Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Jay’s instant assessment wasn’t idle speculation or defeatism. Two years earlier, one of Jay’s firefighting heroes had published a prescient manual that seemed to eerily anticipate the situation awaiting Ladder 6 as it sped down Canal Street.

  When Jay was a young firefighter, FDNY Deputy Chief Vincent Dunn was the highest-ranking officer he’d ever met. Awestruck at the time by Dunn’s encyclopedic knowledge and his unbridled confidence, Jay told his wife, Judy, “I want to be like him.” In the two decades that followed, Dunn became a nationally acclaimed expert on high-rise fires, unafraid to tell inconvenient truths. In 1999, Dunn wrote: “The best-kept secret15 in America’s fire service is that firefighters cannot extinguish a fire in a twenty- or thirty-thousand-square-foot open floor area in a high-rise building. A fire company advancing a 2½-inch hoseline with a 1¼-inch nozzle discharges only three hundred gallons per minute and can extinguish only about twenty-five hundred square feet of fire.”

  Dunn’s calculations meant that a team of firefighters like Jay’s unit could, at best, hope to defeat a fire in one corner of one upper floor of a building like the North Tower. That is, if they could reach it and had enough water to spray on it. Multiply that by a hundred, or a thousand, and the impossibility of the situation came into focus.

  Dunn took his reasoning one step further: “City managers and department chiefs will not admit this to the public if they want to keep their jobs, but every fireground commander is aware of this vulnerability. What really occurs at a high-rise fire involving an entire floor or more is a controlled burn rather than a suppression operation.”

  Even more disturbing and more prophetic were Dunn’s conclusions, published on the same pages, about how firefighters should expect panicked civilians to react: “People trapped16 in a burning high-rise who can’t be reached by your tallest ladder will leap to their death; they’ll try to escape by climbing down ropes or knotted bedsheets, and fall while doing so; they’ll scribble notes in desperation, telling of their location, and drop them from smoky windows; they’ll leave their last cries for help recorded on the telephones of dispatchers.”

  As a student of Dunn’s work and of firefighting in general, Jay knew all of this. He also suspected that he couldn’t count on the building’s sprinklers or water supply pipes to be much help, if any, because a plane that cut through the tower likely damaged or destroyed the systems that delivered water. Jay’s assumption on that score was correct.

  Jay knew that the drive to the scene wasn’t the time to instruct his men on the overwhelming, to some extent theoretical, problems they faced. Jay controlled his breathing. He applied a trick that he’d learned from his mentors: the more excited he became, the slower and quieter he’d force himself to speak.

  “This . . . is . . . going . . . to . . . be . . . a . . . big . . . operation,” Jay told his men. “There’s going to be guys that are operating all day, and we’ll have a small part of it. And we’ll just do the best we can.”

  Jay sensed the adrenaline coursing through his men. Mike Meldrum’s intensity expressed itself as a heavy foot on the gas as they crossed Broadway in the Tribeca neighborhood, speeding toward the Financial District.

  “Mike, slow down,” Jay told the chauffeur, a beefy twenty-year veteran with a handlebar mustache. “We’ll get there. But if you’re going this fast, we might not get there, you know?” Mike eased off the pedal.

  Even as Jay displayed outward calm, anxiety crept up his spine. As the North Tower loomed larger and larger, as smoke and flames licked higher, Jay thought back to a conversation he’d had two weeks earlier. A friend who was a lieutenant knew that Jay had been awaiting his overdue promotion to battalion chief. He asked if Jay was nervous. “Well,” Jay answered, “after the busy places that I’ve worked, there isn’t too much they’re going to throw at me that I’ve never seen before.”

  As Mike Meldrum and Matt Komorowski turned the truck onto Vesey Street, Jay mentally revised his answer. He told himself: “This is really bad. . . . I never saw this before.”

  On the 64th floor, before Cecilia Lillo began her multifloor delivery and food run, she circled back to her desk to check her email. An explosion announced the arrival of American Flight 11 some thirty floors above.

  “Mommy!” she screamed and burst into tears.

  Remembering 1993, Cecilia feared that a bomb had split the tower vertically, like an ax through a piece of firewood. The building swayed, lights flickered, a secretary at a nearby desk shrieked her boss’s name. Another Port Authority worker struggled for balance as she stood changing into her work shoes. Cecilia saw a large white block, maybe a piece of concrete, or a computer, or something else entirely, plummet past a window.

  “Let’s go!” one of her coworkers shouted as she rushed with several others to a stairwell. Cecilia lurched toward a cabinet to clip her cellphone to an inside pocket of her purse. When she turned around, the other women were gone. Running through the floor in the new black flats Carlos had bought her for their anniversary, Cecilia searched for her boss but couldn’t find her. Neither did she see her Cuban-born friend Nancy Perez or another friend, Arlene Babakitis, a bighearted mother of two sons who’d spent nearly thirty years at the Port Authority.

  On the far side of the floor, Cecilia saw several Port Authority workers, including one of her favorite managers, Patrick Hoey, a silver-haired father of four who oversaw bridges and tunnels. He and the others around him made no move to leave. After speaking to a police sergeant, Pat Hoey announced to his staff: “Listen up, everybody.17 They told us not to leave. They are sending police up, and we need to wait here. We are going to be fine.”

  Cecilia respected Pat Hoey, but she had other plans. Clutching her purse, she scrambled toward the center of the floor to find a stairwell, just as she’d vowed to Carlos during their Caribbean vacation four months earlier. She repeated it to herself like a mantra: someone who loves me will be waiting outside.

  On the 88th floor, two of Elaine Duch’s colleagues, Dorene Smith and Anita Serpe, led the badly burned woman gingerly toward the empty office of Alan Reiss, director of the Port Authority’s World Trade Department, which oversaw the trade center property. He was on street level18 when the plane hit, meeting with other agency officials in a delicatessen to consider the anticipated effects of the new property lease.

  In Reiss’s absence, about two dozen19 men and women congregated with Elaine in his office, in the building’s southwest corner, on the far side of the tower from Flight 11’s point of impact. Still, smoke from the fires ignited by the fireball seeped in through cracks between the office door and its frame.

  As Elaine and the others awaited instructions, several workers scrambled through the debris and the overturned furniture of the 88th floor, looking for anyone who might be hurt and seeking an open stairwell. Leading the searchers was architect Frank De Martini, a Port Authority construction manager. When the plane hit, Frank had been enjoying coffee with his wife, Nicole, a fellow architect who worked in the South Tower. While Frank led the search, Nicole joined Elaine and the others taking refuge in Alan Reiss’s office.

  Coincidentally, Frank De Martini had been featured a few months earlier in a History Channel documentary, boldly describing the towers’ strength. “This building was designed20 to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it,” Frank had told the filmmakers, unwittingly citing the flawed decades-old report that didn’t consider damage from a fuel explosion. “I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door—this intense grid, and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.” If only that had been true.

  Another man scouring the 88th floor for an escape route was Port Authority architect Gerry Gaeta.21 When the plane hit, Gerry leapt over his desk and ran out of his office. “That’s a bomb,” he told his staff. “Let’s get out of here.” He found the halls filled with sm
oke and fire. Windows on the building’s northeast corner were blown out completely. At the centermost stairway, Stairwell B, Gerry and others found a hole where the stairs used to be. At Stairwell A, the southernmost stairway, he saw gypsum wallboards, crumpled and on fire, blocking the door. Gerry entered the real estate department office and saw furniture tossed around as though a hurricane had blown past.

  With no apparent way out and the situation growing desperate, someone on the floor used a two-way radio to call for help from the Port Authority police.

  “Uh, we’re on the eighty-eighth floor,”22 the caller said. “We’re kind of trapped up here and the smoke is, uh, is—” The transmission cut off, but another radio call followed quickly, using the building’s designation as the “A” tower and making a clear reference to Elaine.

  “We also have a person that needs medical attention immediately.”

  “What’s the location?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Eighty-eighth floor, badly burned.”

  “Eighty-eight?”

  “Tower A, south side, eighty-eighth floor.”

  As Elaine sat in Alan Reiss’s office with her colleagues, a lens from her glasses suddenly cracked, a delayed reaction to the heat blast. She took the glasses off, handed her purse to her friend Anita Serpe, and made a close examination of her injuries. As Elaine looked at her legs, she thought the peeling red skin on her calves resembled melting candle wax, dripping toward her sneakers.

  Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 reached the staging area at the corner of Vesey and West Street less than ten minutes after Flight 11 hit. With help from Tiller Man Matt Komorowski, Chauffeur Mike Meldrum parked in a semicircular driveway at the foot of the North Tower. Several other fire companies had already arrived, and more pulled in simultaneously.

  Hail-sized pieces of building debris rained on the truck as Jay, Mike, Matt, Sal, Tommy, and Billy jumped out. With their silver emergency air cylinders bouncing against their backs, they ran to a pedestrian bridge that spanned West Street, taking cover under it as flames and smoke erupted from floors a quarter mile in the sky above them. Three times the Ladder 6 crew ran back to the truck to fetch tools, rope, and other equipment, then each time retreated from the falling junk under the pedestrian span. Finally, a break came in the debris storm. Jay called out, “Okay, ready . . . set . . . go!”

  As they ran toward the North Tower, Jay glanced to his left. Sprinting alongside him was New York City’s civilian fire commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, who’d previously been a longtime firefighter and a top union official. As they approached the tower doors, Jay saw two badly burned people with no hair and melted clothes. Their injuries were so severe that he couldn’t tell their gender. Every instinct urged Jay to halt and help them, but then he thought, “We stop and help these two people, or we go upstairs and help a hundred.” He spotted two paramedics and waved them toward the burn victims, then rejoined his men and entered the lobby as frightened evacuees poured out.

  Inside, Jay saw slabs of decorative stonework and marble tiles smashed on the floor, enormous windows shattered from their frames, and a bank of elevators destroyed by fireballs that had blown down the shafts and incinerated everything in their path. At a melted desk beside the elevators sat the charred remains23 of a security guard, his badge still visible on his burned jacket, his body fused to his chair. Other firefighters stepped over piles of debris in the lobby that they only later realized were human remains.

  Amid the horror and the wreckage, Jay saw a heartening sight: an assembly of firefighting all-stars, lining up for assignments from the chiefs at a security desk being used as the FDNY command post. As he fell into line among them, Jay spotted Captain Terence “Terry” Hatton, leader of elite Rescue Company 1, which specialized in saving trapped or injured firefighters. Six foot four, with a boyish face and a booming laugh, Terry Hatton’s can-do vocabulary relied heavily on the word “outstanding.” He’d never apply it to himself, but others often did: over two decades, he’d earned nineteen commendations24 for bravery. His wife, Beth Petrone-Hatton, was at that moment working alongside Mayor Giuliani, whom she’d served as an executive assistant for eighteen years. The mayor had officiated at their wedding three years earlier.

  Clustered around Terry Hatton, Jay saw other Rescue 1 members he knew, including Lieutenant Dennis Mojica and firefighters Kenneth Marino, Dave Weiss, and a good friend named Gerry Nevins. When Gerry wasn’t saving lives in New York City, he raised pigs, goats, and chickens with his wife and two young sons on a small farm a few miles from where Jay lived. Nearby was another friend, Lieutenant Pete Freund, whom Jay had seen hours earlier at the scaffolding collapse at the Manhattan Bridge.

  Jay saw Commissioner Von Essen lean close to catch the ear of Deputy Chief Peter Hayden, the highest-ranking FDNY officer at the scene. Soon, authority would shift to Chief of Department Peter Ganci Jr., who was still in transit. Ganci would establish a new command post outside the tower, across West Street. In the meantime, Jay admired how cool Pete Hayden seemed amid the chaos. Jay heard Hayden tell Von Essen, “There’s no way we’re putting this out. This is strictly a rescue mission.”

  Hayden had been incorrectly told that as many as fifty thousand people25 worked in the two buildings and as many as seventy thousand visited daily, including shoppers and commuters in the PATH train station below. In fact, the combined number of people inside the two towers at the moment Flight 11 struck was far lower, somewhere between 14,000 and 17,400.26 Yet even those numbers represented an overwhelming fire rescue challenge for the FDNY.

  Standing alongside Hayden was the first boss on the scene, Battalion Chief Joe Pfeifer, who’d called in the initial report. Shortly after he arrived, Joe Pfeifer noticed his only brother, Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer, in the lobby. Joe quickly briefed Kevin, who nodded and led five members of Engine 33 toward a stairwell. Chief Pfeifer returned to the task at hand, juggling a two-way radio and a telephone as he took reports from firefighters and Port Authority officials around him, as well as calls from workers and safety wardens on upper floors, and people trapped on elevators pleading for rescue.

  Numerous calls for help poured in from workers at Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank with offices spread across floors 101 to 105. More than 650 Cantor Fitzgerald employees had arrived to work early that morning, as usual, to get a jump on the markets. Calls also came from employees of commodities broker Carr Futures, a smaller firm tucked among the giants on the North Tower’s upper floors. In addition, more than 350 employees and consultants had already arrived in the offices of Marsh & McLennan on the 93rd to 100th floors, where actor and temp worker Chris Young had just dropped off materials for a presentation. The huge insurance and financial company was the sole occupant of all but one of the floors directly in the path of Flight 11. The exception was the 93rd floor, which Marsh & McLennan shared with Fred Alger Management, an investment firm with thirty-five employees at work. An unknown number of people died instantly or soon after Flight 11 hit, as fire engulfed those impact floors.

  Four emergency calls to Port Authority Police came from Christine Olender, assistant general manager of Windows on the World. Thirty-nine, born on the Fourth of July,27 despite the crisis Christine retained the polite effervescence of the pompom girl and homecoming queen she’d once been.

  “We’re getting no direction up here,” Christine told Officer Steve Maggett. “We’re having a smoke condition. We have most people on the 106th floor—the 107th floor is way too smoky. We need direction as to where we need to direct our guests and our employees, as soon as possible.”

  “We’re doing our best,” Maggett answered. “We’ve got the fire department, everybody. We’re trying to get up to you, dear. All right, call back in about two or three minutes, and I’ll find out what direction you should try to get down.”

  Christine called back three more times, each time speaking to Officer Ray Murray. With each call she grew more frightened. On her fourth and final call, Christine said:
“The situation on 106 is rapidly getting worse. . . . We . . . we have . . . the fresh air is going down fast! I’m not exaggerating. . . . What are we going to do for air?” In desperation, Christine asked permission to break a window.

  Ray Murray sat in a windowless, plaza-level office at Five World Trade Center, yards from the unfolding disaster, but his only view was a video monitor that showed bodies in the driveway outside the North Tower. He suspected28 that Christine and hundreds of others on the North Tower’s upper floors were beyond saving, but during each call he offered hope. “You can do whatever you have to,29 to get to the air,” he told her.

  Ray Murray was affable and well liked, thirty-two years old, six years on the Port Authority Police Department. In addition to Christine’s, he answered more than fifty emergency calls30 during the first half hour after Flight 11 hit the North Tower. Ray juggled calls from his bosses and worried family members, including his own wife; he fielded inquiries from NBC, ESPN, a CBS affiliate in Seattle, New York’s Channel 11, a German radio reporter, and a local rabbi; and he answered security companies whose alarms rang wildly inside the towers. Above all, Ray offered reassurance to men and women calling from upper floors, advising every one to find a stairwell if possible. “If you can get to the stairs, go down the stairs,” he told a woman on the North Tower’s 83rd floor. “If not, you get on the ground. We’re going to get people up there.”

  Ray Murray didn’t know if that was true, but it was all he could offer.