by Dwyer, Jim
“Hi, this is Christine, assistant GM of Windows. We’re getting no direction up here. We’re having a smoke condition.”
Only a few minutes before, she had been chatting on the phone with her mother in Chicago to plan her parents’ visit. Now she was trying to organize an escape.
“We have most people on the 106th floor; the 107th floor is way too smoky,” she continued. “We need direction as to where we need to direct our guests and our employees, as soon as possible.”
Maggett was 1,300 feet below Windows on the World. No one could get to the restaurant now other than by climbing the stairs. It would take hours.
“Okay,” said Maggett. “We’re doing our best, we’ve got the Fire Department, everybody, we’re trying to get up to you, dear. All right, call back in about two or three minutes, and I’ll find out what direction you should try to get down.”
Olender started to speak: “Because our … our—”
“Are the stairways, A, B, and C all blocked off and smoky?” asked the policeman.
“The stairways are full of smoke, A, B, and C,” Olender reported. “And my … and my electric … my fire phones are out.”
“Oh, yeah, they’re … all … all the lines are blown out right now,” Maggett said. “But everybody is on their way, the Fire Department—”
Olender would not take that as reassurance.
“The condition up on 106 is getting worse,” she said.
“Okay, dear,” Maggett said. “All right, we are doing our best to get up to you right now. All right, dear?”
“But where … where do you want to [inaudible] can you at least … can you at least direct us to a certain tower in the building?”
“Uh …” Maggett said.
“Like what tower … like what area … what quadrant of the building can we go into, where we are not going to get all this smoke?” she asked.
“Unless we find out what exactly … area is the smoke … where most … most of the smoke is coming up there, and we can kind of direct that,” Maggett said. “As I said, call back in about two minutes, dear.”
“Call back in two minutes,” Olender said. “Great.”
“About two minutes, all right?” he said.
Two minutes, no time at all, except in a tower that raged with fires, where poisonous smoke was billowing through channels and ducts, and where the sprinklers were unable to suppress the flames. In two minutes, hundreds of people in the north tower would get word out, or try to. Their immediate worry was their own ability to elude the heat and smoke; they had not yet begun to doubt that the tower would survive the crash.
The building had easily absorbed the impact of the jetliner. The pinstripe columns that gave the towers their distinctive look—and kept the windows a mere twenty-two inches wide, comforting their height-fearing architect—were not simply ornamentation, or panic handles for acrophobiacs. They actually held the buildings up. The towers had columns in the central core, but most of every floor was open space. Those external pinstripes made the open floors possible by carrying the great weight of the building, running it down to the foundation, into the bedrock, and doing it with strength to spare. Gravity was actually a lesser force to be reckoned with than the wind. The towers stood like huge sails at the foot of Manhattan Island, with each face built to absorb a hurricane of 140 miles per hour. The wind load on an ordinary day was thirty times greater than the force of the airplane that would hit it on September 11. The mass of the tower was 1,000 times greater than the jet’s. Given the sheer bulk of the towers, it was not surprising that the building continued to stand after the plane hit.
Indeed, that very assurance had been offered by the Port Authority more than three decades earlier, when private developers warned that planes would inevitably strike the towers. Now that the catastrophe had been realized, the surviving pinstripe columns on the north face of the north tower formed an arch around the wound in the building, creating new paths for the weight of the building to travel. In the instant after the plane struck, the everyday physical demands on skyscrapers, gravity and wind, were instantly passed along the arch to those unscathed columns. It looked as if the structural engineers had been correct back in the 1960s: the building was robust enough to stand up to the impact from an airplane.
No one had designs, however, for the people inside, perhaps 1,000 of whom were alive but marooned on the upper floors of the north tower. So they did what humans do: they talked. Just as arches had formed in the surviving structural steel columns and prevented an immediate collapse of the tower, the men and women stranded on the upper floors dialed cell phones, tapped the miniature keyboards on their pagers, and spoke into two-way radios, fashioning a bridge of voices.
Many in the crowd made their living providing information or the equipment that carried it, communications experts taking part in the morning’s conference in the Windows on the World ballroom. They scrambled across their virtual bridge for bits of news. During the early minutes of the crisis, at least forty-one people in the restaurant sent word outside the building.
“Watch CNN,” Stephen Tompsett, a computer scientist at the Risk Waters conference, e-mailed his wife, Dorry, using his BlackBerry communicator. “Need updates.”
Pete Alderman and William Kelly, the two Bloomberg L.P. employees who had had their photograph taken before the breakfast conference began, sent e-mails to their offices and family, in hurried spelling and typography.
A friend of Kelly’s sent around a group e-mail about the plane crash, not realizing that one of the recipients was in the building. Kelly replied, “I’m stuck on the 106th floor … stuck.”
Alderman heard from a colleague who knew that he was scheduled to be in the trade center. “Pete, if you get this please let me know that you’re okay,” the colleague wrote.
“THERE IS A lot of SMOKE,” Alderman replied.
“Are they telling you what to do?” the colleague asked.
“No its a mess.”
“Are you still in the building.”
“Yes cant move.”
At the same time, Alderman was swapping messages with his sister Jane.
“I’m SCARED,” he wrote. “THERE IS A lot OF SMOKE”
“can you get out of there?”
“No we are stuck.”
Lower in the north tower, people could breathe. They could see the stairs. The mood was calmer, but still charged with urgency. At the Port Authority’s public-relations office on the 68th floor, the phones started ringing just minutes after the plane shook the building. News reporters were calling. Greg Trevor, an authority spokesman paid to answer those calls, was still shaken from the impact. He had been nearly knocked to the floor and was as mystified as anyone dialing in about what was going on. All he knew was that something, an explosion, a bomb, had sent the building swinging back and forth like a car antenna. Fire, glass, and paper were falling past the windows, and everyone had to get out. The staff collected files and threw them into bags. They fielded a few calls, grabbed notebooks, then forwarded their phones to the central Port Authority police desk in Jersey City. Just as they were ready to depart, one of Trevor’s colleagues, Ana Abelians, told him that two more media calls were holding. The reflexes of a man who answers questions for a living kicked in.
“You get one, I’ll get the other one,” he told her. “We’ll get rid of them and get the hell out of here.”
He picked up the phone. “Greg Trevor here.”
“Hi, I’m with NBC national news. If you could hold on for about five minutes, we’re going to put you on for a live phone interview.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t. We’re evacuating the building.”
“But this will only take a minute.”
“I’m sorry, you don’t understand. We’re leaving the building right now.”
The caller seemed stunned. “But, but, this is NBC national news.”
Apparently, Trevor thought to himself, it was okay to save yourself from a burning building
if only a local affiliate was calling. But this was The Network.
He politely hung up and headed for the stairwell. Even now, as they started down, Trevor and his colleagues knew only that a plane had hit the building. And even that didn’t make sense. How could a plane hit a 110-story building on such a clear day? He tried to call his wife, Allison, several times by cell phone, but couldn’t get through. He reached a colleague, Pasquale DiFulco, through his BlackBerry communicator.
DiFulco had started the day on vacation and was home watching CNN. He began to give Trevor updates using digital haiku. His first message flashed: “AA 676 from boston crashed into 1wtc. fbi reporting plane was hijacked moments before crash.” He had mistyped the 767’s model number, but Trevor understood.
At a stairway landing on the 27th floor, Ed Beyea watched the people streaming past him, a fixed point in a river of humanity. He was going nowhere, for now. Nothing below his neck moved. He had broken his neck twenty years earlier in a diving accident in upstate New York, where he grew up, and had come to the city for rehabilitation shortly thereafter. He never left. Now forty-two years old, he lived in an apartment on Roosevelt Island, a spit of land in the middle of the East River that was covered with high-rise buildings and was home to a hospital that served people with spinal cord injuries. The island’s subway station had a modern elevator, making it possible for him to commute to the trade center without a car. He worked as a computer analyst for Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, traveling to and from the office with his aide, Irma Fuller. She had accompanied him on the elevator up to 27, hung up his jacket, and set him up with the mouth stick that he used to type. When the first plane hit, she had been upstairs ordering breakfast at a 43rd floor cafeteria. By the time she came down, Beyea had already gone onto the stairwell landing.
With Beyea was Abe Zelmanowitz, another Blue Cross computer analyst who worked one cubicle over, separated by an aisle on the south end of the floor. Considering the distances between them—physical, cultural, religious—that they were now inches from each other in the stairwell might have seemed peculiar.
Beyea came from a small town in upstate New York and had converted to Catholicism as an adult; Zelmanowitz, thirteen years his senior, was an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn. Beyea laughed from a capacious belly, swollen by kidney problems and years of inactivity. He weighed 280 pounds. Zelmanowitz was soft-spoken and slim.
They had worked together for twelve years and had become close friends. Zelmanowitz made a reading stand that Beyea could use in bed. Beyea shot jokes that were irresistible to Zelmanowitz. Once or twice a month they went to a restaurant after work, always with Fuller, often with others from their office. If Beyea picked, he made sure the restaurant was kosher. If Zelmanowitz selected, he made sure it was wheelchair accessible. One favorite was Mr. Broadway, a kosher restaurant in midtown that served a nice rib-eye steak. Zelmanowitz lived with his older brother and his brother’s family. Beyea, who had been briefly married and was separated, lived by himself. The two men had built a friendship on the solid footings of the everyday: joking, eating, and the minutiae of work in a small office, drawing them from the cloisters of their own lives.
The two men knew right away that their situation was serious. They had felt the jolt when the plane hit and had watched the debris fall past their windows. Still, the building had survived a bombing before and there was little smoke on their floor. Moreover, both of them knew that friendship alone would not carry Beyea down the stairs. They needed three or four strong men to do it safely, so they were waiting for help. In the meantime, Zelmanowitz told Fuller that she should go ahead and leave the building.
“I’ll stay with Ed,” he told her. Beyea also told her to go. Find someone downstairs, they told her, and tell them where we are. As Fuller started down, Zelmanowitz yelled a final note down the stairs: “Irma, we are on 27C.”
A few minutes later, he called his brother, Jack, at home, who was watching the tower burn on TV. Zelmanowitz spoke calmly. The fire was above them.
“We’re getting ready to go,” he said. “We’re just waiting for assistance.”
“Is everything okay?” Jack asked. “You know, you have to get out of there.”
“Don’t worry,” Zelmanowitz responded. “I’m here with Ed. We’re just waiting for medical help, and firemen will come and help us go down. Don’t worry. Everything looks like it’s going to be okay.”
Zelmanowitz then held the cell phone while Beyea called his mother, Janet, in Bath, New York, the town in the Finger Lakes where, as a young man, Beyea had tended bar at the Moose Club and waterskied on Keuka Lake. The conversation was short. Beyea told his mother that they were still in the building but they would be leaving soon.
“Mom,” he said, “I’m all right.”
4
“We have no communication established up there yet.”
8:50 A.M.
NORTH TOWER
In the lobby of the north tower, Lloyd Thompson stood at a console, answering calls on the building’s intercom system and trying to make sense of what people and the console were telling him about the smoke and fire on the upper floors. As the deputy fire safety director for the building, Thompson had often stood at the same spot during an emergency, and the console would quickly show him where trouble was: a red light, one for each floor, lit up when someone called for help. It was rare for more than one light to come on. Now Thompson faced a board of red lights.
Though the shape of the disaster was barely forming in his mind, Thompson knew enough about its scale to pick up the public-address microphone and order an immediate evacuation of the building. His message went nowhere: the plane had destroyed the building’s public-address system.
At the police desk in 5 World Trade Center, the low-rise building just northeast of the north tower, Alan Reiss, the former director of the world trade department, was also answering a flood of calls for help. Reiss had run straight from his breakfast meeting in the concourse to the police desk to help answer the phones. He knew the people who worked in Windows—he had a membership in a club there, and a meal in the restaurant was one of the pleasures in his routine. He, too, could do little but tell them to hold on. Rescue workers were on their way. Even the simplest advice, to wet towels and stuff them in the doorsills, became another avenue of frustration. The plane had severed the pipes, so there was no water pressure upstairs, for drinking, putting out fires, or dampening cloths. When Jan Maciejewski, the waiter, called his wife from a cell phone, he told her that he would check the flower vases for water.
In trucks and cars and commandeered buses, on foot and by air, a fresh wave of men and women—on duty, off-duty, and no duty—were heading straight toward a catastrophe from which thousands of others were fleeing. The urge to help was powerful. Several blocks away at the Court Officers Academy, Capt. Joseph Baccellieri grabbed two of his sergeants, Al Moscola and Andrew Wender, and began running toward the trade center. They sprinted west across Fulton Street, weaving through crowds running east. Baccellieri, who was forty-one, had been sorting through a new shipment of uniforms when he heard the shattering noise of the plane’s impact. He understood that he had no official role as a rescuer at a crash, or whatever this was. His job at the academy was to train the court officers who kept order in New York State’s courts. But he had training as a first responder and a simple moral precept that he clung to: “You want people to come for you, you’ve got to help them.” He also had a good deal of experience with the World Trade Center.
As a younger man, Baccellieri had driven a truck for his father’s company, JLB Transport, which made deliveries once a month to the trade center, many of them loads of paper used by printing businesses in the towers. Baccellieri would have to navigate the subterranean maze of the garage to figure out which of the freight elevators served the north tower, the south, and the five other buildings that made up the garden of high-rises. Along sharp corners and dead ends, he would steer the big truck, known as a straight-through, st
ruggling to bring it close to the tight delivery bays.
It was always confusing, he recalled, though nothing like the mayhem he was witnessing now as he ran toward the complex. People streamed from the buildings. The gash where the plane had entered the north tower was clearly visible. Already, just minutes after the crash, people were falling from the building while others screamed. Two police officers held open the doors into 5 World Trade Center, where the complex’s police desk was located, and urged people to keep moving, to get away. As Baccellieri and his two colleagues walked in, one of the cops told him he was crazy.
Chief Joseph Pfeifer took a mental snapshot of the damage as he strode into the north tower lobby in his thick rubber boots. Shattered windows. Tan marble cracked and collapsed from the wall. Severely burned people being helped from the building. The fireball of exploding jet fuel had shot down the elevator shafts, reaching as far as four levels below the lobby. It had announced itself in the lobby with an explosion that had blackened a stretch of wall near one of the elevator banks, and blown the doors off the cars.
Pfeifer, a battalion chief, was the first fire commander to arrive at the scene, getting there at 8:50 A.M., just four minutes after the plane hit. He had heard Flight 11 screeching directly overhead as he stood on Lispenard Street in lower Manhattan, where he and firefighters from Engine 7 were investigating a gas leak. They watched as the plane blew into the upper floors of the north tower. Jules Naudet, a French documentary maker, was taping Pfeifer that day, and he pulled his camera up to record the plane as it burst into the north face of the north tower. They rushed into Pfeifer’s battalion car, and sped south with Engine 7. “That looked like a direct attack,” Pfeifer said in the car.