Fall and Rise

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Fall and Rise Page 30

by Mitchell Zuckoff


  “Bobby, what do you know?” Brian asked.

  Bobby said that he’d joined the initial evacuation but had run back up to the 84th floor with several others upon hearing the announcement that the building was secure. Together, they decided that they’d figure out what, if anything, to do next.

  Stan Praimnath’s immediate focus was on his raisin bagel. He’d barely set down the bag on his desk when his phone rang. His mother asked if he was all right. He told her yes and said goodbye. Similar calls followed from his three brothers. Stan gave each the same brisk response. His family assumed that Stan must have known about the North Tower, so none explained the reasons for their concern. The calls left him increasingly hungry and pleasantly confused. “There’s a lot of love here,” he thought. “It’s not even nine o’clock.”

  Stan’s desk, an L-shaped wedge of industrial steel, faced the tower’s south wall windows, with a priceless view of the Statue of Liberty on its island two miles away. As Stan got to work, a flash of light caught his eye. He turned right, toward the Hudson River, and saw fireballs raining from the sky. He phoned two colleagues who’d recently relocated to the North Tower, but neither picked up. Stan realized that he and temp worker Delis Soriano appeared to be alone on the 81st floor.

  Stan called to her as he rushed toward the elevators: “Let’s get out of here.”

  Stan and Delis took a local elevator down to the 78th floor sky lobby. There they joined eighteen other senior Fuji Bank executives and colleagues from three other floors, most of them Japanese nationals, who had also self-evacuated in the first minutes after the Flight 11 crash. As they awaited an express elevator to the ground floor, Stan silently recited his most reliable daily prayer: “Lord, cover me and all my loved ones under your precious blood, and take me to work and bring us back home in peace and safety.”

  The group rode down without speaking. Stan stepped off first in the South Tower lobby, where a security guard in a blue uniform asked where they were going.

  “We’re going home. I saw fireballs falling from the sky,” Stan said, still unaware that a plane had hit the North Tower minutes earlier. “Something’s wrong.”

  “No,” the guard said, as sirens wailed nearby. “Your building is safe, it’s secure. Go back to your office.”

  The Fuji Bank executives and other employees dutifully reentered the elevator, all but Stan and Delis. The doors began to close, but a hand reached out and held them open. It belonged to John “Jack” Andreacchio, a human resources staffer who worked on the 80th floor. Stan knew Jack as a jovial, Brooklyn-born prankster, always ready with a quip.

  “C’mon, Stan the man, what are you scared of?” Jack asked. “Let’s go back up.”

  Stan hesitated. He thought about his evacuation through smoke after the 1993 bombing. Delis leaned in close: “Stan, I’m scared. I want to go home.”

  “Take the rest of the day off,” Stan told her.

  The permission rankled some of Stan’s workcentric colleagues. He heard a voice in the elevator call out: “Stan, we’ve got an operation to run here!”

  “No,” he said, surprising himself with his rebelliousness. “I’m running the operation, and she is going home.” But Stan’s defiance only stretched so far, and it didn’t extend to himself. He stepped into the elevator and the doors closed, reuniting him with the other Fuji Bank employees on the minute-long ride up to the 78th floor.

  Calmed by the security guard’s assurances, the coworkers enjoyed a livelier return trip. No one mentioned the North Tower. Stan gently teased a youthful executive, Hideya Kawauchi, a fashionable native of Japan fond of Brooks Brothers clothes,7 about tucking a sweater into his khaki pants. That drew a laugh from a human resources executive, Alisha Levin, who loved New York but often returned home8 to Philadelphia to see her parents, her sister, and her two nephews. Stan nodded warmly to a bank vice president, Manny Gomez Jr. Stan turned to Brian Thompson, an executive vice president for human resources, and half-joked: “You’d better start thinking relocation.” After dispersing in the 78th floor sky lobby for local elevators, only Stan and Joseph Zuccala, a consultant who’d started work at the bank several days earlier, exited on the 81st floor.

  At roughly the same time, approximately 9:02 a.m., a new announcement9 sounded over the public address system in the South Tower. This one partially revised the remain-in-place order broadcast several minutes earlier, replacing it with an optional evacuation: “May I have your attention, please. Repeating this message: the situation occurred in Building One [the North Tower]. If the conditions warrant on your floor, you may wish to start an orderly evacuation.”

  Brian Clark on the 84th floor and Stan Praimnath on the 81st were among more than six hundred people10 who either remained on the thirty highest floors of the South Tower or had left and then returned to them during the first sixteen minutes after American Flight 11 struck the North Tower. Some might have heard the Port Authority public address announcer’s mild suggestion at 9:02 a.m. about an “orderly evacuation.” Stan didn’t; neither did Brian.

  Unlike Stan, Brian, and the others on the upper floors, by 9:03 a.m., an estimated thirty-two hundred11 men and women had already escaped from the South Tower, out of concern about the crisis in the North Tower. Another forty-eight hundred were somewhere between the lobby and the 76th floor, in elevators, stairwells, and offices. Some were in the process of evacuating, headed down toward the street, while others stayed fixed in place. Still others were in the process of returning to their desks.

  The initial orders in the South Tower to “remain in place” and “return to your office” demonstrated that Port Authority officials, despite good intentions and extensive precautions after the 1993 bombing, possessed the same blinkered outlook as wide swaths of the U.S. aviation and defense communities. They couldn’t imagine that terrorists would carry out synchronized attacks. This restricted their thinking, their actions, and their defenses to what had happened already, ignoring what might yet occur.

  Yet not everyone shared that limited vision and faulty imagination.

  The South Tower’s largest tenant was the financial megalith Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which had offices from the 43rd to 74th floors, occupied by twenty-seven hundred employees. To those workers’ great fortune, one of their leaders was a big man in a pinstripe suit named Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley’s vice president of corporate security.

  At sixty-two, Rick Rescorla had spent a lifetime honing his innate gift for knowing the best response to danger. His exploits as a platoon leader in Vietnam were the stuff of legend, featured in the book We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. He appeared on the book’s cover, a bayonet fixed on his M-16, an iconic image of a warrior moving forward. Rescorla had spent the previous eight years feeling certain that the 1993 bombing was only the first strike.

  After hearing the announcement to remain inside the South Tower, Rescorla invited a Port Authority official to “piss off.” He called his best friend, a counterterrorism expert, and told him: “I’m getting my people the fuck out of here.”12 He grabbed a bullhorn and ushered hundreds of Morgan Stanley workers into stairwells, two abreast, just as he’d trained them. Then he went in search of stragglers.

  Rescorla was remarkable, but he wasn’t the only person who insisted upon immediate evacuation for others, regardless of the personal danger.

  Alayne Gentul had arrived that morning on the 90th floor of the South Tower dressed as though she anticipated an emergency. She wore a bright red blazer13 that her husband, Jack, had never especially liked. In the weeks since she and Jack had hunted for New Jersey beach houses by bicycle, Alayne had kept up her usual busy pace. She had visited her parents in Florida, weighed a move to California for a promotion, readied her two sons for the start of school, and helped Jack settle into his new job, all without missing a beat at work.

  As senior vice president of human resources at Fiduciary Trust Company, Alayne juggled countless responsibilities involving more than six hundred
workers, spread across five South Tower floors: the 90th and the 94th through 97th. When American Flight 11 hit next door at the North Tower, Alayne behaved as though each employee were her personal responsibility.

  Interrupting a debate among her junior colleagues about whether to stay or leave, Alayne immediately ordered a group of ten people14 to board the elevators that her father’s company had installed three decades earlier. To receptionist Mona Dunn, Alayne resembled a teacher15 marshaling students through a fire drill. One of Alayne’s deputies, training director Ed Emery, a marathon runner with a wife and son, ushered another group to a stairwell, including Anne Foodim, who had just returned to work after treatment for cancer. Anne considered Fiduciary Trust to be like a family,16 and she credited Alayne for creating that atmosphere. When Anne’s energy flagged on the way down, Ed Emery channeled an old track coach to keep her moving: “If you can finish chemo, you can get down those steps!”

  On the crowded 78th floor sky lobby, Ed herded Anne and others into an express elevator to the ground floor, then returned upstairs to help Alayne. Rather than follow the others down, she climbed seven floors above her office, determined to evacuate six technology consultants from California who’d begun work that morning on the 97th floor. Their job had instantly turned from precautionary to prescient: they were supposed to create backup computer systems in the event of disaster.

  When Stan Praimnath returned to the 81st floor shortly after 9 a.m., he reached his desk and grabbed a ringing phone. The caller was a colleague from Fuji Bank’s Chicago office who’d visited the South Tower weeks earlier. “Stan!” she said. “Are you okay?” When he assured her that he was fine, the woman yelled: “Get out!”

  The well-meaning colleague was eight hundred miles away. Stan doubted that she knew more than a security guard eight hundred feet below him. Still standing at his desk, looking absently out the window overlooking New York Harbor, Stan pressed the woman for details. She said something about “no time,” but Stan had already stopped listening.

  In the distance, beyond the Statue of Liberty, he spotted an object rushing toward him. Stan’s mind registered that it was gray, large, and loud enough for him to hear its roaring engines through the sealed windows. A second later, he understood that it was a passenger plane, with a U on its tail. Strangely, it seemed to be speeding directly toward him, its wings banking sharply, its nose level with his. It grew larger, then larger. Then it filled the windows.

  Stan dropped the phone and dived under his desk. Curling into a ball, he shouted: “Lord, I can’t do this! You take over!”

  Four minutes earlier, aboard hijacked United Flight 175, former Navy fighter pilot Brian “Moose” Sweeney left the voicemail message for his wife, Julie. His last recorded words: “I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”

  As Stan Praimnath lunged under his desk on the 81st floor, as Brian Clark and Bobby Coll plotted their next moves on the 84th floor, as Alayne Gentul reached the 97th floor, al-Qaeda terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi aimed the Boeing 767 full throttle at the south face of the South Tower.

  Inside the plane, sales executive Peter Hanson huddled with his doctoral candidate wife, Sue Kim, and their two-year-old daughter, Christine. Nearby were Ruth Clifford McCourt and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana; Ronald Gamboa and Daniel Brandhorst with their three-year-old son, David; the Reverend Francis Grogan; pacifist professor Bob LeBlanc; retired nurse Touri Bolourchi; hockey great Garnet “Ace” Bailey; flight attendants Michael Tarrou and Amy King; and all the other innocents on board.

  At 9:03 a.m., Peter Hanson spoke on the phone to his father, Lee. His mother, Eunice, watched on television as the North Tower burned and a plane suddenly approached the South Tower. Lee heard a woman inside the plane scream as Peter spoke his last words: “Oh my God, oh my God!”

  At 9:03:11 a.m., less than seventeen minutes after American Flight 11 devastated the North Tower, United Flight 175 bored deep into the South Tower.

  The plane struck the tower’s south face, twenty-three feet from the midpoint, toward the southeast corner. The off-center jolt caused the upper floors to rotate like a boxer’s torso twisted from an unexpected blow. The entire building vibrated from rooftop to ground. The plane struck on a 38-degree angle,17 its right wing sharply higher than its left. The nose, pointed slightly downward, hit the slab of the 81st floor, near where Stan Praimnath trembled under his desk. The immediate impact lasted about six-tenths of a second.

  Just as parts of American Flight 11 tore through the North Tower, the right engine of Flight 175 passed entirely through the South Tower and blew through the building’s northeast corner. It damaged the roof of a neighboring building before landing fifteen hundred feet north of the tower, near the corner of Murray and Church Streets. The right landing gear followed a similar trajectory.

  Damage from the fuselage and the 156-foot wingspan stretched across nine floors, from the 77th to 85th floors. The two additional impact floors, compared to Flight 11’s damage, resulted from the more banked approach. The impact shattered 433 windows on the south, west, and east facades. It cut the pipes for fire sprinklers. It destroyed nearly all elevator service, severing cables and trapping occupants, although one freight car from the lobby to the fortieth floor remained operable.

  Unlike in the North Tower, where Flight 11 destroyed all three stairwells, in the South Tower one exit route from the uppermost floors remained at least partially intact: Stairwell A. Although located in the central core, Stairwell A was positioned to the west of where Flight 175 entered and was shielded by heavy elevator equipment. That left the stairwell potentially usable for anyone who could reach it.

  Structurally, the South Tower fared worse than its twin. The plane severed thirty-three exterior steel columns and ten core columns, causing the South Tower to immediately lean slightly to the southeast above the impact zone. The crash stripped fire-suppressing insulation from dozens of core columns and steel trusses that supported the building’s concrete floor slabs. Like the North Tower, the building absorbed the impact and remained upright, as promised by the dreamers and designers who built it. But the severed steel columns and the loss of fire-suppressing insulation portended a disaster caused by fire.

  Flight 175 carried more than nine thousand gallons of jet fuel, plus fourteen tons of flammable luggage, mail, seats, food, and electrical equipment. The impact floors contained tons of office furniture, carpets, and other combustibles. Fires from the fuel wouldn’t melt the intact steel beams, but they would burn hot enough to undermine the strength of the overburdened exterior and core columns, the structural elements that kept the South Tower upright.

  Now both Twin Towers faced existential threats.

  The human toll, already brutal from the North Tower crash, radically swelled.

  In addition to everyone aboard Flight 175, the impact slaughtered an unknown number of people on the nine impact-affected floors, leaving others fatally or severely injured. The dead and injured included many of an estimated two hundred men and women who congregated in the 78th floor sky lobby during the initial haphazard go-don’t-go evacuation. The plane’s left wing shredded that floor, killing and maiming men and women as they waited for their places in packed lobby-bound express elevators,18 as well as others who hoped to catch local elevators to return to their offices.19

  For a moment all was silent on the 78th floor, the darkness relieved only by the half-light of flaming embers. Moans and cries soon filled the void. A handful of bloodied survivors20 struggled to their feet amid severed limbs and lifeless coworkers crushed under steel and stone. The stench of scorched flesh and jet fuel mixed with swirls of smoke that sandpapered survivors’ throats and singed their eyes. A few shuffled toward an area that seemed better lit, while others remained prone, waiting for help, too stunned or hurt to move.

  Onto the 78th floor bounded a young man in a white T-shirt, with a red bandanna tied around his face. Unhurt, he carried a fi
re extinguisher and exuded confidence and a clarity of purpose. He pointed those who could walk toward the stairwells. He told anyone who could help others to do so. About a dozen survivors followed his directions, in groups of two and three. The man, whose identity wasn’t known to the people he helped, hoisted an injured woman onto his back. He steered two others ahead of him into a stairwell. One was a woman named Ling Young, an auditor for the New York State Department of Taxation, who’d been thrown across the sky lobby and badly burned. When the man first arrived, his voice brought Ling to her feet. Until then, she’d sat motionless21 on the debris-filled floor, stunned, riven by fear, her face bloodied. Inside the stairwell, they reached clear air on the 61st floor. The man gently eased the woman off his back. He told Ling and the others to keep going. Then the man in the red bandanna turned and went back up the stairs.

  When the plane hit, Brian Clark and his coworker Bobby Coll felt as though a concussion bomb had struck the Euro Brokers office on the 84th floor. Facing each other, they braced themselves in football stances, legs spread, arms out. Noise buffeted their ears and the building swayed. The false ceiling collapsed around them, bringing down lights, intercom speakers, and air conditioning ducts that dangled from their sockets. The raised trading floor, built of two-foot-square concrete slabs sitting on six-inch pedestals, popped out of place like jumbled cobblestones. Doors burst from frames. The air filled with gritty gray gypsum dust from jagged, broken wallboards.

  Terror gripped Brian as he felt the South Tower lean to the west, farther than he imagined possible without falling, as though the building would topple like a chopped oak into the Hudson River. It righted itself with a decisive jerk, which his engineer’s mind interpreted as the building’s steel bones realigning themselves.

  Brian understood now that this wasn’t a welder’s error but a terrorist act, related to whatever happened to the North Tower. Still he didn’t know that a plane had hit his building, or that its right wing had sliced through the far side of the floor, to the east of where he stood. Yet within the first ten seconds, his fear passed. He told himself: “Brian, you’re going to be all right.”

 

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