“Please don’t let me die!” Cecilia prayed.
She feared for her friends, who’d been only steps behind her, but she focused her thoughts and energy on her promise to Carlos that she’d escape on her own. “I have to get up!” she told herself. Cecilia began to crawl when another burst of pressure from the falling tower next door propelled her forward, lifting her onto her tiptoes. She feared the store windows would shatter and flay her with flying glass.
As she fought to keep her balance—“Please, God, please don’t let me fall!”—yet another pressure burst hurled her headlong toward a marble pillar outside a Gap store. Somehow, she remembered Carlos’s advice: she skidded onto her side and curled into a fetal position, her arms wrapped around her head.
Afraid that the ceiling might collapse, Cecilia lay motionless, knees pulled toward her chest, arms protecting her head, one hand still gripping her purse. She slowly opened her eyes but saw nothing. Gripped by panic in the pitch darkness, unsure if she was buried alive or dead, Cecilia screamed.
“Help! Is anybody out there? . . . Carlos! . . . Carlos!”
She heard the voice of a man she didn’t know: “Don’t worry, I’m going to come for you.”
Cecilia unwrapped one arm from her head and held out her hand. She guided the man with her voice as he crawled toward her until he touched her fingertips. Together, they rose unsteadily to their feet. Afraid to take even one step in the dark, worried that they’d fall into a hole in the floor and plummet to the parking levels below, Cecilia remembered having seen several firefighters farther down the mall corridor before everything went black.
“Anybody out there?” Cecilia cried. “Anybody have a flashlight?”
From around a corner, where the Gap store led toward the PATH trains, several lights came on and shone in their direction. The firefighters clustered around Cecilia, the stranger who still gripped her hand, and several others, and formed them into a tight circle. With flashlights pointed to the floor, they led the group to a stationary escalator for the climb up to the street-level exit outside Five World Trade Center.
“My husband is going to be out there,” Cecilia told the man beside her. “He’s a paramedic.”
Carlos Lillo radioed his partner Roberto Abril that he was between two buildings near where they separated, which Roberto interpreted to mean a passageway between the North Tower and Six World Trade Center, near the northwest corner of the complex. Roberto tried to get there but couldn’t. A short time later, he ran into a boss, EMS Captain Joseph Rivera.
“Listen,” Roberto said, “I’m missing my partner.5 We got separated for some reason and I need to go back. I need to find him.” Rivera told Roberto to care for the injured people all around them while he searched for Carlos.
Before the South Tower fell, numerous emergency responders had seen Carlos at one point or another, helping people even as he continued to ask if anyone had seen his wife. Paramedic Manuel Delgado saw Carlos on the east side of the Trade Center, on Church Street, with tears streaming down his face as he worked. The sight struck Delgado as strange, because Carlos always seemed to be smiling. At first, Delgado thought his friend was overwhelmed by the enormity and needed to get away from the scene. Then Carlos gestured toward the North Tower and told him, “My wife’s in there.”
“Listen, man,”6 Delgado said, “this is God’s will. You’ve got to help me with the people. Snap out of it. We’ve got a lot of patients. You’ve got to help me here.” Carlos kept working, and eventually Delgado lost sight of him.
After dropping off Elaine Duch at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Moose and Paul drove their ambulance back to the staging area at Vesey and Church and resumed work. A woman who’d escaped from one of the towers appeared to be having a heart attack. A lieutenant called to them: “You got a cardiac patient—take her!” The time was 9:59 a.m.
As they strapped the woman onto a stretcher, Moose and Paul heard a volcanic rumble, then a boom, then a Dante’s choir of screams.
EMT Kevin Barrett yelled, “Moose, run!”
The South Tower began its collapse.
Moose tripped over the stretcher as the woman fought to unbuckle herself. Moose mentally downgraded her condition from heart attack to anxiety attack. He helped her off the stretcher and screamed: “Ma’am—just go! Go straight, go straight!”
But there was nowhere to go, no way to outrun the tsunami of smoke and debris. It caught Moose as he ran and slammed him to the ground. It engulfed him, choked him, coated him. He tried to keep moving, but he banged headfirst into a metal scaffolding pole. He lost his helmet and went down. People rushed past, grabbing him, moaning, falling. He helped when he could, even as he kept moving. His mind whirled to a decade earlier, when he had run out of oxygen during a scuba dive at a Pennsylvania quarry. Death beckoned.
Everything grew quiet. The South Tower had come to rest in a smoking pile, and all Moose could hear were agonized cries. But smoke and ash still enveloped him, and Moose felt his lungs running out of air. A hand grabbed his leg and he began to panic, costing him more precious oxygen. Moose reached down to help but feared being dragged down, so he pulled away from the grasping hand. His lungs burning, the world still dark with smoke, Moose fought the urge to lie down and accept his end.
Feeling with his hands, still moving, he looked for a place to curl up and die. But then he thought about his phone call with his wife, Ericka, and how she said she loved him and to be careful. Moose began to cry at the thought of leaving her and their sons. He silently scolded himself: “I told her I was going to be all right, and I’m doubting myself now. I shouldn’t have told her.” The thought of breaking his word kept Moose moving.
Moose started to run, but he still could barely breathe, so he slowed down. He feared he couldn’t keep his promise to Ericka. Then Moose saw a light.
The white beam, strong and bright enough to cut through the smoke and haze, bobbed oddly up and down. Behind it was a man with a white beard and long hair. Moose wondered if he was already dead. He choked out a question through his tears: “Are you Jesus Christ?”
“No,” said the bearded man. “I’m not Jesus. I’m a cameraman.”
Moose looked more closely: the bobbing light sat atop a shoulder television camera.
“I’m going to die,” Moose said.
“No, you’re not,” the cameraman said.
“Damn, you saved my life.”
They hugged, and the cameraman began to cry, too. “I’ve had enough of this job,” he said as he grabbed Moose. “We’ll do this together.”
Moose and the cameraman felt their way down the street and came upon a city bus. They pushed open the door and went inside. Trying to turn on the ignition, Moose pressed a button and compressed air from the brakes created a brief blast that cleared the smoke. Seeing people all around, Moose and the cameraman pulled more than a dozen people onto the bus: men in suits, women in business skirts, a group of construction workers, anyone they could reach. They huddled for a few minutes, hugging one another.
When the South Tower began to collapse and the woman who thought she was having a heart attack ran from Moose and Paul’s stretcher, Paul ran, too. He tripped over a fire hose, and by the time he rose, he couldn’t find Moose. Paul sprinted to a tall gate at the entrance to the Millennium Hotel’s parking garage. A small overhang shielded him from the rain of debris, but he felt smothered by smoke and ash. Alongside him was a man with a small gold shield who Paul thought was an FBI agent.
Paul covered his face with his helmet, then used it to protect the man at his side. His lungs filled with soot. It felt as though he’d plunged his face into a barrel of dust and breathed deep. It occurred to him that he was inhaling a pulverized building, concrete, glass, carpet, chemicals, and who knew what else. Plus whatever remained of the people who’d been inside, the emergency responders and executives, the secretaries and messengers, the custodians and security guards, along with the passengers, crew, and whoever had flown a Boeing 767 into th
e South Tower on that beautiful summer morning.
Minutes passed. Paul’s eyes burned. Choking, desperate for air, Paul began to hyperventilate. On the verge of collapsing, he forced himself to slow his breathing until the plume dissipated. Seeing an opening, Paul grabbed the man with the gold shield and ran to an ambulance parked about twenty feet away on Church Street. Using a master key he kept on a chain attached to his work belt, Paul helped the man inside and gathered about a dozen other people needing help. He drove to St. Vincent’s Hospital and dropped them off.
When its twin fell, the North Tower lobby filled with blinding dust and debris,7 plunging everyone into pitch darkness and forcing FDNY commanders to flee. Flashlights guiding their escape, they climbed frozen escalators from the lobby to the mezzanine, where Chief Hayden stumbled8 on a body. A beam of light revealed it was Father Mychal Judge, the senior FDNY chaplain, last seen in his clerical collar and his white helmet, praying for the horror to end. Judge had suffered an apparent heart attack during the collapse. Efforts to revive him failed, and five men carried his slumped body to St. Peter’s Church, a scene captured by Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton.
As they abandoned the North Tower command posts for safer locations, fire bosses didn’t immediately know what happened. A fireboat on the Hudson River reported the South Tower’s total collapse, but none of the FDNY commanders heard the announcement. Nevertheless, as they searched in the artificial darkness for an exit, Chief Joe Pfeifer used his handheld radio to order all firefighters to immediately evacuate the North Tower: “Command to all units in Tower One, evacuate the building!”9 But again, communication failed.
Jay Jonas and his men didn’t hear the order, and neither did scores of other firefighters still responding to the last order they had received: go upstairs and help everyone you can. The evacuation message apparently did get through to at least some firefighters, but the rest had to figure out for themselves what had happened and decide what to do next.
Inside Stairwell B, the lights flashed back on within thirty seconds after Jay heard an explosion and felt the North Tower shudder. Still on the 27th floor, Jay told Captain Billy Burke: “You check the south windows, I’ll check the north windows. We’ll meet back here.”
Jay rushed to the north side of the North Tower. He pressed close against the narrow windows but could see nothing but smoky white dust. He returned to find his friend Billy Burke with a strange look on his face, his head tilted, as though he doubted what he’d seen. Jay expected him to say that part of the North Tower had broken off high above them.
“Is that what I thought it was?” Jay asked. But he’d underestimated the damage.
“The other building . . . just . . . collapsed,” Billy replied.
That made no sense. Jay had fought countless fires and studied countless more, and he’d never heard of a skyscraper collapsing from fire. But the look on Billy’s face convinced him it must be true. Jay instantly understood that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had just died in the South Tower, including some of his brother firefighters. He also grasped that the building where he and his men stood, which had been burning more than fifteen minutes longer than its twin, was in grave, imminent jeopardy.
Jay hesitated. He put great stock in following orders and maintaining discipline, especially in the midst of a chaotic fire response. Jay hadn’t heard a command on the radio ordering them to evacuate, and he didn’t want to break ranks. But Jay also knew that he couldn’t rely on his radio, so maybe he’d missed a Mayday order to evacuate.
Jay made his decision. He walked over to his men, all still catching their breath: “It’s time for us to go home.” He didn’t explain his reasoning, or even that the South Tower had fallen. At that moment, just after 10 a.m., Jay and his men were among roughly eight hundred people10 still inside the North Tower stairwells.
Nobody moved. The men of Ladder 6 stared back at Jay, teetering between confusion and defiance. As far as they were concerned, the South Tower still stood, civilians in the North Tower still needed rescuing, and they still had a job to do. Leaving wasn’t an option. Moments like these were why they became firefighters. Jay didn’t realize that his men hadn’t heard his conversation with Billy Burke, so they didn’t know the danger they faced. But he did know that he’d given them an order.
“What?” Jay demanded. “I said, ‘Let’s go!’”
The men of Ladder 6 rose, grim-faced and reluctant, to retrace their steps downward in Stairwell B, along with Andy “Nozzles” Fredericks and Billy Burke.
At some point in their evacuation, they lost touch with Andy. Jay thought he must have returned upstairs. Separately, Billy Burke radioed the men of his company to head for the exits—“Start your way down,”11 he told them. “We’ll meet at the rig.” But Billy didn’t join them or Ladder 6. He remained inside the North Tower to help two other men on the 27th floor.
Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz were close friends12 who worked as computer programmers for Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. At forty-two, weighing nearly 300 pounds, Ed had relied on a wheelchair since a diving accident as a young man left him paralyzed. Abe was fifty-five, an Orthodox Jew who lived with his older brother and his family. Both bachelors, Ed and Abe exchanged DVDs, shared meals and musical tastes, and played computer games of chess and golf. Ed couldn’t get down the stairs, and his pal Abe refused to leave him. Abe had already told Ed’s aide to leave because she had children at home. Billy Burke made the pair his responsibility, and so Billy, Ed, and Abe became a trio.
Chapter 19
“Remember This Name”
The Pentagon
On the Pentagon’s burning first floor, working his way through the heat and smoke of the debris-filled Navy Command Center, Captain Dave Thomas shined his penlight at what looked like a rubber Halloween mask. He squinted through the gloom and saw that the squished face belonged to a man trapped in a chair, his head jammed against part of a wall and whatever else had fallen on him. It wasn’t his best friend, Bob Dolan, it was a stranger: retired Navy aviator Jerry Henson.
“Hey, there’s a guy in here!” Dave Thomas yelled. No one replied, so he screamed at the top of his lungs: “I’ve got a guy! Help!”
Dave Thomas moved closer. The tiny beam of light and his shouts sparked something in Jerry’s assistant, Petty Officer Charles Lewis, who’d been trapped nearby. He’d thought there was no way out, but now he saw possibility for deliverance.1 Lewis scrambled and squirmed through burning pieces of the wrecked office, past Dave Thomas.
In the semidarkness, Lewis bumped into Dave Tarantino and SEAL Craig Powell, who directed him out to AE Drive. On his way toward safety, Lewis told them that others remained trapped inside. Dave Tarantino and Craig Powell moved in and quickly freed Petty Officer Christine Williams from under a pile of rubble. She told them that her boss, Jerry Henson, remained stuck. As Powell led her outside, Dave Tarantino slogged deeper into the wreckage. He shined his flashlight toward movement and saw Dave Thomas struggling to raise the load of broken furniture and shelves to free Jerry from his desk entrapment. It wouldn’t budge.
On the second floor, civilian Pentagon worker Lois Stevens had given up. Exhausted, fighting for breath, she couldn’t crawl another foot. Every time she opened her mouth she thought she’d spit fire.2 She curled into a ball, prayed, and thought of her husband. Smoke filled the room, drawing closer to the carpet. Lois urged Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills to leave her behind, to let her die in the rubble of Dilbertville.
“Just get on my back!” Marilyn demanded. “Please. Get on my back. I’ll crawl, and I’ll carry you out of here!”
Lois remained in her fetal curl, but Marilyn refused to accept it. Even as she feared that they’d soon run out of air, Marilyn worried more about having to tell Lois’s husband and grown children that she’d left behind their beloved wife and mother. Burning bits of ceiling tiles melted from their frames and fell like tiny meteors around them.
Marilyn beseeched Lois: “Come on. P
lease. We’ve got to get out of here!”
Lois relented. She rose to her knees and hung on3 as Marilyn resumed crawling like a blind mole, burrowing through debris, feeling her way through the dark.
While Marilyn was encouraging Lois not to surrender, Major Regina Grant disappeared. She’d gone off on her own, generally following the route she had seen badly burned security officer John Yates take when he vanished into the smoke. Still on her hands and knees, Regina kept her head down, focusing on her fingernails, as she scrambled toward an exit. Several times she found herself underneath a sprinkler. Each time, the smoke cleared enough for her to see a man’s black shoes, moving slowly through piles of furniture and debris ahead of her. She assumed the shoes belonged to John Yates, so she kept crawling in that direction.
When the shoes disappeared, Regina Grant yelled, “Where are you?!”
Someone called back through the darkness: “Right here. Are you okay?”
It wasn’t Yates, but Sergeant Major Tony Rose, an Army career counselor who’d been in the service since he graduated from high school twenty-nine years earlier.
“Follow the light!” Rose told her.
Regina tried, but soon she stopped. From somewhere behind her, she heard Marilyn Wills encouraging Lois Stevens not to give up. Ahead, Regina saw a dim glow, but the smoke and heat became too much. Spent, she stopped and said her prayers. Regina thought about her husband and about the military life insurance policy she’d recently increased from $10,000 to $150,000, with portions dedicated to her brothers and sisters, nieces, and nephews. Knowing that she’d be leaving something to her whole family gave Regina comfort. “I have done everything that I can do,” she told herself.
As she prepared to die, Regina saw personnel administrator Tracy Webb trying to rise. The fireball that had torched John Yates as it blew through the room had badly burned Tracy’s head. Initially, Tracy followed Lieutenant Colonel Bob Grunewald, who’d crawled across the room with Martha Carden clenching his belt, but Tracy lost sight of them. Now, like Regina, Tracy felt she’d gone as far as she could. She stood up, intending to fully inhale the smoke and accept her fate.
Fall and Rise Page 39