102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

by Dwyer, Jim

  More than a gigantic tower had fallen. The construction of the trade center had absorbed the labor of men, women, and machines. As the order and shape of a mighty work came undone, the efforts of thousands of people dissolved. Still, the laws of physics hold that energy is not destroyed. All the power used by the construction workers to lift steel, pour concrete, hammer nails had been banked in the buildings as potential energy for three decades, just as a sled at the top of a hill stores the verve of the child who tugged it up there, or a bicycle at the crest of a mountain road holds all the pumping and pedaling that got it to the high place. Stockpiled in the south tower was a tremendous reserve of energy, 278 megawatt hours. All of it was released at the moment of the building’s demise, floors picking up speed as they slammed downward. Scientists would struggle later to describe the burst of power in terms that ordinary people could grasp. It was equal to 1 percent of a nuclear bomb. It was enough power to supply all the homes in Atlanta or Oakland or Miami for one hour. It was so strong, the earth shuddered in waves that were captured on a seismograph in Lisbon, New Hampshire, 265 miles distant. Yet it made no sense in the building next door.

  The blast of air from the south tower traveled 131 feet into the lobby of the north tower and then burst through the passageways across the complex. It found Sharon Premoli just as she ascended from the concourse northeast of the tower that was still standing. An hour earlier, she had begun her descent from Beast Financial, on the 80th floor of the north tower, dressed for a business meeting in a navy blouse and a beige skirt. In an instant, she was in the air, her navy blue shoes flashing before her eyes just before she slammed into the window of Borders Books. Her mouth, nose, and ears were clogged with gunk, her eyes covered with fiberglass splinters. With every breath she drew grit into her chest. She felt intense pain in her chest; shards of glass pierced her hands; she could not hear out of her left ear. The air was black. She could not see, hear, speak, or breathe. I’m dead, she thought.

  The death tremors of the south tower rattled along the bones of the north tower. On the 51st floor, the court officers Joseph Baccellieri, Al Moscola, and Andrew Wender were nearly knocked to the ground. They had heard the radio chatter that a third plane was en route: this must have been it. Their walkie-talkies spat out sounds, but none of it amounted to a message they could grasp.

  Standing at a window on the 27th floor, where she was taking a break on her descent from 88, Patricia Cullen watched a massive cloud explode into her line of sight, a galloping darkness coming straight toward her building. The floor trembled, the rumble passing from her feet to head. She fled toward the elevator lobby in the core of the building. There, she saw the big man in the wheelchair, Ed Beyea, and his friend, Abe Zelmanowitz.

  The physics of the moment had registered in the eyes, the ears, and the muscles of people in the north tower. These sensations did not form a coherent shape. Hardly anyone in the north tower, whether civilians or rescuers, realized that the other building had fallen. Moving in the stairwells, they had little reliable information from the outside. Early in the crisis, the office workers could smell the odor of splattered jet fuel, but that did not linger. True, there were ponds of water to ankle through. That was part of the ordeal of departure. So, too, were the aches in the feet and the calves, the heat shimmering from all those thousands of people, the dizzying reversals of direction at each landing of stairs. These were the present-tense realities of the departing people. The inferno, though, was out of sight. Mercifully so, too, were the bodies dropping from the high floors. Indeed, the very fact that the building—both buildings—had been struck by commercial aircraft was not widely known inside the towers. Millions around the world watched the south tower fall, but the true peril of the moment had not revealed itself widely inside the surviving building. That the buildings were collapsing not only was beyond expectation; it was beyond conception.

  Mak Hanna, from Frank De Martini’s crew, was making his way down from the 88th floor with his eighty-nine-year-old colleague, Moe Lipson. After the rumble of the south tower’s collapse, Patricia Cullen, who also worked for the Port Authority on 88, saw them in the hallway at the 27th floor. Hanna carried a pager that sent not only phone messages, but also news headlines. For some reason, it had kept working through the descent. Hanna knew that terrorists had taken over airliners and were crashing them into buildings. He knew, as he neared the 27th floor, that the south tower had collapsed. Hanna did some calculations in his head. Everyone was leaving as quickly as possible. They were reasonably calm. If he spread word of the collapse, what would be gained? Nothing, he decided. And panic might set in. He held his tongue.

  “You’re doing okay, Moe?” he asked.

  Lipson said he was. They plodded down. Patricia Cullen, after her break on the 27th floor, also resumed her departure.

  By 10:01, two minutes after the south tower collapsed, seventy-five minutes from the beginning of the calamity, a police dispatcher went on the air to contact the ESU officers who had gone inside the north tower.

  “Citywide central to unit, ’kay, with emergency message.”

  The dispatcher was interrupted by other transmissions, then continued.

  “Emergency services out of 1. Emergency services out of 1, ’kay?”

  Four more times, he gave the order: All of the NYPD emergency service officers were to get out of Building 1. Over a special channel for the ESU, Det. Ken Winkler, who was just across from the buildings and had taken shelter from the torrent of dust beneath a car, ordered everyone to leave, saying that the other tower had fallen. The news astounded cops inside the north tower, who asked him to repeat it.

  At just about the same moment, Chief Joe Pfeifer wiped the dust from his eyes. The avalanche of soot from the south tower had driven him and the other fire commanders out of their command post in the lobby of the north tower. They raced into a passageway that led to 6 World Trade Center, a low-rise structure just north of the north tower. The cloud pursued them, but they outran and out-turned the worst of it. Pfeifer assumed there had been a local collapse; he had no idea that the other building had fallen to the ground. All morning, institutional prerogatives and customs and obstinacy had blanketed him and his colleagues in a thick fog of ignorance. The people fighting the two worst building fires in the nation’s history had no video monitors. No radio communications with other agencies. No way to get reports from police helicopters and only a limited ability to communicate among themselves. Moments after the south tower collapsed, a fireboat in the harbor reported the disaster over the radio channel used to give fire companies their assignments. The radio that captured that channel and those messages had been left behind, however, in the north tower lobby when the fire chiefs made their desperate flight from the debris. Now, from inside a heavy, choking, blinding cloud, Pfeifer spoke on his radio, betraying no sign of agitation, no hint that one of the world’s largest buildings had just collapsed a few yards away. He did not know.

  “Command post in Tower 1 to all units,” he said. “Evacuate the building. Command post to all units.” At their feet, Pfeifer and his group found Father Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain who had been alongside them all morning, murmuring prayers. They opened his collar, felt no pulse.

  On the 30th floor of the north tower, Steve Modica, a fire lieutenant, had stopped to rest, stripping off his bunker coat, helmet, oxygen tank. Modica served as the aide to John Paolillo, the chief of the special operations battalion. Paolillo, a marathon runner, had outpaced Modica once they got into the 20s. Now Modica sat with two other firefighters, similarly worn by the climb. They had just about caught their breath when the south tower collapsed. To Modica, the shudder suggested that a bomb had gone off somewhere below them. Or maybe a third plane had hit. He listened for radio transmissions, but did not catch a whisper of any explanation or instructions. The order made by Chief Pfeifer to evacuate the buildings did not reach his radio. He could hear fragments of chatter from people inside the building—firefig
hters with chest pains, oxygen needed on one corridor, a particular floor that a company had stopped on. Nothing about getting out.

  A moment or two after the shudder, though, Modica heard banging in the stairwell. He saw four ESU police officers charging down, moving so fast, he thought their feet were not touching the treads of the stairs. Modica tried to absorb all that had happened in the last few minutes: The building had been shaken. For some reason, the cops were flying out of there. His chief was somewhere upstairs. For a long moment, he was frozen in place.

  Modica’s place was the lowest zone in the building. In essence, the tower was three buildings, stacked atop one another: the first ran from the lobby to the 44th-floor sky lobby; the middle section rose from 44 to the 78th-floor sky lobby; the highest zone stretched from 78 to the top of the building. Most of the people who remained in the north tower were in either the top zone—trapped on the high floors where the fire was roaring—or in the bottom zone, office workers making their way out and the rescuers on a slow climb.

  In the middle zone, the building was quiet. A group of six rescuers, traveling lighter than the firefighters, had made it to the 51st floor. The three court officers who had rushed into the building, Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender, were moving up with three Port Authority officers. They found no one in the offices. The stairways also were empty. They did not even meet any firefighters. All the noise that they heard was from the staircases far below them, until the south tower collapsed. Then the lights shut down and the stairs fell dark. A moment later, the emergency lights kicked on. From the court officers’ radios, reports blared of other trapped court officers, their colleagues. Al Moscola assumed that the voices were calling for help from their usual place, in the Court Officers Academy, a few blocks away from the trade center.

  “Those bastards! They attacked William Street!” Moscola screamed.

  “Al,” Baccellieri said. “They’re downstairs. They’re not at William Street.”

  Wherever and whatever the trouble was, the dynamic had changed. The court officers felt they had gone as far as was prudent, nearly 600 feet up, every step on their own initiative. They decided to head downstairs and reconnect with the three Port Authority officers. Together, the group began to go down from the 51st floor. Just then, the Port Authority officers’ radios crackled with orders to evacuate.

  Sixteen floors below the court officers, on the 35th floor, a battalion chief stood with parts of five fire companies: Ladders 5, 9, and 20, and Engines 33 and 24. The streams of people leaving had slowed their progress up the stairs, keeping them near the ground, and closer to safety. So had the ballast: the gear they were carrying, much of it useless. The senior fire commanders all felt there was no hope of extinguishing a blaze that was burning so high in the tower, over so many floors, but the orders they thought they had given the ascending companies—to leave half their gear behind—were largely ignored or unheard. As they had started their trek to the fire ninety-two stories above them, many companies carried hundreds of pounds of equipment that no one expected them to use. That surely slowed the climb—and kept them from penetrating so far in the tower that they had no prospect of quickly backing out. On the landings in the 20s were traces of the struggle of those climbing up: coils of hose, fire extinguishers, even pry tools, abandoned.

  Now, on the 35th floor, these five companies, who had been among the earliest to arrive, were taking a break and trying to gather the firefighters who had fallen behind. Someone had found a kitchen, so they were drinking to replenish the fluids they had sweated out. The staircases were virtually empty of civilians now. One of the lieutenants on the 35th floor, Warren Smith, had fought fires in Manhattan for most of his twenty years in the department, and knew that they could not put out eight floors of raging fire, or whatever the scope of that ghastly hell was. Dropping gear made sense. Maybe they would settle for finding people who needed a hand and get them out. Mike Warchola, the lieutenant from Ladder 5, was on his last day of work, and earlier in the morning, had been congratulated by other firefighters. Now, as he stood on the 35th floor, sweat poured off him. Gregg Hansson, the lieutenant from Engine 24, spotted him.

  “How are you doing, Mike?” Hansson asked.

  It was more than a casual question. Warchola looked Hansson in the eye.

  “I’m doing fine,” he replied.

  Another lieutenant taking a break on the 35th floor, Kevin Pfeifer of Engine 33—brother of the battalion chief—recognized Hansson from other fires. As Hansson sipped iced tea, he and Pfeifer discussed pairing up so they could scuttle half their load and make the climb a bit easier. Just as they were bringing the idea to Richard Picciotto, the battalion chief taking a break on 35, the building began to shake.

  “What’s going on?” Smith asked Picciotto.

  The chief was not sure. A moment later, Hansson—and probably Pfeifer, as well—heard a cry of “Mayday! Evacuate the building” from Picciotto’s radio. It is possible that this was the message sent from 6 World Trade Center by Lieutenant Pfeifer’s brother, although Chief Pfeifer had not used the term “mayday,” not realizing the other tower had collapsed. While some firefighters in trouble gave mayday calls, there is no clear evidence that any chief specifically issued that most urgent of distress warnings.

  In any event, Chief Picciotto told them all to leave. Then he hollered the order to other fire companies on the 35th floor. No one among that group knew the other building had fallen, but the urgency of the situation seemed apparent to Warren Smith, the lieutenant who had been thinking about dropping gear. When firefighters pull back from a high-rise, it usually involves dropping down a few floors, not leaving the building entirely. Something’s fucked up beyond what we can handle, Smith would remember thinking. He and the other officers shouted out the orders to leave. Kevin Pfeifer rounded up his troops. Gregg Hansson turned to his men, and said, “Drop your gear and get out.” Robert Byrne, a probationary firefighter on his first job, followed to the letter what he thought Hansson intended: Byrne put down not only his tools and rope, but also his face mask—a piece of equipment used for breathing when the air is fouled by smoke or dust.

  Hansson and his men went to stairway A, where they spotted Lt. John Fischer and a few firefighters from Ladder 20.

  “Not all my guys are here,” Fischer said. “Where is everybody?”

  One of the firefighters replied, “I think a couple of them went upstairs.”

  Fischer was annoyed. “We’ve got to stick together,” he said. He got on his radio and tried to contact them, but got no answer. He had to go up and get them.

  “I’m going down,” Hansson said. “I’m taking my men down.”

  He saw Fischer start up the stairs.

  Eight floors below, on the 27th floor, another congregation of firefighters and police officers had gathered. After the collapse, two fire captains, Jay Jonas and William Burke, split up to check the windows, Jonas to the north and Burke to the south. Jonas could see nothing through the windows on the north, and circled back to the vestibule. Burke returned with his report.

  “Is that what I thought it was?” Jonas asked.

  “Yeah,” Burke said, “the south tower’s just collapsed.”

  “We’re going home,” Jonas said, giving the order to leave.

  The firefighters began to clear off the floor, though many did not realize why they were being sent back downstairs. Still waiting on that floor were Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz, who had already turned aside many suggestions that he leave Beyea behind to the care of firefighters. Now the firefighters themselves were packing up to go. Firefighter Rich Billy, in need of a break, had been left on the 27th floor by Lieutenant Hansson. Billy continued the ritual of clearing each floor—he counted eight people still on 27, including Beyea in his wheelchair and Zelmanowitz—and the firefighter felt he had taken over responsibility for Beyea.

  Billy recognized Captain Burke, an officer he had once worked with, and told him that he had taken charge of Beyea. It wa
s evident that Rich Billy, on his own, could do little to evacuate Beyea.

  “We’ve got to get them out,” Burke said. At that moment, Lieutenant Hansson arrived from the 35th floor. He was there to pick up Billy, whom he had left behind. Hansson heard some talk about using an elevator—in fact, Captain Burke had come up to the 20th floor on an elevator that few firefighters realized was working—but he wanted no part of anything but a staircase leading directly to the ground. In any case, Burke was taking control of the situation. That was fine with Hansson. He told Billy to come along, and they left the floor.

  Burke had his own company of firefighters, from Engine 21. In their recollections, Burke told them to head downstairs, and they did not notice for a couple of floors that he was not with them. When they radioed back, Burke told them he would meet them at the rig. If William Burke was indeed still with Beyea and Zelmanowitz, that would have surprised few who knew him. Burke, like the two friends from Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, was another variation on the theme of bachelor life. Forty-six years old, he had worked for twenty-five years as a lifeguard on Long Island, at Robert Moses State Park. One day, the oldest living former lifeguard came to the beach, and his fondest wish was to swim in the ocean one more time. The man was frail, and in a wheelchair. Burke lifted the man into the waves and swam with him. Then they shared a beer.

  The elevator door was moving as he pushed it. Chris Young almost didn’t believe it was happening. The other times he had tried, the door would not budge. Now, with no more effort, it was sliding out of the way, toward the corner of the car.

  Young was elated. Being stuck in the huge north tower elevator alone had gotten very old—and very scary. The thirty-three-year-old temp from Marsh & McLennan had been waiting nearly ninety minutes to be rescued. It had been more than half an hour since the people trapped in the other elevator nearby—Judith Martin and the rest—had last answered his calls. It had been twenty minutes since the elevator had shaken so violently again that he dropped to the floor in a ball.