Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Brian and Stan walked through the Concourse, feeling safe and in the clear. They passed firefighters pulling on boots and equipment, and police officers who seemed busy but under control. Although the two men were the only civilians in sight, covered in dust that should have made it apparent that they’d come from affected floors, no one asked them about conditions inside the tower or which stairwell they had used to escape.

  When they reached the exit, a firefighter told them, “Whoa, whoa. If you’re going to leave through these doors, you’ve got to run for it.”

  “Why?” Brian asked.

  “There’s debris falling from above.”

  “Should I look up?”

  “No! Just go for it.”

  Brian couldn’t follow that order. He slowly opened the door and poked his head out. “It looks clear,” he told Stan. “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  As firefighters set up shop inside the South Tower lobby, Assistant Chief Donald Burns led relatively few troops compared to the throngs in the North Tower. But Chief Burns had at least one advantage: he’d brought along Battalion Chief Orio Palmer.

  Forty-five, married with three children, Orio commanded an area that stretched across Midtown Manhattan, including the Empire State Building, Penn Station, the Garment District, and scores of high-rise office and apartment buildings. A marathon runner and three-time winner of the department’s fitness award,16 Orio had a brushy mustache, a thatch of comb-resistant brown hair, and boundless energy that hadn’t subsided since his first days on the job. Almost twenty years earlier, as a probationary firefighter, Orio had followed Jay Jonas up the stairs of the burning Bronx tenement. Later, he had interrogated Jay to learn all he could. Now, while Jay guided the men of Ladder 6 up the North Tower, Orio led FDNY’s charge up the South Tower.

  An elevator mechanic before becoming a firefighter, Orio found the one functioning freight elevator17 and took it to the fortieth floor. He also discovered that, despite earlier problems, the FDNY’s radio repeater18 channel somehow worked inside the South Tower, amplifying his signal and enabling him to remain in contact with his bosses and his troops as he moved from the elevator to the South Tower’s Stairwell B.

  As Orio climbed, a firefighter trailing him, Scott Larsen of Ladder 15, radioed that “the director of Morgan Stanley” had told him: “Seventy-eight seems to have taken the brunt of this stuff—there’s a lot of bodies.”19 With that information, almost certainly from Morgan Stanley security chief Rick Rescorla, Orio knew exactly where he was needed most. As he rose higher, Orio displayed no concern that the building wouldn’t stand. When another firefighter radioed that he’d stopped to catch his breath, Orio told him: “Take your time.”

  At 9:32 a.m., Orio radioed down from the 55th floor to Battalion Chief Ed Geraghty that they should set up a command post on the 76th floor, just below the impact zone. Among the firefighters rushing up the stairs behind Orio were Scott Kopytko and Doug Oelschlager, who’d worked the overnight shift with Jay Jonas and his Ladder 6 crew.

  By 9:45 a.m., Orio had sprinted up thirty-four flights from where he exited the freight elevator, reaching the 74th floor. He’d climbed nineteen floors in thirteen minutes despite being loaded down with gear. Breathing heavily, he cautioned the men behind him that the walls of Stairwell B on the 73rd and 74th floors were ruptured.

  On the 75th floor, at around 9:49 a.m., Orio met Fire Marshall Ronald Bucca, a twenty-three-year FDNY veteran who also was a registered nurse and a reservist in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Fifteen years earlier, Ron earned the nickname the Flying Fireman20 when he fell five stories from a fire escape, surviving thanks to telephone and cable wires he struck on the way down. After Flight 175 hit, Ron had walked up from the lobby with Fire Marshal Jim Devery. On the 51st floor, Jim Devery came across a burned woman who needed help: Ling Young, who’d first been rescued from the 78th floor sky lobby by the man in the red bandanna. Jim Devery helped Ling down to the lobby, while Ron Bucca kept going up.

  Blocked from climbing higher inside Stairwell B, Orio found a new path: Stairwell A. He and Ron Bucca switched to the intact stairwell only minutes after Stan Praimnath and Brian Clark had used the same route on their way down.

  At 9:52 a.m., gasping for breath, sounding stressed but in control, Orio reached for his radio. Roughly forty-five minutes had passed since he rushed into the burning South Tower, rode an elevator up forty floors, then scaled more than seven hundred steps. Now, he faced the twin forces driving his professional life: a fire to fight, and people to help.

  “We’ve got two isolated pockets of fire!” Orio radioed Lieutenant Joe Leavey of Ladder 15, who’d reached the 70th floor. “We should be able to knock it down with two lines.” Encountering the bloodbath in the sky lobby, Orio described what the man in the red bandanna, Ling Young, and others experienced more than a half hour earlier: “Seventy-eighth floor, numerous ten-forty-five, Code Ones.” In FDNY terms, Orio was describing a floor filled with fatalities. But others, still alive, needed rescue.

  “Numerous civilians,” Orio told Joe Leavey. “We’re gonna need two engines up here.”

  Orio offered guidance to the men coming up behind him, who were busy fighting a fire in Stairwell B: “I’m gonna need two of your firefighters, Adam [A] Stairway, to knock down two fires. We have a house line stretched, we could use some water on it. Knock it down, ’kay?”

  Meanwhile, another problem emerged, as the freight elevator Orio found earlier had stalled, trapping ten injured people sent down by members of Ladder 15. “We’re chopping through the wall to get out,” a firefighter radioed. He advised his commanders that they’d have to find another way up and down.

  As Orio surveyed the 78th floor, he eyed an escalator in the sky lobby: “We have access stairs going up to the 79th floor.” He announced that he wanted firefighters up there and higher. Some six hundred people remained on the upper floors, some calling 9-1-1 and their loved ones, some jumping or falling to their deaths. Orio intended to help as many as possible.

  As they awaited more firefighters, Orio and Ron Bucca apparently tried to free a group of people in an elevator who’d tried to evacuate after the North Tower crash, only to become imprisoned for nearly an hour when Flight 175 hit the South Tower. At 9:57 a.m., a Port Authority security guard named Robert Gabriel Martinez radioed a call for help: “We need EMS21 over here! On the double! Two World Trade Center!” He told the dispatcher that he was in the 78th floor sky lobby, then said, “The firefighters have eighteen passengers stuck, and they’re going to try to get them out! They’re trying!”

  One minute later, Orio made a final radio transmission, an unfinished, unanswered call from a commander to his troops. It cut out after the first words: “Battalion Seven to Ladder 15.”

  Brian and Stan ran across Liberty Street, avoiding or hurdling debris, and jogged a block and a half south down Greenwich Street. Shopkeepers in doorways cheered as the two men passed. Brian stopped outside a deli to catch his breath. The deli owner gave them each a bottle of water, then rushed back inside and reemerged with an unclaimed breakfast platter of sliced fruit and pastries. “Nobody’s coming for this today,” he said.

  Brian carried the platter as they continued south. They turned east and bumped into two priests. Stan felt an outpouring of built-up emotion. He wobbled and broke down.

  “This man saved my life!” Stan wept to the priests. “He called to me in the darkness!”

  Brian welled up. “I think you saved my life, too,” he told Stan. “You got me out of that argument about whether I should go up or go down.”

  In the middle of the street, one priest placed his hands upon them and led a prayer. Brian and Stan embraced. The priest mentioned that Trinity Church remained open, a block away. Brian and Stan headed for the sanctuary, walking along the upward-sloping street on the church’s south side, stopping beside a wrought-iron fence a few feet from the grave of Alexander Hamilton. They looked up at the burning South Tower, roughly a thousand
feet away. At that angle, they couldn’t see its twin. In two minutes, it would be ten o’clock.

  “I think those buildings are going down,” Stan said.

  An engineering student in college, Brian dismissed him: “No way. Those are steel structures.” He described the great strength of steel and assured Stan that the fires were from furniture, paper, carpeting, and other combustibles. Not knowing the true extent of damage in the South Tower, Brian felt certain that the fires would burn out and the buildings would remain standing.

  As Brian and Stan debated, and as Orio Palmer, Ron Bucca, and other firefighters went above and beyond, inside the South Tower an insurance company vice president named Kevin Cosgrove22 dialed 9-1-1. He was forty-six years old, a caring husband, and the kind of father who indulged his three children with dessert before dinner.

  Kevin worked for Aon Corporation, a giant insurance brokerage, on the 99th floor, far above the impact zone. After the plane hit, he walked down to the 79th floor,23 but he couldn’t get down through the stairwell he’d chosen. He climbed back up, beyond his office floor, apparently headed toward the roof. His 9-1-1 call connected from the 105th floor, where window washer Roko Camaj also took refuge.

  Kevin coughed on smoke as he sought help and reassurance from a male firefighter and a female police operator on the call.

  Kevin: “What floor are you guys up to?”

  FDNY: “We’re getting there. We’re getting there.”

  Kevin: “Doesn’t feel like it, man. I got young kids.”

  FDNY: “I understand that, sir. We’re on the way . . .”

  Kevin: “Come on, man.”

  The female operator came on the line: “We have everything, sir.”

  Kevin: “I know you do, but it doesn’t seem like it. You got lots of people up here.”

  Operator: “I understand.”

  Kevin: “I know you got a lot in the building, but we are on the top. Smoke rises, too. We’re on the floor. We’re in the window. I can barely breathe now. I can’t see!”

  Operator: “Okay, just try to hang in there. I’m going to stay with you.”

  Kevin: “You can say that. You’re in an air-conditioned building. . . . What the hell happened?”

  Operator: “Sir, I’m still here . . . still trying. . . . The Fire Department is trying to get to you.”

  Kevin: “Doesn’t feel like it.”

  Operator: “Okay, try to calm down, so you can conserve your oxygen, okay? Try to . . .”

  Kevin: “Tell God to blow the wind from the west! It’s really bad. It’s black. It’s arid [sic]. . . . We’re young men! We’re not ready to die!”

  The operator’s voice dropped to a whisper. She seemed on the verge of tears. “I understand,” she said.

  Kevin: “How the hell are you going to get my ass down? I need oxygen.”

  Operator: “They’re coming. . . . They have a lot of apparatuses on the scene.”

  Kevin’s voice grew raspy, his breaths shallow. His words became at once labored and frantic: “It doesn’t feel like it, lady. You get them in from all over. You get ’em in from Jersey. I don’t give a shit. Ohio.”

  Seeming unsure what else to say, the operator asked his name again.

  “Name’s Cosgrove. I must have told you about a dozen times already. C-o-s-g-r-o-v-e. My wife thinks I’m all right. I called and said I was leaving the building, and then—bang!”

  Kevin said he was with Doug Cherry, a colleague at Aon and a married father of three, and another person he didn’t name.24 He described his location again: “We’re overlooking the Financial Center. Three of us. Two broken windows!”

  Suddenly the building shifted. Before the call disconnected, Kevin screamed: “Oh, God! . . . Oh!”

  The forces of catastrophe25 and heat had gnawed at the South Tower impact zone for fifty-six minutes. The fires weakened and added stress to its remaining core columns, its exposed steel floor supports, and its load-bearing exterior walls.

  The clock read 9:59 a.m. Passengers and crew members of United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania fought to prevent a fourth building strike. The Pentagon and the North Tower burned. Countless millions watched on live television.

  Thick gray smoke gushed with greater intensity from the South Tower. The weakened east wall, where fires had been the most intense, lost the strength to withstand the inexorable pull of gravity. As the east wall failed, its multi-million-pound burden shifted through the building’s core to the adjacent north and south walls. But those walls were compromised, too. The damage from Flight 175 and the resulting fires made the load too much to bear. Sapped of their fortitude, the steel wall columns bowed farther and farther inward. Floors sagged deeper and deeper.

  The end began.

  Above the impact zone, twenty-five stories tilted as one, to the east and south, then went into free fall. The plunging upper floors overwhelmed the undamaged lower floors with a mass impossible to resist. Down it all went, almost straight down. The roar of steel, concrete, furnishings, and so many lives crumbling to the ground was a seismic event. It registered as a minor earthquake26 on sensors throughout the Northeast. It lasted about ten seconds.

  A cloud of grayish smoke and dust rose like the ghost of a vanished civilization. The collapse took the lives of everyone still inside. It left behind a hole in the skyline, a mound of rubble, and a question: Would its twin follow suit?

  Roughly eight thousand people27 escaped the South Tower. But 619 people remained on the 77th floor and higher, and eleven stood in the lobby, when it fell. That didn’t include emergency responders and others whose exact final locations were unknown. Among the dead were men and women who almost certainly would have lived if they’d evacuated immediately or soon after but who remained inside because they were told not to leave or because they stayed to help others.

  One was Rick Rescorla of Morgan Stanley. Of the firm’s twenty-seven hundred employees in the South Tower, all escaped safely except the former Vietnam platoon leader and five others, several of whom were members of Rescorla’s security team.

  Another fatality was the civilian rescuer who appeared in the 78th floor sky lobby, his features masked by a red bandanna. He’d later be identified by several people whose lives he saved as Welles Crowther,28 a driven, charismatic twenty-four-year-old equities trader with Sandler, O’Neill & Partners. A volunteer firefighter and college athlete whose bandanna was his trademark accessory, Welles had recently told his father and friends that he wanted to give up Wall Street to become a New York City firefighter. His actions spoke even louder than his words. Welles Crowther died in the South Tower lobby, surrounded by members of the FDNY, among them Assistant Chief Donald Burns.

  The South Tower collapse claimed the lives of the responders who reached higher in the building than anyone else: Battalion Chief Orio Palmer and Fire Marshal Ron Bucca. Others who sacrificed themselves included Battalion Chief Ed Geraghty; Lieutenant Joe Leavey; firefighters Doug Kopytko, Scott Larsen, and Doug Oelschlager; and sky lobby security guard Robert Gabriel Martinez. Outside the tower, among those killed was Police Officer Moira Smith,29 who made the first NYPD report of the Flight 11 crash. She guided dozens of evacuees, many of them hurt and bloody, away from the South Tower, each time returning for more. Victims trapped on upper floors included 9-1-1 callers Melissa Doi and Kevin Cosgrove, and window washer Roko Camaj.

  The World Trade Center’s security chief, John O’Neill,30 was last seen ten minutes before the collapse, walking from the North Tower command post toward the South Tower. O’Neill had begun the job only weeks earlier, after retiring from a storied career as the FBI’s foremost authority on Osama bin Laden. He’d publicly warned of the hidden dangers of militant terrorist groups four years earlier. At the time, he said: “A lot of these groups31 now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to.” O’Neill had been proven right.

  If Alayne Gentul had evacuated instead of going higher in the building
to tell others to leave, she wouldn’t have found herself trapped on the 97th floor. When the building collapsed, as Jack Gentul prayed in his New Jersey office, he felt as though his wife’s spirit passed through him. On his knees, Jack suddenly smelled Alayne’s perfume.

  For several seconds as the South Tower fell, Brian Clark and Stan Praimnath stood side by side on the sidewalk outside Trinity Church, mouths agape. When each floor pancaked downward, window glass burst into the bright blue sky. The shards looked to Brian like sparkly confetti in the morning sunlight. In their shock and disbelief, neither Brian nor Stan yet registered the human toll. Seconds later, the surreal beauty yielded to horror when dust as thick as malted milk stormed toward them.

  Brian and Stan sprinted down Broadway. Trinity Church’s brownstone walls shielded them, absorbing the blow. They glanced back to see swirling dust rise over the church, obscuring the steeple that once marked the highest point in New York City. The ash-filled cloud threatened to crash down onto them.

  Before the dust could overtake them, Brian and Stan ducked into a century-old stone building at 42 Broadway. As Brian pushed through the doors, he realized that he’d run the entire way carrying the breakfast platter. He stripped off the cellophane and invited several dozen strangers in the lobby to share the fruit and sweet rolls.

  Brian and Stan remained there for forty-five minutes, filthy and disheveled, resting and talking, unaware of the full extent of what had befallen the South Tower. They didn’t know it had collapsed entirely. In their partial awareness, they knew about the hijacked planes, but not that there were four. As they waited for sunlight to return, Stan handed Brian a business card, with his home address and a phone number for a clothing company that Stan and his wife, Jenny, ran on the side.