Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Ten miles away, at a chemical company in Bayonne, New Jersey, Elaine’s twin sister, Janet, looked up from her desk to see her boss standing over her.6 He said that a small plane had slammed into the World Trade Center. Probably no big deal.

  Janet sprinted outside, to a parking lot where she could see across the sparkling bay to Lower Manhattan. She spotted flames and smoke bursting from the World Trade Center tower with the giant antenna on top. Janet knew that Elaine worked on the 88th floor of the North Tower, which looked to be around the affected level. But, seized by fear, Janet couldn’t remember which of the buildings had an antenna on top.

  Frustrated that she didn’t know which Twin Tower held her twin sister, Janet rushed back inside. She called Elaine’s desk phone, but the call wouldn’t go through. Janet tried Elaine’s new cellphone, but it rang unanswered, buried deep in Elaine’s abandoned tote bag.

  A howl from an engine followed by a powerful boom launched FDNY Captain Jay Jonas to his feet.

  For Jay, sudden loud noises were almost as motivating as fire alarms. He abandoned his Wheaties and ran outside as his mind spun through a catalog of horrendous sounds. Jay guessed that a freight truck must’ve driven off the nearby Manhattan Bridge, where he and his ladder company had been only hours earlier on the overnight shift in response to a scaffolding collapse.

  Out on the street, firehouse watchman Ray Hayden already understood that the awful noise hadn’t come from something as ordinary as a truck or a bridge. Hayden had seen a passenger plane screech overhead, heading toward the World Trade Center. Other buildings in the cramped Chinatown neighborhood blocked his sightline, but Hayden heard enough and rushed back inside to alert the troops.

  The watchman’s assumptions proved correct. New York’s emergency airwaves burst to life with calls between FDNY dispatchers and a battalion chief7 who’d been responding to a gas leak on a street corner less than a mile uptown from the Twin Towers. Within seconds, the chief radioed: “We just had a plane crash into the upper floors of the World Trade Center. Transmit a second alarm and start relocating companies into the area.”

  The radio reports quickly escalated.

  “The World Trade Center, Tower Number One, is on fire,” said an officer from FDNY Engine 6, a half mile west of the sixteen-acre complex. “The whole outside of the building. There was just a huge explosion.”

  The first report of victims came from Captain Eugene “Jack” Kelty of Engine 10, located across the street from the towers: “World Trade Center, ten-sixty,” he said, using the code for a major emergency with the possibility of multiple casualties. “Send every available ambulance, everything you’ve got, to the World Trade Center now.”

  As Jay reached the sidewalk on Canal Street, he heard watchman Ray Hayden yell over the firehouse intercom: “A plane just crashed!8 A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!”

  Jay turned west to face toward the towers, about a mile downtown. He couldn’t see them, but as Jay scanned the sky, he saw an ominous plume of rising black smoke.

  “How big a plane?” Jay called to the watchman.

  “It was a big fucking plane!” he answered.

  Jay rushed inside and told Ray to sound the alarm to turn out Ladder 6 and also Engine 9, which shared the firehouse. Neither company had yet been ordered to respond, but Jay felt certain that both would soon be called to duty. In simplified terms, ladder companies climb into buildings to find victims and create ventilation, while engine companies pump water. But those rules applied more neatly to a six-story tenement fire; skyscraper fires had their own rules and made different demands on all firefighters, regardless of company assignments. Jay understood instinctively that a fire fed by jet fuel and a wealth of combustibles, caused by an airplane crashing into an upper floor of one of the Twin Towers, would make unique and vicious demands.

  Jay raced into his office to pull on his bunker gear: fire-retardant pants, thick rubber boots, and a heavy black-and-yellow turnout coat. Stuffed in its pockets were gloves, a flashlight, and a smoke hood, along with items more typical for a mountain climber: rolls of nylon webbing and steel carabiners, which had as many potential uses as there were possible disasters. Jay had employed similar gear during the rescue of two firefighters in 1995, and he’d written an FDNY training bulletin on improvised rope rescues. He grabbed his air mask, a twenty-pound device as essential to a firefighter as scuba gear is to a diver. His black helmet, with a bold red 6 and captain above the brim, awaited him in the truck.

  As Jay dressed, the battalion chief who witnessed the crash into the North Tower added more chilling details, and another alarm, to the initial report that he had issued only twelve seconds after impact. “We have a number of floors on fire,”9 Chief Joseph Pfeifer told the Manhattan FDNY dispatcher. “It looked like the plane was aiming toward the building. Transmit a third alarm throughout; the staging area [is] at Vesey and West Street”—the intersection at the northwest corner of the trade center property.

  A third alarm meant a call for a dozen engine companies, seven ladder companies, an elite rescue unit, communications teams, multiple chiefs, and assorted support crews. As Jay anticipated, that included his unit, Ladder 6. Eventually, more than two hundred fire units,10 with more than a thousand firefighters, would swamp the scene, along with more than one hundred ambulances and the FDNY’s Hazmat team. Some would come without being called, desperate to help however they could. Because the crash occurred close to the 9 a.m. shift change, many firehouses had double their usual complement of firefighters. Few if any of “New York’s Bravest” wanted to avoid the fight. Trucks that normally carried six men zoomed toward the trade center with twice that number, “riding heavy” in firefighter parlance.

  The FDNY responders also would soon include a charismatic, pious, sometimes joyously profane sixty-eight-year-old chaplain named Father Mychal Judge. His lifesaving skills included leading scores of people to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he, too, had found rescue. A day earlier, the silver-haired Father Mychal had rededicated a renovated firehouse in the Bronx, where he reminded firefighters of an essential truth about their work: “You show up,11 you put one foot in front of another. You get on the rig and you go out and you do the job, which is a mystery and a surprise. You have no idea when you get on that rig, no matter how big the call, no matter how small, you have no idea what God’s calling you to. But He needs you. He needs me. He needs all of us. . . . So keep going.” When Mayor Rudy Giuliani reached the trade center, he’d call out to Father Mychal: “Pray for us.” The priest assured the mayor that he would, as always.

  Captain Jay Jonas, Chief Joe Pfeifer, and every other firefighter who sped toward the scene understood that this would be a big one. Maybe the biggest one ever. For his part, Pfeifer wanted some semblance of order from the outset. At a minimum, he wanted to steer rescuers into the tower as quickly as possible. Pfeifer continued his radio call: “As the third-alarm assignment goes into that area, the second-alarm assignment report to the building!”

  As Jay Jonas mustered his troops, he knew that they’d be among the firefighters going in.

  Inside the Marriott lobby, Ron Clifford heard an explosion, followed by a deep rumble that shamed the previous night’s thunderstorm. Vibrations rose up from the soles of his polished shoes, reverberating through his body and everything around him, as though he and the entire hotel were tuning forks. Ron thought a storage tank in the basement might have ruptured. Yet the lobby walls, fixtures, and ceiling remained intact. He looked around and saw people trying to regain their bearings.

  Confused, Ron glanced toward the revolving doors that led to the North Tower lobby. On the other side of the glass, he saw a chaotic scene. Ron smelled what he thought was kerosene. He heard screams. His mind flashed to the 1993 attack and his conversation on a sailboat the previous weekend with the retired World Trade Center engineer. Still, he didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

  As Ron stared at the North Tower lobby, he saw smoke fill the soaring s
pace where moments earlier he’d admired the view. People rushed toward the blown-open revolving doors he’d just come through. Not fully processing the situation, Ron briefly fixated on the broken doors. “My god,” he thought, “it must’ve been some kind of pressure to do that.”

  Fleeing people entered the hotel lobby and rushed past him, eyes wide, faces gripped by fear. Ron’s gaze settled on one person who moved differently, more slowly and clumsily than the others. Through a foggy veil of fuel particles and fumes, a short, stout figure marched awkwardly yet determinedly toward him. His first thought: a homeless person in tatters. Then his mind sharpened: it was a woman, nearly naked, horribly burned.

  Fire had consumed the woman’s pants, blouse, and underwear. A zipper ran up her blackened chest, fused with her ruined skin. Dark tufts of fried hair sprouted from her head. A metal clip had melted against her scalp. Her eyelids were slits, clamped shut from burns or swelling. She shuffled forward. Her hands reached out, her twisted fingernails scorched white from heat.

  The woman moaned in agony. Ron resisted an urge to recoil and banished an impulse to join the fleeing herd. As Ron stared at the woman, her burned lips formed a word that rooted him in place: “Help.”

  As everyone else ran to save themselves from the explosion that rocked the building and filled the North Tower lobby with smoke, fumes, and debris, Ron stepped toward the oncoming figure. Without medical training, with no idea what happened, Ron didn’t know what to do for her. But he knew he had to do something.

  “Okay,” Ron told the woman, “we’ll get some help.”

  He eased her down onto the marble floor. Her ravaged skin and what remained of her hair still smoldered. Heat and vapor rose from her body. Ron wished he could call his sister, Ruth, who’d spent a decade running a day spa, to draw upon her skin care expertise.

  Ron thought water might help. He told the burned woman to wait as he ran into the restroom where minutes earlier he’d straightened his yellow tie. Remembering how clean the lavatory was, Ron snatched an empty garbage bag from its container and partly filled it with cool tap water. He ran back to the woman, still on the floor, alone in the crowd as people coursed toward an exit like deer from a forest fire.

  Ron knelt and gently poured water on her burned arms, legs, and body.

  “Help!” Ron called to passers-by. He stood and shouted: “Emergency! Help! Can anybody help us?!” No one stopped. No one replied.

  He dropped back to the woman and the wet floor. A closer look showed that she had been burned head to ankle, as though she’d stood under a molten waterfall. Only the ragged tops of her New Balance running shoes were partly intact. The rubber soles were melted to the bottoms of her feet.

  Despite her shock and pain, somehow the woman remained coherent and able to speak. She told Ron her name: Jennieann Maffeo.

  He pulled out a notebook as she told him where she worked. She said she’d been waiting outside the North Tower for a shuttle to the ferry when she burst into flames. She didn’t know how or why. As flaming debris and fireballs rained down, Jennieann had been swept into a frightened crowd, unable to see, on legs burned to the muscle. She’d somehow stumbled into the North Tower lobby, then passed through the blown-open doors to the Marriott lobby, and into Ron Clifford’s path.

  At Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, FDNY paramedic Carlos Lillo sprinted toward EMT partners Moose Diaz and Paul Adams, his eyes wild and brimming.

  “A plane hit the towers!”12 Carlos yelled. “We gotta go!”

  As they raced to their ambulances, Moose heard Carlos shout: “My wife’s in there!”

  Moose remembered a locker room conversation during which Carlos said he’d drilled Cecilia about how to find an escape route in any emergency, and how he’d made her promise to find an FDNY ambulance to summon him. Carlos had also told Moose about the promise he’d made to Cecilia about not risking his life to look for her if anything like the 1993 bombing happened again. Moose understood that those promises might soon be tested.

  As they tore away from the hospital, the EMTs and paramedics radioed dispatch to say they were leaving their assigned district to cross the river to Manhattan. Sirens blaring, lights blazing, the two ambulances raced along Queens Boulevard. Through the passenger seat window, Paul Adams caught a glimpse of smoke pouring from the upper floors of the North Tower. The radio barked a report: a code 1040—airplane crash—at the World Trade Center. Chatter came across the airwaves about a “small airplane” striking the building. Paul thought about the single-engine Cessnas he piloted. He stared at the multistory gash and turned to Moose. “That ain’t no small airplane,” he said.

  Moose fell silent. Fighting nerves, he reminded himself of all he knew about responding to a major catastrophe with multiple casualties. As he ran through the protocols in his head, Moose thought the North Tower looked like a lit cigarette standing on its filter end.

  Alone inside an express elevator descending toward the North Tower lobby, Chris Young landed from his third unsuccessful antigravity test. As he did, he heard a roar. A blast of warm, dusty air and a sickly-sweet scent flooded his senses. Lights popped from ceiling frames but remained lit. The elevator car screeched and shuddered to a stop, knocking Chris off his feet.

  Curled into a ball, Chris briefly wondered if his jumping up and down had somehow derailed the elevator as it descended. Then he remembered 1993. He couldn’t be sure, but the noise he had heard sounded as though it came from below. “Another bomb under the World Trade Center,” he thought.

  Chris saw the “L” illuminated on the elevator car’s digital control panel, but he didn’t know how close it had stopped to the lobby. Heart racing, breathing fetid air, he stood and took stock. Relieved that he wasn’t hurt, Chris gathered his wits. He pressed a red emergency button that set off a ringing alarm.

  After several minutes with no response, he noticed a second button with the outline of a firefighter’s helmet. He pulled the alarm button to silence the ringing and pressed the fire hat. An automated computer voice assured him that his emergency call had been received and would be answered shortly.

  The voice repeated itself without pause for the next fifteen minutes.

  Dressed and ready, Captain Jay Jonas climbed into the front seat of the red-and-white firetruck, a tractor-trailer model called a tiller rig, designed for the tight turns of Chinatown streets. He looked around to see a fire crew he’d match against any in New York City, or anywhere else for that matter.

  The men of Ladder Company 6, Jay’s men, held job titles that evoked an earlier era of firefighting or the credits from a superhero movie. “Roof Man” Sal D’Agostino brandished a long rope and hand tools; “Can Man” Tommy Falco, who years earlier had asked Jay to lead the company, carried a loaded extinguisher; “Chauffeur” Mike Meldrum drove the big truck; “Tiller Man” Matt Komorowski steered the rear wheels from a raised perch atop the back end; and aptly named “Irons Man” Billy Butler, the strongest among them, wielded special pry bars to get them into and out of trouble.

  Sirens screaming, lights flashing, hearts pumping, Mike Meldrum and Matt Komorowski pulled the truck out of the firehouse and pointed it west on Canal Street. The street rose as they approached an entrance to the roadway that led toward the Manhattan Bridge. The higher elevation gave Jay a panoramic view of Lower Manhattan that had never been more breathtaking.

  As he stared toward the Twin Towers, Jay felt the strange and unfamiliar sensation of being overwhelmed. He’d spent years studying fire, learning its destructive ways and plotting creative, disciplined responses to every kind of catastrophe he could think of. Now, looking through a windshield the size of a big-screen television, Jay had a view that shamed his imagination: orange flames and gray-black smoke blasted from an enormous, angled hole in the topmost quarter of the North Tower, polluting a sky that had been as crystalline as a mountain lake.

  “Buckle up!” he called to his men. “We’re going to work.”

  In the silence that followed, J
ay wondered: “How many people13 need our help right now, right at this very minute?” As he calculated the possible toll and considered the job ahead, Jay couldn’t conceive the disaster’s true cause: “My god,” he thought, “what a horrible accident.”

  Others in the FDNY understood immediately, with various degrees of precision, that this was no accident. In one of his earliest radio transmissions, Chief Joe Pfeifer used the word “aiming” to describe the route he saw the plane take to the North Tower. Less than three minutes after impact, at 8:49 a.m., Lieutenant William “Billy” McGinn from Squad 18, a Special Operations Command unit based in Greenwich Village, displayed even deeper insight.

  Without knowing about Mohamed Atta’s “We have some planes” comment a half hour earlier aboard American Flight 11, or that United Flight 175 had also been hijacked and at that moment was pointed toward Manhattan, or that two F-15 fighter jets from Cape Cod were racing toward New York, Billy McGinn told a dispatcher: “Looked like it was intentional. Inform all units coming in from the back it could be a terror attack.”14 An FDNY dispatcher acknowledged the new reality: “Ten-four. All units be advised.”

  As Jay gaped at the burning tower from the front seat, he silently counted the number of upper floors that appeared to be belching smoke. We have twenty floors of fire, Jay thought. As Chauffeur Mike Meldrum wove through traffic, and as rapid-fire voices on the truck’s radio confirmed the horror awaiting them, Jay’s mind raced. He didn’t know the exact point of impact, but he estimated that the lowest fire floor was about a thousand feet in the air, and he knew that each floor of the tower covered about forty thousand square feet, or nearly an acre.

  Jay leapt to an inescapable conclusion, one that would be overwhelmingly shared among his colleagues: from a firefighting standpoint, the numbers didn’t compute. Jay felt confident that the men of Ladder 6 and the rest of the FDNY would do whatever they could, whatever their bosses asked of them, whatever the public needed of them, but they couldn’t defeat this fire. At most, they could limit its spread until, in a best-case scenario, it burned itself out while they rescued as many people as they could. Jay also understood that the great vertical distance between the ground and the fire meant that many, perhaps most, of the thousands of civilians inside the tower would be forced to rely on themselves and one another if they were to escape.