Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  As they strategized to rescue as many survivors as they could, FDNY chiefs Hayden and Pfeifer concluded that none of the North Tower’s ninety-nine elevators appeared to be working, although a battalion chief later used one to reach the sixteenth floor.31 Without elevators, firefighters bearing upwards of eighty pounds of equipment would have to walk up fifteen hundred or more steps to reach people in desperate need of help. That is, if time, stairway access, and physical strength permitted.

  Adding to the difficulties, communication and coordination immediately proved to be critical problems32 for most of the firefighters sent upstairs. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone. FDNY handheld radios had worked poorly, sometimes not at all, during the response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1999, the department purchased new ultra-high-frequency Motorola radios33 designed to vastly improve communications inside steel and concrete buildings. But shortly after the new radios went into service, a New York firefighter lost in a house fire couldn’t be heard calling for help. Disputes arose about whether the radios were faulty or if they weren’t being used properly. Either way, in early 2001, the FDNY reissued its old analog radios, the same ones that were ineffective in 1993. Those radios had the same shortcomings now.

  After the 1993 bombing, the Port Authority had installed what was known as a “repeater” system at the World Trade Center. The system was designed to boost FDNY radio signals in emergencies by amplifying and rebroadcasting them. Chief Pfeifer tried to activate the repeater almost as soon as he arrived in the North Tower lobby. He tested it with help from Battalion Chief Orio Palmer, an authority on radio communications, who nineteen years earlier had worked alongside Jay Jonas as a probationary firefighter during a Bronx tenement rescue. After several unsuccessful attempts to use the repeater, Pfeifer decided that they couldn’t count on it. The outdated radios, though proven inadequate, would have to suffice.

  Not only couldn’t firefighters reliably talk to one another inside the building, they didn’t have access to information from outside sources. The FDNY had a notoriously fraught relationship with the New York Police Department, built on more than a century of competition and cultural differences. The Finest and the Bravest used different radio frequencies and different equipment. As a result, FDNY chiefs inside the North Tower couldn’t communicate with police helicopters hovering above the building. Independent of one another, fire chiefs and police officials determined almost immediately that helicopter rooftop rescues would be impossible34 because of fire and smoke. Still, police chopper pilots could have shared information in real time about the fire’s progress and the building’s structural integrity. Fire chiefs in the North Tower lobby also didn’t have access to the extensive local and network television coverage of the crisis scene, rendering them almost blind to the destruction directly above them.

  Making matters even worse from a communications standpoint, Flight 11’s impact had wiped out the North Tower’s public address system, preventing firefighters in the lobby from offering survivors hope of help on the way. Yet even if that message had reached the uppermost nineteen floors, it wouldn’t have made a difference. With all three stairwells destroyed, and no possibility of rooftop rescues, people on the upper floors were beyond help.

  In their desperation, office workers clustered at the windows at the highest floors to escape the fire, heat, and smoke. Within six minutes of the crash,35 the first person fell or jumped. At least 110 more lives would end that way from the upper stories of the North Tower. Each thousand-plus-foot fall, each flailing or graceful ten-second descent, would end with a thud that sounded like a gunshot. With each loud bang, emergency responders in the lobby involuntarily flinched as one.

  The falling or jumping victims fulfilled the awful predictions of Captain Jay Jonas’s mentor, high-rise firefighting expert Vincent Dunn. They also echoed a tragedy that had occurred ninety years earlier, one mile uptown. In 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them women and teenage girls, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.36 Trapped above the flames in that ten-story building, roughly fifty women and girls leapt or fell to their deaths. Nearly a century later, the calamity remained seared in the collective memory of FDNY members and many New Yorkers.

  Unaware that the upper stairwells were impassable, or that the public address system was broken, Chief Joe Pfeifer tried to offer reassurance. He pleaded with people trapped in the North Tower to await rescue. “Please don’t jump,”37 he said into a public address microphone at the lobby command post. “We’re coming up for you.”

  No one on the highest floors could hear him.

  On the marble floor of the Marriott lobby, the air around them a greasy haze, burn victim Jennieann Maffeo told Ron Clifford she worried about a coworker who’d been standing beside her at the shuttle stop. She felt certain he’d been killed. Jennieann didn’t tell Ron the man’s name, but she almost certainly meant Wai-ching Chung, the shy database executive whose niece worked in the South Tower.

  Jennieann listed her medications and told Ron she had asthma and a severe allergy to latex. Ron recorded it all in his notebook.

  Jennieann also gave Ron her boss’s name and phone number. She instructed Ron to tell her boss to call only her sister, Andrea. She begged him, “Please don’t call my mother and father. They’re old and sick and they’ll be very upset.” Ron promised.

  “I’m going to die,” Jennieann said.

  “No, you’re not,” Ron answered. “You’re going to be fine.”

  Even as he said it, Ron wondered with rising anger why no help came. Several more times he called for aid, but a seemingly endless stream of people rushed past, headed toward an exit at the south end of the hotel lobby.

  By 8:57 a.m., little more than ten minutes after the crash in the North Tower, FDNY commanders had asked a Port Authority police officer and building workers to immediately evacuate the unaffected South Tower,38 based on their belief that the entire trade center property was unsafe. At 9 a.m., the commanding officer of the Port Authority Police ordered an evacuation of all civilians in the entire World Trade Center complex. But communication problems thwarted the evacuation order. Sent out only over a radio channel used by Port Authority Police commanders, it didn’t reach Port Authority Police officers or other emergency responders.

  Almost like the children’s game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled or lost entirely when passed from one person to the next, evacuation messages didn’t reach at least some of the people who needed them most. The orders weren’t passed to 9-1-1 operators, who fielded calls not only from people trapped in the damaged North Tower, but also from workers in the unaffected South Tower seeking guidance whether to stay or leave. As a result, at least some 9-1-1 operators and FDNY dispatchers told callers in both buildings not to evacuate,39 and to instead wait until emergency workers reached them.

  For instance, shortly after Flight 11 hit the North Tower, a man on the 92nd floor of the South Tower called Port Authority Police: “We need to know40 if we need to get out of here, because we know there’s been an explosion. I don’t know what building.”

  An officer told him: “Do you have any smoke . . . smoke conditions up in your location at [Tower] Two?”

  The caller answered: “No, we just smell it, though.” After several interruptions and crosstalk, the caller persisted: “Should we stay or should we not?”

  The officer told him: “I would wait till further notice. . . .”

  “Okay, all right,” said the caller. “Don’t evacuate.”

  Callers received different advice41 from other Port Authority Police dispatchers, some of whom consistently told civilians to leave.

  Although a majority of emergency responders entering the North Tower along with Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 were firefighters, they weren’t alone. Also responding were members of the NYPD, which sent elite officers from its Emergency Service Unit. In addition, at least three plainclothes police officers without radios or protective gear climbe
d high into the North Tower. They checked floors for trapped civilians and refused orders by their chiefs42 to leave.

  Port Authority Police officers responded in droves as well. Among them was Officer David Lim, who’d been working in his office in the South Tower when Flight 11 hit next door. When he heard the explosion, Dave worried that the explosion marked a repeat of the 1993 bombing. He turned to his bomb-sniffing dog, a yellow Labrador retriever named Sirius that Dave considered the smartest dog he’d ever known.

  “Maybe they got one by us,43 Sirius,” Dave told his partner, who moonlighted as the pet of Dave, his wife, and their two children.

  Dave locked Sirius in a cage in the South Tower basement and ran toward the North Tower. On the way, he spotted a body next to a bandstand set up for a scheduled concert on the Austin J. Tobin Plaza. As he radioed a report to dispatch, another person landed fifty feet from him on the plaza’s pink granite. On impact, the body disintegrated into a puddle of flesh, bone, and blood. Dave kept moving, into the North Tower.

  Most of the people who fell, jumped, or were swept from the building died instantly. But not all. Amid smoking debris on the plaza, Ernest Armstead, an FDNY emergency medical specialist, found a well-dressed woman in her fifties, with brown hair and tasteful earrings, who’d suffered catastrophic injuries that left only her head and right torso intact. Somehow, she remained conscious. He hung a black triage tag around her neck, to signify to other responders that she was beyond help.

  “I am not dead,”44 the woman insisted. “Call my daughter. I am not dead.”

  Shocked, Armstead stammered, “Ma’am, don’t worry about it. We will be right back to you.”

  He knew he was lying. Her wounds were incompatible with life. Armstead wondered if an air draft had somehow cushioned her fall. He wished he knew if she’d been a passenger on the plane, or a worker swept through an office window by the crash, or someone who’d leapt to escape flames, but he didn’t ask. He had to keep moving.

  As Armstead stepped away, the woman yelled: “I am not dead! I am not dead!”

  “They’re coming,” he told her as he moved on. “They’re coming.”

  As Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 awaited their assignment, a rakish FDNY captain named Patrick “Paddy” Brown urged Jay to immediately follow him into a stairwell on the hunt for survivors. “Jay, don’t even bother45 reporting in,” Brown said. “They’re just gonna send you upstairs. Come with me.”

  Jay knew that his fellow captain, five years his senior, was among the most decorated officers in FDNY history. Paddy Brown had movie-star looks and a bigger-than-life reputation: savior of a baby from a burning building, supervisor of a daring rope rescue, Golden Gloves boxer, marathon runner. He had a black belt in karate and a devoted following of yoga students. Before fighting fires, he served as a Marine sergeant in Vietnam. Decades later, Paddy Brown remained eager to take the next hill.

  “This is a little too big not to follow procedure,” Jay told him. “Let me get my name on paper that I’m here.” Paddy shrugged and led his Ladder 3 crew to Stairwell B, the only one of the three North Tower stairwells that opened onto the lobby level. The other two opened onto the mezzanine level, just above.

  At that moment, a New York Police helicopter circled the Twin Towers, some 1,700 feet above where Jay stood. Officer Timothy Hayes, a pilot for the police aviation unit, had already despaired that thick smoke made rooftop rescues impossible. Now he spotted a large aircraft speeding toward his copter.

  “Jesus Christ!” he told his partner. “There’s a second plane46 crashing.”

  They pulled up and United Flight 175 flew beneath them. Seconds later, at 9:03 a.m., Jay Jonas heard a thunderous explosion.

  Chapter 14

  “We’ll Be Brothers for Life”

  South Tower, World Trade Center

  When the day began, Brian Clark sat silently at his desk1 at Euro Brokers, his back to the windows on the west wall of the 84th floor of the trade center’s South Tower.

  A Canadian immigrant who’d risen to become the firm’s executive vice president, Brian pecked at a keyboard, writing emails and updating spreadsheets. Outside his office, more than two hundred fifty men and women prowled the trading floor, angling for an edge, bantering among coworkers who’d become friends. Brian loved that about Euro Brokers. He considered it an enchanted workplace, with a culture of camaraderie that defied the cutthroat stereotype of Wall Street firms.

  At 8:46 a.m., Brian’s reverie was broken by a double explosion, a boom-boom! to his ears, that caused the lights in his office to flicker. He spun toward the noise. Swirling flames pulsed against his windows, then fell from sight. Brian registered something strange about the fire: it had mass, not like the dancing flames in a fireplace, but a molten weight subject to gravity’s pull. Brian leapt to his feet, thinking that a welder must’ve hit a gas line on a higher floor of the South Tower.

  Brian transformed instantly from financial executive to civilian fire safety warden. He reached into the mounted credenza above his desk and grabbed his flashlight and whistle, leaving behind the ugly red hat and the reflective vest.

  At 8:46 a.m., Stan Praimnath rode a local elevator2 up from the South Tower’s 78th floor sky lobby, briefcase in one hand, a brown paper bag with a toasted raisin bagel in the other. He wore new rubber-soled work shoes that he considered stylish and his wife, Jenny, deemed hideous.

  The elevator doors opened onto the 81st floor offices of Fuji Bank, nearly empty as a result of recent job cuts. Stan walked toward his desk in the loan department, near the southwest corner of the building. Along the way, he passed a temp worker, Delis Soriano, and engaged her in a ritual greeting as she toiled at a photocopier.

  “How are you, Delis?”

  “Fine, Stanley, and you?”

  “I’m special,” he said, knowing that it would make her smile. A pastor had taught Stan that line, as an opening to share the gospel. Delis had heard Stan use it often. She knew that if she wanted to finish her copying, she shouldn’t ask why he’d said it.

  “I know you’re special, Stan,” she said kindly as she resumed her work.

  Neither Stan, who’d been encased in an elevator, nor Delis, standing at the noisy copier, knew that a plane had just flown into the north wall of the North Tower next door.

  At the moment of Flight 11’s impact, Brian Clark, Stan Praimnath, and Delis Soriano were among approximately eighty-six hundred people3 inside the South Tower. Most couldn’t identify the cause immediately, but roughly half heard the sound4 of an aircraft hitting the North Tower, only 131 feet away. About one in ten people inside the South Tower felt the building move as a result of a shock wave from the tower’s damaged twin.

  Red flashlight in hand, whistle around his neck, Brian rushed from his office. He yelled the emergency instructions he’d learned during training sessions and fire drills held every six months during the eight years since the 1993 bombing: “Go to the center corridor and await further instruction!”

  Roughly two hundred of Brian’s colleagues followed the first half of those orders. Then they kept going, exiting the 84th floor down stairwells and elevators, at least some without knowing what had happened. The Euro Brokers evacuees were part of a much larger South Tower exodus. Within five minutes of the North Tower strike, acting without formal instructions to flee, about half of the people5 in the South Tower exited their floors and headed toward the ground via elevators or stairwells.

  Brian felt no temptation to join them. As he herded colleagues toward the intersecting hallways at the floor’s center corridor, where the building’s elevators and stairwells stretched through its inner core, he overheard television reports from the trading floor that said the emergency was next door at the North Tower. He adopted a stereotypical New York attitude: close doesn’t count.

  While other Euro Brokers workers crammed into elevator cars and stairwells, Brian spotted several dozen traders clustered against the building’s north-side windows, looking up
at a ring of fire around the 93rd floor of the North Tower. As Brian approached, he heard someone gasp that people were jumping. He didn’t want that image burned in his memory, so he hung back, about fifteen feet from the windows. A colleague named Susan Pollio, who volunteered in homeless shelters as she rose from secretary to bond broker, wasn’t so fortunate. The sight of a person plummeting from the North Tower sent Susan running to Brian in tears.

  “Oh, Brian, it’s terrible,” Susan wept. “People are dying.”

  Whispering comfort, Brian embraced Susan as she heaved with sobs. He led her to a ladies’ room near the center of the floor and guided her inside. Brian returned to his office and called his wife, Dianne, and his father in a Toronto nursing home, to say he was safe. The damage was next door, he told them.

  As Brian set down the phone, strobe lights flashed and a whoop, whoop siren sounded. About ten minutes after Flight 11 crashed, shortly before 9 a.m., the voice of a South Tower building safety official boomed over the intercom: “Your attention, please,6 Building Two [the South Tower] is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building Two. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you can use the reentry doors and the elevators to return to your office. Repeat, Building Two is secure.”

  Brian recognized the voice: it belonged to a deputy safety director who regularly conducted fire drills on the floor. Confirmation from a trusted source that the emergency was elsewhere smothered any lingering thought Brian had about joining South Tower evacuees cramming into stairwells. Flashlight in his pocket, whistle around his neck, he wandered onto a smaller trading floor on the west side of the 84th floor, where he bumped into Robert “Bobby” Coll, an affable thirty-five-year-old senior vice president, a devoted husband and father, and an avid sailor, skier, and surfer.