“No way,” Clark replied. “Those are steel structures.”
HIGH IN THE TOWER the two men had just escaped, an Aon Insurance vice president named Kevin Cosgrove was on the phone to a 911 operator.
COSGROVE: Lady, there’s two of us in this office … 105. Two Tower. We’re not ready to die, but it’s getting bad … Smoke really bad …
FIRE DEPARTMENT OPERATOR (joining the call): We’re getting there. We’re getting there.
COSGROVE: Doesn’t feel like it, man. I got young kids … I can barely breathe now. I can’t see … We’re young men. We’re not ready to die.
911 OPERATOR: Okay, just try to hang in there.
On the same floor, Cosgrove’s colleague Sean Rooney was still on the line to his wife, Beverly. Neither of them now hoped for rescue. “I think,” Beverly said, “that we need to say goodbye.”
• • •
FAR BELOW, on the ground near the towers, EMT Zarrillo completed his dangerous run to get to Chief Ganci and began blurting out the warning from Chief Peruggia. “Listen … the message I was given was that the buildings are going to collapse. We need to get our people out.”
“Who the fuck,” Ganci had time to say, “told you that?”
At that moment, Zarrillo would recall, there was “this thunderous, rolling roar.”
FIREFIGHTER RICHARD CARLETTI, peering up at the South Tower, had noted a sudden change. It “started to lean. The top thirty floors leaned over … I saw the western wall start to belly out.” The columnist Pete Hamill saw the walls “bulge out,” and heard “snapping sounds, pops, little explosions.” The explosive noises—to some they seemed “real loud”—were followed by a sort of “groaning and grinding.”
High in the tower itself, Aon’s Kevin Cosgrove finally lost patience with the 911 operator. “Name’s Cosgrove,” he said. “I must have told you 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 that I was fine … There are three of us in here … Three of us … Two broken windows. Oh, God … OH …!” Against a background of huge noise, Cosgrove screamed. Then the line went dead.
Beverly Rooney, still on the phone to her husband, heard sounds she, too, recalled as sounding like an explosion, followed by a crack, followed by a roaring sound. “The floor fell out from under him,” she thought. “It sounded like Niagara Falls. I knew without seeing that he was gone.”
Rooney and Cosgrove and so many others were gone. Then, and in little more than the time it takes to read these words, the South Tower itself was gone.
“The entire structure just sank down on to itself with a colossal whoosh,” reported the British journalist David Usborne, who had watched from the park in front of City Hall. “For a second, the smoke and dust cleared enough to reveal a stump of the core of the building … But the clouds closed in again and nothing more could be seen. All of us simply stood and gaped, hands to our faces.”
• • •
IN THE STUDIO AT ABC, Peter Jennings had been juggling the cascade of brutal news, his eye on one live monitor, then another. “It may be,” he said, puzzled by the vast new plume of smoke that had appeared where the South Tower had been, “that something fell off the building.” Jennings asked a colleague closer to the scene what had happened.
“The second building that was hit by the plane,” Don Dahler told him, “has just completely collapsed. The entire building has just collapsed … It folded down on itself, and it’s not there anymore.” The famously unflappable Jennings allowed himself an on-air “My God! My God!” Then, as if in the hope that he had misheard, “The whole side has collapsed?”
Dahler said it again. “The whole building has collapsed … There is panic on the streets. Thousands of people running … trying to get away.”
It was 9:59 A.M. One of the tallest buildings in the world had collapsed in no more than twenty seconds. “From a structure,” in the words of a witness, “to a wafer.”
IN THE WAKE of the roar there was darkness—an all-enveloping, suffocating, blinding dust cloud—and cloaked in the cloud a mass of humanity, rushing pell-mell for refuge.
Fire chief Ganci and his senior aides, and Zarrillo, the EMT who had brought word of a possible collapse, rushed into the garages of adjacent buildings. “I took ten or fifteen rolling steps into the garage,” Zarrillo recalled, “and hugged into a corner, an indentation, and I felt two or three guys get in behind me … The dust, the cloud, came rolling in.”
Chief Peruggia, still outside Building 7, became aware of the cloud as he answered a woman reporter’s question. “I grabbed the female, threw her through the revolving doors of Number 7 … Everything came crashing through the front … Next thing I remember I was covered in glass and some debris … I had shards of glass impaled in my head … I was able to get all this debris and rubble off me and cover my face with my coat so that I could breathe. It was very thick dust. You couldn’t see.”
When the building began to fall, EMT Jody Bell had been strapping a hysterical patient into a stair chair. “Everybody’s like, ‘Run for your lives!’ ” he remembered. “She’s hyperventilating … It’s like, a tidal wave of soot and ash coming in my direction. My life flashed before my eyes … I started to run—took about ten steps, and the lady started screaming, ‘Don’t leave me!’ … I got ahold of myself. ‘Wait, what the hell am I doing?’ I turned back, got her out of the chair. I said, ‘Ma’am, can you run?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ She took off. I’ve never moved so fast … The dust was like snowfall. The cars are covered … I’m breathing in mouthfuls … The scene was totally blacked out.”
Firefighter Timothy Brown had just left the South Tower, where he had seen people—only their legs and feet visible through the door of a stranded elevator—being “smoked and cooked.” On his way to fetch medics when the tower fell, he had ducked into the lobby of the Marriott, the eight-hundred-room hotel adjoining the Trade Center.
“Everything started blowing towards us that wasn’t nailed down … I’m guessing that the wind at its height was around 70, 75 miles an hour … You couldn’t see anybody … You couldn’t hear anything. It was becoming our grave … I thought it lasted four minutes … You could hear an eerie silence at first, and then you could start to hear people starting to move around a little bit, people that were still alive.”
Sixteen of some twenty firefighters who had been on a stairwell in the hotel were not alive. The collapsing tower had sliced the Marriott in two.
Spared thanks to their final dash, Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath had sheltered outside a church. They “stared in awe, not realizing what was happening completely … You at least thought people had a chance—until that moment. Then this great tsunami of dust came over … I suppose it was a quarter of an inch of dust and ash, everywhere.”
To Usborne, the British reporter, the dust was a “huge tidal wave, barrelling down the canyons of the financial district … The police went berserk, we went berserk, just running, running for our lives … we were in a scene from a Schwarzenegger film … thousands of Hollywood extras, mostly in suits for the office, with handbags and briefcases, just tearing through the streets of the city. Every few seconds we would snatch a look behind us.”
Columnist Hamill remembered dust blossoming perhaps twenty-five stories high, leaving the street a pale gray wilderness peopled by “all the walking human beings, the police and the civilians, white people and black, men and women … an assembly of ghosts.… Sheets of paper scattered everywhere, orders for stocks, waybills, purchase orders, the pulverized confetti of capitalism.”
INSIDE THE NORTH TOWER, few were even aware of the collapse. “We felt it,” one said. “Our tower went six feet to the right, six feet to the left … it felt like an earthquake.” “You just heard this noise that sounded like the subway train going by,” said another, “multiplied by a thousand.”
“It didn’t register,” recalled James Canham, a firefighter who was on the 11th floor. “Ther
e was the sound of the wind blowing through the elevator shafts … air pressure coming in … the entire floor enveloped in dust, smoke … Then I had gone right into the stairwell. There had to be twenty people piled up—I mean actually in a pile … I told them to grab the railing … to grab the belt loop of the person in front of them … If it was a woman … the bra strap. I told them, ‘Hold the bra, with the other hand hold the railing, and make your way down.’ Panicking and crying as they were, they were listening … on their way … coughing … disoriented.”
On hearing by radio of the South Tower’s collapse, police officer David Norman—on the 31st floor—could not comprehend what the operator told him. “To think that a building of one hundred and some stories had fallen was like, you know, not believable … He then explained that there was no South Tower, that it was absolutely gone.”
A great burst of energy, generated by the fall of the South Tower, had translated into a blast of air and dust shooting into the North lobby and on up into the building. For a while it was pitch black. Debris rained down, fatally for some—including the Fire Department chaplain, Mychal Judge. He died in the lobby, hit on the head by flying debris, as he returned from giving last rites to the dead and dying outside.
Fire chief Pfeifer, still running operations in the lobby, knew nothing at first of the collapse on the other side of the plaza. Thinking that something catastrophic was going on above him, though, he decided to pull his men out. Police commanders made the same decision, and an evacuation began.
The order did not reach battalion chief Richard Picciotto, on the 35th floor, but he took the decision on his own initiative. “All FDNY, get the fuck out!” he hollered on his bullhorn. And, over the radio, “We’re evacuating, we’re getting out, drop your tools, drop your masks, drop everything, get out, get out!”
Outside, meanwhile, Fire Department chief Ganci had sent his command group off in one direction while—with just one colleague—he headed back toward the North Tower. He went back, an aide explained simply, because he “knew that he had men in that building.” Some of those men, on the 54th floor, defied the order to evacuate. Intent on continuing to help civilians, they radioed, “We’re not fucking coming out.”
On the higher floors, civilians and firemen alike now had no chance of survival. For those really high up, it had long been so. Tom McGinnis, a trader with Carr Futures on the 92nd floor, had been trapped behind jammed doors since Flight 11 hit. He and colleagues had long been ankle-deep in water from either burst pipes or the sprinkler system. Now they were forced to the windows to get air. The phones were still working, and McGinnis told his wife he was going to crouch down on the floor. Then the connection was broken.
“WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW,” Chief Pfeifer said later, “was that we were running out of time.” In the dark and confusion of the lobby, he and other chiefs were for all intents and purposes operating blind. Firefighter Derek Brogan recalled the chaos that greeted him when he got there from above. “There was gas leaking all over the place. The marble was falling on top of us … You couldn’t see anything.”
Brogan stepped outside, to realize it was suddenly “raining” bodies. Fireman Robert Byrne found himself dodging jumpers and falling debris, weaving between corpses “littering the courtyard.” “Everything was on fire … I took a peek up … aluminum was coming down … going through thick plate glass like a hot knife through butter.”
Pilots in the helicopters, circling above, could see what was coming. As early as five minutes after the South Tower’s collapse, a Police Department pilot reported thinking that the North Tower’s top floors might collapse. Nine minutes on, another pilot said he thought the tower might not last long. Twenty minutes on, the pilot who had made the first report radioed that the tower was now “buckling and leaning.”
In the absence of an effective liaison arrangement between the Police and Fire Departments, this crucial information was not passed on to the firefighters.
AT 10:28, not quite half an hour after the South Tower’s slide to ruin, time did run out.
Fireman Carletti, now watching from the safety of a fire truck, saw the antenna atop the North Tower “do a little rock back and forth, and I could just hear the floors pancaking. I heard it for about thirty pancakes … boom, boom, boom, boom.” As when the first tower had fallen, others spoke of “explosions,” “pop, pop, pop” noises, a “thunderous, rumble sound.”
Firefighter Dean Beltrami saw “the entire facade starting to buckle … Nobody said anything. We just turned and ran.” EMT Jody Bell saw the tower “looking like it was going to tip, and there was a piece of the building coming down right on top of me … The building was hitting other buildings … This time it was worse … We were just running … I was damn near ready to jump in the river … The debris went well into the Hudson. It almost went to Jersey.”
“I opened up my eyes,” said EMS chief James Basile, “dust and dirt, debris … total darkness, I guess for about two, three minutes. I thought, ‘I guess this is what it’s like to be dead.’ Then I heard a woman screaming.”
“This beautiful sunny day now turned completely black,” said Chief Pfeifer, who survived the fall of the tower. “We were unable to see a hand in front of our faces. And there was an eerie silence.”
The 110-story North Tower had become a pile of flaming, noxious rubble—like its twin before it, in about twenty seconds.
THE SILENCE WAS BROKEN by the high-pitched tones of locator alarms, the devices that are triggered when a firefighter goes down and does not move. Three hundred forty-three men of the New York Fire Department would never move again.
The number of firefighters killed on 9/11 was almost a third of the total killed since the department’s inception in 1865.
Chief Ganci had been killed near the North Tower, and his body was one of the first to be found. Chief Pfeifer’s brother Kevin would be found dead in the rubble, his fireman’s pick at his side. Firefighting runs in families in New York, and fathers and sons, brothers and in-laws, would search for fallen comrades and kin for months to come.
Thirty-seven Port Authority police officers, including their superintendent, Fred Morrone, had died. Five of their bodies were found grouped around that of a woman in a steel chair, a device used to carry the disabled. They had died, it seemed, trying to carry her to safety.
The New York Police Department lost twenty-two men—and one female officer. She had brought an injured person out of the South Tower, only to be killed when she went back in to help another.
“THE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES,” New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, “will be more than any of us can bear.” Government officials would at first suggest, in a serious overestimate, that as many as seven thousand people had been killed in the city. The death toll was nevertheless stunningly high.
The number of fatalities in New York was eventually to stand at 2,763. That figure included the people in or near the Twin Towers, the passengers, crew, and hijackers aboard the two flights that crashed into the complex, and firefighters, police, paramedics, and other emergency workers. The highest number of casualties was in the North Tower—1,466, the majority of them above the point of impact—followed by 624 in the South Tower, all but 6 of them above the point of impact. One hundred and fifty-seven people died aboard the two planes.
Rarely mentioned, if at all, is the fact that this was not exclusively an American catastrophe. Five hundred and eleven nationals, perhaps more, from more than two dozen other countries, died in New York. They included dozens of Hispanic immigrants, delivery men, cooks, and dishwashers, with no work permits. They are almost all nameless now, remembered on no memorial.
THE TRADE CENTER COMPLEX rapidly became known as Ground Zero, for good reason. Assault by airplane had transformed it in an hour and forty-two minutes from iconic landmark to sixteen-acre wilderness. “All that remained standing,” wrote Atlantic Monthly correspondent William Langewiesche, “were a few skeletal fragments … vaguely gothic structures th
at reached like supplicating hands toward the sky. After the dust storms settled, people on the streets of Lower Manhattan were calm. They walked instead of running, talked without shouting, and tried to regain their sense of place and time. Hiroshima is said to have been similar in that detail.”
The towers had thrown mighty shards of steel and rubble to the ground and—such was the force involved—beneath it to a depth of thirty feet. Vehicles on the surface were flattened, power and telephone systems crippled, subways and watercourses severely damaged. Even before the collapse, plummeting rubble devastated nearby buildings.
The lesser giants of the complex had been known by numbers. Trade Center 3—the Marriott Hotel—was now wreckage. Great chunks of debris had fallen on Trade Center 7, which collapsed into its own footprint in the late afternoon. Trade Center Buildings 4, 5, and 6 suffered serious damage and were later demolished. Eight more structures, including World Financial Center 2 and 3—American Express—the Winter Garden pavilion, Bankers Trust, a City University of New York building, and Verizon Communications, were damaged but not beyond repair. Tiny St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, in the shadow of the South Tower, had been flattened.
The attackers had succeeded in stopping the engine room of America’s economy, if only briefly. Damage to Verizon Communications, gored by Building 7’s fall, crippled the electronics that connect the financial markets to the New York Stock Exchange. Exchange chairman Dick Grasso delayed opening the market, then closed it as the strikes escalated. It would not open again until the start of the following week.
Unlike the New York Stock Exchange, located at a relatively safe distance from the Trade Center, its cousin the American Stock Exchange was jolted by the second strike. The towers’ collapse left its offices filled with debris and remaining staff—the chairman and the president included—trapped for hours, covered in soot and dust. Seeing the exchange afterward, a leader of commerce would recall loftily, was like “visiting a third world country.”
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 8