Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Petty Officers Christine Williams and Charles Lewis weren’t talking anymore, and he worried they’d been asphyxiated. Jack Punches still hadn’t answered his calls.

  In the darkness and the silence, his mind fading, his lungs aching, the burden across his lap and on his head unyielding, Jerry felt certain that he had less than five minutes to live. He didn’t think about God or family or whoever did this to him and his friends and colleagues. He thought only of his situation at that very moment: “Well, this is it. If somebody doesn’t get you out, you’re not getting out.”

  Jerry tried again: “Help!” he croaked. “Help!”

  With civilian Lois Stevens clinging to her belt, Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills crawled through the conference room door into what remained of Dilbertville. The normally bustling workspace was unnaturally quiet. Smoke obscured her view, and noxious fumes stung her mouth, nose, and eyes. Marilyn squinted through the darkness to her right, toward a door that led out to the E Ring corridor. She hoped it would be an easy way to escape. But through the crack at the bottom of the door she saw red and felt the heat of flames consuming the Pentagon’s outer edge.

  “Let’s go left!” she told Lois. “To the windows. I know there are windows.”

  Unbeknownst to Marilyn, two officers who’d been with them in the conference room, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Johnson and Major Steven Long, both unfamiliar with the new office layout, had gone through the door. Both perished24 in the inferno of the E Ring corridor.

  Marilyn set herself and Lois on a path in the opposite direction, toward the second-floor windows that overlooked AE Drive. On a normal day, it would be a two-minute walk, including stops at friends’ cubicles to chat. Now it was an uncertain, serpentine crawl in pitch darkness through more than two hundred feet of poisonous smoke, rising heat, and overturned furniture, cabinets, and office partitions. Marilyn reached for her wrist, to illuminate her watch, but she’d lost it somewhere along the way. The Pentagon alarm siren rang in her ears. She heard the system’s recorded voice on an endless loop: “Attention! A fire emergency has been declared in the building. Please evacuate!”

  As Marilyn led Lois on the journey toward the windows, her head bumped into a woman’s rear end.

  “Talk to me,” Marilyn said. “Who are you?”

  It was Major Regina Grant, a human resources officer who’d been with them in the conference room. She identified herself, and Marilyn said they’d be okay as long as they stayed together. She had a plan.

  Moments earlier, when Regina escaped from the conference room into Dilbertville, she’d spotted John Yates,25 the security officer who had jokingly promised his wife that he’d spend the day underneath his desk. Regina saw John on his feet, towering over her, but he was in shock. Burns lashed his face, winding around his ears and down his neck to his back, buttocks, and legs. His arms and hands were blanched as white as surgical gloves.

  Yates had been watching Marian Serva’s television when the plane hit and the lights went out. An orange fireball coursed through the office just below the ceiling, consuming some people and missing others altogether. It knocked Yates off his feet. A mist of jet fuel coated his glasses and the remains of his tattered clothing. Regina thought he looked as if he’d been blown out of a cannon.26 She’d grabbed the back of his leg just before Marilyn bumped into her rear.

  Despite John’s injuries, his security training kicked in. “Get up and come with me,” he told Marilyn, Lois, and Regina as he stumbled slowly away.

  “No!” Marilyn yelled. “You get down. Get down! The smoke is too thick!”

  John Yates either didn’t hear or didn’t listen. Regina Grant started to follow him. But Marilyn snatched her by the skirt.27 “No! Stay down.”

  Marilyn led Lois and Regina on the crawl through debris-strewn Dilbertville toward the C Ring windows over AE Drive. Heat rose from fires in the Navy Command Center below them, burning Regina’s knees through her nylon stockings. Somewhere on the floor beneath them were Jerry Henson, still trapped in his chair, Petty Officers Christine Williams and Charles Lewis, Jack Punches, and Dave Thomas’s best friend, Bob Dolan, among dozens of others.

  Regina stopped crawling to rest, so Marilyn halted their flight. As they caught their breath, emergency sprinklers doused them, providing relief from the heat. Yet the smoke grew thicker and the air hotter, and Marilyn knew they didn’t have much time before they baked or choked to death. She urged them to get moving.

  Lois Stevens tugged on Marilyn’s leg. Marilyn turned to see Lois patting her throat. “I can’t breathe, Colonel Wills,” Lois said. “Just go ahead.”

  “No—here, suck on my sweater,” Marilyn said, handing Lois the empty sleeve of the black cardigan, moist with water from the sprinklers. “We got to keep going!”

  But Lois was spent. Even with Marilyn’s sweater, her lungs felt scorched from smoke inhalation. She feared that she might prevent Marilyn and Regina, both younger and stronger, from reaching the windows.

  “I am too tired,”28 Lois said. “I just can’t go any farther.”

  “Please,” Marilyn begged. “Please come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Lois refused. She pressed down against the hot carpet and prepared to die.

  As Navy Captain Dave Thomas searched for his best friend, Bob Dolan, Dave Tarantino and other rescuers, strangers to one another, took turns using fire extinguishers to beat back flames. Someone passed around flashlights. They worked their way from AE Drive into the first floor through the blown-open holes in the C Ring walls.

  Several developed a strategy they hoped would lead them to survivors. One took the point, staying low to the ground for as long as he could bear, then he’d switch places with the man behind, leapfrogging deeper into the Pentagon’s wrecked Wedge One. Drops of melting metal and plastic burned tiny holes in their skin. Secondary explosions made them fear that the building would collapse around them.

  The group cleared the jagged debris as much as possible, trying to avoid live electrical wires that sparked in the smoky gloom. Twice, Dave Tarantino recoiled from shocks, then kept moving. His uniform shirt, a no-iron synthetic style banned aboard ship for its fire-friendly properties, began to melt from the heat, so he tore it off and threw it onto AE Drive. Someone handed him a wet T-shirt to breathe through, and he went back in. One word rattled around his brain: “Apocalypse.”

  Working separately, still hoping for any sign of Bob Dolan, Dave Thomas took a slightly different route deep into the burning Navy Command Center. He scanned the darkness, through smoke and flames. Perhaps twenty yards away, he saw what appeared to be a disembodied face. It looked like a misshapen Halloween fright mask, its eyes fixed open. Then it blinked.

  Chapter 17

  “I Think Those Buildings Are Going Down”

  South Tower, World Trade Center

  On the South Tower’s 81st floor, new blood brothers Brian Clark and Stan Praimnath returned to Stairwell A battered and covered in soot. Brian remembered the heavyset woman’s insistence that fire would block their way down, but Stan knew he needed medical help, so they decided to try. The two men pushed away the broken drywall that in places covered the stairs like playground slides and stepped through water from broken pipes that cascaded underfoot. Smoke fouled the air, but the stairwell was passable.

  They passed the stairwell door to the 80th floor, unaware that some of Stan’s Fuji Bank colleagues huddled in the northwest corner of the floor. Jack Andreacchio, who urged “Stan the man” to return to work a half hour earlier, told a 9-1-1 dispatcher that he, Manny Gomez, and three others were trapped by heat and smoke, unable to reach a stairwell.

  “I think we should break the window,”1 Jack Andreacchio said during a call logged at 9:23 a.m. The operator told him that would only bring fire closer.

  “Fidnee,” the operator said, using dispatch jargon for FDNY, “is on the way. They have it. People are on their way to you, okay?”

  “You’ve gotta help me,” Andreacchio sai
d.

  Inside the stairwell, at the 78th floor sky lobby level, Brian and Stan skirted past flames that spurted through cracks in the wall. They didn’t cross paths with the man in the red bandanna or the people he led to safety. By the 74th floor, the air in the stairwell began to clear. Lights were on and the stair treads were dry. Brian thought they’d be safe. Stan grew steadier on his feet.

  The first person they encountered in the stairwell was a colleague of Brian’s from Euro Brokers: José Marrero, who’d risen from the kitchen staff to become the firm’s facilities manager. José, a married father of three who served with Brian as a fire safety warden, had led other Euro Brokers workers down partway through the building from the 84th floor. Now, breathing heavily, he climbed back up.

  “José, what are you doing?” Brian asked.

  José nodded to his walkie-talkie. He’d spoken with another member of their safety team, Dave Vera, who was one of the half dozen people Brian originally led down from the 84th floor. At the urging of the woman in the stairwell, Dave had reversed course and gone back upstairs with Bobby Coll, Kevin York, and the others.

  “Dave’s a big boy,” Brian told José. “He can get out. We’ve just come through hell to get here. Come with us.”

  “No, no, no. I’m okay,” José said as they parted. “I’ll be okay.”

  Brian and Stan continued downward, trading tidbits of what they knew about what happened. Stan told Brian he’d seen the plane that hit their tower, and the enormity came into clearer focus.

  At the 44th floor sky lobby, they exited Stairwell A, hoping to phone their families, unaware that the South Tower’s structure was growing weaker by the minute. They found a security guard, a man in his sixties, standing watch at his desk.

  “Do you have telephones?” the guard asked.

  Brian and Stan noticed a semiconscious man on the floor behind the security desk, moaning from massive head injuries. Stan had occasionally seen the injured man in the building but didn’t know his name. Stan heard him say: “Please tell my wife and our baby that I love them.”

  “When you get to a phone,” the guard said, “you must get a medic and a stretcher up to the forty-fourth floor.” Stan and Brian promised and returned to the stairwell.

  They exited again on the 31st floor and walked through the deserted offices. They found a working phone in a conference room of the investment firm Oppenheimer Funds, whose nearly six hundred employees on four floors had escaped unhurt. At shortly after 9:30 a.m., Brian called home. He’d last spoken to Dianne less than forty minutes earlier, after Flight 11 struck the North Tower. After they hung up, Dianne saw United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on television. Neighbors and church friends had rushed to her side, to keep her and their children from panicking.

  “Hi, honey,” Brian said, breezy as ever. “I’m on the thirty-first floor. I got a good story to tell you. Got to go now, want to get out of the building. But I thought I’d check in.” He hung up, and Dianne shared the news that Brian was alive, but still inside the burning tower.

  Stan tried to reach Jenny, but she’d fled from work when she heard about the South Tower, certain that Stan was dead. Stan left a message with her coworkers.

  Brian then called 9-1-1 for the injured man on the 44th floor. During the next three minutes and seventeen seconds,2 the depth of chaos in the 9-1-1 system became evident. Brian was transferred twice, put on hold, and talked to three different people. His frustration rising, Brian told the last woman he spoke with, “I’m only going to say this once—don’t put me on hold.” He again relayed details about the man, then hung up.

  None of the 9-1-1 operators Brian spoke with asked him how high he’d been inside the building, conditions on the upper floors, or details about which stairwell he’d used. As a result, they never learned potentially lifesaving information that might have helped firefighters or trapped people in the South Tower who survived the crash and then called 9-1-1 for guidance.

  Amid the chaos, overwhelmed 9-1-1 operators never learned that Stairwell A remained relatively intact above the South Tower impact zone, at least to the 91st floor and possibly higher. No evidence exists that any person who called 9-1-1 from above the impact zone was urged to seek out Stairwell A3 as a potential path to survival.

  One 9-1-1 operator, besieged by urgent calls for help from people trapped in the towers, vented her frustration to a colleague: “How can you have a big building4 and no way to get out of it? That’s ridiculous.”

  Emergency operators also weren’t told that rooftop rescues5 wouldn’t be attempted because of smoke, or that exit doors to the roof remained locked, even as some 9-1-1 callers mentioned plans to try to reach the roof. Some of those heading upstairs might have recalled the daring rescues of twenty-eight people from the North Tower roof by a New York Police Department helicopter after the 1993 bombing.

  One person who tried to reach the South Tower rooftop knew the route well. Roko Camaj was an immigrant from Montenegro, a sixty-year-old husband, the father of an adult daughter, and a man with an eagle’s comfort with heights. He’d spent twenty-eight years working as a window washer at the World Trade Center—squinting against the sun’s reflection off the towers had carved deep crows’ feet around his eyes. Roko operated a machine that automatically cleaned the lower ones, but he climbed into a harness to soap the highest windows by hand. Roko was the subject of a children’s book in which he declared: “It’s just me and the sky.6 I don’t bother anybody and nobody bothers me.”

  Now, unable to reach the roof, Roko went down several floors and called his wife.7 He said he was stuck on the 105th floor with about two hundred others. He radioed a fellow Port Authority worker: “Don’t let no people up here . . . there’s big smoke!”8

  Meanwhile, following traditional rules that didn’t apply to this unprecedented situation, at least some 9-1-1 operators told survivors on high floors of the South Tower to remain in place, regardless of conditions. How many people received those instructions isn’t clear.

  When Brian Clark made his 9-1-1 call,9 nearly seven thousand people had already escaped the South Tower, while more than a thousand remained between the lobby and the 76th floor, heading downward if they could. More than six hundred people were on the 77th floor and above. Those numbers didn’t include the emergency responders who flooded into the South Tower after United Flight 175 struck.

  Time was becoming an enemy, but not everyone understood that. A 9-1-1 caller on the 73rd floor, below the impact zone, told an operator that oxygen was running out, only to be instructed not to leave the floor.10 A police dispatcher gave a similar order to a man on the 88th floor, in the offices of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods: “You have to wait11 until somebody comes there.”

  Meanwhile, the Stairwell A escape route remained nearly empty.

  And at almost the same time as Brian Clark made his 9-1-1 call, the FDNY suffered its first fatality12 of the day.

  Firefighter Danny Suhr, a thirty-seven-year-old captain of the FDNY football team, had just arrived on the scene. Debris littered the ground and people fell from the sky. As he neared the South Tower, Danny told his captain, “Let’s make this quick.”13

  Before they reached the building, a person who fell or jumped from an upper floor clipped Danny’s head on the way down. EMTs tried to help, and two fellow firefighters from Engine 216 jumped into the ambulance with their friend, who had a two-year-old daughter and a love affair with his wife that dated from grade school.

  “Danny! Danny! Danny!” they yelled.

  EMT Richard Erdey knew that Danny Suhr was gone, a victim of catastrophic head injuries, but he kept trying.

  “Look,” Erdey told the firefighters, “we’re doing the CPR for that small glimmer of hope,14 but I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. They’re going to call it at the hospital. Please stop staring at him. You’re going to burn this image in your head. I want you to remember a better image.”

  As evacuees ran from the building, as upper-floor surviv
ors called for help, and as firefighters rushed inside, the South Tower experienced ominous structural changes.

  Shortly after 9:30 a.m., bursts of smoke15 spouted from the building’s north side, on the 79th and 80th floors, possibly from shifting floor slabs or the sudden ignition of pools of unspent jet fuel. Simultaneously, threats to the building’s integrity worsened. Intact core columns strained under the added burden previously borne by the severed columns. External columns on the tower’s east side supported added loads that had shifted from the severed columns. The remaining external columns also struggled to hold up sagging floors.

  The strain caused the exterior columns to bow inward, like straws trying to support a brick. All the while, unchecked fires undermined the strength of steel columns throughout the impact zone, contributing to a threat that almost no one imagined. The South Tower neared its breaking point.

  Tiring as they continued inside Stairwell A, Brian Clark urged Stan Praimnath to slow down. Stan had begun bounding down the steps two at a time. “I’d hate to break an ankle and have to walk thirty more floors,” Brian said, “then come in on crutches tomorrow.”

  As they slowed their descent, they encountered no one else, neither evacuees nor firefighters, on the final floors of Stairwell A.

  Brian and Stan emerged on the north side of the South Tower, facing the sprawling Austin J. Tobin Plaza. Both men had long cherished its sparkling fountain, with a twenty-five-foot bronze sculpture called The Sphere at its center. They liked how the plaza served as an urban oasis for workers, tourists, and vendors. Now they saw it buried in ash and debris. Brian thought it looked like an abandoned archaeological site.

  Stan and Brian stood shoulder to shoulder, silently absorbing the ruins for twenty or thirty seconds, then walked down a nonworking escalator to the Concourse level. A female officer at the bottom of the escalator told them it would be safer if they didn’t exit onto Liberty Street. She directed them through the Concourse mall under the plaza, past the Victoria’s Secret shop and out by the Sam Goody music store. The route snaked underneath Four World Trade Center, to an exit at the southeast corner of the complex.