102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (23 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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As he reached higher ground, Orio Palmer’s voice rang with the exertion of the moment, and the conviction that he was getting close to the mouth of the fire. After climbing thirty floors, he accelerated, moving at a pace of thirty-six seconds per floor.
“Where are you, Chief?” Lieutenant Leavey asked.
“Seventy-four,” Palmer responded at 9:45.
“We’re making our way up behind you,” Leavey said. “We took our coats off.”
Palmer covered the next flight in twenty-one seconds. He reported that he saw no smoke or fire problems in stairway B, but some walls had been damaged at the 73rd and 74th floors. “Be careful,” he said. And he had run into fire marshal Ron Bucca, who had rushed into the building with his partner, Jim Devery. At the point
where Devery turned back to escort Ling Young out of the building, Bucca kept climbing. Bucca was a registered nurse, a reservist in the United States Army Special Forces. He kept a set of blueprints of the trade center in his locker, concerned that terrorists would return to attack the building.
“I found a marshal on 75,” Palmer reported, a few seconds later, no doubt pleased to have some company as he neared the fire. They were leaving stairway B, he reported. As many others had found, it was hard to pass. After some scouting, he discovered that stairway A was open, the proven portal out of the calamity. From the 75th floor, Palmer radioed back to the trailing firefighters, telling them they should head for stairway A.
Behind him, Joe Leavey had made it to the 70th floor by 9:50. He found some of the people hurt by the plane, who had crept down a few floors, but apparently were unable to move much lower. The elevators were essential. He knew that Tom Kelly had shuttled one group of the injured to the lobby, and had come back to the 40th floor to collect more of the walking wounded.
“Tommy, have you made it back down to the lobby yet?” Leavey asked Kelly.
“The elevator’s screwed up,” Kelly replied.
“You can’t move it?” Leavey asked.
“I don’t want to get stuck in the shaft,” Kelly said.
Kelly’s caution was hardly excessive. Yet to Leavey, thirty floors above Kelly, the situation was too dire for hesitation. Injured people had reached the 70th floor, and no doubt those people were telling him about the devastation on the 78th floor and above.
“All right, Tommy,” Leavey said. “It’s imperative that you try to get down to the lobby command post and get some people up to 40. We got injured people up here on 70. If you make it to the lobby command post, see if they can somehow get elevators past the 40th floor. We got people injured all the way up here.”
One minute later, at 9:51, Palmer’s voice came across the radio in a short, urgent burst. He had last been heard from two minutes earlier, on the 75th floor, where he had met Marshal Bucca.
Now, Palmer did not say where he was, but he was trying to reach Donald Burns, the chief in charge of the south tower. His words conveyed less than his tone. His voice sounded a higher pitch. Most likely, Palmer had reached the 78th floor, the first uniformed rescuer to reach the impact zone. Because of radio traffic, it would take another minute before he was able to contact other firefighters on the radio. At 9:52, he spoke with Joe Leavey, who was to relay the message down.
“We’ve got two isolated pockets of fire,” Palmer said. “We should be able to knock it down with two lines.”
The next part of his message was a report not about fire or broken walls, but about the condition of the people. In radio transmissions, the Fire Department avoids the term “civilians,” referring to them as “10-45s,” and does not describe anyone as “dead,” but as “Code One.” He stammered, just slightly, perhaps from exertion, perhaps from what he, the first person from the outside, was seeing.
“Radio, radio, radio that—78th floor, numerous 10-45 Code Ones,” Palmer said.
On the 78th floor, he was saying, there were many dead civilians.
“Floor 78?” asked Leavey.
“Ten-four,” Palmer replied. “Numerous civilians. We’re gonna need two engines up here.”
“We’re on our way,” Leavey said.
 
 
In the lobby, Ed Nicholls had emerged from Tom Kelly’s elevator, bleeding from the head, the arm, the abdomen, uncertain of where to go next. He would have little recollection of how he got out, but a photographer snapped a picture as he emerged from the concourse onto Church Street. In the photo, a young policewoman, Moira Smith, puts one hand under Nicholls’s elbow, another on his shoulder. She is wearing blue disposable gloves. Her blond hair is pulled back from her face; she had left her police hat on the seat of the van in which she and her partner drove down to the trade center from Greenwich Village. Smith had not been dispatched to the
trade center; she had been filling out forms when she saw the van loaded and ready to go. She jumped on. No ordinary city patrol officers were sent inside the buildings, an assignment left to the ESU teams, and to the Port Authority police, trained in firefighting. In this division of labor, no one had the quotidian task of shepherding people from the buildings to the ambulances. Moira Smith, policewoman, joined the security guards, firefighters, and Port Authority bureaucrats who had taken that job upon themselves. Smith escorted Ed Nicholls through the concourse of the trade center, leading him out to Church Street on the east side of the complex, where ambulances were staged. Then she returned to the lobby of the south tower.
By now, about ten minutes to ten, nearly fifty minutes after the south tower had been hit, a line of molten aluminum was pouring from a window on the corner of the 80th floor: the airplane was melting. The 83rd floor appeared to be draped across windows on the 82nd floor, and was gradually drooping even lower. These were details on photographs, analyzed in depth months later. From the inside, though, the people on the high floors narrated the rapid undoing of the building. On the 80th floor, where the Brooklyn cowboy Jack Andreacchio and his boss, Manny Gomez, were trapped, the smoke and heat had all but engulfed the men and those with them. A colleague who had made it outside, Bobby McMurray, reached Gomez by radio. “It don’t look too good, Bobby Mac,” Gomez said. Kevin Cosgrove from Aon had walked down twenty flights from the 99th floor, only to be turned back by smoke at 79. He walked back up to the 105th floor, where so many people had gone in hopes of escape to the roof. He called his brother, Joe. “I’m not getting out of this, I need you to take care of my kids, tell my wife I love her,” Cosgrove said. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up.
The voices from the 105th floor, twenty stories above the top of the impact zone, grew more urgent. One woman called 911 and said the floor was collapsing. A moment later, a man called from 106 and said a floor below was collapsing. From the 88th floor, Rick Thorpe of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods told 911 that people were passing out, and that he would break the windows.
Calling from the 93rd floor, Greg Milanowycz spoke to his father and then to a colleague of his father’s, Marcia De Leon.
“The ceiling is caving,” Milanowycz said. “The ceiling is caving.”
 
 
On the street, Rich Zarillo had arrived at the West Street command post with the message from the Buildings Department engineer that the towers were near collapse, and told Chief Ganci’s aide, Fire Marshal Steve Mosiello.
The aide turned to his boss, a few steps away, involved in other business.
“Chief, these buildings are in imminent danger of collapse,” Mosiello reported.
Ganci looked stunned. “Who would tell you something like that?” he asked. After thirty-three years in the Fire Department, Pete Ganci had risen to chief of department, and he knew full well that skyscrapers do not collapse from less than an hour of fire.
Mosiello turned to the messenger.
“Richie, come over here and tell the chief what you just told me,” Mosiello said.
 
 
In the south tower elevator, Tom Kelly, sent back down to the lobby, had not gotten very far: his worries about the balky car turned out to be justified.
“Stuck in the elevator, in the elevator shaft,” Kelly reported on the radio. “You’re going to have to get a different elevator. We’re chopping through the wall to get out.”
Palmer, on the 78th floor, heard Kelly. “Radio lobby command with that,” he said.
Strangely, the 78th floor was quiet. On all the radio transmissions from firefighters lower in the building, the whooping of the building’s alarm could be heard in the background. Behind Palmer’s voice from the 78th floor, there was no alarm, no clamor. By now, Palmer had caught his breath, and his voice was fully composed.
He sent one group of firefighters up to the 79th floor: the 78th and 79th floors were connected by an escalator, and the fire on 79 was visible from 78. The firefighters had made it to the border territory between life and death, just as Frank De Martini and his men had in the north tower an hour earlier. The sky lobby floor was carpeted with the dead, but also the immobilized living, perhaps in despair of ever getting any help. Yet here was Palmer, organizing the troops, alongside Bucca, a registered nurse, a soldier, a firefighter, all in one.
They discovered, when they reached the floor, that the people had not been entirely alone: a security guard was on the scene. A few months earlier, twenty-four-year-old Robert Gabriel Martinez had left his job at McDonald’s and gone to work as a security guard at the trade center, finding a pay hike in the $11.61-an-hour salary. Normally, Martinez did not work on the 78th floor. But he had stayed up late the night before, watching the New York Giants on
Monday Night Football
, and he had overslept that morning. When he got to the trade center, he learned that his regular assignment—in a loading dock on the north end of the complex—had been given to someone else. So he was headed for the south tower’s upper sky lobby. “They sent me to the 78th floor,” he told James Flores, the quartermaster for the security guards. Flores issued him the blue-and-gray striped clip-on tie that all the security guards were issued, and the heavy-duty portable radio that allowed them to communicate throughout the complex.
When Palmer and Bucca arrived on the 78th floor, the evidence suggests that they found Martinez, a big, burly man. Somehow, he had survived the impact of Flight 175. He had not left his $11.61-an-hour post. He had stayed in the slaughterhouse. At 9:57, the voice of the 78th-floor security guard burst onto the airwaves. His messages rang with desperation, but also, it seemed, a gust of exhilaration and hope.
An entire elevator car full of people had been trapped on the 78th floor, stuck for nearly fifty-five minutes, ever since the second plane had hit.
Central, please be advised, I need EMS at 78 sky lobby, 2 World Trade Center. I’ve got people coming out of the elevator banks. Listen, please be advised, I’ve got, like, eighteen passengers stuck on the 78th sky lobby elevator. They’re trying to get them out, we need EMS over here! ON THE DOUBLE! TWO WORLD TRADE CENTER!
The dispatcher tried to calm him down.
“Is that an elevator entrapment, sir?” she asked.
“That’s a ten-four,” the guard said. “The firefighters have eighteen passengers stuck, and they’re going to try to get them out!
“They’re trying!”
Fourteen floors up, a man on the 102nd floor was speaking to a 911 operator. He was a young man, he said. He had children. He did not want to die. He pleaded his case over and over: He did not want to die. He did not want to die. Suddenly, his words were drowned out by crashing noises, a terrible scream, an even worse silence.
At that moment, at the command center on West Street, Chief Ganci had just finished hearing the message delivered by Rich Zarillo about the threat of an imminent collapse. A gathering rumble filled the air.
“What the fuck is that?” Ganci asked.
A glance at the south tower, its top dissolving into smoke, answered his question.
13
“We’ll come down in a few minutes.”
9:59 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
 
“
M
om,” asked Jeffrey Nussbaum. “What was that explosion?”
Twenty miles away, in Oceanside, New York, Arlene Nussbaum could see on television what her son could not from the office at Carr Futures on the 92nd floor of the north tower.
“The other tower just went down,” Mrs. Nussbaum told her son.
“Oh, my God,” Jeffrey said.
Decades earlier, before the towers rose to altitudes nearly out of sight, each one had been bolted to bedrock seven stories below the street, a depth virtually out of sight. At their nearest point, the buildings were separated by 131 feet. For twenty-eight years, in weather fair and foul, they kept their distance, parallel lines that could not cross, no matter how high the towers rose into the sky or how deep they sank into the earth. In a span of ten seconds, the south tower pulverized itself and became a mammoth cloud of dust that blasted into the base of the north tower, curling up the shafts and stairways of its twin. Geometry dissolved, the two buildings had met.
More than a gigantic tower had fallen. The construction of the trade center had absorbed the labor of men, women, and machines.
As the order and shape of a mighty work came undone, the efforts of thousands of people dissolved. Still, the laws of physics hold that energy is not destroyed. All the power used by the construction workers to lift steel, pour concrete, hammer nails had been banked in the buildings as potential energy for three decades, just as a sled at the top of a hill stores the verve of the child who tugged it up there, or a bicycle at the crest of a mountain road holds all the pumping and pedaling that got it to the high place. Stockpiled in the south tower was a tremendous reserve of energy, 278 megawatt hours. All of it was released at the moment of the building’s demise, floors picking up speed as they slammed downward. Scientists would struggle later to describe the burst of power in terms that ordinary people could grasp. It was equal to 1 percent of a nuclear bomb. It was enough power to supply all the homes in Atlanta or Oakland or Miami for one hour. It was so strong, the earth shuddered in waves that were captured on a seismograph in Lisbon, New Hampshire, 265 miles distant. Yet it made no sense in the building next door.
The blast of air from the south tower traveled 131 feet into the lobby of the north tower and then burst through the passageways across the complex. It found Sharon Premoli just as she ascended from the concourse northeast of the tower that was still standing. An hour earlier, she had begun her descent from Beast Financial, on the 80th floor of the north tower, dressed for a business meeting in a navy blouse and a beige skirt. In an instant, she was in the air, her navy blue shoes flashing before her eyes just before she slammed into the window of Borders Books. Her mouth, nose, and ears were clogged with gunk, her eyes covered with fiberglass splinters. With every breath she drew grit into her chest. She felt intense pain in her chest; shards of glass pierced her hands; she could not hear out of her left ear. The air was black. She could not see, hear, speak, or breathe. I’m dead, she thought.
The death tremors of the south tower rattled along the bones of the north tower. On the 51st floor, the court officers Joseph Baccellieri, Al Moscola, and Andrew Wender were nearly knocked to the ground. They had heard the radio chatter that a third plane was en
route: this must have been it. Their walkie-talkies spat out sounds, but none of it amounted to a message they could grasp.
Standing at a window on the 27th floor, where she was taking a break on her descent from 88, Patricia Cullen watched a massive cloud explode into her line of sight, a galloping darkness coming straight toward her building. The floor trembled, the rumble passing from her feet to head. She fled toward the elevator lobby in the core of the building. There, she saw the big man in the wheelchair, Ed Beyea, and his friend, Abe Zelmanowitz.
The physics of the moment had registered in the eyes, the ears, and the muscles of people in the north tower. These sensations did not form a coherent shape. Hardly anyone in the north tower, whether civilians or rescuers, realized that the other building had fallen. Moving in the stairwells, they had little reliable information from the outside. Early in the crisis, the office workers could smell the odor of splattered jet fuel, but that did not linger. True, there were ponds of water to ankle through. That was part of the ordeal of departure. So, too, were the aches in the feet and the calves, the heat shimmering from all those thousands of people, the dizzying reversals of direction at each landing of stairs. These were the present-tense realities of the departing people. The inferno, though, was out of sight. Mercifully so, too, were the bodies dropping from the high floors. Indeed, the very fact that the building—both buildings—had been struck by commercial aircraft was not widely known inside the towers. Millions around the world watched the south tower fall, but the true peril of the moment had not revealed itself widely inside the surviving building. That the buildings were collapsing not only was beyond expectation; it was beyond conception.
Mak Hanna, from Frank De Martini’s crew, was making his way down from the 88th floor with his eighty-nine-year-old colleague, Moe Lipson. After the rumble of the south tower’s collapse, Patricia Cullen, who also worked for the Port Authority on 88, saw them in the hallway at the 27th floor. Hanna carried a pager that sent not only phone messages, but also news headlines. For some reason, it had kept working through the descent. Hanna knew that terrorists had taken over airliners and were crashing them into buildings. He
knew, as he neared the 27th floor, that the south tower had collapsed. Hanna did some calculations in his head. Everyone was leaving as quickly as possible. They were reasonably calm. If he spread word of the collapse, what would be gained? Nothing, he decided. And panic might set in. He held his tongue.
“You’re doing okay, Moe?” he asked.
Lipson said he was. They plodded down. Patricia Cullen, after her break on the 27th floor, also resumed her departure.
 
 
By 10:01, two minutes after the south tower collapsed, seventy-five minutes from the beginning of the calamity, a police dispatcher went on the air to contact the ESU officers who had gone inside the north tower.
“Citywide central to unit, ’kay, with emergency message.”
The dispatcher was interrupted by other transmissions, then continued.
“Emergency services out of 1. Emergency services out of 1, ’kay?”
Four more times, he gave the order: All of the NYPD emergency service officers were to get out of Building 1. Over a special channel for the ESU, Det. Ken Winkler, who was just across from the buildings and had taken shelter from the torrent of dust beneath a car, ordered everyone to leave, saying that the other tower had fallen. The news astounded cops inside the north tower, who asked him to repeat it.
At just about the same moment, Chief Joe Pfeifer wiped the dust from his eyes. The avalanche of soot from the south tower had driven him and the other fire commanders out of their command post in the lobby of the north tower. They raced into a passageway that led to 6 World Trade Center, a low-rise structure just north of the north tower. The cloud pursued them, but they outran and out-turned the worst of it. Pfeifer assumed there had been a local collapse; he had no idea that the other building had fallen to the ground. All morning, institutional prerogatives and customs and obstinacy had blanketed him and his colleagues in a thick fog of
ignorance. The people fighting the two worst building fires in the nation’s history had no video monitors. No radio communications with other agencies. No way to get reports from police helicopters and only a limited ability to communicate among themselves. Moments after the south tower collapsed, a fireboat in the harbor reported the disaster over the radio channel used to give fire companies their assignments. The radio that captured that channel and those messages had been left behind, however, in the north tower lobby when the fire chiefs made their desperate flight from the debris. Now, from inside a heavy, choking, blinding cloud, Pfeifer spoke on his radio, betraying no sign of agitation, no hint that one of the world’s largest buildings had just collapsed a few yards away. He did not know.
“Command post in Tower 1 to all units,” he said. “Evacuate the building. Command post to all units.” At their feet, Pfeifer and his group found Father Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain who had been alongside them all morning, murmuring prayers. They opened his collar, felt no pulse.
On the 30th floor of the north tower, Steve Modica, a fire lieutenant, had stopped to rest, stripping off his bunker coat, helmet, oxygen tank. Modica served as the aide to John Paolillo, the chief of the special operations battalion. Paolillo, a marathon runner, had outpaced Modica once they got into the 20s. Now Modica sat with two other firefighters, similarly worn by the climb. They had just about caught their breath when the south tower collapsed. To Modica, the shudder suggested that a bomb had gone off somewhere below them. Or maybe a third plane had hit. He listened for radio transmissions, but did not catch a whisper of any explanation or instructions. The order made by Chief Pfeifer to evacuate the buildings did not reach his radio. He could hear fragments of chatter from people inside the building—firefighters with chest pains, oxygen needed on one corridor, a particular floor that a company had stopped on. Nothing about getting out.
A moment or two after the shudder, though, Modica heard banging in the stairwell. He saw four ESU police officers charging down, moving so fast, he thought their feet were not touching the treads
of the stairs. Modica tried to absorb all that had happened in the last few minutes: The building had been shaken. For some reason, the cops were flying out of there. His chief was somewhere upstairs. For a long moment, he was frozen in place.
Modica’s place was the lowest zone in the building. In essence, the tower was three buildings, stacked atop one another: the first ran from the lobby to the 44th-floor sky lobby; the middle section rose from 44 to the 78th-floor sky lobby; the highest zone stretched from 78 to the top of the building. Most of the people who remained in the north tower were in either the top zone—trapped on the high floors where the fire was roaring—or in the bottom zone, office workers making their way out and the rescuers on a slow climb.
In the middle zone, the building was quiet. A group of six rescuers, traveling lighter than the firefighters, had made it to the 51st floor. The three court officers who had rushed into the building, Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender, were moving up with three Port Authority officers. They found no one in the offices. The stairways also were empty. They did not even meet any firefighters. All the noise that they heard was from the staircases far below them, until the south tower collapsed. Then the lights shut down and the stairs fell dark. A moment later, the emergency lights kicked on. From the court officers’ radios, reports blared of other trapped court officers, their colleagues. Al Moscola assumed that the voices were calling for help from their usual place, in the Court Officers Academy, a few blocks away from the trade center.
“Those bastards! They attacked William Street!” Moscola screamed.
“Al,” Baccellieri said. “They’re downstairs. They’re not at William Street.”
Wherever and whatever the trouble was, the dynamic had changed. The court officers felt they had gone as far as was prudent, nearly 600 feet up, every step on their own initiative. They decided to head downstairs and reconnect with the three Port Authority officers. Together, the group began to go down from the 51st floor. Just then, the Port Authority officers’ radios crackled with orders to evacuate.
Sixteen floors below the court officers, on the 35th floor, a battalion chief stood with parts of five fire companies: Ladders 5, 9, and 20, and Engines 33 and 24. The streams of people leaving had slowed their progress up the stairs, keeping them near the ground, and closer to safety. So had the ballast: the gear they were carrying, much of it useless. The senior fire commanders all felt there was no hope of extinguishing a blaze that was burning so high in the tower, over so many floors, but the orders they thought they had given the ascending companies—to leave half their gear behind—were largely ignored or unheard. As they had started their trek to the fire ninety-two stories above them, many companies carried hundreds of pounds of equipment that no one expected them to use. That surely slowed the climb—and kept them from penetrating so far in the tower that they had no prospect of quickly backing out. On the landings in the 20s were traces of the struggle of those climbing up: coils of hose, fire extinguishers, even pry tools, abandoned.
Now, on the 35th floor, these five companies, who had been among the earliest to arrive, were taking a break and trying to gather the firefighters who had fallen behind. Someone had found a kitchen, so they were drinking to replenish the fluids they had sweated out. The staircases were virtually empty of civilians now. One of the lieutenants on the 35th floor, Warren Smith, had fought fires in Manhattan for most of his twenty years in the department, and knew that they could not put out eight floors of raging fire, or whatever the scope of that ghastly hell was. Dropping gear made sense. Maybe they would settle for finding people who needed a hand and get them out. Mike Warchola, the lieutenant from Ladder 5, was on his last day of work, and earlier in the morning, had been congratulated by other firefighters. Now, as he stood on the 35th floor, sweat poured off him. Gregg Hansson, the lieutenant from Engine 24, spotted him.

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