by Dwyer, Jim
It was an incomplete history, though not uncommonly so. Every calamity casts its own long shadows of confusion. Myth is always embedded in the early drafts. A few months after the Titanic went down, George Bernard Shaw commented that the disaster had led to an “explosion of outrageous romantic lying.”
More than a year after the attacks, Congress created an independent national investigative commission under pressure from families who lost husbands, wives, and children, and against the wishes of President George W. Bush and Giuliani, who was no longer the mayor of New York but had become an iconic figure in politics and in business, thanks to his graceful deportment in the hours after the attacks.
The commission documented years of difficulties in intelligence gathering and coordination, in border control, in airline security, and in emergency response. These were painful revelations. The attacks were hardly the bolt from the blue that they seemed in the early days: the hijackings were only the latest and most lethal link in a chain of events that stretched back years and had been foretold, in one fashion or another, during the months before them. In fact, the commission found that the threat reports were more clear, more urgent, and more persistent than the government had acknowledged. Some intelligence reports had focused on Al Qaeda’s plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. While some pieces of the intelligence had been gathered in the mid-1990s, warnings that Al Qaeda soldiers had infiltrated the United States, and seemed interested in hijacking a plane, were delivered to the president on August 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks, under the headline, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”
The diagnostic postmortems by the press and by the commission threw light into the long shadow of secrecy, dissembling, and myth that had surrounded the events of September 11, 2001. That said, no level of American government had practice for such ferocious attacks on civilians. Neither New York nor the United States had any muscle memory of sustained attacks on the homeland, and given the speed of events that morning, there was no time to invent new moves. In New York, the two towers stood for 102 minutes—less than two hours—before they collapsed. That gives no hint of the morning’s velocity. One plane crash. Sixteen minutes later, another plane crash. Twenty-five minutes later, word of a third plane approaching—untrue, but certainly not outside the freshly staked borders of the plausible. Then, about thirty minutes after that, the first building falls. Twenty-nine minutes later, it was over. It was as if a car going ninety miles per hour were making a ninety-degree turn every few minutes. Each moment brought fresh demands, fresh hell.
Speed does not, however, explain everything. A cascade of lapsed communications—much like the undelivered Cheney shoot-down order—cost lives. The police helicopters reported the deterioration of the two towers and specifically predicted the collapse of the north tower. The fire commanders had no link to those helicopters or reports, but for that matter, they had few or no links to their own troops. The interagency radios were sitting on shelves and in the trunks of cars, unused. It is likely that as many as 200 firefighters were inside the north tower when it collapsed. Most of them had been in striking distance of safety when the south building fell. This gave them twenty-nine minutes to go down no more than thirty or forty flights of stairs, and many people did, including eighty-nine-year-old Moe Lipson, who was walking down from his office on 88 and had reached the 27th floor when the south tower fell. Few of the people inside the north tower, even those who had heard the evacuation orders, knew that the other building had collapsed. Virtually none of them—apart from some police officers and those they encountered—realized that helicopter pilots were predicting the imminent failure of the one they were in. For no good reason, firefighters were cut off from critical information. This was as much a matter of long and bad habit as it was of the extreme circumstances.
At a hearing in the spring of 2004 on the emergency response, Giuliani spoke with great passion about the firefighters who did not leave the north tower. “The reality is that they saved more lives than I think anyone had any right to expect that any human beings would be able to do. Done differently with different people and people maybe unwilling to be as bold as they were, you would have had much more serious loss of life.”
Moreover, Giuliani said that the firefighters had indeed heard the warning that it was time to leave, but asserted that they had “interpreted the evacuation order” to mean that they should make sure the civilians got out. “Rather than giving us a story of men, uniformed men fleeing while civilians were left behind, which would have been devastating to the morale of this country; rather than an Andrea Doria, if you might remember that, they gave us an example of very, very brave men and women in uniform who stand their ground to protect civilians,” Giuliani said. “Instead of that we got a story of heroism and we got a story of pride and we got a story of support that helped get us through.”
If history is to be a tool for the living, it must be unflinchingly candid. The full chronicles of D-Day in World War II note that a number of landing boats opened in deep water, sending troops to drown, a fact of vital importance to those who would someday follow the D-Day soldiers onto another beach. The evidence shows conclusively that in the critical final minutes of the north tower, firefighters were indeed helping civilians, but that involved no more than a fraction of the rescuers. There can be no doubt that the firefighters’ purpose in going into the building was to help, and that a number, like Captain Burke, stayed behind even when the future took its fearsome shape. Even so, there is substantial reason to discount Giuliani’s assertion that specific duties—rather than widespread ignorance of the peril—kept the bulk of those 200 firefighters inside during the time they might have escaped.
Nearly all of the 6,000 civilians below the impact zone had left the north tower by the time of its collapse, a fact hard to square with the notion that most of the approximately 200 firefighters who died in the north tower could not get out because they were busy helping civilians. In the oral histories collected by the Fire Department, numerous firefighters recalled that they were unaware of how serious the situation had become in those final minutes. This does not mean that the firefighters were not a welcome and uplifting presence; indeed, teams were helping people like Josephine Harris, and had stopped to offer aid to Judith Reese, and had opened stairways after the collapse of the south tower. Yet those efforts do not explain why so many firefighters died in a building they could have escaped and where there was scarcely anyone left who could be helped.
On the 19th floor of the north tower, scores of doomed firefighters were seen—by, among others, the court officers Joseph Baccellieri, Al Moscola, and Andrew Wender—taking a rest break in the final minutes, coats off, axes against the wall, soaked in sweat. As an explanation for why that group did not escape, a lack of “situational awareness,” to use the military term, seems far more likely than the mayor’s position that firefighters were tied up helping civilians. That shortcoming was not simply a consequence of being overwhelmed by the new epoch in terror that had arrived. The Fire Department’s reports after the 1993 trade center bombing had highlighted the poor coordination and communication among the emergency agencies. Even so, when questions were raised in 2004 by the 9/11 Commission about the Fire Department’s tactics, planning, and management, past and present city officials responded with outrage, demanding to know how anyone could challenge the bravery or sacrifices of the firefighters. No one had.
At first glance, the collapse of both towers hardly seems startling or complicated, given the nature of the attacks on them. Important columns were destroyed. The structural elements that initially survived—most importantly, the floors and ceilings—were then subjected to intense fires, unlike anything considered in the design of ordinary buildings. Indeed, federal investigators concluded that it had been primarily the impact of the planes and, more specifically, the extreme fires that spread in their wake, that had cau
sed the buildings to fall, and nothing that they termed a “design” flaw. After the planes hit, the towers shuddered for four minutes. Much of the spray-on fireproofing in the impact zone was dislodged, leaving the structural steel exposed and mortally vulnerable to the intense heat.
No one, it turned out, had fully considered the effects of a plane crash, particularly the loss of fireproofing followed by intense fires, when the buildings were being designed in the 1960s, even though the Port Authority and its engineers had announced the towers would be built to withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707. These assurances were reaffirmed after the 1993 bombing and again only a week before September 11. In a matter of minutes, the unthinkable had become inevitable.
As investigators reviewed how the towers were conceived and built, it also turned out that no one had relied on any technical standards or done any tests to determine how long the spray-on fireproofing could protect the floor system that connected the building’s core to the exterior. The thickness of the fireproofing applied to the floors in two of the world’s tallest buildings seemed to have been based on little more than a hunch.
Those floors were held up by long, unsupported trusses, familiar to anyone who has glanced at the ceilings in warehouse-type supermarkets. In buildings with a high premium on open space, uninterrupted by columns, trusses are often used to hold up floors and ceilings. To turn such a structure into a 110-story building—much less two of them—involved considerable daring and ingenuity, and towers of this type remain a rarity in New York City. Given the inherent difficulty of evacuating the high floors of skyscrapers, the construction of two monumentally tall buildings of novel structure without testing the adequacy of the fireproofing put thousands of people at risk.
Not until the summer of 2004 was the fireproofing tested, in the course of a lengthy postmortem by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The results showed, on the one hand, that the fireproofing was sufficient to protect a seventeen-foot length of steel for two hours, which met the requirement of the code at the time. But the towers had not been built using seventeen-foot lengths of steel; the actual pieces in the floors were at least twice that length. When a thirty-five-foot length of steel, the true size used in constructing the floors, was tested in 2004, the federal investigators found that the fireproofing could not provide two hours of protection. Long before September 11, the floors in two of the world’s landmark skyscrapers had been more vulnerable to fire than was thought.
This was an alarming finding even if investigators believed that the shortcomings of the original fireproofing—however disturbing—were probably not the direct cause of the collapses. For decades, the generations that rode higher and higher into the upper floors of skyscrapers had taken it on faith that the evolution of such buildings had been solely a story of progress, of innovations and enhancements that made new buildings safer than the old. The World Trade Center towers were presented as marvels, as buildings so robust they could withstand the impact of an airliner. By code, the floors were supposed to be able to withstand fire for two hours. When Chief Orio Palmer and the other firefighters reached people in the crash zone of the south tower, fifty minutes after the plane hit the building, they had every reason to believe there was another hour available for their rescue work. Instead, the tower collapsed seven minutes after they got there.
Not only the Port Authority had a hand in shaping safety for people inside the trade center. To make skyscrapers more profitable to own and less costly to build, New York City had overhauled its building code in the 1960s, part of a national trend that permitted developers more flexibility in their choice of materials. The revisions in New York had another dimension, one that was little remarked on by the new code’s champions in politics and the news media. In 1968, the city reduced the number of stairways required for tall buildings by half, and eliminated fire towers—reinforced stairs that would provide a smoke-free way to escape during an emergency. All these stairways were, in the view of the real estate industry, the wasteful legacies of a bygone era that lacked modern fireproofing techniques. In fact, the stair requirements were the residue of reforms that followed dreadful high-rise fires in the early years of the twentieth century. By the time the codes were changed in 1968, though, more than fifty years had passed since young women, with no other way out, had gone to the windows of a building two miles from the trade center site to escape the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. At the start of the twenty-first century, young men and women in the prime of their days were, once again, leaping from windows to escape the heat of a tall building. The hijackers—and history—had left them no other way out.
The indifference to the lessons of history, or the inability to integrate them, were hardly limited to the municipal government of New York, of course. Ultimately, all of the people in the trade center that morning were at the head of a pin on which history had come to rest. “On the morning of September 11, 2001, the last, best hope for the community of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center rested not with national policymakers but with private firms and local public servants,” a staff report from the 9/11 Commission stated.
Virtually no one was able to escape from the collapse of the south tower—not the firefighters Orio Palmer and Tom Kelly, not the building’s fire-safety director, Phil Hayes, not the supervisor of elevators at the tower, Francis Riccardelli. The people upstairs perished as well—those trapped on the 78th-floor sky lobby, those in the offices of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Aon, and Fiduciary Trust. Even Roko Camaj, the window washer with the keys to the roof and an inside knowledge of the building, had not been able to get out. Indeed, above the 78th floor, only four people survived: Richard Fern and Ronald DiFrancesco found a staircase that was, relatively speaking, intact. Stanley Praimnath survived because Brian Clark heard his cries for help; Clark says that had he not heard Praimnath, he might have wound up in the staircases with his colleagues who were persuaded by an ailing stranger to go up, not down. Fourteen other men and women were able to get out of the building from the 78th floor, the lower part of the south tower crash zone. Hours after the collapse, one building worker, Lenny Ardizzone, who had been in the lobby of the south tower, was discovered alive. He was not sure how.
In the north tower, the high floors became a tomb: Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 people. Marsh & McLennan lost 292. Everyone at Windows on the World, 170. Fred Alger Management, 35. Carr Futures, 69. James Gartenberg’s calls for help from the 86th floor had been heard by many but could be answered by none. The collapse caught him and Patricia Puma trapped in their office. It overtook others as they made their way down. Lt. Kevin Pfeifer, the chief’s brother, was found near the pry tool he had carried upstairs. Tony Savas, the construction inspector who had been freed from an elevator on the 78th floor, was found in a stairwell near the bottom of the building, along with John Griffin, who had helped to get him out.
The stub of stairway B proved to be a refuge for Capt. Jay Jonas of the Fire Department and the men accompanying Josephine Harris out of the building, who were among sixteen people who survived the building’s collapse there. They included Port Authority Police Officer David Lim, a dozen firefighters, and two other civilians—Pasquale Buzzelli and Genelle Guzman—who were themselves the only survivors of a group of sixteen workers from the Port Authority office on the 64th floor. That group had left their offices at 10:12, after the boss, Patrick Hoey, made a phone call and got word that they should go.
Others in that staircase survived the collapse, but could not escape. Mike Warchola, the fire captain on his last day of work, radioed from the rubble that he was around the 12th floor, although the staircase no longer went that high. It is likely that he was among the group that had stopped to help Judith Reese, the woman with asthma from Frank De Martini’s office. None of them made it out. In all, 2,753 people were killed at the trade center.
An hour or so after the collapse, Will Jimeno, buried beneath the plaza, heard a voice coming through the same hole where the l
ight was entering. The voice wanted to know if a particular person was down in the hole. Jimeno could not quite make out the name, but he was delighted by the sound of another human voice.
“No, but Jimeno and McLoughlin, PAPD, are down here,” he yelled.
The voice did not answer, but moved off, and they heard no more from him.
Balls of fire tumbled into their tiny space, a gust of wind or a draft steering them away, the fire spending itself before it could find another morsel of fuel. Jimeno, thirty-three years old, felt that death was near. His wife, Allison, and their four-year-old daughter, Bianca, would be sad, but proud, he thought. The Jimenos’ second child was due at the end of November. So he prayed.
Please, God, let me see my little unborn child.
Jimeno tried to make a bargain. He might die, but surely there was a way he could do something for this child.
Somehow in the future, he prayed, let me touch this baby.
Then shots rang out.
The fireballs had apparently heated up the gun of the late Dominick Pezzulo. The rounds pinged off pipes and concrete, erratic and unpredictable, until the last of the ammunition was gone.
With his one free arm, Jimeno reached his gun belt for something to dig with. He had graduated from the Port Authority Police Academy in January and was issued the standard police tools, but he already owned his own handcuffs—a pair made by Smith & Wesson, bought when he was a security guard in a store, arresting shoplifters. He scraped at the rubble with them, but the cuffs slipped out of his hands, and he could not find them again.