by Dwyer, Jim
In the helicopters, the pilots now got word that the inbound aircraft was most likely a military jet, scrambling to protect the skies over New York. “Is that a U.S. military, Central?” Detective Semendinger asked, just to make sure. Yes, he was assured, it was. The fire chiefs downstairs, however, had already begun to order their people out of the buildings, at least until the situation cleared up.
“All units in Building 1,” Assistant Chief Callan said into his radio as he stood in the lobby at 9:32 A.M. “All units in Building 1, come out, down to the lobby.”
Radio communications with the upper floors remained feeble. More than 1,000 firefighters were now fighting for airtime on the same four or five channels, breeding considerable interference. Worse, the channels they were using in the north tower did not benefit from the amplification of the repeater, which had been abandoned because the chiefs had decided it was malfunctioning.
“Everybody down to the lobby,” Chief Callan repeated again.
It did not matter how many times he said it. No one answered his call.
12
“Tell the chief what you just told me.”
9:22 A.M.
SOUTH TOWER
All morning, Anthony Bramante had been dialing his brother, Jack, who worked in the south tower for Mizuho. Time and again, his call ended before it began, in fast busy signals or a taped announcement that the circuits were overloaded. Finally, he dialed just as a gap opened momentarily in the electronic pileup, and the signals pulsed from his office in Brooklyn to his brother’s desk on the 80th floor. Bramante listened to the rings. He wanted the call to get through, but he did not want it to be answered. The phone rang on. Please, he thought, don’t let him pick up. Six rings. Ten. Thirteen. Let him be out of there.
“Hello?”
The voice jolted Bramante, dashing the illusion that everyone had left. But the person answering was not his brother. No, the man said, Jack Bramante was not there. He was gone.
“The floor is on fire! Help us! The floor is on fire!”
After a few seconds, Bramante realized he was speaking to Jack Andreacchio, who normally changed lightbulbs and wired computers and ran the grab bag of errands essential to any corporate bureaucracy. Bramante had met Andreacchio on visits to his brother in the south tower.
Andreacchio reported that he was trapped with Manny Gomez, his boss. Both men had been part of the Fuji evacuation team that had herded people off the bank’s floors. Andreacchio had even started downstairs and had gotten as far as the 70th floor, but turned back, apparently on hearing the announcement that the building was safe. In most circumstances, Andreacchio was famously amiable. An Italian American from Brooklyn, he had taken an extravagant liking to country music and became an energetic line dancer who wore a cowboy hat and vacationed in Nashville.
Now he was stuck with Manny Gomez and three other people in an office on the 80th floor. Bramante talked him through the options. What about the stairs? Destroyed, said Andreacchio, or blocked by rubble.
“Have you called 911?” Bramante asked.
“No,” Andreacchio said. He was not getting a dial tone when he picked up the phone, so he could not make calls out. This did not make clear sense to Bramante, who had just dialed into the office, but he used a three-way-call function on his telephone and connected Andreacchio to 911. The call was logged in at 9:23 in the 911 center.
ROOF TOP ANOTHER CALL—TRAPPED ON 80 FLOOR—HOT AND SMOKY—FD 403 NTFD—STAIRWAYS BLOCKED—NW CORNER—CONF CALL—BRAMANTE ANTHONY 32 COURT ST
“I think we should break the window,” Andreacchio said.
Bramante and the operator hollered at once that he should not do that. The oxygen would draw the fire into their refuge.
The operator explained that the Fire Department was mounting a big response, and speaking in the jargon of the dispatchers, rendered the department’s abbreviation—FDNY—as a word.
“Fidnee is on their way,” the operator said. “They have it. People are on their way to you, okay?”
“You’ve gotta help me,” Andreacchio said.
“Fidnee is on the way,” the operator assured him.
The impact zone of the south tower was closer to the ground than the ruined floors of the north; the nose of Flight 175 had entered at the 81st floor, sixteen floors lower than Flight 11 in the north tower. Moreover, a single escape route—stairway A—remained open, though this was known to only a few people, and the city’s emergency-response program had no mechanism for communicating any live information, as opposed to canned scripts, through its 911 call centers.
The conditions in the south tower had become so bad, so quickly, that sixteen minutes after the plane had hit, at 9:02:59, people despaired of escape or rescue. Two of the young men at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Brad Vadas and Stephen Mulderry, made calls from the 88th floor of the south tower. At 9:19, Vadas left a message on the answering machine of his fiancée, Kris McFerren. “Kris, there’s been an explosion. We’re trapped in a room. There’s smoke coming in. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I want you to know my life has been so much better and richer because you were in it.” He added that he would do his best to get out. “I love you,” he said. “Good-bye.” Mulderry, the former college basketball star, called a friend, and on her tape said that whatever might happen, he would be okay. He had said all the prayers his mother had taught him. Five floors above them, Greg Milanowycz, an insurance broker for Aon, reached his father, Joseph, at work. “Can you call someone, can you tell them we are here in the northeast corner of the 93rd floor?” he asked. His father reached 911 on another line. The dispatcher sounded cool, calm, wise.
“Okay, this is what you have to tell them,” the dispatcher said. “Get as close to the floor as possible, don’t talk to conserve oxygen, and if they are in a room and have access to water or something, try to wet clothing or towels and wedge them under the doorways, to try to stop smoke from getting in there.”
Joseph Milanowycz meticulously tracked the instructions. The words lifted his heart.
“We have set up a command post already down there,” the dispatcher said. “We are on our way up. We will get him out of there.” The father passed this message on to the son, who shouted to the room of people: “They are coming. My dad’s on the phone with them. They are coming.”
It was true, as the dispatcher said, that command posts had been set up at the trade center, but the more that fire commanders could see, the grimmer their outlook. At the main post, across West Street from the towers, Deputy Fire Commissioner Tom Fitzpatrick watched people falling or jumping from the high floors of the north tower and concluded that the firefighters simply could not get to the hundreds trapped above the fires. At the same post, Lt. Joseph Chiafari heard dispatcher reports—a blur of floor numbers and trapped workers, thirty people in a conference room somewhere, another group elsewhere—as a roll call of places that the firefighters would not get to anytime soon. His boss, Deputy Assistant Chief Al Turi, began to think about how long the buildings would stand up to the uncontrolled fires before they had partial collapses on the upper floors. Three hours of fire resistance, Turi figured. They were just a half hour into the fight.
The catastrophe could be seen for miles with the naked eye, across oceans and continents on television. To rescuers at the very base of the towers, the fires appeared to be in another world. They blazed so far beyond them, 1,000 vertical feet in the north tower, 800 in the south, they might have been looking at the light from distant, dying stars.
Yet in the lobby of the towers, the view was not as bleak—in large part because there was no view whatsoever of the raging fire overhead, but also because the impulse to try, to make an effort, had a momentum more powerful than the sense of futility. And at 9:18, a piece of electrifying news had come across the radio frequency used inside the towers. Just when Brad Vadas and Stephen Mulderry were making their farewells on the answering machines of loved ones, and as Deputy Commissioner Fitzpatrick was reluctantly c
oncluding that people like Vadas and Mulderry were lost, and as Chief Turi was wondering if firefighters would get near the fires before the three hours of fire protection were up, the first group of firefighters climbing skyward had started to change the calculus of doom.
“This is Battalion 7 on floor 40 of Tower 2,” Chief Orio J. Palmer reported. “We got one elevator working up to the 40th floor staffed by a member of Ladder 15, ’kay.”
At that moment, the gap between the rescuers and the trapped people had narrowed from the implausible to the possible. One elevator—apparently car number 48, a freight car that served the lower zone of the south tower—had continued to function. Car 48 ran up to the 40th floor. By taking it, Palmer was already halfway to the border territory of the south tower, the area where Frank De Martini and his group had been so effective in the north tower.
Orio Palmer wore the traditional chief’s helmet, a durable white shell that was part modern gear, part homage to tradition, with its Maltese cross. He often added a few custom alterations. Tucked into the band of his helmet were little chocks of different widths and angles, in case he needed to prop open a door; these were firefighter tools that he had kept on hand as he advanced through the ranks. Another item clipped to his helmet was a small, powerful light. Strapped to his back was a Scott Airpak, a portable supply of air; on one of his earliest days as a chief, he had been laid low by a dose of carbon monoxide poisoning, and a picture in the Daily News showed him as he was helped out of a fire in downtown Manhattan.
In one potentially critical area, the fire operations in the south tower differed from those in the north. Somehow, with enough fiddling, Palmer had been able to speak over his portable radio with his commander in the lobby of the south tower, using the specially amplified “repeater” channel. The chiefs in the other tower were having no similar success in communicating, although the same repeater served both buildings; in fact, the north tower commanders had stopped using the channel boosted by the repeater, believing that it was not working.
Like the chocks carried in his helmet, Palmer’s ability with radios was no accident. While working full time as a firefighter, he had earned an associate degree in electrical engineering, and had written technical articles about the use of two-way radios inside high-rise buildings and subways. Still, none of the clever equipment or advanced study would mean a thing unless he could get higher in the building, another forty floors above the first forty.
Before they could fight fire, the firefighters would have to take on gravity, with each man wearing or carrying fifty-six and a half pounds of boots, coat, helmet, oxygen tank, and mask—plus tools. Here, too, Palmer was ready. As a young man, he had all but worn a path on the sidewalks around Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, regularly running miles past the graves of Herman Melville and Joseph Pulitzer, Duke Ellington and George M. Cohan, Adm. David Farragut and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. After he married, he and his wife, Debbie, moved out of the Bronx to a small Long Island suburb, into the only house they could afford. Palmer rebuilt the place, plank by plank. On breaks from the renovation project, he ran. About a half mile from home was Hendrickson Park, with a three-mile running track around Valley Stream Pond. Trees leaned over the path. Swans glided across the water. A white gazebo, utterly useless and perfectly lovely, was set back from the water’s edge. He wore his Walkman—Van Morrison was a favorite, and he called his wife the Brown-Eyed Girl—and would knock off three or four circuits, depending on how much time he had. He had run the New York City Marathon in 1988, and every year after that, ran at least a half-marathon on Long Island. When the family watched TV in the basement he had rebuilt, he would do stomach crunches during the commercials. Not surprisingly, he had won the department’s top fitness medal four or five times. With chocks in his hat, a good head on his shoulders, and the memory of hundreds of miles in the muscles of his legs, he now started up the stairs from the 40th floor, halfway to his destination.
At that moment, all the promises the dispatchers made to people trapped above and around the flames, the assurances from friends and family to the Brooklyn cowboy Jack Andreacchio, to Greg Milanowycz and his father, no longer were empty words, palliatives dosed out to the frantic and doomed. Help was not only on the way, it was getting there. At least some of it was. In the lobby, Deputy Chief Donald Burns heard Palmer’s report that an elevator was running to the 40th floor.
“All right,” said Burns, “but I got no units yet. There are no units here yet.”
Many firefighters, coming from firehouses far outside lower Manhattan, simply could not find their way into the south tower, and had gone into the north tower instead.
Palmer, who had brought a company with him to the 40th floor, did not seem to hear what Burns was saying.
“Yeah, we’re just starting them up,” Palmer said. He led the way.
As Palmer was climbing stairs in the south tower, a wounded, struggling band was gathering at the building’s 78th-floor sky lobby. Minutes before, the sky lobby had bustled with office workers unsure whether to leave the building or go back to work; now it was filled with motionless bodies, moans from people hidden in clouds of pulverized dust. The ceilings, the walls, the windows, the information kiosk, even the marble that graced the elevator banks—everything was smashed.
Mary Jos crawled across the ground, not sure how she had gotten to the 78th floor from her office in the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance on the 86th floor, or how she had ended up on the floor of the sky lobby, searing pain in her back, her clothes on fire, until she had rolled over and smothered the flames. About ten feet away in the smoldering darkness was her friend Ling Young. They had gone to college together, and now, at midlife, worked for the state tax department. At this grim moment, the two old friends had no idea they were only a few feet apart.
Not far away, Jos knew, was a door into a stairway. A colleague had the habit of getting exercise by walking up from 78 to 86, and Jos often saw her use a set of stairs in the northwest corner of the building. She headed in that direction. The door was still there. She stood and pushed it open. Her watch and left shoe had been blown off. She did not care: she was leaving.
“There’s an exit here,” she called out. A few paces into the stairs, she yelled. “Can somebody help me?” One flight down, a man named Eric Thompson heard her and came to escort her.
Young had not seen Jos on fire, nor had she noticed Jos crawling across the floor. Her glasses covered in blood, Young saw that the people nearest her had been injured, but were alive. The woman who appeared to have lost her legs had gone into shock, leaning against an elevator door. As Young looked around, she saw that her colleagues from the tax department also were hurt, though not so catastrophically as the woman by the elevator: Dianne Gladstone might have broken an ankle, and Yeshavant Tembe might have fractured his knee.
Young herself was badly burned, though she did not realize it until she tried to lift Gladstone. When Gladstone put her arms around Young’s neck, pain shot through her. They all wanted water, but did not dare move, afraid that the floor would collapse beneath them. The lights were gone; fire banked and ebbed; a man walked past, pleading for help. “I’m on fire,” he said, but Young recalled no one helping him. She was not sure why.
Perhaps twenty minutes or so after the plane hit, another young man appeared.
“I’ve found an exit,” he said, and he led them to a door in the northwest corner, the same stairwell that Mary Jos had found right after the impact. Young walked to it, the pain shut down by the task of leaving. She saw a thin man behind her in the stairs. Gladstone, with her bad ankle, was helped by Diane Urban, the department’s famously sharp-tongued boss. Another colleague, Sankara Velamuri, escorted Tembe with his bad knee toward the stairs. They were trailing her, though Young could not tell by how much.
In the stairwell, Young and her colleagues began to drift apart, with Young ahead of the others. She noticed that the young man who had found the door also was walking down the
stairs.
“Don’t get separated,” he ordered.
About ten floors down, he stopped. Only then did Young realize that he had been carrying a woman on his back, apparently to get her past the drastic conditions in the area around the 78th floor. Once they reached the 60s, he put her down, then turned back up the stairs.
“Don’t get separated,” he called again.
Back on the 78th floor, more people struggled to orient themselves. Scattered around the bank of sky lobby elevators that served the floors of Aon, two women and three men had survived the plane’s impact. Despite being battered, Judy Wein, Gigi Singer, Ed Nicholls, and Vijay Paramsothy were still able to walk. Rich Gabrielle, however, was pinned under marble, and Wein had been unable to move the stone from his legs. Wein had scouted part of the floor, looking for the guard’s stand. She could not find it, and joined Paramsothy perched amid the rubble. Wein had a broken rib, a collapsed lung, and a broken arm. Singer was seriously burned. Paramsothy, apparently not drastically hurt, was able to walk. Nicholls was bleeding heavily: his right arm from near his shoulder was nearly severed by some piece of the building or airplane that had turned into a missile. Bits of stone and cement had lodged in his abdomen. A window had broken open, and he stood there for a minute next to an older man, getting some air.
From nowhere, a young man appeared. Judy Wein saw a red handkerchief or bandanna wrapped around his face. Was he the same person who had led Ling Young and the other people from the tax department to the stairs, the same man who had carried a woman down several flights of stairs on his back before putting her down and going back upstairs? It is one of many possibilities, but few certainties. Young, who had left a few minutes earlier and by now was a half dozen stories below the impact zone, would not remember the red handkerchief until Wein described it some months later.