102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (15 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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After that group headed for the stairwell, the first rescue helicopter landed on the south tower. By about 10 P.M., a dozen or so people were shuttled off the roof of that tower as well. Finally, when the building was clear, the pilot asked Hurley if he wanted a ride. He was the last civilian airlifted from the buildings.
 
 
From most perspectives, the 1993 bombing of the trade center, killing six people, had been a bleak moment, marking the arrival of terrorism in America. The rooftop rescues became one of the few bright spots in the early news coverage. The helicopter crews made the rounds on television.
Nightline. CBS This Morning
. While they were feted, fire officials seethed. In their view, the people atop the towers had never been in serious danger, not at least until the police helicopters scooped them off the roof in windy conditions. A month after the bombing, the New York City Fire Chiefs Association sent Mayor David N. Dinkins a letter. “This was nothing more than sheer grandstanding, a cheap publicity stunt done at the expense of public safety,” the chiefs wrote. “The people removed via helicopter were in no danger until the Police Department arrived and gravely jeopardized their safety by this stupid act.”
The tenants simply should have waited for the smoke to clear and then walked down the stairs. At least, that was how the chiefs saw it.
Ludicrous, police officials said. People were trapped. Time was of the essence. Who knew at the outset how the building would handle a major explosion at its base?
No doubt some emergency-management experts would have sided with the fire chiefs, but it was hard to see their position strictly as a matter of principle or public safety, devoid of pique over the
acclaim the cops had received just for dropping onto the building tops in plain sight, while their firefighters invisibly trudged up and around 10 million square feet of office space. The Fire Department did not own or operate helicopters. On the issue of operating a sane, coordinated response, however, the fire chiefs had a strong point. Fire rescues were supposed to be their job. The police had never bothered to tell them what they planned to do, even though fire officials were supposed to have been in charge. The fire commissioner, Carlos Rivera, said, “Communications between the Police Department and the Fire Department were a problem at this incident.” When reporters asked a police spokeswoman about communications difficulties, she replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The following year, in an effort to stop the squabbling, the city officially restated its position on the use of helicopters at fires: Rooftop rescues would be a last resort. If undertaken, they would be performed by firefighters, not the police. The firefighters would be carried to the roofs by police helicopters, which would be summoned to the scene by fire officers. There would be joint training runs so that the two agencies could work smoothly together when the time arose. Over the years, though, the commitment waned, and training became sporadic. Nevertheless, memories of that day remained vivid for veteran firefighters.
As Captain Fred Ill of Ladder Company 2 in midtown responded, he radioed the dispatcher. “I know you have your hands full with the trade center,” he said, “but keep in mind about the helicopter units that have been trained for this. They didn’t do it the last time, with the last explosion at the trade center. In case nobody prompts you on that. We do have these helicopter units that are available.” Captain Ill himself had done the training. It was the first of several reminders he sent to the dispatchers.
 
 
Panes of glass from the upper floors, near where the plane had hit, kept shattering in the plaza outside the lobby of the north tower. Each time, the noise was startling, like a cymbal shot, and with each crash, several firefighters in the lobby looked up anxiously
at the ceiling. Many of the fire companies now arriving were from outside Manhattan and, to them, the trade center was an unfamiliar place, a maze of exits and entrances and buildings that looked alike. Some of the companies assigned to Tower 2, the south tower, were mistakenly reporting to Tower 1, so Chief Pfeifer told his aide to write the words
Tower 1
with a marker on the command desk in the north tower. Indeed, so many companies went to the wrong building that the commanders in the south tower ultimately ordered another whole set of companies to respond from their firehouses.
Inside the north tower lobby, around 9:15, about a half hour after the first plane struck, someone asked Pfeifer if he had put the helicopter plan into effect, and Pfeifer began looking for one of his radios. Although the city had bought radios that were supposed to make it possible for the Fire and Police Departments to communicate, the agencies could not agree on which one was in charge of the frequencies. So they remained unused. Instead, the fire commanders had to contact their own dispatchers, who would forward the request to the police. The police helicopter crew would then arrange to pick up the firefighters at a landing zone. But Pfeifer couldn’t find the radio he needed to talk to the dispatcher, so he tried the phone. Some of the lines were dead. When he finally found a live line, he got a busy signal. Cell phones weren’t working, either. With his options declining and other crises tugging at his sleeve, Pfeifer moved on to the next task. He figured that the commanders outside, the bosses who were running the department’s overall operations, had probably ordered up the helicopter already. In fact, they had not.
The police aviation team had been anticipating a call from the firefighters, but when they did not hear from them, they just flew on. The Police Department’s team of high-rise experts mustered to a landing zone near the building, preparing in case they were ordered to rappel down to the roof. But the chief of the department, Joseph Esposito, decided that the smoke and heat were too much. At 9:08 he had spoken over the police radio. “I don’t want to see anybody landing on either one of these towers,” he said.
It was a decision that would be revisited, but not revised, that morning. “Did we get anybody on the roof of either building?” an
ESU cop asked over the radio about twenty minutes later. “Negative,” responded the dispatcher. “Nobody is landing on the roof up there.”
“Well,” the cop continued, “as soon as that clears up, we need people on that roof.”
The need for intervention was horribly apparent to Semendinger, Hayes, and the other pilots watching the fires advance through the upper floors and seeing people on those floors hanging out of the windows. One pilot, Officer Yvonne Kelhetter, hovering off the north tower, got on the radio at about 9:30. “About five floors up from the top,” she said, “you have about fifty people with their faces pressed against the window trying to breathe.”
Ten minutes later, an officer in the field sent a radio message to one of the teams that were trained to drop from a helicopter: “You’re on your way to rig the helicopter. We need you on the roof as soon as possible.”
In the north tower, where the plane’s wingspan had spread from the 93rd to the 99th floor, the heat and smoke were far more intense than in the south tower, where the impact zone was fifteen to twenty floors lower, from the 77th to the 85th floor. The people had hurled chairs and computer monitors and anything they could find to break the windows to get air, with the unfortunate effect of drawing fire closer to them and to others above them. On the 110th floor, Steve Jacobson, a broadcast engineer for WPIX-TV, had a breathing pack in his office, a piece of precautionary equipment distributed after the 1993 bombing. But in a telephone call to a colleague at the station, Victor J. Arnone, he said he could not make it to the roof.
“It’s too hot in the hallway,” he said. “I can’t leave the room. Get me out of here. Send help.”
 
 
The first people had been seen falling from the north tower at 8:48 or 8:49, two or three minutes after the crash of Flight 11, men and women at the seat of the inferno of jet fuel. The early plunges were less deliberate, more reflexive, like a person recoiling from a hot
stove. To get away from the heat, they did not have to fight their way through fire and flame. The side of the building had been ripped open. Alone or holding hands, they climbed onto windowsills, the only refuge from heat and smoke.
A man. A woman. A man and a woman together.
Later, the people on the upper floors of the north tower retreated into rooms and sealed the doors, but the smoke was relentless, pushing them against the windows—windows that could not be opened. As the smoke and flames moved through the buildings, scores of people called 911 to ask permission to break the windows. No, the operators said, that would make matters worse. Then the people called again, to say that matters were getting worse. On the other side of the room, they said, people had already broken windows. And they were jumping.
When the smoke parted for a moment, Richard Smiouskas could see that not everyone was consciously jumping. Smiouskas, a fire lieutenant and departmental photographer, had climbed to the roof of a building across West Street from the trade center and was watching the developments through a long lens. He saw a man standing in a window frame on a high floor in the north tower. Around him were five or six other faces, crowded into the same narrow window frame. Then the man pitched forward, nudged, it seemed to Smiouskas, by others crowding for a mouthful of air. As the desperation rose, it was impossible not to remember that a drowning person will push a lifeguard under water if it means one more gulp of air.
So urgent was the need to breathe that people piled four and five high in window after window, their upper bodies hanging out, 1,300 feet above the ground. They were in an unforgiving place.
On one of the top floors—104 or 105—two men, one of them shirtless, stood on the windowsills, leaning their bodies so far outside that they could peer around a big intervening column and see each other. On the 103rd floor, a man stared straight out a broken window toward the northwest, bracing himself against a window frame with one hand. He wrapped his other arm around a woman, perhaps to keep her from tumbling to the ground.
That people were falling and jumping from the north tower was evident, not only to onlookers but also by the accounts of callers from within that building. Conversely, there is evidence that only a few people jumped or fell from the south tower. Why people would jump in greater numbers from one building than the other reflects the different paths that the crisis followed in each place. Both towers had similar volumes of smoke and heat, but because of where and when the planes hit, the impact zone in the south tower was not as crowded. Flight 175 had hit the south tower roughly seventeen floors lower than Flight 11 had hit the north tower. And because evacuation had started in the south tower before the plane hit there, fewer people remained in the impact area. In the north tower, about three times as many people were confined to roughly half the space.
From the 101st through the 107th floors of the north tower, nearly 900 people were trapped in the office of Cantor Fitzgerald, and just above it, in Windows on the World. In the restaurant, at least seventy people crowded near office windows at the northwest corner of the 106th floor, according to accounts they gave relatives and coworkers. “Everywhere else is smoked out,” Stuart Lee, the Data Synapse vice president, quickly typed in an e-mail to his office in Greenwich Village. “Currently an argument going on as whether we should break a window,” Lee continued a few moments later, “Consensus is no for the time being.” Soon, though, a dozen people appeared through broken windows along the west face of the restaurant.
By now, fires were rampaging through the impact floors, darting across the north face of the tower. Since most of the space was open, the flames consumed the furnishings—about 20 minutes for each area—then moved on to the next reservoir of fuel. Coils of smoke lashed the people braced around the broken windows.
In Cantor Fitzgerald’s northwest conference room on the 104th floor, Andrew Rosenblum and fifty other people temporarily managed to ward off the smoke and heat by plugging vents with jackets. “We smashed the computers into the windows to get some air,” Rosenblum reported by cell phone to Barry Kornblum, a colleague who was not in the office.
Rosenblum called his wife, Jill, calmly discussing the situation. He did not mention that people were falling past the windows, but in the midst of speaking to her, he suddenly interjected, without elaboration, “Oh, my God.”
Many of those who did not jump or fall from the windows were heaped in stacks along the frames, just as another generation had at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire ninety years earlier. This time, helicopter pilots broadcast descriptions of what they were seeing.
Kelhetter:
Aviation 3 has a couple of people hanging off the windows about five floors from the top. There’s at least fifty people hanging on.
An officer on the ground radioed the helicopters. They could see a man poised on a high ledge.
Ground:
Definitely outside the building. Do you have an eyeball on him?
[
inaudible
]
Ground:
He’s the one with the white shirt. We’ve been watching him for about a good five minutes, he’s … completely outside of the yellow line.
Kelhetter:
All right, let me go pass one more time.
Ground:
Right about the center of the building, looks like he’s got on black pants and a white shirt.
Kelhetter:
Is he below the fire line?
Ground:
Affirmative … . You see where that white flag is … . He’s directly below that white flag but several floors below it.
Kelhetter:
We’re about 1,200 feet. Have him in view from 1,200 feet from the ground, whatever floor that would be.
Ground:
But you definitely see him, he’s there by himself, correct?
Kelhetter:
He’s standing there by himself.
Ground:
All right, 10-4. Thank you. I’m going to go over to … and try and let them know inside.

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