Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  When they reached the North Tower’s 76th floor, the group discovered that the stairway led into what was called a crossover corridor, a passageway roughly one hundred feet long that bypassed mechanical equipment, with fire doors on either end. At the corridor’s far end, Gerry Gaeta struggled to open the door. He tugged and kicked at it, to no avail. Gerry wondered if terrorists had locked the stairwell doors to trap survivors, as part of what he mistakenly believed was another bombing plot. More likely, the door was bent inside the frame by the plane’s impact on the building.

  Elaine and the other 88th floor evacuees reluctantly reversed course, retracing their steps inside Stairwell C and climbing up two flights to the sky lobby on the 78th floor. They found the lobby nearly empty except for several Port Authority security workers and a few men trying to free someone trapped in an elevator. A security guard pointed them toward a potential new escape route: Stairwell B seemed passable from the 77th floor down.

  As they moved toward their new exit path, Elaine and the others saw that the ornate sky lobby had been heavily damaged. Green marble panels that had lined the walls near the elevators lay broken on the floor. The group walked down the stairs of a frozen escalator to the 77th floor, where they stopped in their tracks. Facing them was a corridor full of water puddles and live electrical wires shooting sparks. They had two bad options.

  “We are going to die11 waiting here,” Gerry Gaeta told the others, “or we are going to die getting electrocuted.” He chose to risk the latter.

  Dipping one foot gingerly into the water, Gerry discovered that either the wires weren’t live or the current wasn’t powerful enough to electrocute them.

  They reached the door to Stairwell B and resumed their escape march. Down ten steps, turn at a landing, then nine more. Down ten steps, turn at a landing, then nine more. Elaine kept pace, flight after flight, floor after floor, inside the larger, 56-inch-wide12 stairwell.

  After about twenty floors, they caught up with crowds of other evacuees who slowed their progress. One reason for the reduced pace was the clogging that resulted from several thousand North Tower workers funneling into stairwells to escape. Another was the fact that on the lowest floors, firefighters had begun climbing upward inside the same narrow stairwells. The evacuees and their would-be rescuers brushed shoulders as they walked single file in opposite directions inside Stairwell B.

  Gerry Gaeta worried that the slowdown would cause Elaine to stop moving entirely. Once she halted, he feared, she might not start again. He knew that he would try to carry her, but he didn’t expect that would go well. “Please move to the right!” Gerry yelled at the civilians in front of them. “Burn victim!”

  Everyone stepped aside. As Elaine passed, sandwiched between Dorene and Gerry, some gasped; others burst into tears. Elaine gritted her teeth and said nothing. She focused her energy on the stairs—ten down, turn, then nine more, each floor taking a minute or so. She kept her eyes down, focused on her feet. It dawned on her that her sneakers might qualify as lifesavers; if she’d changed into sandals when she arrived at work, her feet would have been hideously burned by the fireball, making it all but impossible to walk down these seemingly endless flights of steps.

  Floor after floor they continued, pressed to the right wall of the stairwell as they passed a conga line of red-faced firefighters who trudged upward, burdened by the weight of their equipment and the anticipation of what awaited them. One young firefighter poured water on Elaine from an extinguisher, stimulating what remained of her nerve endings and unintentionally causing pain. She pulled away, fearful that the water would worsen her injuries.

  At one point, Gerry noticed two men trying to help a heavyset woman in a dark dress who seemed to be struggling. Something appeared to be wrong with her legs, and he didn’t know how she’d endure the rest of the descent. But Gerry kept moving, his attention on Elaine, cheering her along like a trainer.

  “Only another ten floors, Elaine,”13 he told her. “Only another ten minutes.”

  At 9:11 a.m., twenty-five minutes after American Flight 11 hit the North Tower, eight minutes after United Flight 175 hit the South Tower, some Port Authority Police dispatchers inexplicably continued to tell worried callers not to evacuate.

  Cecilia Lillo had already left the North Tower’s 64th floor, but others remained there. Port Authority executive Pat Hoey, an engineer who oversaw bridges and tunnels, remembered the chaos of the hours-long evacuation in 1993. Now, he sought expert advice for himself and twenty or so other agency workers alongside him, so he called the Port Authority Police.

  Pat Hoey: “What do you suggest?”14

  A sergeant answered: “Stand tight. Is there a fire right there where you are?”

  Pat Hoey: “No, there is a little bit of smoke on the floor.”

  Sergeant: “It looks like there is also an explosion in [Tower] Two.”

  Pat Hoey: “Okay.”

  Sergeant: “So be careful. Stay near the stairwells and wait for the police to come up.”

  As the building burned, as people fled if they could, or jumped if they couldn’t, as firefighters climbed, as civilians helped one another to escape, Pat Hoey and his remaining office mates followed those instructions. Despite clear stairwells and time to leave, they remained fixed in place on the 64th floor, waiting for someone to come get them.

  Once inside Stairwell B, Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 encountered a steady stream of office workers, many frightened, a few burned, but all remarkably calm, coming down the stairs. Evacuees cheered the firefighters as they passed.

  “You deserve a raise,” one man told Jay’s crew.

  “God bless you,” said another office worker.

  “Go get ’em,” said a third.

  Evacuees smashed the glass of vending machines in stairwell landings and handed Jay and his men bottles of Poland Spring water. One man removed Tommy Falco’s helmet and drenched Tommy’s head and neck to keep him from overheating. “Good luck,” the man said before moving on. The lights were on and the air inside the stairwell was relatively clear, but the smell of jet fuel lingered.

  Down in the lobby, Chief Peter Hayden expected firefighters to go no higher than the seventieth floor, but Jay estimated they might need to ascend as many as ninety floors, or more than seventeen hundred stairs, to reach victims awaiting rescue. “We’ll take ten floors at a time,” he told his men. “Ten floors. Take a quick break, get a drink of water, and press on.”

  By their first stop, on the tenth floor, the men of Ladder 6 were drenched with sweat, red-faced and breathing heavily. After a brief rest, they trudged up to the twentieth floor, their legs rising more slowly on those 190 steps, with stops along the way to help two firefighters from other units suffering chest pains.

  As Ladder 6 and other companies struggled to reach the fires and survivors on upper floors, numerous mobility-impaired civilians received help from friends and colleagues. Some of the impromptu rescuers offered a guiding hand, some a calming word, and some a strong back. Ten coworkers of accountant John Abruzzo,15 a quadriplegic who relied on a wheelchair, banded together to save him. They carried him from the 69th floor using an evacuation chair that worked like a sled on stairs. When they crossed paths with firefighters, the men declined help. They’d get their friend John out on their own.

  Jay and his men encountered several such scenes of civilians helping one another. At one point, they stepped aside for a terribly burned woman, her clothes melted to her skin. Jay watched as she slowly but steadily descended the stairs with a man following close behind making sure she didn’t fall. The woman said nothing. She continued downward, and Ladder 6 persisted upward. From the description of the woman’s burns and her escort, the timing of the encounter, and the location inside Stairwell B, it seems likely that Jay and his men had crossed paths with Elaine Duch and her Port Authority colleague Gerry Gaeta, with Elaine’s friend Dorene Smith somewhere nearby, clearing the way.

  Andrea Maffeo stared across the
East River, watching horrified from her fifth-floor office on Fifty-Ninth Street in Brooklyn as flames and smoke poured from both Twin Towers. She couldn’t shake a strong premonition about her big sister.

  “Oh my god,” Andrea told her secretary, “Jennieann is there.16 She’s there, and she’s hurt badly.”

  Her secretary said that made no sense. Jennieann Maffeo didn’t work at the World Trade Center, she only stopped there on her commute, to hop on a shuttle bus to a ferry. Even if Jennieann had been close by when the planes hit, the fires were near the top of each tower. Andrea couldn’t argue with that logic, but she had a bad feeling in her bones.

  Both single, the Maffeo sisters lived together, laughed together, went to movies together, cared for their elderly parents together, and vacationed together. A month earlier they had been to Cancun, Mexico, where they’d sat on a bed in their hotel room and talked about the afterlife. Jennieann had been deeply affected by a book she’d just finished, Crossing Over, written by the self-professed medium John Edward.

  “You have to read this book,” Jennieann told Andrea. “It made me feel so comfortable. It talks all about how, when you go, everybody you love who’s gone before is going to be there.”

  Sitting in the hotel room, Andrea had dismissed her. “What the hell are you talking about? Where are you going? You’re forty years old.”

  “I’m not afraid to die anymore,” Jennieann answered.

  Now, watching the towers burn, Andrea felt chills of fear. She grabbed her cellphone to call Jennieann, but when she pressed the talk button she got a surprise: her mother was already on the line.

  “Where’s your sister?” demanded Frances Maffeo, a retired seamstress who survived cancer but remained in poor health.

  “Ma, she’s fine.”

  “Where. Is. Your. Sister?” Frances Maffeo repeated, louder with each word.

  Andrea decided not to share her own fears.

  “I’m sure she’s at work already. I’m sure she’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  Frances wasn’t buying it. She had intuition, too, and she’d already called Jennieann’s employer, UBS PaineWebber, in New Jersey. “She’s not there.”

  Andrea pivoted, trying to keep her mother from panicking. “She’s not answering the work phone because she’s probably on the bus.”

  Andrea said goodbye and repeatedly tried Jennieann’s cellphone. She called UBS PaineWebber, but no one there had seen Jennieann. Anxiety rising, Andrea looked out the window at the towers, watched television, kept calling her sister, and prayed.

  About twenty minutes after the North Tower express elevator shook then stopped on its descent to the lobby, Chris Young heard a human voice on the intercom.

  “Is anybody in there?” a man asked.

  “Yes!” Chris said.

  “Is anyone in there with you?”

  “No, I’m by myself.”

  The disembodied voice likely belonged to Dave Bobbitt,17 a Port Authority elevator supervisor who contacted about seventy-five elevator cars from his post in the North Tower lobby and estimated that he spoke to people in ten stalled cars. Flight 11 severed an unknown number of elevator cables in the North Tower. Some cars followed their programming, returned to their lowest floor, and opened their doors. But many didn’t. Some elevator cars stopped on their lowest floors but didn’t release passengers, while others plunged dozens of stories, killing or injuring those inside. Elevator shafts also became deadly chimneys, channeling smoke and flames, and blowing out doors and walls18 from the impact zone down to the basement floors.

  Some people trapped in elevators would die, some would be saved, and some would save themselves. Almost halfway up the North Tower, six men in a smoke-filled elevator pried open the doors but found themselves facing a sheetrock wall. Jan Demczur,19 a Port Authority window washer, reached into his bucket and pulled out a squeegee. With help from the other men, he used its metal edge and a second brass squeegee handle to carve through three layers of sheetrock. They punched a hole through white wall tiles, squeezed through, and landed on the floor of a men’s restroom on the fiftieth floor. From there, the six men rushed down a stairwell and escaped.

  The voice on the intercom told Chris Young not to try to force his way out. Instead, he should wait for someone to rescue him. The man didn’t tell Chris what caused the car to stall, perhaps assuming that everyone already knew about the planes. He didn’t ask the elevator number, so Chris suspected that an electronic indicator showed which car or cars had sustained mechanical failures. Chris didn’t know that his was one of ninety-nine elevators in the North Tower, with the same number in the South Tower, nearly all of them stuck or worse. Chris also didn’t know that emergency responders were focused on helping people trapped on high floors, so they never systematically checked20 the towers’ elevators. Dave Bobbitt made a list of elevators with trapped survivors, but no one followed up on it.

  Comforted by his contact with a live person, still unaware of what happened, Chris resumed his dramatic monologues and ran through song lyrics in his head. After about ten minutes, he heard a man’s voice shouting.

  “Anybody there?”

  “Yes!” Chris called, thinking he’d been found by firefighters. “I’m in an elevator!”

  “We’re in an elevator, too,” the man said.

  Chris and the man yelled back and forth, straining to hear each other through the walls separating them. They made a pact to tell anyone who came for them about the other. The man told Chris that he was one of seven people stuck in the car. The four men and three women21 had just entered the elevator to ascend to the 78th floor sky lobby when it rocked and stopped. No one had answered their emergency calls, and like Chris, they didn’t know what had happened.

  Chris repeatedly pressed the fire helmet button. When someone responded after several minutes, Chris told him about the other elevator. “We’ve got people working on it,” the man said. “We’ll get you out, and we’ll get them out, too.” The man on the intercom again told Chris not to try to free himself.

  Chris thought the voice belonged to a different person than his earlier contact. It worried him that the new person didn’t seem to remember him. Still, the news seemed hopeful. Chris yelled to the man in the other elevator that he’d reached someone on the outside. He waited, then shouted again. No one answered.

  As she descended the stairwell with her friends and coworkers, Cecilia Lillo repeatedly tried calling her paramedic husband, Carlos, on her cellphone, but she got no signal. Somewhere in the low fifties, she passed a beefy, square-jawed man going up: Fred Morrone, superintendent of the Port Authority Police Department. Cecilia liked Fred, who had always been kind to her. As Fred climbed toward the fires of the impact zone, the former New Jersey state trooper encouraged the civilian evacuees headed down.

  “It’s above the eighty-something floor,” Morrone said. “You guys will be okay.”

  Morrone’s confidence calmed Cecilia. The slow downward progress had been making her uneasy about whether she, Nancy Lopez, and Arlene Babakitis would get out. They stopped again when they heard someone from a higher floor yell that everyone should stand aside to let injured people pass. A woman who halted next to Cecilia screamed and cried when a burned woman shuffled past. Cecilia turned the distraught woman toward the stairwell wall. “It’s okay,” Cecilia told her. “We’re going to be okay. You don’t have to look.”

  As they waited, Cecilia overheard a man nearby yelling and cursing on his cellphone, ordering his wife or girlfriend not to drive into New York from New Jersey. Cecilia wanted to ask to borrow his phone, to call Carlos, but the man sneaked in behind the walking wounded to jump the line and speed his exit.

  A dozen floors lower, at around 9:30 a.m., Cecilia thought she heard a man’s voice in the stairwell call “Cece!”—pronounced to rhyme with “Bessy”—the nickname Carlos used for her.

  “I think my husband’s here!” Cecilia told her friends.

  “Huh? I didn’t hear anything,
” Nancy said. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Carlos. They kept going.

  At the 23rd floor, firefighters directed them out of Stairwell A without explaining why. The three women and others nearby splashed through puddles as sprinklers drenched Cecilia’s hair and her sand-colored suit. Cecilia and her friends waited in a 23rd floor hallway for about ten minutes, then the firefighters directed them to Stairwell C and told them to squeeze in among the evacuees already inside.

  At the tenth floor, Cecilia and Nancy started a floor-by-floor countdown—“Ten! . . . Nine! . . . Eight!”—to bolster their spirits and encourage Arlene, who’d grown weary.

  During the first half hour of the disaster, 9-1-1 operators passed word to the fire chiefs in the North Tower lobby that locked doors had foiled efforts by some people trapped on upper floors to reach the roof. Roof access was routinely limited to hinder suicides, vandals, and anyone who might attempt to repeat Philippe Petit’s 1974 wire walk between the towers. Although rooftop rescues had already been ruled out, a “lock release order”22 was transmitted to the building’s Security Command Center, so people trapped on burning, smoky floors might have at least a chance at fresh air. But the impact of Flight 11 had damaged the computerized system, and the rooftop doors remained locked. Survivors on the nineteen floors above the North Tower impact zone had nowhere to go.

  At 9:32 a.m., an assistant FDNY chief radioed an order requiring all firefighting units in the North Tower to return to the lobby.23 He issued the order either because of reports of a third inbound plane to New York, which proved false, or because of concerns about the building’s structural integrity. With radio communication inside the building ranging from weak to nonexistent, few or no firefighters apparently heard him. Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 never did, so they continued climbing. By all accounts, no FDNY units returned to the lobby as a result of that order.