102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (25 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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Hoey called the police desk first. “I’m in the trade center, tower one. I’m with the Port Authority and we are on the 64th floor. The smoke is getting kind of bad, so we are going to … we are contemplating going down the stairway. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” the police officer replied. “Try to get out.”
“All right,” Hoey said. “Bye.”
It was 10:12 A.M., eighty-seven minutes after the north tower was struck.
The message to leave spread fitfully. Warren Smith, the lieutenant who had gotten the word because he was standing near a chief on the 35th floor, found that the civilians had departed—even the people who looked most responsible and diligent, those who Smith supposed might be company fire wardens. They were the ones who had cleared their colleagues and then stayed around to
hand out bottled water to the rescue teams. Yet as Smith went down, he kept coming across firefighters still carrying their heavy coils of hose, still forcing open doors. It was as if nothing had changed. Another cycle of firefighters would search the floors. They had no idea that the order had been given to get out. When Smith told them that everyone was leaving, he felt they did not believe him.
“Listen,” Smith said. “Forget about that. Drop your roll-ups. You can get them later if you want. Just get out.”
Those firefighters did not have any sense of urgency about complying with a secondhand order, Smith felt. He noticed them stopping to look out windows, to see what was happening in the street. Because the fire was so distant, many of them had gone up without a specific order—basically, to see what they could do—and Smith felt they were very confident about the building. He couldn’t blame them. The 1993 bombing had shown them it could stand up. It was, he thought, the
Titanic
mentality.
Another lieutenant who had left the 35th floor, Gregg Hansson, was moving fast with his company. They had stopped at 27 to pick up Rich Billy, who had been with Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz. As they reached the 19th floor, a firefighter popped out into the stairway. Hansson did not recognize him.
“I need some help,” the firefighter said. “We’ve got a lot of people on the other part of the floor who aren’t leaving.”
Hansson had to stop, but before he went onto the 19th floor, one of his own men, the probationary firefighter Robert Byrne, told him that he had left his respirator mask back on the 35th floor. Not having the mask could slow them down if they needed to share air. Hansson, however, did not want Byrne to turn back. The trouble, vague as it was, held enormous menace. “I want you to go,” Hansson told Byrne. “Just get out of the building.”
Then Hansson walked onto the 19th floor, and in the gloom, saw a crowd of firefighters and some civilians. In the group was Kevin Pfeifer, who had been on the 35th floor with Hansson.
“What’s going on?” Hansson asked. “We gotta get out of here.”
A firefighter from Rescue 3 approached Hansson and addressed him with the universal nickname for lieutenants.
“Lieu, can I talk to you?” he said. The firefighter walked Hansson over to a window that overlooked West Street. It was Hansson’s first glimpse of the outside world. He could not see the Marriott Hotel, which stood between the two towers, but West Street seemed jumbled and strange to him. He did not even know that the other tower had also been hit with a plane, much less that it had collapsed.
The firefighter who brought him to the window said, “I don’t think we can get out.”
“We gotta try to get out of here,” Hansson said. “We gotta go.”
He headed back for the stairs, calling out that people had to leave. They were moving far too slowly, he thought. They could not have heard the same urgent orders.
Around that same time, another group had also reached the 19th floor—the court officers, Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender, coming down from 51. They had stopped there on the way up and noted the mass assembly of firefighters. Now, on their way down, they again stepped out of the staircase and into the corridors. They could scarcely believe their eyes. The 19th floor was just as full as it had been when they came up, still packed with firefighters. From end to end of the hallway, and down other corridors, so tight it would be tough to find a place to squeeze in alongside the wall with them, the place was carpeted with firefighters. Most were sitting, and had stripped off their turnout coats. Helmets off. Some were down to their blue T-shirts, maps of sweat blotting through the fabric emblazoned with the Fire Department shield. Wender saw that some were lying down. Axes leaned against the wall. Legs stretched out. Arm resting against oxygen tanks. They could not be hearing, Wender thought, what we are hearing.
Baccellieri and Moscola took in the scene. They guessed there were at least 100 firefighters on the floor.
“We’re getting out of here,” Baccellieri yelled. “We’ve been told we’ve got to get out of the building.”
No one moved.
“We’ll come down in a few minutes,” someone said.
But all the rescue workers are bailing out, the court officers said.
“Yeah, all right, we’ll be right there,” another firefighter replied.
As the court officers tramped downstairs, the alarm outside the tower grew more urgent. Hayes, in police helicopter Aviation 14, broke through the jumble of radio traffic to reach the dispatcher at 10:19, ninety-three minutes into the crisis.
“Be advised, just not one hundred percent sure—but it does appear that the top of the tower might possibly be leaning at this time,” Hayes said.
“Tower’s leaning?” the dispatcher said. With that, he began to alert the other cars in the field that they had to “read direct,” meaning they needed to pay attention to the message, rather than waiting for it to be relayed from the central dispatch office. “Car 3, car 1, ESU 1—read direct on that.”
Hayes came back on the air.
“It is confirmed,” he said. “It is buckling and it is leaning to the south.”
“Which tower is that?” asked the dispatcher. “One or two?”
“The remaining tower, the north tower is leaning to the southwest at this time,” Hayes said. “It appears to be buckling in the southwest corner.”
To be sure that all the officers on the air got the word, the dispatcher repeated the message.
“The northwest tower is leaning,” he said. “And it appears to be buckling at this time at the southwest corner.”
That was at least the fourth time police officers in helicopters had broadcast warnings of ominous conditions at the top of the towers, yet another dire message carried solely on police channels. The rescue workers of New York City did not have a system for sharing that information: no common frequencies, no practice of working together at command posts, nothing they could count on beyond the serendipity of an encounter with someone carrying the right radio.
Fred Ill, the captain of Ladder Company 2, who had radioed dispatchers early in the crisis to remind them about getting firefighters on the helicopters, was in the north tower, rounding up his men. They could not hear the warnings from the sky.
“You don’t understand.”
10:20 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
 
T
en minutes. Maybe longer, but nothing in the quiet, deserted stairwell around the 10th or 12th floor marked the passing time. A woman drew short, quick breaths, as if she had run a race and could not catch her breath. A man who sat near her carried a two-way Port Authority radio, but even that had fallen silent. No one else stirred. The north tower seemed more than empty. The place itself felt exhausted and depleted. The woman sat on a step, unable to face another flight.
“We’re gonna die,” Judith Reese said between gasps.
No, no, insisted Jeff Gertler. “Look—wet your finger, feel the fresh air coming up from the street,” he said.
Reese had severe asthma. Everything about the long descent—the exertion, the heat, the anxiety—tightened the clamp around her tormented airways. Gertler, her colleague, tried soothing assurance, pep talks, pleading. Anything to keep her going. Another ten flights or so and they would be out of the building, and she would get help from an ambulance. She had to sit.
It had been about twenty minutes since they had felt the quivering
from the collapse of the south tower. They had no idea what had happened, to their building or the other one.
They had been on the move for close to an hour and a half, ever since they left their offices on the 88th floor, where Gertler worked as a project manager for the Port Authority, and where Reese worked as the administrative assistant to Frank De Martini. In the early clamor, when the people on the 88th floor debated waiting for help or leaving, it was the labored breathing of Judith Reese that helped settle the issue. No one with her chronic breathing problems could stay in a space even with small fires. She had been among the first to go, but every step taxed her, and she could move down only one or two flights before stopping. Soon, she had fallen to the distant rear of the procession. Gertler, a colleague but not a close friend, had stayed with her. As with everyone who worked in the towers, the morning’s alarm had instantly revived the memory and stories of the 1993 attack and the brutal evacuation. Gertler realized that for Reese, going down the stairs was also to walk into the dread of the evacuation eight years earlier. He had prodded her forward.
“It’s not like ’93,” he said. “Look down the center of the stairs.” This was not empty cheerleading. The stairways were lit, the steps marked in glow-tape. They were crowded, but people moved. Prodded by Gertler, she continued. Along the way, she had gotten oxygen from rescuers, permitting her to continue, but now she had to stop.
Spent, Reese sat on the stairs. In the silent stairway, Gertler waited for her to catch enough breath for the final leg of their trip. The time was approaching 10:20, ninety-four minutes since Flight 11 had struck.
 
 
If the twin towers could be thought of as two shoeboxes stood on end, then the Marriott Hotel was like a child’s shoebox that lay flat between the two big ones. For much of the morning, the hotel lobby had served as an exit ramp from the north tower, which it abutted. By using the hotel, people were able to leave the north
tower without walking outside, emerging on Liberty Street, at the south end of the trade center complex. Close to a thousand people had done just that, steered by a team of hotel employees who had gathered in the lobby in the early moments of the crisis. A few of the hotel workers, like Abdu A. Malahi, an audiovisual engineer, had gone upstairs, to make sure the rooms were empty; others, like Joe Keller, the thirty-two-year-old executive housekeeper, had formed a cordon in the lobby. This kept people from using the doors onto West Street, where a lethal rain of glass and building parts and people were falling from the high floors.
The hotel lobby also became a launchpad for the arriving firefighters, many of whom had never worked in that part of Manhattan and knew little of the layout of the trade center. The hotel had a sweeping entrance on West Street, the approach taken by many of the companies. It was the most obvious way into the trade center, even if it required dodging the plummeting debris and bodies. A chief sent a few companies upstairs to check the rooms; others milled around in the lobby, trying to find a route to their assigned building.
By 9:59, the evacuation had slowed to a trickle, and the lobby, no longer taken over with the urgent task of evacuation, now was occupied mostly by hotel workers who lingered at their stations, and firefighters and police officers who were mustering to go upstairs. Then it came: a rumble, the crashes, the blotting out of light, as if a cosmic drain had suddenly been opened, sucking away the ordinary, familiar shapes of everyday life.
Joe Keller, the executive housekeeper, vanished. He had been less than ten feet from Rich Fetter, the hotel’s resident manager. In an instant, he was gone. Fetter pressed himself under and against a column as dust whipped through the lobby. He put his hand out for a second and was smacked with a piece of flying debris. The place went pitch black. Fetter’s glasses disappeared. His eyes and nose clogged. Then, suddenly, it seemed to him impossibly quiet. Through the haze, he could make out a group of hotel workers huddled near the Tall Ships bar, along with some firefighters. They began to climb out onto the street.
Fetter knew if he could get near the concierge desk, he could find a walkie-talkie. He felt around, then put his hands on it. Coughing out dust, Fetter called for Keller over the walkie-talkie, knowing that Keller usually carried one. He had been standing in chatting range. How could he have disappeared?
Suddenly, Keller’s voice came back.
“Rich, I’m fine—I’m in a void by the bell-stand area,” Keller said. “I’m on a ledge, there’s a big hole and I can see down to the lower levels of the hotel. There’s two firemen in here with me and they seem to be hurt bad.” The collapse of the south tower had cleaved the hotel from top to bottom, as if a giant scissors had snipped the building in two.
The two men were separated by a wall of debris. Fetter assured Keller they would get him out. Part of the lobby turned out to be a safe zone shielded during the collapse by reinforced beams that had been installed after the 1993 bombing. Fetter was in the safe area of the lobby, while Keller was caught in the area that collapsed, but in a space that had been sheltered from direct impacts. Also with Fetter on the safe side were seven or eight firefighters, looking for openings in the debris wall because they, too, were missing colleagues. Whole companies had disappeared—at least forty firefighters were either in the part of the lobby that was crushed, or on the severed floors upstairs. Fetter told the ones who had escaped serious injury about the two firefighters trapped with Keller, and they tied a rope to mark the spot, then climbed out through holes and intact passages to get more help. When Deputy Chief Tom Galvin made it onto West Street, he saw a fresh crew from Ladder 113 and told them about two companies that were trapped inside, Engines 58 and 65. Ladder 113—Lt. Raymond Brown and Firefighters Dennis Dowdican, Willie Roberts, Rich Nogan, Bob Pino, Tom Feaser, and Bill Morris—had pulled up just a few minutes before the south tower collapsed. Now, the ladder company headed into the husk of the Marriott, following the rope line. They met two of the firefighters from 58, Mike Fitzpatrick and John Wilson, who happened to be standing in the safe area of the hotel and now wanted to get the rest of their team out, including their lieutenant, Bob Nagel.
Brown and Fitzpatrick crawled through a void and began to cut at the debris. They were able to speak through the debris to Lieutenant Nagel, caught on the wrong side of the debris wall. “I’m okay,” Nagel said. “There are two chiefs and another company behind us.”
The rescue group began working with power saws. Someone passed a flashlight through to Nagel.
Trapped behind the same wall, Joe Keller of the hotel housekeeping department watched the activity to free Nagel. He spoke to Fetter. “I can see the sparks, I can see where you’re working,” Keller said. “You’re twenty or thirty feet away from me.”
 
 
About 100 yards east of the hotel, in a collapsed hole at the center of the trade center, other voices called across dark crevices to one another.
“Sound off!” the sergeant, John McLoughlin, hollered.
“Jimeno,” said Will Jimeno.
“Pezzulo,” said Dominick Pezzulo.
They waited for an answer from Officers Antonio Rodriguez and Chris Amoroso, but heard none.
The five Port Authority police officers had been fifteen or twenty feet underground, not far from a globe sculpture that rested on the plaza. The officers had been running through the concourse, a small arsenal of tools clanking around each man’s waist: Guns. Ammunition. Flashlight. Handcuffs. Their task was to collect safety and rescue gear for the climb into the buildings, and they had stopped at security closets to gather Scott Airpaks, helmets, axes, piling it all into a canvas laundry cart. Then they ran the cart toward a meeting point with other officers. With the fall of the south tower, part of the plaza had caved in, trapping them.
Jimeno called for Rodriguez, a friend: “A-Rod. A-Rod.” McLoughlin yelled for Amoroso. They got no answer. Pezzulo, a powerful man who lifted weights, began to plow his way out of the rubble, lifting concrete. He had joined the Port Authority police about a year earlier, just making the age-thirty-five cutoff; before that, he
had taught shop at a high school in the Bronx, and had spoken about going back to that. He could handle tools, he could fashion his own, and he certainly could handle heavy weights. He struggled to his feet, and turned to the rubble that pinned Jimeno. Sergeant McLoughlin was buried beyond Jimeno, deeper in the rubble.
On the mezzanine of the north tower, where the two police officers Tim Pearson and John Perry had been helping to carry an ailing woman, the debris storm from the south tower separated Pearson from the woman and Perry. Pearson crawled along the floor, shouting out for Perry, for Port Authority people, for anyone who might know the way out. No one answered. The woman and Perry did not seem to be there anymore. The mezzanine was intact, but was no longer a promenade around a proud marble-lined lobby. Instead, it was now a ledge on a cavern, dark and silent. A light appeared—someone must have had a flashlight—and with the emergence of that single beam came sounds: groans and coughs and people saying, I’m over here. One voice found another, then more, aural links that became a hand on a shoulder that led to a hand on yet another shoulder: a sputtering human chain that shuffled toward where the escalator had been. They found it by groping, the smooth skin of the handrail familiar and steadying. Still unable to see one another’s faces, they started walking down from the mezzanine to what had been the lobby. As they got lower, the way became clearer. The lobby was lit by fires.
All morning, making the last few hundred yards out of the trade center, drawing clear of the falling bodies and the shredding structure, had been the most arduous and delicate portion of the escape. With the collapse of the south tower, the lowest floors of the north tower now had a new web of obstacles. Rubble blocked the last few feet of stairways. The air had been fouled with smoke and dust. The pace of departure drastically slowed.
Leaning against those snags, pushing everyone toward the exits, however, was the momentum built up over the previous hour and a half. Michael Benfante and John Cerquiera from the communications company Network Plus had carried the Port Authority marketing analyst Tina Hansen from the 68th floor in an evacuation
chair, a rolling buggy that can slide down stairs for adults who normally use wheelchairs to get around. Along the way they received help from a shifting cast of strangers. At the 21st floor, firefighters suggested leaving Hansen with them. She insisted that they go on. Around the 5th floor, the stairway had become clogged with traffic backing up from the broken lobby. A pair of firefighters led the Hansen entourage out of the stairway, into the dark corridors. They sloshed through the puddles of water from sprinklers or broken pipes, and then found another stairway. It was blocked, too.
“What are we going to do?” one firefighter asked the other.
“I have no idea,” his partner replied.
A bolt of fear ran through Cerquiera. They kept searching and found an intact exit. Benfante, Cerquiera, and Hansen continued, making their way to the bottom. Long ago—when they had started the journey—they had hoped to find a working elevator along the route so that Hansen could ride down. Now, in the lobby, they saw elevator doors blown out of their tracks, security turnstiles torn from their moorings, the frames of the great soaring windows twisted. Any glass that was not in bits on the ground stood in shards. On the street seemed to be a fresh fall of snow. Over this terrain of ruin, Benfante and Cerquiera lifted Hansen out of the building. They spotted an ambulance and delivered her to its doors. She was unhurt, Benfante explained, but she could not walk. The two men turned north, uptown, toward safety.
John Abruzzo, a quadriplegic from a diving accident, had come down from the 69th floor in an evacuation chair flanked by ten of his colleagues from the Port Authority—Michael Ambrosio, Peter Bitwinski, Phillip Caffrey, Richard Capriotti, Michael Curci, Michael Fabiano, Wilson Pacheco, Tony Pecora, Gerald Simpkins, and Peggy Zoch. They had taken turns at the head and foot of the chair, or holding jackets and briefcases. They teased Abruzzo, telling him that he would have to lose a few of his 250 pounds before they would carry him out of another skyscraper.

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