102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (22 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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A few seconds later, Palmer called Kelly back. The chief apparently had gotten information from people in the stairways. He wanted to set up his command post on the 76th floor.
“Try to get down to the lobby and find out what bank of elevators terminates below the 76th floor,” Palmer said. “That’s the bank we’re going to want to use.”
“Ten-four,” Kelly said.
By 9:32, almost precisely thirty minutes after Flight 175 had struck the south tower, Ed Geraghty, the chief of Battalion 9, also had taken the elevator to the 40th floor, and was preparing to deploy his firefighters. He checked in with Palmer.
“What floor should we try to get up to, Orio?” Geraghty asked.
Palmer told him what he had just told Kelly: they needed to find elevators that would get them to the 76th floor. Otherwise, it was thirty floors or so of walking.
“I’m up to 55,” Palmer reported. He had covered twelve floors in his first ten minutes of climbing after riding the freight car as far as 40. At home, his favorite time to run in Hendrickson Park was the hottest part of the hottest days of the year; now he was climbing in turnout coat, boots, and helmet, with oxygen tanks strapped to his back. Even so, as he rose, Palmer seemed to find a new burst of speed in his legs, and after he reached the 55th floor, his radio transmissions mapped an ever-faster ascent. People were starting to come down the stairs, with word of a hellish sprawl of destruction on 78.
By about 9:35, Ling Young had gotten down to the 51st floor, then stood at the landing, her burned arms extended from her burned body. Her eyes were closed. Coming up the stairs were two fire marshals—Ron Bucca, trailed a few floors behind by Jim Devery, who had gotten into the building within minutes of the plane hitting, and had not used the elevator, but had walked up the steps. Devery noticed Young on the 51st-floor landing. She seemed ready to faint, but then launched herself toward the stairs. Devery, exhausted by the climb, decided to go down the stairs with her, to make sure she got out.
Not far behind them were Judy Wein, Gigi Singer, and Ed Nicholls from Aon. Around the 50th floor, they saw the first firefighters.
“What floor did you come from?” one of the firefighters asked.
“Seventy-eight, and there’s a lot of people badly hurt up there,” Wein answered.
Just those three people had enough injuries among them to keep a trauma ward busy: Ed Nicholls, with his nearly severed arm; Wein, with her collapsed lung, broken ribs, and torn arm; Singer, with serious burns.
The firemen looked at them. “Go to the 41st floor, there’s firemen there,” one of them said. “There’s an elevator to take you to the ground.” In fact, the elevator was on the 40th floor, but they would find it.
Even more people were coming down behind the Wein group. Lieutenant Leavey got on his radio. He wanted to make sure that Tom Kelly had the elevator ready.
“Tommy, listen carefully,” Leavey said. “I’m sending all the injured down to you on 40. You’re going to have to get them down to the elevator, there’s about ten to fifteen people coming down to you.”
“Okay,” Kelly replied.
“Ten civilians coming down,” Leavey said.
“Got that, I’m on 40 right now, Lieu,” Kelly said.
“All right, Tommy,” Leavey said. “When you take people down to the lobby, try to get an EMS crew back.”
“Definitely,” Kelly said.
The radios crackled with messages, the humming of a crisp high-rise rescue operation, all business from the mouths of Palmer, Geraghty, Leavey, Kelly, Larsen. Scott Kopytko was designated “roof man,” a title that at the trade center meant he would be trying to get up as high as possible, as quickly as possible. Douglas Oelschlager was the can man, bringing up extinguishers. They kept pace with the hard-driving Palmer.
They soon got bad news about the elevators: the people on the ground could not find working cars that would bring them above the 40th floor. “We’re going to have to hoof it,” Palmer said. “I’m on 69 now, but we need a higher bank.” It was 9:42. It had been ten minutes since the last report of his location, and he had moved even faster. He had covered fourteen floors in those ten minutes. They were going to get to the fire.
 
 
The elevator ride from the 40th floor to the lobby lasted no more than thirty seconds, so for Ling Young, Judy Wein, Ed Nicholls, and Gigi Singer, it was just another leg in their flight from the devastation of the 78th floor. They would remember little of the ride, or of the man who brought them down. Firefighter Tom Kelly struck people as the classic, ordinary working stiff. No one mistook him for a mythic fireman of steel. He did not run marathons in his spare time, but played outfield for a bar’s softball team. During television commercials, he did not do sit-ups, but often enjoyed working on a beer or two. After eighteen years as a firefighter, he had not climbed the promotional ranks, but put spare time and energy into a second job, as a construction worker. He had worked his entire career at the firehouse in the South Street Seaport, and knew the drill on high-rise fires. Now, a week before he was to turn fifty-one, he was among the oldest firefighters to go up in the south tower. As it happened, his knowledge of the trade center stretched back decades, to its beginnings.
On a late September night in 1971, he had taken a young woman from his Brooklyn neighborhood out for their first big date. Her name was Kathleen, known to everyone as Kitty. He brought her to the Copacabana, the storied nightclub in midtown Manhattan. To make the night even more special, they caught a cab and rode downtown to West Street, to the construction site where Kelly worked as an apprentice steamfitter, welding pipes and joints. It was long after regular work hours, of course, but he wanted to give Kitty a private tour of the colossus he was helping build. It was called the World Trade Center. He slipped a twenty-dollar bill to the security guard, who waved them inside. Then the guard thought of something.
“Hey!” he called. “Put a hard hat on your young lady.”
They took a construction elevator to the 40th floor of the south tower, and stepped into the steel skeleton. To leave a swanky nightclub for a raw, unfinished building hardly seemed like the classic gondola ride to romance. Yet from there, on the 40th floor, the
world and all in it were spread before them. To the north, the sky was stenciled by the night-lit forms of office towers; to the west, the low plains of New Jersey glowed against the horizon; to the east and south, bridges twinkled. They were one hundred feet higher than the torch of the Statue of Liberty, just below them in New York Harbor. Kitty was nineteen. Tom had just turned twenty-one. They had become part of the city’s candlelight, in a building that was still being born. Six months later, they married. When construction slumped, and jobs for junior steamfitters were scarce, Kelly took a test to join the Fire Department, the better to support his family and two growing children. The firefighting schedule allowed ample time for a second job, so he continued to work steamfitting shifts whenever they were available.
Now, three decades after his big night out with Kitty, he was back in the trade center, once again on the 40th floor, collecting an elevator full of people—bleeding, broken, battered. The building he had come to in muscular youth was dying. Kelly’s lieutenant had sent word that ten injured people were coming down. He brought the first four to arrive, Ling Young (accompanied by Marshal Devery), Ed Nicholls, Gigi Singer, and Judy Wein, to the ground. Then he went back up.
 
 
The four people in the elevator were among eighteen people making their way down from the 78th floor and above; the fourteen others were moving at a remarkably strong pace that would bring them out of the building. Still others were trailing, but at a slower pace. Those first eighteen people, as they reached the lower floors and the lobby, brought hard-won intelligence on the state of the stairways. They had found a way past, a seam in the destruction. Above the fire were hundreds of people who were not on their way, who believed they were stranded—some had gone to the roof, others believed the stairs down were fraught with danger.
Richard Fern, one of the first to escape from the upper floors, had raced down stairway A from the 84th floor, through the concourse and out of the east side of the trade center. He continued east to Park
Row, and by 9:45 had wound up outside his regular barbershop. He all but collapsed into a chair, and one of the barbers brought him cold wet towels. As he sat there, his Euro Brokers walkie-talkie was capturing transmissions from inside the south tower. Dave Vera was sending word for help. The last place Vera had been seen was in stairway A, just below the 84th floor, in the company of a half dozen other people. The group had been going down the stairs, but were turned back by the heavyset woman and skinny man coming up, insisting that the smoke below them was too intense. That, as it turned out, was the same stairway used by Fern and the seventeen other people. Inside the building, one of Vera’s colleagues, Jose Marrero, who already had gone well below the fire, had turned back and had started climbing the stairs to help him, crossing paths with Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath along the way.
News of the open stair did not reach Vera, or the people in Keefe, Bruyette & Woods or Fiduciary Trust, or Jack Andreacchio, the Brooklyn cowboy, or the scores of workers in the offices of Aon, Sandler O’Neill, the state tax department. Those who took that open stairway did not realize that it was the only way out. Collecting this information did not seem to be anyone’s job. And even if the intelligence had been gathered, the building’s public-address system apparently had been knocked out by the impact of the plane. The people on the upper floors had adapted quickly, fashioning their own communication network with cell phones and with phones plugged into the backs of computers. They dialed the city’s 911 operators, many of whom tried, but could not dispel, their anguish. The operators did not know about the open stairway and advised people to stay put. The city’s 911 operation had been in turmoil since the early 1990s, when the city began plans to overhaul it; in its daily operations, the 911 system was run by the Police Department. The people who answered the phones were civilians, among the lowest-paid workers in city government, relegated to the bottom caste in a world of uniforms. So poor was the coordination with other emergency agencies that fire dispatchers actually had to dial back into 911 themselves in order to reach police dispatchers.
And so the people inside the south tower remained unaware of the open staircase. They spoke to their families, who watched the towers burn on television, but also did not know about the stairway. The word had not gotten back to the fire commanders, to the 911 call center, or to broadcasters, so the information that stairway A was available did not circle back to the places where it might have done some good. Like the lifeboats that left the
Titanic
half-empty, stairway A remained little used.
Not only were the rescuers unable to communicate with the people they were trying to help, they often could not communicate among themselves. A number of city agencies sent representatives to 7 World Trade Center, the headquarters of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, about 300 yards from the main fire command post on West Street.
By the time John Peruggia, the Fire Department’s delegate, reached 7 World Trade Center, that building was being evacuated because of worries that a third plane was bound for New York. So instead of using the mayor’s bunker, the emergency-response officials huddled in the lobby. Over the next few minutes, Peruggia heard a warning that he could scarcely believe, but did not dare to dismiss.
An engineer from the Department of Buildings reported that the structural damage appeared to be immense. The stability of both buildings was compromised. In particular, the engineer was worried about how long the north tower would stand.
This was an astounding possibility. Like many others, Peruggia was a veteran of the 1993 bombing, and after that attack, he had heard the presentations about the strength of the two towers. No one could forget the claim by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer, that the towers were designed to stand up to the impact of a Boeing 707.
The Buildings Department engineer did not care what had been promised a decade earlier, or three decades earlier. In glimpses when the flow of smoke parted, he could see the damage.
Peruggia summoned an emergency medical technician, Rich
Zarillo, who was working for him as an aide. He was to go immediately from 7 World Trade Center to the command post where the senior fire commander, Chief of Department Peter Ganci, was located, on West Street, across from the north tower.
“You see Chief Ganci, and Chief Ganci only,” Peruggia said. “Provide him with the information that the building integrity is severely compromised and they believe the building is in danger of imminent collapse.”
Peruggia could not communicate with the chief by radio. He simply did not have the means. The emergency operations center had been shut because of fears that terrorists would fly a third plane into it. The expensive 800-megahertz interagency radios were all in the trunks of cars, unused, because no one with clout in the city government ever got around to pressing the issue. Peruggia himself was not carrying a fire ground radio that morning, because his ordinary assignment did not call for it. In the world capital of communications, he had only one way to get the engineer’s assessment to the chief of the Fire Department: to send a messenger dodging across acres of flaming debris and falling bodies. He would have to deliver this warning in person.

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