“No,” her sister said.
Cecilia felt her chest clench.
Ladder 6 and Josephine resumed their evacuation, but at a much slower pace, frequently moving aside to let other fire companies pass. Step-step-step-step became step . . . pause . . . step . . . pause . . . step . . . pause. Jay stayed close behind Josephine and Billy, who still hadn’t learned the fate of the South Tower.
A voice in Jay’s head screamed: “We gotta get outta this building! Move fast!” But he kept that to himself, instead relying on his old habit of forced calm.
“Billy,” Jay said in his quiet voice, the one he used when he felt most anxious, “can you move a little faster, please?”
“Okay, Cap,” Billy said. Beads of sweat rolled down his face.
“Josephine,” Billy told her, “your kids and your grandkids want you home today. We gotta keep moving.”4
Josephine tried, but even as she clung to Billy’s thick shoulder, even as she wanted to get out, Josephine’s pain dictated their pace. She placed both feet on each step, rested, then repeated the process. Her bad leg threatened to give out, and she grew shakier with each downward flight.
Around the fifteenth floor, Ladder 6 and Josephine ran into Battalion Chief Rich Picciotto, a longtime study partner of Jay’s for promotional exams. Picciotto brandished a bullhorn, a rare tool among firefighters, because he remembered the communications and crowd control problems during the 1993 bombing.
“All FDNY, get the fuck out!”5 Picciotto boomed on his bullhorn. To anyone who could hear him over the radio, he yelled: “We’re evacuating, we’re getting out—drop your tools, drop your masks, drop everything. Get out, get out!” Dozens of firefighters heeded his lifesaving command and raced toward the exits.
However, some firefighters continued to linger, including a large group seen resting on the nineteenth floor. By some accounts they numbered as many as one hundred men.6 On his way out, a fire lieutenant told them, “Didn’t you hear the Mayday?7 Get out.” Without moving, one answered casually: “Yeah, yeah, we’ll be right with you, Lou.” Some straggling firefighters apparently didn’t know the South Tower had fallen. Others had become separated from their units and insisted on waiting to regroup. Still others refused to leave while fellow firefighters remained inside the building and rescue work continued. One firefighter who heard an evacuation order made his intentions clear, radioing back: “We’re not fucking coming out!”8
Jay didn’t know what was happening high above him in the North Tower, or even above or below him in Stairwell B, but with each step he imagined that he was inside a ticking bomb, each second bringing them closer to the moment when the North Tower followed its twin to the ground.
Jay’s nervous suspicion had merit. The collapse of the South Tower had sent a pulse of air pressure9 that appeared to fuel and intensify the fire high in the North Tower. Within four seconds of the South Tower collapse, flames erupted from south-facing windows on the North Tower’s 98th floor, and flared and brightened on three floors just below. Within two minutes of the South Tower collapse, fire spewed from the North Tower’s 104th floor, three floors higher than where it had previously been seen. The fires threatened the building’s integrity, weakening the steel of the North Tower’s core, floors, and exterior walls.
Observers with unique vantage points watched it happening. At 10:07 a.m., a police helicopter pilot radioed, “About fifteen floors down10 from the top, it looks like it’s glowing red. . . . It’s inevitable.” A second NYPD pilot added, “I don’t think this has too much longer to go. I would evacuate all people within the area of that second building.”
But with no clear communication links between police and firefighters, FDNY commanders didn’t hear those messages. Neither did would-be rescuers, some climbing higher, some catching their breath, and some slowly descending the North Tower. Yet even without warnings of impending collapse, a sense of impending doom spread.
At 10:12 a.m., from the North Tower’s 64th floor, engineer Pat Hoey sought fresh advice from a Port Authority Police dispatcher. During a call an hour earlier, Hoey had been told to wait in his office for rescuers, so that’s what he and a group of colleagues did, using tape and coats to seal out smoke. Now, he checked again.
Pat Hoey: “I’m in the Trade Center, Tower One. 11 I’m with Port Authority and we are on the 64th floor. The smoke is getting kind of bad, so we are going to . . . we are contemplating going down the stairway. Does that make sense?”
At that moment, eighty-seven minutes had elapsed since Flight 11 hit the North Tower. Thirteen minutes had passed since the South Tower fell. Roughly twelve hundred steps separated Pat Hoey from the lobby and possible salvation. Now, finally, Pat Hoey and his coworkers got different, better advice.
“Yes,” the dispatcher told him. “Try to get out.”
Ladder 6 and Josephine Harris continued down Stairwell B. When they reached a landing, Jay ran into another firefighter friend, Faustino Apostol, a lanky, easygoing aide to Battalion Chief William McGovern. Apostol made no move to leave.
“Faust, let’s go,” Jay insisted. “It’s time to go.”
“That’s okay,”12 Apostol replied. “I’m waiting for the chief.”
Jay, his men, and Josephine, kept moving. When they reached the twelfth floor, Jay found several firefighters from Ladder 5 gathered around a man suffering from chest pains. Their leader was Lieutenant Michael Warchola, a twenty-four-year FDNY veteran. Years earlier, when Jay was in Rescue 3, he and Mike Warchola lived in the same town and carpooled to work. They’d remained friends, and Jay knew that Mike had recently submitted his retirement papers. His last scheduled FDNY shift was two days away.
“Mike, let’s go,” Jay told him.
“That’s all right, Jay. You got your civilian, we got ours. We’ll be right behind you.”
“Don’t take too long.”
As their descent continued, Jay’s radio worked intermittently, crackling and squawking with calls for help, updates on fire company locations, and occasional moments of heroic grace under pressure. At one point, Jay heard Paddy Brown, the hard-charging, charismatic FDNY captain who’d urged Jay to skip the lobby check-in line and immediately start climbing.
“Dispatch, Captain Brown,13 Ladder 3. . . . I’m at the World Trade Center. . . . I’m on the 35th floor, okay? . . . Just relay to the command post, we’re trying to get up, you know. There’s numerous civilians in all stairwells. Numerous burn injuries are coming down. I’m trying to send them down first. Apparently, it’s above the 75th floor. I don’t know if they got there yet, okay?”
Paddy Brown intended to find out—Jay listened on the radio as he reinforced his reputation as a human engine with no reverse gear: “Three Truck, and we’re still headed up, all right?” Brown said.
“Okay,” the dispatcher said.
Ever the gentleman, even in the midst of disaster, Paddy Brown signed off as he kept climbing: “Thank you.”
By the time Ladder 6 reached the tenth floor, Jay relaxed enough to start calculating. He knew that Roof Man Sal D’Agostino carried a 150-foot rope, coiled in a bag on his shoulder. If they got trapped, they could use the rope to rappel down the outside of the building. They’d have to rig a harness for Josephine, but if their lives depended on it, they’d make it work. A few floors lower, Jay took a sip of optimism: “We may actually make it out of here.”
Before Jay could share that thought with his crew, hope went sideways: Josephine’s legs gave out. Wracked by pain, she fell to the floor in tears on the fourth-floor landing.
“Don’t touch me!” Josephine cried. “Leave me alone! Go! Leave me!”
As his exhausted men turned to him, Jay gritted his teeth and swallowed his frustration. He had no intention of leaving her there, but with Josephine immobile, they needed a new plan. Jay pried open the steel door from the stairwell to the fourth floor, to search for a chair they could use as a litter to carry Josephine the rest of the way down.
Jay discovered
that it was a mechanical floor, not an office floor. He found only a flimsy stenographer’s chair and an overstuffed couch. Neither would work. Jay went deeper onto the floor. When he reached the far side of the North Tower from Stairwell B, a chill passed through him. The imaginary ticking bomb in his head grew louder. They’d carry Josephine out by hand, drag her if necessary. Upon deciding to return to the stairwell, Jay remembered the first rule he’d learned as a young firefighter: “Never run at a fire. If you’re running, you’re not looking.” He broke the rule and sprinted toward Stairwell B.
Five feet from the door, Jay felt a rumble, far worse than when the South Tower fell. The floor heaved. The time was 10:28 a.m., just over two hours after the hijacking of American Flight 11.
Jay lunged for the stairwell doorknob and pulled, but it wouldn’t open. He tugged again with all his might. The door swung toward him and Jay dived through, onto the fourth-floor landing of Stairwell B, nearly crashing into Tiller Man Matt Komorowski, who stood wide-eyed as the world rocked and rattled beneath his feet. The rest of Ladder 6 and Josephine were lower, on the steps approaching the third floor and below. Jay didn’t know what was happening, but he knew it was bad.
Almost a hundred stories above him, fires had weakened the building’s bones: steel floor trusses and core and exterior steel support columns. The south exterior wall became unstable. The wall automatically tried to shift its load to the core columns and adjacent exterior columns, but they’d been fatally weakened, too, and they couldn’t bear the extra burden. The upper floors sagged,14 pulling the exterior steel columns inward. Everything above the impact zone tilted to the south. Gravity went to work. The North Tower began to collapse on itself. As it did, bone-rattling vibrations of impending doom bounced Jay, his men, and Josephine against Stairwell B’s walls and floor.
The volume and violence intensified within seconds, as buckling floors grew closer. Compressed air sent a gale-force wind shooting down the length of Stairwell B, blasting everyone inside with a storm of dust and a hail of sheetrock fragments. The squall lifted Matt Komorowski off his feet and blew him down two flights of stairs, injuring his shoulder.
The sounds defied description. In all recorded history, only one other 110-story building had ever collapsed, and that was twenty-nine minutes earlier. Everyone who heard it from the inside took the experience to the grave. Maybe the sound and fury rivaled an Everest avalanche, or a volcanic eruption, or a rocket launch. Or maybe not. Nothing matched being inside five hundred million fiery, falling pounds15 of twisting steel, crumbling concrete, disintegrating office furnishings, shattering glass, and ending lives.
Curled in a ball, his eyes squeezed shut, his helmet knocked aside, Jay tumbled head over heels. As the noise grew closer, he braced himself for the crushing pain of a steel beam he anticipated would flatten him. Time slowed. Jay realized that the ticking time-bomb sensation in his mind had stopped. He accepted his fate, with thoughts of regret and disbelief: “I failed my men—I didn’t get them out,” and “I can’t believe I’m going to die right here in this stairway.”
After escaping from his elevator holding cell, Chris Young ran west down Vesey Street toward the Hudson River, never turning to look back. He reached a bench near the water as a dust storm overtook him, blotting out the sun and coating him in the powdered remains of the North Tower and all it contained. His mind blocked out how long he lay on the ground, sparing him the details of a terrifying memory. Chris still knew nothing about the planes, or about the fallen South Tower, and he didn’t know that the rumbling explosion he now heard and felt was the North Tower collapsing.
When the cloud passed, Chris pulled himself onto the bench. He unwrapped his dress shirt from around his head and tugged it over his T-shirt. Functioning but in shock, not sure what else to do, Chris walked north, toward the Marsh & McLennan office four miles uptown, where his day had begun. He wanted to collect a bag of personal items he’d left behind when he grabbed the box of materials for Angela Kyte.
As Chris walked, an EMT asked if he needed help.
“I’m fine,” Chris said. “I have to get back to my office.”
The EMT gave him a strange look and moved on.
Chris Young, aspiring actor, temp worker, and survivor, blended into the northbound horde of exiles from Lower Manhattan. The last person to escape from a World Trade Center elevator spoke to no one as he walked on.
Hours later, inside a conference room in the shell-shocked Midtown offices of Marsh & McLennan, Chris looked up to a television set as CNN replayed Flight 175 hitting the South Tower. He began to understand all he’d been through and broke down.
After the smoke and dust from the South Tower collapse cleared, EMT Moose Diaz settled his emotions. He exited the bus where he, a television cameraman, and several others had taken refuge. Just as Moose stepped back into the street, the North Tower buckled, following its twin to the ground. As smoke and debris chased him again, Moose ran several blocks north to an open hydrant near an improvised command post. Someone wiped his ash-covered face with a wet cloth. And then he returned to work, helping several asthmatics and a pregnant woman.
Moose had no radio, no helmet, but worst of all, no partners. He turned and walked back toward the World Trade Center to search for Paul Adams, whom he’d last seen when the South Tower began to fall. Moose ran into fellow Battalion 49 EMTs Kevin Barrett and Alwish Moncherry. The three men wept as they held one another for several minutes. Eventually, they made their way to an aid station set up at the recreation complex Chelsea Piers, at Twenty-Third Street and West Side Highway, where they prayed for news of their friends and colleagues Paul Adams, Roberto Abril, and Carlos Lillo.
Paul, meanwhile, had climbed back into his ambulance after dropping off patients at St. Vincent’s. While making a U-turn in front of the hospital, to return to the World Trade Center, Paul saw terrified faces looking south. One hundred and two minutes after being struck by American Airlines Flight 11, the North Tower was coming down. Paul drove toward whatever remained of the trade center. He again filled the rear of the ambulance. Paul also invited one man into the passenger seat and allowed another to ride on the hood. Back he went to St. Vincent’s.
Before Paul could return for more victims, the ambulance died of smoke inhalation in front of the hospital. Paul noticed a Port Authority police officer riding slowly past on a motorcycle. He asked for a ride, and the cop told him to hop on the back. Paul grabbed his trauma bag, jumped on, and returned to the scene to help anyone he could and to search for Moose, Roberto, Carlos, and the other Battalion 49 EMTs.
Twelve seconds after it began, twelve seconds that felt to Jay Jonas like two minutes, or maybe a lifetime, the din and the heaving stopped. Jay didn’t know it yet, but only a few of the lowest floors of Stairwell B had somehow survived relatively intact, entombed within a colossal mound of wreckage, a pile of ruins that began the day as the iconic North Tower of the World Trade Center.
In the crypt-like darkness, Jay took a breath. He gagged on smoke and dust and the faint smell of jet fuel and spit out silt while he rubbed his face and picked out debris from his eyes, nose, and ears. He heard others coughing nearby. Jay couldn’t see anyone, so he took roll call for Ladder 6: “Mike? Matt? Billy? Tommy? Sal?”
One after another they yelled back: “I’m here”—“Yep”—“I’m good.” All were banged up, but somehow all had survived, and none had serious injuries. Worst off was Mike Meldrum, woozy from a concussion.
“What about the woman?” Jay asked.
“Yeah, she’s right here,” Billy answered.
Josephine lived through the collapse clinging to the Irons Man’s boot. Billy and Tommy lifted mounds of fallen sheet rock and found her relatively unscathed.
Soon they discovered they weren’t alone inside the abbreviated remains of Stairwell B. Spread along the stairs of the lowest four floors, covered in dust but with only minor injuries, were six more firefighters: Battalion Chief Rich Picciotto, lieutenants Mickey Kro
ss and Jim McGlynn, and firefighters Bob Bacon, Jeff Coniglio, and James Efthimiades.
A few steps below Jay was a fourteenth survivor inside Stairwell B: Port Authority Police Officer Dave Lim, who’d run toward the North Tower when he heard the plane crash and left his bomb-sniffing dog Sirius in the basement of the South Tower. Dave Lim had made it all the way up to the lower sky lobby,16 on the 44th floor of the North Tower, when United Flight 175 hit the South Tower. He spent the next hour shepherding North Tower survivors toward exit stairs and checking for stragglers on floors where he didn’t see firefighters already working. Dave joined the Stairwell B evacuation when the South Tower fell, only to slow his descent to help more people.
As Jay absorbed the situation, he imagined that the building must have sustained only a partial collapse. He thought they should flee immediately, before the rest crashed down. Jay didn’t expect to survive a second fall. He told Billy Butler to fashion his nylon webbing into a full body harness for Josephine. They’d haul her downstairs to whatever remained of the lobby. But Matt Komorowski, two flights down, called out to squelch that plan. Piles of blasted sheetrock and debris clogged the bottom of the stairwell.
As he considered his next move, Jay heard a radio call from Lieutenant Mike Warchola that reinforced his mistaken belief that large parts of the North Tower still stood. Jay saw his longtime friend not ten minutes earlier, helping a man with chest pain.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”17 Warchola called. “This is the officer of Ladder Company Five. I’m on the twelfth floor, B stairway. I’m trapped, and I’m hurt bad.”
“Cap,” called Sal D’Agostino, “you get that?”
“I got it,” Jay said. Mike Warchola was saying that he was trapped in the same stairwell, also injured, only eight stories above them. Ladder 6 was on its way.
Fall and Rise Page 44