102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (12 page)

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Authors: Jim Dwyer,Kevin Flynn

BOOK: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
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Not only the fire towers disappeared. So did half the staircases. The 1968 code reduced the number of stairways required for buildings the size of the towers from six to three. When those provisions were still a draft proposal, the Port Authority engineer in charge of construction, Malcolm P. Levy, ordered them incorporated into the plans. “The tower core should be redesigned,” he wrote on September 29, 1965, “to eliminate the fire towers and to take advantage of the more lenient provisions regarding exit stairs.” Moreover, those three stairwells would have less protection, as the new code lowered the minimum fire resistance for walls around the shafts from three hours to two, and permitted them to be built from much less sturdy material. All these changes offered significant financial opportunities. They would increase the space available for rent by getting rid of stairways and make the building lighter by eliminating the requirements for masonry. When New York City building officials
pointed out in 1968 that the towers, as planned, did not meet the existing code, the Port Authority’s representatives replied that they would satisfy the new code—the one that would become law in December. At the time, no city regulator noted a feature of the towers that would have required a fourth staircase, even under the less stringent requirements of the new code: atop each tower was a “place of assembly” for more than 1,000 people—the Windows on the World restaurant in the north tower, and an observatory in the south.
Fewer Stairwells
A change in the New York City building code in 1968 reduced the number of stairwells required in tall buildings. The World Trade Center, completed in 1970, had fewer escape routes than the Empire State Building, completed in 1931.
Sources: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; Empire State Building; Carol Willis, the Skyscraper Museum The New York Times
The signature building of New York in the first half of the twentieth century—the Empire State Building, which opened in 1931—had nine staircases at its broad base, six in its tapered middle, including the fire tower. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, which received their first tenants in 1970, had just three.
Another safety issue that would be of great consequence on September 11—the distance between the stairways—was all but ignored by the 1968 code. In 1959, a fire in a stairwell at Our Lady of Angels school in Chicago killed ninety-six children and three nuns. Around the country, building codes were quickly changed to require that exits be spread out, to create a second chance if one was somehow disabled. New York passed a law taking effect in 1961 that required exits in school buildings and other “places of assembly” to be on “opposite sides of the floor or space.” Less than a decade later, the 1968 code did not press the standard for office buildings. The new code, and real-estate economics, encouraged the use of a single core in the center of the building. There, bunched as tightly as possible, would be shafts that housed essential services, including elevators, mechanical conduits, and, most important, stairs—all elements that did not directly produce rent revenue. The 1938 code generally required that exits on each floor be “remote” from each other, so that a single problem could not obstruct all the ways out. The new code amended that language in a small but significant way: each exit now had to be “as remote from the others as is practicable.” New York would not explicitly demand remote stairways in office buildings until 1984, long after the trade center was open.
Finally, just as the
Titanic
was required by the British Board of Trade to have the same number of lifeboats as a ship one-quarter its size, the building code generally required the same number of exit stairways—three—for a building 75 feet tall as for one 1,350 feet high. So a 110-story skyscraper had to provide no more capacity for escape than a six-story building. The building code’s limited stairway requirements not only embraced the implausibility of a total building evacuation for very tall buildings, but enshrined it.
The trade center was a marvel for the building trade in dozens of ways, but its singular triumph was in its use of space, the tight bundling of the building systems that made it possible for the Port Authority to offer for rent fully three-quarters of each floor. That was 21 percent higher than the best yield achieved in older skyscrapers, which were forced to commit that much more space to exit routes and so forth.
The Stairwells in the South Tower
Impact 9:02 A.M. Collapse 9:59 A.M.
Building code reform hardly makes for gripping drama. A few feet chiseled here and there from stairwells by getting rid of fire towers. The elimination of masonry reinforcement around stairwells. Exits bunched together in the core of the building. And yet from the balcony of history, the new standards yield a dramatic view of contrasts. While the foundation of the trade center was being wrapped in a stupendous girdle of concrete, to stand against time and tide—it was three feet thick, more than half a mile long, and seventy feet deep—the stairways in the sky would be clad in a few inches of lightweight drywall. These stairways, bunched together, built for only a few hundred people at a time to walk three or four stories, would now have to carry out of the buildings the 12,000 people beneath the airplane impacts on September 11, 2001.
 
 
Richard Fern looked ahead to the stripes in stairway A of the south tower. They had been applied to the stairs after the fiasco of the 1993 evacuation, when thousands of angry, choking people emerged to describe pitch-black staircases, unlit because the emergency lights had failed when the power went out. Since then, the Port Authority had spent $2.1 million on emergency lighting and exit signs lit with light-emitting diodes. The emergency lights now had batteries that would stay on for at least ninety minutes if the building lost power. The stripes helped, too. Fern flew down the flights, nine steps a landing, then a turn, another nine steps. Coming from the 84th floor, he was going directly past the heart of the devastation in the south tower. Here again, he had the benefit of yet another stroke of luck. Only in two places in the towers were the stairs not bunched in the center of the building. At those spots, the stairwells had to detour away from the middle of the building because elevator machinery took up half the space on the floor. One of these detours ran from the 82nd to the 76th floors, just below where Fern had entered the stairs—and at the exact area where most of Flight 175 had hit. Because stairway A was about fifty-four feet northeast of its regular path in the center of the building, it survived in at least
passable condition. The machine room may also have helped deflect damage from the plane.
Unlit and smoky, stairway A seemed possessed by gloom. Fern, however, was possessed by yet another chance. Beginning at 84, he ran through the smoke, finding it bad but bearable. A few floors down, most likely on the 82nd floor, he was shocked to discover that stairway A seemed to come to an end; this was in fact a corridor that led people coming down stairway A in the core of the building to the continuation of the staircase, along the periphery. He reached against the wall, found a door handle, and opened it. Some daylight fell on his eyes, and he felt a surge of relief.
“Do not go down that staircase,” someone shouted. “Use this one.” Fern walked quickly toward the voice, passing a bleeding woman who was being helped by a man. They seemed okay. He found the continuation of stairway A, and headed down. He hustled past the people ahead of him in the stairs. As soon as he made the next turn in the stairs, he saw another man and another woman, stopped dead. One of the wallboards had collapsed into the staircase, and they could not get by.
“Don’t go this way,” one of them said. They were ready to turn back.
Fern did not speak to them. He lifted the wall off the ground and rested it on the banister, creating a triangle that was just big enough for him to crawl under. At the next floor, a smaller piece of the wall had collapsed. This time, Fern simply jumped from the stairs onto it, rolled onto the landing, and kept going. A few flights down, he caught up with Peter, another man who worked at Euro Brokers. Fern was about to blow past when Peter stopped him.
“We should stay together,” Peter said.
“Okay, but you will have to keep up with me,” Fern said. He resumed his fast pace, but the initial surge of his flight had subsided. He noticed that few people seemed to be in the stairwell. He switched on his walkie-talkie radio and heard a member of Euro Brokers’ security department, who was outside the building, speaking with Dave Vera, who was with the other group from Euro
Brokers, higher up in the building. By the time Fern got to the 30th floor, his legs were shaking. He thought he would collapse. At the bottom of the building, he met a phalanx of Port Authority police officers and security guards, who steered him and Peter out of the south tower, through the concourse and east to Church Street, where he came out near Borders.
 
 
A few people found the same staircase that Richard Fern had discovered, and they also met a man and a woman who were stymied by the fallen wall. But stairway A would prove to be a path out of the destruction for those in the south tower’s 78th-floor sky lobby, where the ground was carpeted with the silent, fallen bodies of scores of people who had been standing there a few moments earlier. Perhaps two dozen people were alive. Keating Crown of Aon had gotten to stairway A with his colleagues Kelly Reyher and Donna Spera, who also had been waiting for the elevators. Reyher had used his briefcase to wedge apart the doors of a burning elevator car after the impact, and Spera and Crown had both been badly burned; Spera also had multiple broken bones. The three managed to stumble to stairway A at the northwest corner of the building. They hollered into the dusty, dying sky lobby that they had found a way out. A few others followed their voices to the door.
In the stairwell, Crown wanted to carry Spera on his back, but Reyher said, “That’s not a very good idea,” pointing out that they had a long way to go. Spera then slung her arms over Crown and Reyher, and they began to walk down. Very soon, they encountered a man and woman—quite possibly, the same people encountered by Fern—who reported that the stairwell was blocked. “You can’t go this way,” one of them said.
Fern’s temporary solution to the collapsed wall near the 76th floor—propping up the drywall—apparently had not held. Crown had run ahead and seen that the wallboard had been knocked out by an elevator car, which ran in a shaft adjacent to the stairs. With Reyher, Crown could see the struts that had once held the wall, and
they could see a conduit that had been running in the shaft, and it was all down in a heap. There was more discussion in the stairway about going back up, but Reyher and Crown, having just left the horrors of the 78th floor, were not turning back. They began to pick up junk from the floor and shove it aside, and they pushed the wall into place, but it quickly fell back onto the stairs. Then Crown realized that the wall could rest on the fallen conduit, which was relatively secure, and still leave space. A third man helped lift the board. Among them, they had cleared enough room to get by.
Crown traveled with a woman for a few flights, thinking it was Donna Spera, before suddenly realizing it was someone else. Another man stepped in to walk with that woman. Crown continued down on his own. His own left leg was broken. He was bleeding from the back of the head and from cuts on his arm. Another man took off a shirt, soaked it in water, and dabbed the back of Crown’s head. Crown took off his own shirt to wrap around his wrist. As he caught up with people from the lower floors, the word was passed ahead that an injured person was coming, and the double line of evacuating people immediately folded into a single file. Some gasped or shrieked when they saw him, but Crown plodded on. A woman passed him the last ounce of a can of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi. It was mostly backwash, Crown figured, but it cleared his throat. He kept going. When he got to street level and an ambulance, a paramedic checked his bleeding head and pulled out a metal spring that somehow had gotten lodged in his scalp. Behind him a few flights, Reyher and Spera made steady progress. When she wanted to rest, Reyher gave no quarter. “Keep going,” he insisted.

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