“Oh,” Jack said when he switched to Alayne’s call, “thank God you’re okay.”
“Well, not really.”
Alayne explained her situation, and Jack asked why they didn’t try to get out.
“There’s smoke coming in,” she said, “and it’s really hot out there.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jack said. “It was the other building.”
“I know, but there was an explosion beneath us.”
“Jeez,” Jack said, “I don’t know what that could be.”
As Jack began to put the pieces together, he understood that Alayne’s reference to “out there” meant outside the office where she and the others took refuge, as fire and smoke made the exits unreachable. Jack grabbed another phone and called the college’s police chief, a former New York City detective who promised to find out what he could.
Alayne told Jack the sprinklers wouldn’t work, so he called an engineer in the campus facilities department, who rushed to Jack’s office and got on the phone.
“Hit the sprinkler head with your shoe!” the facilities engineer told Alayne.
Ed Emery climbed atop a table and tried, not knowing that the crash had severed water pipes. He lost his footing, and Jack heard Alayne call out: “Oh, Ed! Are you all right?”
The engineer asked if there was a water cooler nearby and told them to wet clothes and use them to seal ventilation ducts. Ed tried with his blazer, to no avail.
Smoke grew thicker, Alayne’s breaths grew labored.
“Don’t breathe so hard,” Jack said. “Try to relax.”
“We don’t know whether to stay or go,” Alayne said. “I don’t want to go down into a fire. . . . I’m scared.”
Jack knew Alayne to be smart and practical, self-assured and steely when needed. After twenty-four years together, scared was something new.
“Honey, it’ll be all right. It’ll be all right,” Jack said. “You’ll get down. You’ll get down.”
“Tell the boys I love them,” Alayne said.
“Of course I will, but this doesn’t have to be it, okay?”
“Tell the boys I love them,” she repeated. “And I love you.”
“I love you,” Jack replied.
They said “I love you” again and again, until Alayne said goodbye. Jack refused to accept it was the end: “Call me when you get down.”
Jack called their pastor, who started a prayer chain. Jack fell to his knees beside his desk and began to pray.
Chapter 15
“They’re Trying to Kill Us, Boys”
Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center
When United Flight 175 exploded into the South Tower, a startled FDNY Captain Jay Jonas looked out through the empty frames of shattered lobby windows in the North Tower. He saw flaming debris and large pieces of metal crashing to the ground, but he didn’t know the cause. He and other firefighters waiting in line for assignments stared at one another in confusion. Maybe a fuel tank exploded above them, Jay thought.
A frantic civilian rushed into the North Tower lobby and set them straight: “A plane just hit the second tower!”
For a moment, no one spoke. Chief Joe Pfeifer and other early callers to FDNY dispatch had been right from the start: the first plane had aimed at the North Tower, and now another one had aimed at the South Tower. Any lingering doubt ended. These were terrorist attacks.
Firefighter-farmer Gerry Nevins of Rescue 1 broke the silence: “We may not live through today.”1 Jay and several others turned to one another and shook hands. “I hope I see you later,” one said. “Great knowing you,” said another.
The men of Rescue 1 were already gone, heading to the stairs behind their captain, Terry Hatton. Before entering the stairwell, Terry embraced one of his closest friends, Firefighter Tim Brown, and said “I love you, brother.2 It might be the last time I see you.”
The chiefs huddled. Assistant Chief Donald Burns,3 a thirty-nine-year FDNY veteran who’d commanded operations at the 1993 bombing, left the North Tower to establish a command post and take control of the new calamity at the South Tower. In the FDNY command structure, an assistant chief outranked a deputy chief, who outranked a battalion chief. Among those sent to the South Tower with Chief Burns was Jay’s old friend, Battalion Chief Orio Palmer.
Jay stepped up to the command post. “Chief,” he said, addressing Deputy Chief Peter Hayden, “do you know the South Tower has just been hit with another plane?” The question was Jay’s way of letting Hayden know that Ladder 6 was ready and willing to head into the unknown disaster next door, if needed.
Hayden closed his eyes and shook his head: “Yeah, I know. Just take your guys upstairs in this building and do the best you can.”
Jay saluted. “Okay, chief.” As he walked away, Jay thought Hayden had the air of a general who knew that some of the men he sent into battle wouldn’t return.
Jay approached his five-man crew, who clustered nearby. With both towers burning and an overall lack of useful information, rumors took flight. Roof Man Sal D’Agostino heard someone say they were under attack from missiles being fired4 from atop the Woolworth Building, two blocks away. He told Can Man Tommy Falco: “This is not going to be good.”
“All right, here’s the deal,” Jay told them. “It’s a raw deal, but it’s what we’ve got. We got to go upstairs for search and rescue in this building. And we gotta walk up eighty floors. We can’t use the elevators because they’ve been exposed to fire already.”
Jay had one more message for Ladder 6, about the unknown enemy who’d thrown two giant daggers into the heart of New York City: “They’re trying to kill us, boys. Let’s go.”
“Okay, Cap,” said Chauffeur Mike Meldrum, speaking for them all. “We’re with you.”
As they walked single file to Stairwell B of the North Tower to begin their upward trek, Roof Man Sal D’Agostino caught up with Jay: “Hey, Cap, I wonder where the Air Force is.”
It occurred to Jay that he’d never considered the need for air cover at any of the thousands of fires he’d fought. But Sal’s question made perfect sense. In fact, after both towers were struck, the F-15s from Otis Air National Guard Base, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy and Major Daniel Nash, were still on their way to New York.
In the Marriott lobby, Ron Clifford kept calling for help. Finally, a man stopped—he told Ron that he worked in emergency medical services on Long Island. Ron tore off his blue suit jacket and asked the man to cover Jennieann, for modesty, while he returned to the restroom to fetch more cool water. A woman who Ron believed worked as a nurse at the Marriott joined them, with an oxygen tank and gauze.
When Ron returned to Jennieann’s side, he rinsed her wounds again.
“Sacred heart of Jesus,” Jennieann said, “please don’t let me die.”
“Are you Catholic?” Ron asked.
“Yeah, I’m Catholic.”
Ron’s religious life had ebbed as a young man, but remnants of faith remained deep inside him.
“Well,” he told Jennieann, “maybe we can say the Our Father while we’re waiting for help.”
Ron’s brogue harmonized with Jennieann’s smoke-strained Brooklynese as the Irish American immigrant and the first-generation Italian American recited words that summarized the Christian gospel: “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Before they reached the prayer’s last words, “deliver us from evil,” United Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower. Again, the building quaked. This time debris fell from the hotel lobby’s ceiling. On his knees, Ron felt it even more powerfully than he did the first blast. It pounded through his chest, rumbled through his bones, bounced him against the marble floor. The sailor in Ron felt as though he’d been dashed against the rocks.
He had no idea how much rougher his day would become.
Confused, afraid, Ron still had no idea what happened to either tower, but he knew be
tter than to remain in place. The hotel lobby had grown packed as guests emptied from their rooms and an endless stream of people from the North Tower used it as a refuge or a pass-through, seeking safety from debris and people falling or jumping from the flaming upper stories.
As he rose to his feet, Ron heard the hotel nurse say they’d find help outside, through an exit at the far end of the lobby that would lead them near Liberty and West Streets, at the southwestern corner of the World Trade Center complex.
“Let’s get her out,” Ron told his fellow helpers.
He asked Jennieann: “Can you get on your feet?”
She agreed to try, so Ron helped her up. The man from Long Island held Ron’s suit jacket like a cloak, a few inches from Jennieann’s burns, shielding her. Ron handed the man his leather shoulder bag so he could use both hands to steady Jennieann. The nurse held the oxygen mask over Jennieann’s mouth as the four of them jostled slowly through the teeming crowd.
Ron sensed that Jennieann felt embarrassed by her nakedness, despite the suit coat. He spotted a large man who looked like a Marriott waiter or busboy and appealed to him for help. The man disappeared for a moment then threw Ron a fresh white tablecloth. Ron wrapped it around Jennieann as they kept moving.
The mass of people trying to squeeze through the outer doors made for slow going. As they approached the exit, Ron roared a demand to let them pass. When people saw Jennieann’s ravaged face, her body draped in white, they turned in horror and cleared a path. From somewhere in the crowd, Ron heard a person shout, “It’s a plane!” Someone else yelled back, “It’s two planes.” Ron had his first inkling of what happened.
Racing to the scene in their ambulance, EMTs Moose Diaz and Paul Adams finally reached the mouth of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, which crosses under the East River to connect Queens with Manhattan. Moose tried to enter the tunnel going in the wrong direction, to save time, but a taxicab exiting the tunnel refused to yield, despite the sirens and swirling lights. Paul leaned out the window and launched obscenities like mortars at the cabbie, to no effect. He saw the cab’s passenger write down the ambulance’s vehicle number, presumably to complain about Moose’s driving and Paul’s language. That aggravated Paul more.
“Push this fucking cab out of here!” he told Moose. Trying to stay composed, the more placid Moose maneuvered around the cab while Paul flashed the cabbie and his passenger a digital salute.
Oncoming cars cleared an ambulance-sized pathway. At the far side of the tunnel, five miles from the World Trade Center, the ambulance barreled south down Second Avenue at the relatively breakneck speed of 50 miles per hour. The whole city seemed to be heading the opposite direction, away from danger. Only fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, journalists, and intrepid volunteers were headed toward Lower Manhattan.
As they drew near, Moose and Paul watched United Airlines Flight 175 slam into the South Tower. Moose called his wife, Ericka. “Listen, I’m going,” he told her. “I can’t believe the towers got hit.” Ericka made him promise to be careful. They exchanged I-love-yous and hung up.
Moose hit the brakes at a makeshift staging area at the northeast corner of the trade center site, at Vesey and Church Streets. They jumped out near the rear of the city’s oldest church, the boxy, beloved St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington worshipped on his inauguration day.
Carlos Lillo and Roberto Abril took another route through Manhattan, steering their ambulance down Broadway and ending up on the northwest corner of the trade center site. Carlos told Roberto he couldn’t wait for him to park at a staging area; he snatched his trauma bag, jumped out, and went looking for injured people to help.
Upon their arrival, they found a mass casualty scene no manual or exercise could have prepared them for. Paramedics and EMTs came upon every imaginable body part, some with clothing or jewelry still attached, some burned or mangled beyond recognition. Among all the pieces, amid all the gruesome human wreckage, one image locked into the minds of several emergency responders who saw it: a girl’s foot, inside a pink sneaker.5 One EMT immediately thought of his own daughter, whose foot was the same size. He looked away, up to the sky to clear his mind, only to see people jumping from the North Tower.
Even as he worked among his colleagues on the wounded, Carlos kept thinking about Cecilia. He asked Kevin Barrett, a fellow Battalion 49 EMT: “Where is my wife—have you seen my wife?”6 Barrett told him not to worry. “She is going to be okay. She is around. . . . Concentrate on what you’re doing.”
Rushing to leave the 64th floor of the North Tower, Cecilia Lillo ducked inside Stairwell A. She found it crowded but orderly, with no sign of panic among the evacuees. At first Cecilia recognized no one, but then she heard her friend Nancy Perez shouting up to her from the stairs below: “Come down! Come with us!”
Cecilia saw their mutual friend Arlene Babakitis with Nancy and wanted to be with them, but she wouldn’t cut the line. As Nancy continued to yell, strangers stepped aside and urged Cecilia forward to join her friends. When Cecilia reached them, Nancy shook as she grabbed Cecilia’s hands.
“It’s a plane!” Nancy said. “Somebody has a portable radio, and they’re announcing it’s a small plane.” Nancy wanted to keep a tight grip on Cecilia’s hand as they went down, but only two of them could walk side by side in the 44-inch-wide stairwell. Cecilia told Nancy to hold on to Arlene, who at forty-seven was the oldest of the three friends.
As he waited inside a motionless elevator, oblivious to what happened, Chris Young’s lone companion was the automated voice that incessantly promised that help was on the way. He didn’t have a cellphone, only a pager clipped to his belt that alerted him to messages left on his answering machine. Usually they were calls for auditions, but now he grew anxious about the possibility that his predicament wasn’t isolated. He wondered if the messages pinging his pager meant that his mother in North Carolina had heard that something bad had happened in New York.
Trapped in a box, with no one answering his emergency signal, Chris turned to his personal security blanket: memories of his college acting triumph as the imaginary knight Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. Forcing himself to stay calm, Chris recited a monologue from the show that he often used at auditions:
I shall impersonate a man. . . . 7 Being retired, he has much time for books. . . . All he reads oppresses him; fills him with indignation at man’s murderous ways toward man. He ponders the problem of how to make better a world where evil brings profit and virtue none at all. . . .
The automated voice repeated its only line.
Inside Alan Reiss’s crowded 88th floor office, badly burned Elaine Duch listened as about two dozen of her colleagues debated whether to wait for building security officers to lead them to safety or to try on their own to evacuate. Smoke wormed its way between the door and the frame, so several people cleared papers from Reiss’s desk and stuffed them into the cracks in an effort to avoid suffocation.
Meanwhile, construction manager Frank De Martini and a few others, including construction inspector Pablo Ortiz, a former Navy SEAL, continued to scout through the wreckage for an escape route. Soon Frank returned to Reiss’s office looking like a chimney sweep, covered in gray soot, his eyes red from smoke. Architect Gerry Gaeta opened the door and Frank delivered hopeful news: Stairwell C, toward the building’s west side, appeared to be clear, if they could climb over piles of debris to get there.
Still not grasping the cause or the severity of the damage, several Port Authority workers declared that they wanted to wait on the 88th floor for help. Some recalled the exhausting, smoky, hours-long walk down darkened stairwells during the 1993 evacuation. But finally they were persuaded by their bosses, and by the rising smoke in Reiss’s office, that no one would reach them in time.
Frank De Martini, Gerry Gaeta, Pablo Ortiz, and several other men led Elaine, Frank’s wife Nicole, and the rest through a scrapyard of upturned furniture, broken wallboards, and office wreckage that was waist high and burning in pl
aces. The receptionist who minutes earlier had called Elaine about the waiting messenger loudly quoted scripture8 as they sought deliverance.
They moved through the real estate office reception area, adjacent to the elevator banks, then turned right into a corridor. Gerry Gaeta was stunned by the sight of the elevators: gaping black holes where the doors had been. Each new sight, each new piece of information, expanded Gerry’s understanding of the magnitude of what happened.
When the group reached the steel door to Stairwell C, they discovered that Frank had been right: not only were the stairs passable, they were lit by battery-powered emergency lights and luminescent tape, installed after the 1993 bombing. Gerry went down one flight to be sure it was safe, then returned with news that the smoke seemed less intense below them.
“Let’s go for it!”9 he yelled.
Most headed down, but not all. Frank De Martini, Pablo Ortiz, and several other men from the 88th floor went up to break through walls and pry open doors in an effort to rescue people trapped on higher floors.10 With crowbars and flashlights, resolve and grit, they were credited with saving at least seventy people, reaching as high as the 90th floor.
Inside the lightly populated stairwell, everyone cleared a path for Elaine. Her friend Dorene Smith stepped in front of Elaine and held an empty arm of the sweater tied for modesty’s sake around Elaine’s waist. Dorene used it like a rope to pull Elaine along and to catch her if she lost her footing. After a brief separation, Gerry Gaeta fell in behind Elaine and Dorene, gripping the knot tied in the sweater at Elaine’s back, to steady her.
With Frank De Martini’s wife, Nicole, and most other evacuees from the 88th floor following close behind, the threesome of Elaine, Dorene Smith, and Gerry Gaeta descended step by step down a dozen flights of stairs. Unaware that Flight 11 had cut through all three emergency stairwells, preventing escape from above, Elaine was surprised not to encounter people evacuating from the upper floors.
Fall and Rise Page 32