was helped by Diane Urban, the department’s famously sharp-tongued boss. Another colleague, Sankara Velamuri, escorted Tembe with his bad knee toward the stairs. They were trailing her, though Young could not tell by how much.
In the stairwell, Young and her colleagues began to drift apart, with Young ahead of the others. She noticed that the young man who had found the door also was walking down the stairs.
“Don’t get separated,” he ordered.
About ten floors down, he stopped. Only then did Young realize that he had been carrying a woman on his back, apparently to get her past the drastic conditions in the area around the 78th floor. Once they reached the 60s, he put her down, then turned back up the stairs.
“Don’t get separated,” he called again.
Back on the 78th floor, more people struggled to orient themselves. Scattered around the bank of sky lobby elevators that served the floors of Aon, two women and three men had survived the plane’s impact. Despite being battered, Judy Wein, Gigi Singer, Ed Nicholls, and Vijay Paramsothy were still able to walk. Rich Gabrielle, however, was pinned under marble, and Wein had been unable to move the stone from his legs. Wein had scouted part of the floor, looking for the guard’s stand. She could not find it, and joined Paramsothy perched amid the rubble. Wein had a broken rib, a collapsed lung, and a broken arm. Singer was seriously burned. Paramsothy, apparently not drastically hurt, was able to walk. Nicholls was bleeding heavily: his right arm from near his shoulder was nearly severed by some piece of the building or airplane that had turned into a missile. Bits of stone and cement had lodged in his abdomen. A window had broken open, and he stood there for a minute next to an older man, getting some air.
From nowhere, a young man appeared. Judy Wein saw a red handkerchief or bandanna wrapped around his face. Was he the same person who had led Ling Young and the other people from the tax department to the stairs, the same man who had carried a woman down several flights of stairs on his back before putting her down and going back upstairs? It is one of many possibilities, but few certainties. Young, who had left a few minutes earlier and by now was a half dozen stories below the impact zone, would not remember the red handkerchief until Wein described it some months later.
“Do you have any idea where a fire extinguisher might be?” the man in the bandanna asked. Wein pointed out one she had seen earlier, but the man found that it was useless. He pointed the way to the stairs.
“Anyone who can walk should leave now,” he said. “If you can help others to leave, help them.” Wein and Singer moved to the stairs, followed closely by Nicholls. All three of them were hurt but able to move. Paramsothy, who was in similar shape, decided to stay. Of the five Aon employees still known to be alive, Paramsothy and Rich Gabrielle, pinned under the marble, remained on the 78th floor.
 
 
By 9:30, most of the 6,000 people who had passed through the south tower turnstiles on their way to work had reversed course and left the building, or were about to. The evacuation from the south tower had been under way since 8:46. The evidence suggests that by this moment, about 9:30, fewer than 1,000 of the trade center workers had not yet left the building; of these, 600 would never leave. Perhaps 200 were already dead, killed when the plane hit. A few people, well below the fires, were still making their descent. Eighteen men and women who had been at or above the impact zone were making progress down from the 78th floor and higher—everyone from Brian Clark from Euro Brokers on the 84th floor, and Stanley Praimnath, from Fuji on the 81st floor, to the people who had been waiting on the 78th floor, Mary Jos and Ling Young and Keating Crown and Kelly Reyher and Donna Spera. Considering the trauma and their injuries, those eighteen moved at a strong clip.
The floors above the impact zone teemed with urgency. Even on the floors where the plane hit, pockets of survivors were struggling to find a way out, or to comfort people around them. On the 78th floor, despite the wholesale carnage of those waiting for the sky lobby elevators, survivors were creeping into the stairwells. The witnesses account for about a dozen people, alive but injured or tending to the injured. Farther above them were Jack Andreacchio and Manny Gomez, stuck in the 80th floor, in the offices of Fuji
with three others. From the 88th and 89th floors came calls to 911 and to family members, reporting that at least one hundred people were alive, with sixty-seven of them employees of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, most of them traders. Some, like Linda Rothemund and Lauren Smith and their colleagues in the elevator that had nearly plunged to the ground, were trapped in the lobby.
Of the eighty-seven people who had come to work at the trading firm of Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor that morning, only twenty had left the building, or had gotten far enough down to have a clear path out. At Aon, 176 were still inside.
Around this time, Alayne Gentul of Fiduciary Trust, whose father had helped to build the trade center’s elevators, phoned her husband, Jack, who worked at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” Jack said.
“Well,” she said, “we came up to 97 to get tech support out. There’s smoke coming in, and it’s really hot out there.”
Before the second plane hit, Gentul and her colleague Ed Emery had ordered everyone off the Fiduciary floors. Emery had escorted crowds of them to the 78th-floor sky lobby. Then Emery climbed back up to the 90th floor, meeting Gentul. That very morning, a group from Fiduciary’s parent corporation, Templeton Strong, had come to the 97th floor for disaster backup planning. Before the second plane hit, Gentul and Emery had gone up there to lead that group out. Then they became trapped.
Emery climbed onto a table, trying to block smoke by stuffing the vents with a new jacket he had bought just that weekend. From his office in Newark, Jack Gentul called to members of the school’s security and engineering staff. They advised hitting the sprinklers, with a shoe or anything at hand. Nothing seemed to work. Jack Gentul also called the minister of their church, and they began a prayer chain.
Another Fiduciary employee on the 97th floor, Shimmy Biegeleisen, phoned his wife, Marion, at their home in Brooklyn. He was desperate. He told her that a group had tried to go upstairs, but found the way unpassable. Marion passed the phone to David
Langer, one of a group of friends who worked in the neighborhood and had gathered at the Biegeleisen house. He patched in a local doctor, who advised wetting his clothes and using the dampness to filter the smoke. Biegeleisen was due to travel to Israel four nights later with his oldest son, to observe Rosh Hashanah. In the first several phone calls, he had been calm, but as the smoke advanced, his messages sharpened in focus, and rose in intensity: there was a clock running. He asked a friend, Jack Edelstein, to attend to some of his personal business. With every breath becoming a struggle, he asked Edelstein to pray with him.
“Why don’t you say it and I’ll listen and say it along with you?” Edelstein said.
“
Of David. A psalm,
” Biegeleisen began, speaking in Hebrew.
“The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it, the world and those that live in it … .”
Biegeleisen was using a phone plugged into back of a computer, bypassing the central phone systems that relied on the building’s electrical power, and he had to share it with others in the room. Ed McNally, the director of technology for Fiduciary, called his wife, Liz. He wanted to tell her some things. She and the children had meant the world to him. The papers for his insurance were in this file; other important documents could be found in another file. He had to go. He hung up, then called back a few minutes later. Liz’s fortieth birthday was coming up, and he had made plans to surprise her.
“I feel silly,” he said. “I booked a trip to Rome. Liz, you have to cancel that.”
His wife tried to shake that entire line of thinking.
“Ed,” Liz said, “you’re getting out of there. The firemen are coming up to get you. You are a problem solver. You’re going to get out of there.”
 
 
Over the radio, the fire dispatcher sprayed buckshot of information about the south tower onto the airwaves.
“Okay,” he announced. “The 82nd floor, west side; the 88th floor;
73rd floor, west side; 10th floor, east side; 104th floor, east side; 47th floor; 73rd floor, west office; 83rd floor, room 8-3-0-0; and 80th floor, northwest. That’s what we have at this time.”
These were not just numbers in a big skyscraper with metal pinstripes down the sides: these were pulse beats of people who had called 911 to report that they were present, alive, in trouble. To Orio Palmer climbing the stairs, the particular floor numbers did not tell him what he needed to know. As the chief leading the way up, he had a single task: to find out where the fire was, then to set up a command post two floors below it. From there, he would send firefighters to put water on any fires they could reach, and to clear a way for the trapped people. This was the Fire Department textbook on fighting high-rise fires, and Palmer knew it backward and forward. (As a sideline, he ran a small business tutoring other fire officers who were going to take the test for chief.) Some months earlier, a number of battalion chiefs had been reassigned, and Palmer was sent to the Bronx. He quietly lobbied to go back to Manhattan. After all, he had researched and practiced high-rise firefighting. He had made a study of the radio system inside Pennsylvania Station, the railroad depot where trains set off from New York for the whole nation. He got his wish, and was sent to Battalion 7, based in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.
Coming up the stairs was Ladder 15, a company based on Water Street, in the South Street Seaport district, and led by another officer devoted to skyscrapers, Lt. Joseph Leavey.
“Fifteen Irons to 15.”
The “irons” firefighter carries tools for prying open doors, and is always among the first up the stairs. That morning, the irons man for Ladder 15 was Scott Larsen.
“Go ahead, Irons,” Leavey said.
“Just got a report from the director of Morgan Stanley,” Larsen said. “Seventy-eight seems to have taken the brunt of this stuff, there’s a lot of bodies, they say the stairway is clear all the way up, though.”
“All right, 10-4, Scott,” Leavey said. “What, what floor are you on?”
“Forty-eight right now,” Larsen replied.
“All right, we’re coming up behind you,” Leavey said.
The director of Morgan Stanley mentioned by Larsen was most likely Rick Rescorla, the firm’s director of security, who was instrumental in planning and then leading the firm’s mass evacuation from the south tower. Morgan Stanley had some 2,700 people based in the south tower, between the 44th and 74th floors, and Rescorla, who had served in Vietnam and was featured in the book and feature film
We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,
had been fixed on the trade center as a possible terrorist target. During the early part of the evacuation, someone took a photograph that showed him standing in the stairway at the 10th floor, with a bullhorn shouting encouragement. By the time firefighter Larsen crossed paths with Rescorla, all but a handful of the Morgan Stanley workers had left the building. Orio Palmer, moving up quickly, was not part of that exchange, but no doubt had tracked it on his radio. A moment later, he heard from Tom Kelly, the firefighter assigned to run the elevator that was shuttling fire companies from the lobby to the 40th floor.
“I got an engine company on 40, do you want them up there?” Kelly asked.
“Tell them we’re going to have to try to get the high-rise bank of elevators into operation,” Palmer said. “Until we verify the fire floor, we can’t do that.”
The process was logical. Before he could send up elevators, Palmer needed to find out where the fire was. Once he had confirmed the location, someone could tinker with whatever cars were still in running condition, and perhaps bring the teams up to the floors just below the fire. Palmer himself had been an elevator mechanic before he joined the Fire Department, but it was the kind of job that could be done by any number of firemen who were well versed in how things worked.

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