Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  If money had an aroma, Lower Manhattan would have been as fragrant as a bakery. Instead it smelled of fast-moving people and slow-moving vehicles, asphalt and steel, coffee and steam, cologne and sweat, with salty high notes wafting from New York Harbor. Air brakes hissed in complaint as city buses disgorged passengers. Horns blared as taxis avoided men in polished brogues and sneaker-wearing women who, like Elaine Duch of the Port Authority, carried heels in their work bags. Another among the sneaker set was Jennieann Maffeo.

  At forty years old, Jennieann stood five feet one,24 with luxuriant brown hair held in place by a metal clip. She wore blue pants, a pretty blouse, and a zippered sweater. New Balance running shoes cushioned her steps; her briefcase contained her work shoes alongside her wallet, a book, and a knitting project.

  As Ron Clifford approached the Marriott, Jennieann waited nearby for the second leg of her commute in the shadow of the North Tower, at a bus stop on West Street. She intended to grab a New York Waterway shuttle bus to a Hudson River ferry pier. A brief cruise would leave her on a dock in Weehawken, New Jersey, close to her job as a computer systems analyst at the financial firm UBS PaineWebber.

  Jennieann’s younger sister and best friend, Andrea, often teased her that the long commute would be the death of her. But Jennieann tolerated the ninety-minute trek every morning and every night so she could live with Andrea. Together, they cared for their mother, Frances, a cancer survivor, and their father, Sam, a stroke victim, in a three-family house in a working-class section of Brooklyn.

  Single, a gifted soprano in her church choir, Jennieann threw herself into childcentric volunteer work. She raised money to fight juvenile diabetes, supported Make-a-Wish, and spent lunch hours reading to impoverished children. Earlier that morning she had interrogated Andrea, the literacy director for the New York City public schools, about the most economical way to buy art supplies for a needy New Jersey elementary school. Before leaving for work, the sisters made plans to shop that night at a discount store.

  As Jennieann waited for the shuttle bus, she stood alongside a quiet colleague, Wai-ching Chung,25 a thirty-six-year-old UBS PaineWebber vice president. Wai-ching’s colleagues knew him as a man so devoted to protecting the firm’s databases that he rarely took a day off. A Hong Kong native, painfully shy, Wai-ching would get flustered if anyone at work so much as said hello. He lived with his parents and younger brother in Brooklyn. He spent his little free time with his sister and her family, including his niece Maurita Tam, a recent graduate of Amherst College.

  When Maurita was a child, Wai-ching had amused her by blowing sheets of tissue paper into the air so she could watch them float gently to the ground. Now twenty-two, Maurita enjoyed the sight of rainbows26 that spanned the Manhattan skyline. At that very moment, Maurita was headed skyward, to her job as an executive assistant for the Aon Corporation on the 99th floor of the South Tower, a thousand feet above the shuttle stop where Wai-ching and Jennieann stood waiting.

  Ron Clifford climbed the stone stairs to the Marriott, a twenty-two-story hotel dwarfed by the adjoining towers. A favorite of business travelers, the 843-room Marriott boasted meeting rooms fittingly named Dow, Stock, Bond, and Trader.27

  Ron stepped into the beige marble lobby. With some time to kill before his 9 a.m. meeting, he ducked into a restroom for a peek in the mirror. He couldn’t explain why, but Ron took appreciative note of the bathroom’s antiseptic cleanliness. His hair in place, his bold yellow tie straight, Ron returned to the lobby. Still too early to call his meeting partner’s room, he pushed through revolving doors that connected the Marriott to the North Tower.

  Despite his ambivalence about the towers, Ron enjoyed the soaring grandeur of their light-filled seven-story lobbies. He gazed through the windows onto the five-acre plaza. It occurred to him that the steel trident columns at the towers’ base resembled an upward branching design in stained glass windows created by Frank Lloyd Wright. The master architect called his pattern the Tree of Life.

  Invigorated, Ron returned to the Marriott lobby. Diners clinked silverware and spoke in muffled tones over breakfast in the hotel’s Tall Ships Bar and Grill. Guests checking out bustled toward the front desk. Ron reminded himself of everything at stake and inhaled deeply.

  By 8:41 a.m., on the North Tower’s 88th floor, Elaine Duch had caught up with her pile of work. She took a break to send a ritual morning email. She wrote her twin sister, Janet, that she’d arrived safely and reminded her of their yoga class that night. Elaine included an exasperated complaint about the first leg of her morning commute: “bus soooooooo28 crowded. . . . no a/c—i was roasting on bus, then i finally cooled.”

  Minutes later, a receptionist called Elaine with momentous news: a messenger had arrived with ten brown cardboard boxes whose contents foretold the future of the World Trade Center. Inside the boxes were overdue lease documents that would enable the Port Authority to give two private real estate companies control of the complex for the next ninety-nine years. This was the paperwork that had delayed Elaine’s planned move to a new job in the agency’s audit department, based in an office across the river in Jersey City. The messenger’s arrival signaled not only the trade center’s historic turnover to private control, but also the final days of Elaine’s quarter century of work inside the North Tower. She’d miss her Port Authority friends, but not the building, whose magnificent views of Manhattan never compensated Elaine for its dizzying height.

  Elaine grabbed a set of keys and walked briskly through a glass door that led to a vestibule down the hall from a bank of elevators. The messenger’s flatbed cart couldn’t fit through the glass door, so Elaine pointed him toward double-wide doors down the hall that served as the main entrance to the Port Authority real estate department.

  In the Marriott lobby, Ron Clifford made final preparations for his big meeting. In his Chinatown firehouse, Captain Jay Jonas spooned his Wheaties. At Elmhurst Hospital, paramedic Carlos Lillo, EMT Moose Diaz, and their partners awaited their next call. On the 64th floor of the North Tower, Cecilia Lillo plotted her second breakfast. The World Trade Center hummed with the usual activity of a normal Tuesday morning in September. Roughly 8,900 people29 were at work or visiting the North Tower.

  After being dismissed by his supervisor, Angela Kyte, on the 99th floor, temp worker and actor Chris Young retraced his steps to a local elevator. He rode it down to the 78th floor sky lobby, then switched to one of ten giant express elevators to the ground floor.

  Alone in an elevator car built to carry up to fifty-five people, Chris felt tired from his movie premiere the night before, but upbeat about an easy workday ahead. He recognized a rare opportunity to test a childhood theory that claimed a person who jumps inside a high-speed elevator feels as weightless as an astronaut in space.

  Chris jumped once. Nothing. A second jump, higher. Still nothing.

  Chris jumped a third time, higher still. The time was 8:46 a.m.

  At that moment, terrorist pilot Mohamed Atta gripped the controls inside the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 11. Thirty-two minutes had elapsed since the takeover began. After flying the Boeing 767 the full length of Manhattan island, Atta pointed the hijacked jet toward his target: the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  Flight attendant Amy Sweeney huddled in a rear jump seat. Using an Airfone, she described the hijacking to Boston-based flight service manager Michael Woodward.

  “Something is wrong,” Amy told Michael. “We’re in a rapid descent. . . . We are all over the place.”

  Michael asked her to look out the window and describe what she saw.

  “Oh my God!” Amy said. “We are way too low!”

  Chapter 13

  “God Save Me!”

  Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center

  Forty-seven minutes after takeoff, carrying eighty-seven hostages, five tons of cargo, ten thousand gallons of fuel, and five terrorists, American Airlines Flight 11 completed its forced conversion from a passenger jet in
to a 283,600-pound guided missile.1 Its nose aimed slightly downward, its right wing tipped upward, the silver Boeing 767 with red, white, and blue stripes and “AA” on its tail smashed into the north face of the North Tower at 8:46:40 a.m. Its violent arrival carved an airplane-shaped gash in the steel and glass that stretched at an angle from the 93rd to the 99th floor.

  As it entered the building, what remained of Flight 11 sliced through thirty-five exterior steel columns and heavily damaged two more. It severed six core columns and damaged three others. It shattered at least 166 windows. It broke the concrete floor slabs of the 95th and 96th floors eighty feet deep into the building. It launched a fusillade of flying debris that knocked or scraped fire-retarding insulation from forty-three core columns. It stripped the insulation from sixty thousand square feet of steel floor supports over several floors. It severed pipes that fed water into the fire sprinkler system. It stopped elevators in motion and cut off elevator service to at least the sixty upper stories. It sent glass and metal and office contents and body parts raining down a thousand feet to the plaza and the streets below.

  It altered the path of American and world history.

  All that damage took less than one second.

  A wheel from the left wing landing gear crashed through the North Tower’s central core, embedded itself in an exterior column on the far side, ripped the steel beam from the building, and flew with that piece another seven hundred feet to the south, landing on Cedar Street. Another wheel also passed entirely through the tower; unencumbered by building parts, it flew twice as far to the south.

  The crash immediately killed everyone on board Flight 11 and an unknown number in the plane’s path. But that was only the beginning. As the plane blasted through the tower’s core, it crushed the walls of all three emergency stairwells in its path, cutting off stair access to everyone on the 92nd floor and above. At the moment of impact, an estimated 1,355 people2 were inside those nineteen uppermost floors. That included roughly two hundred people dining or working at Windows on the World and attending a technology conference on the 106th floor.

  The survivors on those floors had no way down and no way out, although many didn’t yet know it. Scores called 9-1-1 as well as family members and friends, while others sent emails. They delivered oral and written messages that spanned the emotional spectrum, from panicked pleas to calm appeals. Some expressed their greatest concern not for themselves, but for the loved ones whom they worried they would soon leave behind.

  Yet despite the damage, despite the death and destruction, in the immediate aftermath of the assault, the North Tower still stood. It absorbed the unthinkable blow, bending and swaying but not breaking. Even with its relatively spindly design and sparing use of steel, the tower had what engineers call “reserve capacity” that allowed it to support a far greater load than its own weight plus the weight of people and furnishings. When Flight 11 severed more than forty exterior and core support columns, the building instantly and automatically redistributed the load to undamaged neighboring columns. That kept the North Tower upright and prevented the immediate deaths of survivors in and above the impact zone, as well as more than seventy-five hundred3 men and women on lower floors who streamed toward undamaged stairwells to try to escape.

  With its load redistributed, the tower could have remained standing4 indefinitely, potentially allowing rescue workers to reach everyone who survived the initial damage. If not for the fires, that is.

  The North Tower’s external steel columns cut through the Boeing 767’s fuel-filled wings like the blades of an egg slicer. Fireballs visible for miles exploded from the entrance wound and from blown-out windows on the east and south sides of the tower. More fireballs raced up and down elevator shafts, blowing out doors and walls as far down as the basement levels. Toxic clouds of hot, thick smoke poured up and down the central core and gushed out of the broken building. No longer was the morning sky an unblemished blue.

  Despite the explosions, less than half of the ten thousand gallons of jet fuel from Flight 11 burned in the initial fiery blasts. The rest sprayed through the impact floors and nourished fires that consumed combustibles from the plane and the office furnishings. Those fires fed off fresh air that flowed into the torn-open building. As flames gathered strength and spread, trapped survivors rushed toward sealed and broken windows in desperation. At the same time, the fires began to threaten the remaining support columns that already carried a heavier-than-normal load from their broken neighbors. Meanwhile, fires licked at the exposed steel of floor supports that were shorn of their fire-retarding insulation.

  The secondary effects of the crash were in full swing.

  Building fires typically don’t get hot enough to melt structural steel columns, even relatively thin ones. But long before steel reaches its melting point, it loses strength. The weaker a steel column gets, the less able it is to carry its assigned or reassigned load. Similarly, fires could make unprotected steel floor supports sag, adding stress and pulling down on the exterior and core columns to which they were attached.

  Ultimately, if the structural steel in the impact zone became hot enough for long enough, or was forced to carry too much added weight, it would buckle. If that happened, everything above the impact zone would come crashing downward, creating an enormous moving mass that could overwhelm the entire North Tower. Put simply, it could cause total collapse.

  Although the impact of the B-25 bomber on the Empire State Building in some ways resembled the crash of Flight 11, fundamental distinctions between the buildings’ designs made the two events vastly different. No building like the North Tower had ever experienced such an assault, so no one could say for certain what might happen next. Like everything else about the morning of September 11, this was uncharted territory.

  When Flight 11 struck, Elaine Duch had just stepped through the glass door outside her office on the 88th floor to meet a messenger, Vaswald George Hall, and his document-laden flatbed cart. Hall was fifty, the father of four, a police officer in his native Jamaica before arriving in the United States seventeen years earlier. He’d recently scored high on a civil service exam and hoped to start a new career.5

  Before Elaine could guide him through the larger, double doors of the Port Authority’s real estate department, an explosion roared from above. The building swayed and moaned as though threatening to dive into the Hudson. The floor rippled and rocked beneath her sneakers like the deck of a ship in high seas.

  Before Elaine could think, before she could act, a fireball of ignited jet fuel traveled down an elevator shaft and burst through the elevator doors. It illuminated the hallway with a brilliant orange flash of dragon’s breath. It consumed Elaine. The fire seemed to touch every part of her at once, as though she’d leapt into a cauldron, a scorching immersion that bathed her in unspeakable heat. Certain that she was about to die, Elaine screamed: “God save me!”

  The fire considered her open mouth to be an invitation to scorch Elaine’s lungs.

  All around her, ceiling tiles popped from their frames. Light fixtures crashed to the floor. Gypsum drywall boards burst from their anchors. Elevator doors ruptured off their tracks. The fireball from Flight 11 passed as quickly as it arrived on the 88th floor, with the growl of an engine and the shush of a snuffed-out candle. It left behind a smoky haze and small fires in the far reaches of the corridors.

  And it left behind Elaine.

  In shock, yet still on her feet, Elaine glanced down and saw charred tatters of her cream-colored top melted to her skin. Blackened remnants of her skirt made gruesome tattoo marks on her exposed legs. Her face and arms shone bright red, as though she’d fallen asleep on a broiling beach. Her jacket seemed to have burned away entirely. The sulfurous smell of her scorched hair mixed with the lingering odor of jet fuel. Smoke rose from her like mist from a morning lake. When the fire embraced her, it cut through her watchband and sent her watch skittering to the floor. Her key case leapt from her hand. Elaine’s glasses were aske
w but intact, having miraculously protected her eyes. Her only other unscathed body parts were her feet, shielded by her sneakers. Vaswald Hall, the messenger who’d been just feet away from her, was gone; Elaine didn’t know where.

  The fireball burned more than three quarters of her skin, from her scalp to her ankles. Her burns were mostly third-degree, which destroyed Elaine’s nerve endings. For the moment, that was a blessing. The absence of nerve endings blocked her ability to feel pain and allowed her to only partly comprehend the severity of her injuries. Elaine’s immediate concerns were embarrassment at her disheveled seminakedness, confusion about what just happened, and worry about the strange sizzling sounds all around her.

  Elaine walked zombie-like into the real estate office, her arms outstretched, stepping across shattered glass from the door she’d passed through less than a minute earlier.

  Startled by the plane’s impact, the rising smoke, and the building’s pronounced sway, Port Authority workers and several employees of the trade center’s new leaseholder, Silverstein Properties, scurried through the office, some invoking the memory of the 1993 bombing. Everyone halted at the sight of Elaine. People she’d worked with for decades asked one another with alarm, “Who’s that?”

  Two longtime colleagues, Joanne Ciccolello and Gilbert Weinstein, rushed over. They patted Elaine’s head and body with their bare hands to extinguish smoldering embers. Elaine saw the horror in their eyes as they tapped and brushed away sparks. Alarmed by her exposed, damaged skin, Elaine ran to her desk and grabbed an off-white cardigan and tied it around her waist as an improvised wrap skirt. Her modesty partially restored, Elaine grabbed her purse. Years earlier, someone stole her pocketbook when she worked on the 63rd floor. She still winced at the hassle of losing her license and belongings, and she was determined not to let it happen again.