Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  28 An airplane’s supposedly indestructible Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) are useful tools that aid airline disaster investigations. The boxes cost from (cont’d) $10,000 to $15,000 each and can reveal events that immediately precede in-flight disasters. Boxes use magnetic tape or solid-state memory boards to record data that is then dumped into a Crash-Survivable Memory Unit (CSMU), which can store up to two hours of CVR audio data and up to twenty-five hours of FDR information. Solid-state FDRs can track up to 700 flight parameters in larger, modern aircraft; this includes data pertaining to acceleration, airspeed, altitude, flap settings, outside temperature, cabin temperature and pressure, and engine performance. Both boxes are generally stored in the rear section of an airplane.

  29 To accommodate the growing number of tourists interested in visiting Ground Zero, the city built a viewing ramp overlooking the site.

  ANNA BAHNEY

  Anna Bahney, twenty-six, works at the New York Times. Anna had a peculiar experience on September 11. While most of Lower Manhattan was fighting like mad to get out of the city, she was fighting like mad to get back in.

  I LIVE IN WILLIAMSBURG, Brooklyn. My alarm went off at 8:30 A.M. and I was listening to NPR on the radio. I opened my eyes, turned over in bed and looked out the window. I remember thinking, this is an alarmingly beautiful day.

  The radio said that there was a fire up on top of one of the World Trade Towers and my response was, time to make the donuts. Meaning: today was going to be a big news day.

  I was actually scheduled to work on news at the National desk that day. A building fire would technically be a Metro story, but the way the desks worked, I knew that a story like that would eventually trickle down to National. So I wasn’t tearing out the door. I figured I had a little time.

  I got up and went through my morning routine. I had the radio on in the shower. When I got out of the shower they were already interviewing an eyewitness, who said she saw a plane kind of veering off toward Brooklyn, as if it wanted to go towards the airport. But then she saw it fly into the building. So we knew then that it was an attack.

  I turned on the television. You could see smoke coming out from the one building. And then there was this moment—like one of those subliminal clips they put in movies to make you buy Fritos or something. You saw this dark, shadowy object coming toward the front Tower. You could see it, but you almost couldn’t consciously see it, do you understand? It was so shocking. And then my whole TV went black.

  That’s when I knew this was serious.

  I didn’t freak out. I just kept saying to myself, “This is serious. This is serious.” I knew this was a deliberate attack.

  The TV came back on, and I continued to watch and eat my cereal. They cut to a split screen where they had “New York” and “Washington.” I had this sudden image of eighteen cities up there. New York, Washington, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles. All of them. I was afraid somebody was gonna come on and say, “These places have been hit, too, and they’re taking over.”

  Then the pieces started falling into place: two airplanes in New York, another one at the Pentagon. I knew I had to get to the office. But by this time, they were saying that the bridges in New York had been shut down, as well as the subway systems. No traffic in or out of Manhattan. And I’m thinking, I have to get to Manhattan. I have to get to the Times office.

  My boss, Erika, called and said, “Hey, have you heard about this?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about this.”

  “Are you gonna make it in?”

  I could just imagine the frenetic energy in the Times office, how they would need people. A lot of people who work at the paper live in the suburbs and even more remote areas. No prayer for them to get into the city.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m leaving now. The bridges are closed and the subway is down. But I’ll do what I can.”

  The Times building is near 42nd and Broadway. Normally, I take the L train to 14th Street, then the N/R up to Times Square, but none of those trains were running. The only access into Manhattan from Brooklyn was the Williamsburg Bridge, which is on Delancey Street, forty-plus blocks away to the south.

  I had on blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and sandals. Since I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, I changed into walking shoes. I got my backpack and put in a big bottle of water. I was very, very calm. Like thinking, I’m packing for destruction. Okay. I put in an extra shirt, which I thought I might need to cover my face. And I packed some bagels, a notebook, and some pens.

  I set off walking down the street.

  There weren’t that many people on the streets. I got the feeling that they didn’t know. That they either weren’t listening to the news or they weren’t understanding it. Or maybe they didn’t care. No one looked terrified. But then, I guess I was really stressed out, too, and I didn’t think that I looked terrified. Maybe they were looking at me the same way.

  This drunk was standing on the street, talking to himself. I remember thinking, he doesn’t know what’s going on. I wonder when he’s going to figure it out.

  I continued walking. There were radios on in the delis and some cars on the streets. I’m hearing things as I’m walking: “The second Tower has fallen.” “Children will be held in school.” “President Bush is crisscrossing the country in a plane.”

  I tried to call the Times, but my cell phone was dead. I kept walking.

  I got to the train station and there was mild chaos there because people were still trying to get to work. They didn’t understand the severity of the situation. “Where are the trains? What’s going on?”

  Around the train station, Williamsburg is a very artsy, urban hipster area. The kids who couldn’t get to work had sat down in the cafés. Like I said, it was a beautiful day.

  I went to see if I could walk over the Williamsburg Bridge.

  I walked through a Puerto Rican area, and the news from the radio became all Spanish. But I could hear “Giuliani” and I could hear “American Airlines.” I could hear “World Trade Towers” and I could hear “President Bush.” There were many more people on the streets in this neighborhood. There was a lot more chatter in this area.

  Finally, I got to the bridge. By this time, I’d met lots of people who were asking, “Is the train closed?”

  I said, “Yeah, it is.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Well, I’m gonna walk to the bridge.”

  So now there’s more people moving with me in that same direction.

  I got to the bridge and there was a footpath, a pedway that went up. There’s a white sawhorse barricade across it with three policemen there and about a hundred people gathered at the foot of it. People were petitioning the cops.

  “My child is over there.”

  “My father is over there.”

  “I live just on the other side.”

  “I just need to get across.”

  The police were saying, “No, no, no, no, no.” One policeman was Hasidic, one was Latino, and one was Polish, and they were saying no to people in various languages.

  I’m looking for a way to bypass them and get across.

  There were lots of people trying to use their phones. One person would get a connection, then eight people would try to use that cell phone. There were offers to exchange money—this man held out $5, saying, “Please, let me use the cell phone. Please.” But no one was charging anything. A woman saying, “No. Here. I’m finished. Use this.”

  It was an incredible rumbling going on, all these people trying to get across, trying to communicate. And then this tall black man ran out of the crowd and right up to the policemen. He said something to them and he showed them a card. He was allowed to step onto the bridge and cross.

  I asked some people who were closer to the front what had happened. They said: “The only people allowed to pass are members of the press and hospital workers.”

  I had my Times ID card, so I showed it.

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p; “Look,” I said, “I have to get ther, I have to get to work.”

  There was no question after that. The police just said, “Go ahead.”

  Meanwhile there were torrents of people coming down off the bridge from Manhattan. On the Manhattan side, they were letting people start across the bridge in heats. A group would come across, then there would be nobody for a while. Then another group. Then no one.

  A bunch of people had just come across as I was allowed to pass through. It was like walking through a mob. But once I got past them, I took off running.

  I ran up the ramp and up the stairs and started across the bridge. There were hundreds and hundreds of people walking toward me. Businessmen. Storekeepers and their families. Old people. It was if the whole island of Manhattan had been tipped on its side and dumped out onto the bridge.

  As I’m running, this guy shouted, “You’re going the wrong way!” But I kept going. By the time I reached the middle of the road, this next group had thinned out and I was alone again on the bridge.

  At that point, I could actually see what I was running to. I saw the two distinct columns of smoke and the … nothing. The Towers just … weren’t there. I ran harder for what seemed like a long time.

  When I got to the other side, there was a policeman standing guard before you hit the off-ramp down to the streets of Manhattan. When he saw me, he kind of bolstered himself up.

  Just the two of us on this bridge. A doughy sort of cop. A middle-aged man gone sort of round in the middle, balding, with a mustache. He looked terrified and alone.

  At first, he postured himself like, you’re going the wrong way, what’s your reason for crossing? I showed him my card and he completely changed. He looked so vulnerable.

  There was a moment of silence and he said, “What do you know?”

  I didn’t know anything. I was clueless myself. But I told him what I’d heard on the radio, having walked as far as I had. “Vice President Cheney holds office while the president is moving to a safe location.”

  He said, “Oh.” And he looked down. We were both quiet for a minute.

  And then? I don’t know why I did this. I’m not a religious person, I’m not Catholic. But what I really wanted to do was cross myself, though I have no spiritual, traditional reason to do that. So I touched my hand to my forehead. I offered the man a salute. A benediction, I guess. A gesture of respect I wanted to give to him. Something. Because I appreciated him standing on that bridge so much, being vulnerable.

  And I said, “God bless you.”

  And he said, “God bless you.”

  I ran down the stairs.

  At the bottom of the stairs there was another barricade and thousands of people waiting to go up and cross. The crowd spread from the very start of the pedestrian bridge way back down Delancey Street, which was shut down across all four lanes of traffic. All the way back past Essex, past the streets of the East Village whose names I don’t know. Plus traffic from all the cars on the tributaries to the Williamsburg Bridge. Lots of trucks backed up in a gridlock. Lots of people in cars, stuck there, nobody moving. Everyone had their radio on.

  I had made it into Manhattan. But what now?

  I tried to use my cell phone again, and I called into the office. This time it worked. I talked to Erika and said, “Look. I’m in Manhattan. I’m down here. Does the Metro desk need anything?”

  She said, “Hang on, I’m gonna transfer you.”

  I talked to an editor at Metro and repeated, “I’m down here on Delancey Street, do you need anything?”

  And they said, “Oh, yeah.”

  It’s a pretty tight ship at the Times. They had already dispatched a lot of reporters, and they had things covered for the most part. But the sort of over-arching things that they would need—the sights, the sounds. They wanted to know about the ad-hoc crisis centers that were being set up. They wanted interviews with people who had actually seen and/or participated in rescues. They were very specific about all that, and I said, “Okay.”

  Right where you come down from the Williamsburg Bridge, there’s a firehouse, which you can see from the top of the bridge. I backtracked to there. A woman there was hooked up to some sort of oxygen mask. She was dressed in business attire with her purse at her side, and she was covered in dust. Her purse was black leather but the dust had turned it white. She was sitting there by herself, breathing into this mask.

  Three firemen were standing nearby and I talked to them. I said, “Are you with this house?”

  They said, “No, we’re from Queens. The firemen from this house have been sent out already, we were brought in to cover them.” They had their trucks and their ladders with them, the idea being that they would rotate out when the house came back in.

  These guys knew what was going on. They had seen the pictures on TV, same as all of us. And they were waiting in that firehouse, knowing they had to go down there when and if these men came back.

  The lid was on. They were so nervous. They were pacing back and forth, and there was a rat-tat-tat rhythm to their conversation. They just had to keep talking, keep talking. They told me, “Yup, we’ve been here, we know this is what’s happening, we know these people are coming back, we’re waiting, we don’t really know what’s going on.”

  They didn’t have much information. They just had this raw-nerve energy.

  I took some notes and kept walking.

  I saw a group of businesspeople coming toward me with cloths over their faces, and I said, “Where were you?” They’d been in a building near one of the Towers and were covered in debris.

  I walked down toward Chinatown. No cars. All the streets are shut down. It was a pedestrian free-for-all with everybody heading north and east, away from where I was going. I was still heading in the wrong direction.

  There was this young blonde woman crying on the street corner. She was with another young blonde woman, who was trying to console her. The crying woman had all these keys in her hand, as if she’d just run out of her house. The two women were standing there when all of a sudden this police car, covered in debris like snow, swerved up and came to a screeching halt in front of them.

  A policeman jumped out. He was covered in debris, too; there was dust all over his hair. He ran to the crying woman and embraced her, lifted her off the ground and spun her around while the other woman stared.

  The couple pressed their foreheads against each other and talked, saying private words. Then the officer got back in his police car and drove away.

  I asked the woman, “Is that your husband?”

  The crying woman could barely talk, she was sobbing so hard. “No,” she said. “That’s my boyfriend. He was working down there and he has to go back.”

  I took more notes and kept walking.

  Most places I passed were shut, but I found some delis open with their radios on and people gathered around, listening. Some places had telephones, water, and toilets, and if they had these three things, they put up signs that said “Telephone, Water, and Toilets.” These were the beginnings of my makeshift crisis centers. Several churches had these signs out front, and people were going into the buildings. Along the Bowery, methadone clinics and halfway houses were taking people in.

  I kept walking faster toward the traverse of the Manhattan Bridge. It was still a free-for-all, with people walking in all different directions. This big crowd passed me and suddenly, right before me, stood one of my co-workers, Jesse, this guy that I sit next to every day who also works in Culture. We saw each other and stopped. Then we gave each other a big hug.

  This is a person I work with; I certainly wouldn’t under normal circumstances go up to him and give him a hug on the street. I had seen more people in that one morning than I had probably seen during my whole time in New York, masses of humanity. But in all that, I had been anonymous. Jesse was the first person I’d run into that I knew from my life before the attack. And even though we were all—everyone in New York—witnessing what was happening together,
even though there was a bond, a friendship of sorts, it was almost not validated for me because they hadn’t been there yesterday. They hadn’t been part of my life, my routine.

  Seeing Jesse was like validating that this wasn’t a dream, this was my life. I was here. There. Right where it was all happening.

  Jesse had been dispatched down to the scene to gather information. We exchanged brief words of, “I’m doing this, I’m doing that.” He was going off to Brooklyn to visit churches that were serving people who’d fled the city.

  We said goodbye, and he went along his way.

  I ended up walking through Chinatown, and I got as far as Canal Street before I was stopped at a checkpoint of barricades. The authorities had a bunch of emergency vehicles lined up. Policemen all over the street. I could not pass. There was no getting into the zone we now call Ground Zero.

  I circled around for a bit. Eventually, I ended up sitting on a curb in front of a firehouse in Chinatown. It was still a beautiful day. And in Chinatown, I watched workmen continue construction on a shop. Men were painting the doorjamb and the doors. Other shops were open for business, and kids were playing ball on the sidewalk.

  I sat in front of this firehouse, waiting for the fire teams to come back so I could interview them. Waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

  Eventually, some firemen returned to the house. Some of them were from Westchester County, and I found out that different teams who’d come into the city from the outlying regions to volunteer were brought to a command center up in Harlem, then dispatched down to individual houses throughout Manhattan on a rotation plan.30 These Westchester men had that same nervous energy I’d seen in the guys from Queens.