American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  I could never really appreciate that place, which to me suggested the style in which too many people here must have lived—stacked in their fluorescent-lit towers, removed from the city outside, and wanting to drink in the morning. Rinaldi himself was not much of a drinker, though he liked a good Chianti with dinner. But during another survey of the PATH station, when I mentioned my dislike of the Commuter Bar scene, he grew upset and said he disagreed, maybe because he still thought of all these ruins in some way as his home.

  Rinaldi was human but also always an engineer: even during the worst moments of September 11 he continued to think analytically about the buildings. He was two days into the vacation on the Outer Banks, having breakfast with Audrey and friends, when his grown son called from Connecticut and said, “Hey, Dad. A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” It had happened at 8:46, just a few minutes earlier. Rinaldi turned on the television and saw the first pictures: it was the North Tower that had taken the hit, high on its north face and apparently well above the engineering quarters on the seventy-second floor, where Rinaldi’s staff was already at work. From the quantity of black smoke pouring out, Rinaldi realized that a major fire had erupted. Television reported that the airplane was believed to be small, possibly a commuter airliner. But Rinaldi knew the building’s true dimensions, and he was not fooled by television’s miniaturization. He said, “Boy, that’s pretty large damage for a small plane.” The entry wound seemed to stretch nearly the width of the North Tower’s 209-foot face, and against that scale it formed the head-on silhouette of a very large airplane, banked to the left. Later, when it became known that the airplane was a Boeing 767, it was easy to discern even the outline of its low-slung twin jet engines. Some people were reminded of the perfect holes left in walls and clouds in cartoons. Rinaldi was more practical. He interpreted the tightness of the gash’s pattern as a sign of the structure’s admirable redundancies: the impact had severed much of the North Tower’s all-important exoskeleton, the closely spaced steel columns that shared with an internal elevator core the work of supporting the building’s weight, and yet there was no sign of further unraveling. Rinaldi thought about the weather, which was bright and clear, and he wondered how any pilot on such a morning could have made such a mistake.

  But then, at 9:03, the second 767 came in fast from the south and, hooking a hard left turn, slammed into the South Tower. It hit lower than the first one had, but with much the same effect. Rinaldi saw the impact, the fireball, and the ensuing flames. One of the friends cried out, “My God, we’re under attack!” It was true enough, but Rinaldi was concentrating on the immediate practicalities. He said, “They’ll be evacuating down through the stairwells, and then they’ll have to put these fires out.” And that was true too. Rinaldi knew about the improvements that had been made in the stairwells since the terrorist bombing of February 1993, primarily in ventilation and emergency lighting, and he trusted that his staff in the North Tower would be able to reach the street from the seventy-second floor in about fifty minutes. If they had left the offices immediately, they would be almost halfway down by now, mixed into the crowds going steadily around and around, and probably starting to encounter firemen moving up to fight the flames. Even if they were descending more slowly, or for some reason had lingered in the office, there was probably no reason to worry about their safety. Rinaldi himself had needed five hours to escape the building when he’d been stranded there in 1993—and though today’s attack was clearly more severe, this time the fire was located higher than the engineering offices, and the smoke was rising away. Rinaldi was of course horrified by the scenes unfolding above the impact zones, where people had broken out the windows, and some were clinging to the outside and jumping and falling away. But it can be understood if he reacted to these first minutes of the disaster like an old Port Authority hand, with more confidence in procedure than in initiative and speed.

  He was not the only one. The memory of the 1993 bombing turned out to be a trap for many people on September 11, because it boiled down to the fact that though six people had died, the buildings had survived. The Fire Department was particularly proud of its reaction, which it promoted within the ranks as an important success story. Until September 11 it was the largest operation in the department’s history—a sixteen-alarm response that initially occupied nearly half the force, and engaged specialized crews (which included John O’Connell and Sam Melisi) for twenty-eight days afterward. As is well known, the bomb was set by Islamic militants, who were easily caught and convicted. It was a powerful device, the equivalent of more than a thousand pounds of TNT, detonated by a timer just after midday in a yellow Ford Econoline van parked on the B-2 level of the underground garage, near the foot of the North Tower. It blew a crater through all six levels of the basement structure, rupturing the surface of the Trade Center’s open-air plaza, destroying a hotel meeting room, and disabling the complex’s “communications center,” while also blasting downward through the stacked garages, lighting cars on fire, and dropping slabs into the chiller plant, causing peripheral damage. One of the people killed was a maintenance man who had placed his desk in an alcove in the North Tower’s exterior foundation structure. He was handling paperwork there when the floor dropped out beneath his chair. For weeks afterward the desk remained exactly as he had left it, cluttered with his work but perched impossibly on a steel spandrel high above the crater, as if some crane operator with a dark sense of humor had put it there.

  Rinaldi was late for lunch that day, and he was riding an elevator from his offices to the Port Authority cafeteria, on the forty-third floor, when mysteriously the elevator stopped. There were nine passengers aboard, including several other Port Authority engineers who knew the building well. Because elevator failures were not uncommon at the Trade Center, no one seemed frightened at first. The standard procedure was to push the red emergency call button; in theory, someone in the communications center would answer, and then find a way to work the elevator down, or send a rescue crew. This time, however, all that came back was a taped response, a voice repeating, Your call has been registered—we will get back to you in a minute. Your call has been registered—we will get back to you in a minute. During the nightmarish events that followed, the message played on for at least an hour, defeating one man’s attempt to silence it with a bundled coat and adding a surreal quality to the experience—something like being trapped and tortured inside a voice-mail machine.

  For a while the elevator was well lit. The engineers analyzed the problem, as engineers like to do. When a thin, acrid smoke began to filter in, they discussed the possibility that the elevator motor had shorted and burned; when the smoke grew thicker, they agreed that something more serious had occurred. Then the lights went out, and a dim emergency illumination automatically switched on. The smoke coming in turned dark brown and grew so heavy that visibility within the elevator cab became limited, and people began to cough and choke. Rinaldi pried the door open a crack and was faced with the close, solid wall of the elevator shaft. More smoke poured in through the opening. They had been trapped for about twenty minutes now, and their situation was suddenly desperate.

  People reacted in different ways. The only woman crouched silent in a corner as if she had gone into shock. One of the men grew hysterical—presumably because he was not an engineer. When I asked Rinaldi about it later, he said, “Yeah, we had a guy who was kind of emotional.”

  I said, “Crying?”

  “Hyper and screaming and kind of upset.”

  The others ignored him, and he finally quieted down.

  As for his own predicament, Rinaldi thought, “This is real.” He was not afraid to die so much as he was worried about abandoning his wife and children. He locked eyes with an old friend named Frank Lombardi, a balding, soft-spoken man who at that time was the Port Authority’s second-ranking engineer, and had his own family to leave behind. They exchanged little nods, acknowledging the danger they were in.

  It was essenti
al that they find fresh air, and soon. A lawyer named Rich Williams took off his undershirt and tore it into strips for people to tie around their noses and mouths. In desperation they pried the doors fully open. The wall that faced them was made of fire-resistant gypsum board two inches thick. Rinaldi, Lombardi, and Williams formed a chorus line and tried repeatedly to kick a hole through it—one, two, three!—but the wall merely flexed. Then Rinaldi remembered the drywall work he had done at home, and he suggested that they should score the surface. He took out his keys and immediately started scraping. Others crowded forward to join him. Using a key ring, one of them managed to unscrew a metal access plate that could serve as a chopping tool. The emergency lighting failed, and they continued to work under the green glow from a couple of electronic beepers. Eventually they dug all the way through, breaking a small hole into what seemed by feel to be an area of pipes. Fresh air came flooding in, diminishing the smoke inside.

  They rested, and after a while returned to their habitual deliberations. A Port Authority engineer suggested that the fire had been small and localized, and probably electrical. He was another one of those good company men with faith in procedures. He said, “Someone will eventually find us.”

  In retrospect it seems significant that the counterargument, which was essentially for improvisation, was made by Rinaldi. He said, “No. Listen to the silence. There’s not a sound in the building. There’s no noise. Nothing. No one. You don’t hear a thing. No one is here in the building. This had to be larger than just a small electrical fire. No one is going to come and get us. No one is here. The building is evacuated, and they don’t know where we are.”

  After further discussion the engineers agreed that it made sense to enlarge the hole and try to crawl through. The work was done again in nearly total darkness, and it was slow. Rich Williams took the lead. Finally he was able to reach across the pipes, break through a thin wall, and get his hand into a new space. He said, “I can feel this smooth, shiny surface.”

  One of the engineers said, “Maybe it’s a bathroom. Does it feel like tile?”

  Williams said, “Yes. It feels like it could be tile.” Then he said, “Wait a minute. I have something else.” He edged a little farther forward, reached down to grab something, and slid back into the elevator waving a disposable toilet-seat cover. It was a good moment. Nearly everyone laughed. As it turned out, they had dug through the back wall of a toilet stall in the bathroom of the law offices of Brown & Wood, on the fifty-eighth floor. Williams was the first to go all the way through. “I made it through,” he said.

  Rinaldi said, “Can you see light? Can you see a way out?”

  Williams answered, “I don’t know.”

  Rinaldi went through next, and dropped to the floor of the stall. He found the bathroom door and emerged into the deserted Brown & Wood offices, where he went to a window to look outside. It was a gray winter day, not yet four o’clock in the afternoon, with a light snow falling. Far below, on West Street, stood a jam of emergency vehicles with flashing lights. There was no sign of fire. He returned to the bathroom, and he and Rich Williams helped the others as, one by one, they squirmed through the wall and, using the toilet as a step, escaped from captivity. After more than three hours in the elevator, all of them were filthy with soot and sweat, and coughing violently. They assembled in the office and began a long descent through pitch-black stairwells to the street. Like many of the survivors of 1993, they navigated in the darkness by linking hands, counting the steps, and talking themselves across the stairway landings. It was an uncertain and slow escape, nearly two hours long. But of course ultimately it succeeded.

  Eight years later, on September 11, Rinaldi’s memory of success informed his reactions during the first hour of the unfolding events, even after the second airplane struck and he knew that the Trade Center was under attack. His confidence was widely shared within the towers themselves, where people on the lower floors were isolated by the size of the structures from the horror overhead. Most knew less than Rinaldi did about what was happening, because of course they were not watching television. More than 15,000 walked out safely, in stairwells that were well lit and smoke-free. In 1993 the mood of the crowd inside the stairwells had been confused and fearful. This time there was little of that. Indeed, the mood was rather too restrained. In the South Tower, before it was struck, a Port Authority man made an announcement on the public-address system that the problem was contained to the North Tower, and that people could return to their offices—this despite the fact that jumpers could be seen falling into the plaza just outside. Most people ignored him. But in both towers a strange, Orwellian calm prevailed. People carried their morning coffee into the stairwells. They were not supposed to talk, and generally they did not. Those who tried to move fast or get ahead were reprimanded. But most were well behaved. They stayed obediently in lines to one side, leaving open lanes for the firemen to climb. Those who later believed that they had seen looks of knowing self-sacrifice in the firemen’s eyes were understandably confusing the chronology of events. The looks in the firemen’s eyes came from the extreme fatigue of having to hump heavy loads up so many stairs, as well as from the anxiety of moving into battle—in this case against a dangerous fire that would have to be fought from below. The firemen remembered the successes of 1993 as clearly as anyone, and they were no more prescient than others. But then, at 9:59 A.M., the South Tower made a noise variously heard as a roar, a growl, or distant thunder.

  By September of 2001 Rinaldi’s soft-spoken friend Frank Lombardi had risen to become the Port Authority’s chief engineer—an exalted position with ties to monumental public projects of the twentieth century, not the least of which was the World Trade Center itself. Lombardi’s office was grand. It occupied the southwest corner of the North Tower’s seventy-second floor, and looked out over New York Harbor to the flats of Staten Island and New Jersey. As elsewhere in the towers, the view was restricted because the windows were only twenty-two inches wide and were inset one foot from the exterior—an unfortunate consequence of the close spacing of the external columns and also, apparently, of the discomfort that the principal architect, Minoru Yamasaki, felt with wide-open perspectives from such heights. Nonetheless, for a busy man like Lombardi the view was good enough. It was a backdrop. He didn’t spend a lot of time looking outside.

  In any case, the first airplane came in high and from the other direction—down the Hudson from the north, down Manhattan, and into the North Tower between the ninety-fourth and ninety-eighth floors. When it struck, it blew fuel and debris straight through the building. Lombardi was at his desk. He heard nothing, but felt the tower sway, and saw people in the hallway go airborne before they fell. His first thought was that New York was experiencing an earthquake. But then, just outside his window, he saw a huge ball of fire followed by a rain of vapor and white paper, and he realized that the building had been hit—though he assumed on the south face, and probably by accident. He went out to check on his staff. He told people to go to the stairwells and leave. Most of them did. He went back into his office and stared at the papers fluttering down, noticing how slowly some were falling, and how close to the window. From the quantity he realized that the perimeter wall had been badly breached. Right away he got three phone calls. The first was from his secretary’s husband, who was in New Jersey, and had either seen or heard of trouble. Lombardi said, “She’s fine. She’s on her way down.” The second was from the friend of a friend, who asked, “Is he okay?” Lombardi said, “Yes. He’s on the way down.” The third was from a contractor, who said, “Frank, do you need help?”

  Lombardi wasn’t sure. He said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know, but something hit you.”

  “I know, but what?”

  The contractor said, “I don’t know.”

  It never crossed their minds to consider a hijacked airliner on a suicide flight. Lombardi wanted to verify that the seventy-second floor had been evacuated. With a couple
of colleagues he searched the one acre of floor space, mostly cubicles. It was empty. But when he went to the stairwell to leave, he heard shouting behind an elevator door. Two men were trapped in the cab. Lombardi did not think they were in immediate danger, but having gone through his own elevator ordeal in 1993, he wasn’t about to abandon them. The door was jammed, and required about twenty minutes to pry open. During that time one of Lombardi’s colleagues was back in his office, getting tools, when the telephone rang. The man on the line said, “You guys are still up in Tower One? Don’t you realize that Tower Two was hit?” In annoyance, Lombardi’s colleague said, “Will you please stop spreading rumors?” and hung up. It seems surprising now. These were alert people, but they were confused by their proximity to an event too large to imagine.

  Lombardi descended the stairwells of the North Tower to the plaza level, where he looked out and saw body parts scattered across the concrete. He went down another level, where all around him crowds were evacuating into West Street. But he was the chief engineer, and he felt a duty to respond—though how and to what he still had no idea. Prompted by memories of 1993, when a command post had been established in the complex’s hotel (the Marriott, World Trade Center Three), he joined a few other Port Authority men and headed there through a passageway. They had assembled for a talk in the hotel bar along with some firemen when the place erupted in a tremendous roar. A pressure wave shattered glass, picked up the men, and threw them to the side. Lombardi thought that terrorists like those of 1993 had bombed the hotel and were maybe coming in through the doors, and he considered the irony that he had survived then only to die now, not 200 feet from where terrorists had hit before. The truth was stranger still: the South Tower had just collapsed over his head, and he had been saved by a few unusually heavy beams used in the structural splinting and patching up that he himself had directed after the earlier bombing. But he knew none of this at the time.