CHAPTER   4

“I was gonna swim to Jersey.”

THE LONGSTANDING TRADITION of mariners assisting those in peril is as ancient as seafaring itself. Stemming from a moral duty rooted in pragmatism about the implicit dangers of nautical life, the obligation was signed into U.S. admiralty law in the aftermath of the April 15, 1912, sinking of the RMS Titanic. Codified as 46 U.S.C. section 2304, the law provides: “A master or individual in charge of a vessel shall render assistance to any individual found at sea in danger of being lost, so far as the master or individual in charge can do so without serious danger to the master’s or individual’s vessel or individuals on board.” Failure to comply is grounds for criminal sanctions.

This rule, however, did not apply to the situation in Manhattan on September 11. At least not technically speaking in most cases. But that didn’t stop the boatmen and boatwomen from New York harbor and beyond from feeling compelled. At stake were notions of identity, of mariners’ acclimatization to taking and mitigating risks, of what disaster researchers James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf call “professional honor.” Mariners they interviewed in the aftermath of the attacks did not talk of choosing to help. Instead, without planning or protocols, many undertook the evacuation out of a sense of duty, unquestioningly, applying to this land-based calamity their mandate from the laws of the sea. The compulsion to rescue, stitched into the fabric of nautical tradition, propelled mariners into action, as did the sense, for many, of New York harbor—waterfront included—as “home.”

Staten Island Ferry Captain James Parese was sprinting across the upper deck of Samuel I. Newhouse when all at once the air turned “a very weird color, like a greenish gray.” He’d been preparing to pull the orange ferryboat away from the slip at the southern tip of Manhattan when a blanket of gypsum dust, smoke, and ash blotted out the sun. The 6,000-passenger ferryboat, one of the highest passenger capacity vessels in the world, was filled with people desperate to evacuate the island—some panicked and crying, some bleeding, some with no shoes—and now they scrambled for life preservers, thinking the boat was on fire. It was one minute before 10 A.M. The South Tower had just collapsed.

Parese’s eyes and throat started to burn. “I remember looking out towards Jersey and I couldn’t see anything.” For a moment he questioned the decision he’d made earlier that morning to set out on this rescue mission from the safety of Staten Island. But when pieces of white plastic began drifting down from the sky, it reminded him of snow. He felt suddenly serene.

“You know when you’re a kid and you’re walking in that gentle snow and it’s very quiet and peaceful? That’s kind of what it brought me back to. . . . I was completely calm at that point. . . . All I could do was focus.” As the captain steered the 300-foot, 3,335-ton ferry into a harbor crowded with other vessels—navigating by radar with zero visibility—the lives of thousands of distraught passengers depended on that focus. Parese drew upon decades of experience as a mariner, a profession where the notion that panic leads to peril is as deeply ingrained as the tradition of helping those in need. He delivered his passengers to safety on Staten Island, then returned, time and time again, to Manhattan to pick up still more.

The shushing noise reminded marine engineer Gulmar Parga of crystal shattering. “Like a giant chandelier . . . It was all the glass breaking.” Together, the twin towers contained 43,600 windows and more than 600,000 square feet of glass. The sound of its fracture reached Parga as he stood on the deck of fireboat John D. McKean, about a thousand feet away. A split-second earlier, Parga had heard what sounded like a series of explosions. “The floors were collapsing: Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!” From where the boat was tied up along the seawall just south of North Cove, it looked to Parga like a string of dynamite had been rigged to blow up each level of 2 World Trade Center in rapid succession.

A career firefighter, Parga still grimaces at the recollection of his first thought when he grasped that the tower was falling. “The feeling of guilt was instant, but I felt like, I’m glad I’m not under it. You know what I mean? I was out there on the water and it was collapsing and I knew all my friends were dying in there—possibly Tom Sullivan and possibly the captain—they were dying and I thought, I’m glad I’m not under it.”

He watched a colossal dust cloud rise up from where the tower once stood. “Like a nuclear explosion, it’s spiraling and spiraling and coming closer and closer to us.”

Scientists have since calculated the energy released in the collapse as equal to about 1 percent of a nuclear bomb. Because energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, the work that construction crews had put into building the 1,350-foot tower (lifting sections of wall, pouring concrete, bolting steel) had been stockpiled in the South Tower for three decades. When the 500,000-ton mass—all that steel, all that concrete, the contents of nearly 5 million square feet of office space, including people—came down, it released 278 megawatt hours of potential energy—enough power to supply all the homes in Atlanta or Oakland for an hour.

Seconds later, the wall of dust and debris descended upon the boat. Parga dropped to his hands and knees. “Whoosh, it went from daytime to nighttime. It got dark instantly and you couldn’t breathe. I could only describe it like sticking your head in a bag of sawdust and shaking it and trying to breathe. You imagine all that grit and everything going in?” Parga waited to die. Instead of sawdust, Parga, like so many hundreds of thousands of people caught in the cloud, was actually breathing in asbestos, lead, glass, heavy metals, concrete, poisonous gases, oil, and exploded jet fuel, as well as the pulverized contents of hundreds of offices, including humans. A few choking breaths later, Parga realized the cloud had not killed him. He found he could actually manage to take in some air.

Gritty, gray sediment mantled every surface in the plaza around North Cove, from the tree leaves, bench slats, and paving stones to the lampposts and railings at the seawall. Thousands upon thousands of bits of paper tumbled softly through the drifts—documents depicting daily stock trades alongside mementos of individuals’ most meaningful moments. One sheet displayed a blur of crunched numbers and corporate acronyms. Another held a newborn’s tiny inked footprints. But amid the maelstrom of fear that accompanied the onslaught of debris, these details went largely unnoticed.

The plaza had devolved into utter panic. For many people caught up in the cloud, the impulse to flee overshadowed rational thought. And when they invited peril by jumping, onto the boat or into the water, the crew of fireboat John D. McKean did their utmost to try to help them.

Technically speaking, the Hudson is not a river, but a tidal estuary wherein fresh mountain water from its source—Lake Tear of the Clouds, sitting atop Mount Marcy, which is New York State’s highest peak—mixes with salt water from the sea. On its journey to New York harbor, the Hudson travels 315 miles and drops 4,322 feet in elevation. Long before it was named after explorer Henry Hudson, the river was called by its Algonquian name Muhheahkunnuk, meaning great waters constantly in motion, either ebbing or flowing. For half of each day, the Hudson acts like a river, flowing downstream. But every six hours the water switches direction as Atlantic seawater rushes upstream, raising the water level an average of 4.6 feet during the flood tide before the ebb tide drains it back down. Though few people except mariners usually give them much thought, the rise and fall of the tides played a key role in the fates of people who ran until they’d run out of land.

Low water at the Battery had come at 8:50 that morning. The outflow of the ebb tide had left a drop between the seawall surrounding North Cove and the river’s surface of five to seven feet. The steep swoop of fireboat McKean’s bow lined it up almost flush with the top of the wall, but left a farther drop at the stern. When the dust cloud descended, people spilled over the wall onto the boat. As quickly as they could, the crew scrambled to set up the three ladders they had aboard to receive them. But the ladders weren’t enough.

“We’re starboard-side-to, facing north, and I’m helping everybody I can within my scope,” recalled marine engineer Gulmar Parga. “They’re climbing over the railing. They’re handing everything over the railing down to us. . . . All the people are jumping on the boat on the bow, and they’re jumping on the stern. And I can’t stop them.”

One middle-aged woman stood outside the railing atop the seawall, calling down to the crew. “Help me. Help me!” she cried as she lined herself up to leap onto the deck.

“Wait. Don’t jump. Wait!” urged the firefighters as they quickly assembled to try to break her fall. “So we got two guys,” said Parga. “‘Okay, jump!’ And she’d land on top of you, knock you down. And then we’d get up and help the next person: ‘One, two, three, jump!’”

When they spotted a man in a wheelchair at the railing, several firefighters worked to carry him and his chair aboard. Another man stood above the stern, poised to jump. “Don’t jump,” yelled Parga. “Wait! Don’t jump!” But he didn’t wait. When his foot hit the steel deck, his leg snapped at the shin. He howled, but Parga couldn’t stop to attend to him while people kept pouring over the side. “He had to stay there and scream.”

Some panicked evacuees began untying the mooring lines until the crew stopped them. “We can’t untie the boat. We’ve got more people,” urged pilot Jim Campanelli. Then he continued hollering reassurances to the people atop the seawall. “We’ll get you out of here,” he said. “We’re not gonna leave anybody back.” Within minutes nearly 200 people had boarded, a number of them sustaining severe injuries.

One minute before ten o’clock, the dinner-boat captain, Jerry Grandinetti, had just stepped inside the VIP Yacht Cruises office when he heard what sounded like a third explosion. He slammed the door behind him. “The world went black,” he explained. “And I mean totally black.” He and another guy in the office quickly set about shutting off the air conditioners to make sure that whatever was outside didn’t get sucked in.

A few moments later, when the blackness faded to a hazy gray, Grandinetti went back out and started walking east toward the trade center. The whole area was blanketed with half a foot of ashy powder and littered with metal and other debris. Grandinetti could see 20 to 30 feet in front of him, but he couldn’t see up at all.

So while millions of people around the world had watched the South Tower collapse, Grandinetti had no inkling that it had fallen. The same was true for countless others who were closest to the unfolding disaster. Even people still in Tower One, both rescuers and civilians, didn’t know the other building was down. The very idea was beyond conception, and little reliable information penetrated from the outside world.

At the foot of Gateway Plaza, Grandinetti watched a handful of dazed people wander west toward the water. Then two firefighters emerged from the fog carrying a third who was unconscious. Grandinetti guided them to the office where they laid the man on a table. Beyond that they exchanged few words. Shocked silence and stoicism steered their interaction.

Grandinetti did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed a case of water from the supply closet to hand to people on the street and headed back to check on the boats once more. As he reached the north side of North Cove, two other firefighters intercepted him. “Can you get that dinghy running?” they asked, referring to the yacht company’s 20-foot inflatable Zodiac. They asked if he could run them south near the tip of Manhattan so they could meet up with their fire company. “Let’s go,” Grandinetti replied.

The dinner-boat captain insists he hadn’t been “looking for stuff to do” to help in that moment. But once asked he agreed with no second thought. “I just knew I had the ability.” So he welcomed the firefighters aboard the dust-covered, “center-console, big-engine, way-too-fast” rigid inflatable and headed south. Nearing the Battery, Grandinetti popped the boat into reverse to slow his approach into the slip at an unused ferry terminal. Then the engine stalled.

There was no mistaking the heart-sinking lurch that had stopped the boat dead in the water. When the Zodiac quit, just feet off the dock where Jerry Grandinetti had intended to drop his passengers, the seasoned boatman recognized instantly what had happened. The braided polypropylene bowline had wrapped itself around the propeller.

By this hour, just after 10 in the morning, the harbor was filled with ferries, NYPD harbor launches, and other vessels running around at top speeds. All these boats kicked up even more wake action than usual and now, dead in the water, the rigid inflatable bobbed like a bath toy in the three-foot chop. Waves or no waves, Grandinetti had no choice but to hang himself over the stern to try to untangle the rope from the propeller blades. Each time the Zodiac dipped between swells, he got dunked underwater face-first. Down. Up. Down again. Grandinetti was dipped repeatedly like a sugar cube in salty Hudson River tea, as he worked to free the propeller. And still the prop stayed jammed. Finally, line removed, he reached the dock, the firefighters debarked, and Grandinetti pulled out, rounded up, and headed north.

On his trip down, the wind had been at his stern. Now that he was northbound the dust covering the boat kicked up with each new wave, plastering his wet torso, face, and hair. Though he was wearing and breathing in the pulverized remains of a 110-story tower and its occupants, Grandinetti still didn’t know that 2 World Trade Center had fallen.

Then Grandinetti spotted his friend, fellow captain Pat Harris, attempting to pull the sailing yacht Ventura up to the seawall just north of Pier A in Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, where hundreds of people pressed up against the railing at the river’s edge. When the first tower fell, Harris had been safely tied up a mile away in Morris Canal, across the river in New Jersey, attempting to get fuel. But when someone on land announced that people were jumping off the seawall in Manhattan, Harris had cast off lines and set out once again, passengers in tow, to offer what aid he could.

He hadn’t come across anyone in the water, but found swarms of people desperate to get off the island. When he tried to maneuver his yacht into position to board passengers he discovered the river was too choppy. “We got smacked by some wave action and I realized that the Ventura was just the wrong boat for that.” Although Harris conceded that “going from a wall to a bowsprit [the spar extending forward from the ship’s bow] on a moving, bobbing boat” was “not a good boarding process,” one man (a 30-something St. Louis resident who worked for the news agency Reuters, the captain recalled) did manage to climb aboard. When he saw Grandinetti, Harris called him over to ask if he could use the little Zodiac to ferry passengers from the seawall over to the Ventura since boarding them directly was sketchy at best.

“It’s too rough, Pat,” Grandinetti replied. “It’s too rough.” Plus people would have had to climb over the metal railing and then jump down well over five feet into the boat.

“I remember Jerry saying, ‘These people are in no danger here,’” Harris recalled. “And it made a lot of sense.” Harris told the would-be evacuees that other boats better suited to boarding were on the way, then headed for New Jersey to deliver his existing passengers—the mate and his family—out of harm’s way.

Volunteer firefighter Bob Nussberger thought he must be dead. The sudden silence, the absence of all sensation, had left him with an odd sense of peace. Where the sun had shone in a cloudless blue sky there was now just blackness. In the space once filled by shrieking sirens only dead air remained. All at once there was nothing. Minutes ticked by.

Just before 10 A.M., Nussberger had trudged in full firefighter’s bunker gear through the gray soot and papers strewn across West Street. He and his volunteer fire company had been called to the World Trade Center from Broad Channel, an island in Queens, near John F. Kennedy Airport. Immediately upon arriving, Nussberger had received orders to tend to burn victims in a South Tower elevator. To find out which elevator, they’d been told to report to a lieutenant in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in 3 World Trade Center, the 22-story building tucked between the two towers.

As they walked across West Street, traces of the carnage were unavoidable. Amid the burning rubble, shoes, airplane parts, garments, and luggage strewn about in the plaza lay charred body parts. But to Nussberger, the remains didn’t look real. It was all too much to fathom. “But still and all,” he said, struggling to find the words, “Just the idea . . . You knew.”

Before he and his unit could step beneath the slanted glass awning at the hotel entrance, a police officer halted them with an outstretched palm and a grim expression. He’d been standing there, working the door, watching overhead. “Okay,” he’d say to people trying to flee the towers through the Marriott’s Tall Ships Bar and Grill. A few people would sprint across the street. “Okay. Now,” he’d yell, and a couple more would dash across. As he gestured to Nussberger, stopping him from entering, the officer pointed up. “There was a lot of debris coming down,” Nussberger explained. “Use your imagination on debris.”

Though Nussberger didn’t know it, a half-hour earlier firefighter Danny Suhr had become the first FDNY fatality of the day when he was struck and killed by a falling body as he approached the base of the South Tower. FDNY Captain Paul Conlon, of Engine Company 216, had been walking ahead of him at the time. “It was as if he exploded,” the captain recalled in an FDNY interview conducted four months later. “It wasn’t like you heard something falling and you could jump out of the way.”

Standing a few yards away from the hotel lobby entrance, the Broad Channel volunteers had waited for the sky to clear, then managed to proceed five or six feet before a roar erupted above them. “By the time we heard that building coming down, it was already halfway down,” said Nussberger. “I didn’t get the chance to run.” The pancaking of the tower, beginning at 9:58:59 A.M., had taken all of 10 seconds.

“I don’t know how high I was off the ground, but I knew I wasn’t on the ground,” Nussberger recalled. Then, with “a large thump,” he hit something solid. “At that point there was no more noise. There was nothing. There was a dead silence. I kept thinking to myself, If I’m dead, that was a nice peaceful way of going, you know?”

Soon the blackness faded to brown. I’m outside, he thought. When he tried to move, a hot rush of pain seared through his shoulders, his chest, his face, his feet. The throbbing and stabbing told the 59-year-old he must not be dead, so he tried to right himself. Whatever was piled on top of him was thick but not too heavy to push aside. He crawled across hunks of blasted concrete and lengths of twisted steel, sucking in air so thick it was like trying to breathe sand.

“There was a lot of junk in my mouth,” said Nussberger. “My eyes were on fire. There was blood all over my hands and my face.” Moments earlier he had seen 80 or 90 people rushing around the city streets. Now 20 or so soot-covered zombies emerged from the wreckage. A blizzard of paper continued to tumble through the sky. “I kept on telling the people: ‘Get into the building! Get into the building. It’s unsafe. There’s still a lot of stuff coming down.’”

Lights flashed and sirens blared all around him as FDNY firefighter Tom Sullivan headed inland on the hunt for fireboat John D. McKean’s captain. Near the southwest corner of Liberty and West Streets, directly across the street from the Marriott, an engine company was working to extinguish a street-level blaze—a car fire, maybe, or a large rubbish bin aflame. Burning wreckage littered the street.

To Sullivan’s right, a scatter of FDNY equipment—safety-red pumpers and aerial ladders—and an army of white ambulances stood parked beneath the enclosed pedestrian walkway crossing West Street. The diversity of their detailing revealed the wide reach of the emergency medical services (EMS) response. Among the rigs was the ambulance that Nussberger and the Broad Channel volunteers had driven into Manhattan.

Up ahead, about a block to the north, Sullivan spotted several “white hats,” or chiefs, at a command post directly across from the North Tower. Among the top brass standing there was 33-year FDNY veteran and Chief of Department Peter Ganci. He had just received a message from a Buildings Department engineer warning that severe structural damage to the towers meant they might be in imminent danger of collapse. Then an awful rumble shook the earth.

“What the fuck is that?” asked Ganci, as the upper floors of 2 World Trade Center began to cave.

Standing directly across from the disintegrating South Tower, Sullivan looked up to see a wall of gray dust barreling down on him. He did a quick about-face and ran, but didn’t get more than 15 or 20 feet before a force that “felt like a giant hand” pushed him from behind, slamming him onto the pavement. His helmet went flying. The fall shredded the skin on his palms and elbows. “I was lying facedown in the street now in total darkness,” he recalled. A hail of broken-up concrete teemed down from the sky, pelting Sullivan on his back and his bare head as he blindly tried to reorient himself. The stinging powder burned his eyes and plugged up his ears, his mouth.

He groped around for his helmet but quickly gave up. He managed to lay hands on his flashlight, but its beam barely penetrated the soot- and gypsum-clogged air. So he focused on feeling for street curbs, knowing that heading due west would lead him back to the water and to the fireboat. Scrabbling beneath an ongoing shower of rubble, Sullivan at one point resigned himself to the futility of his efforts. There’s no way of getting out of this, he thought, picturing the building toppling over instead of pan-caking down, reasoning that heavy steel would soon fall, crushing him where he crawled.

But he kept inching forward, pulling his shirt up over his nose so he could breathe. “I got to the next intersection and just kind of lined myself up to go straight across the street and catch the next corner.” On the other side, Sullivan felt the avalanche lessen. He bumped blindly into parked cars. He could hear people talking, hollering, screaming.

Still on his hands and knees, he found himself cornered, momentarily, in a notch at the base of the Gateway Plaza building. Then he spotted a flashlight. He grabbed at it but quickly let go when he realized he was gripping the muzzle of a rifle. The man holding the gun identified himself as an NYPD ESU officer. Sullivan could feel his helmet and vest. The police officer, too, was looking for a way out.

“Listen, follow me,” said Sullivan. In time, a dim light penetrated the haze and the firefighter was able to recognize the ramp that led down to the waterfront plaza as the same one he’d climbed moments earlier on his way inland.

By the time he reached the Hudson, the air had cleared a bit. The first thing he saw was the John D. McKean nameplate on the bow. Thank God they didn’t leave me. Already the fireboat was overrun with people, civilians desperate to escape the cloud. Sullivan climbed aboard and headed for the nearest sink to flush out his eyes, which were gummed up with particles. Then he returned to the deck to help the crew manage the flood of people hurtling onto the boat.

A group of women—mothers or nannies—handed down the infants in their care before climbing down themselves. Sullivan carried several babies down to the crew’s quarters below decks, lining them up in a bunk “like little peanuts.”

An older woman seemed to have landed headfirst on the deck, cracking her skull. Blood trickled out of her ears and nose, pooling where she lay by the hose reel on the bow. It was impossible to know the extent of her injuries, but it was clear that she needed medical attention—and the only way to get it was to cross the river.

“I was gonna swim to Jersey,” recalled telecommunications specialist Rich Varela. “That’s what I was thinking.” He had just watched people falling through the sky and now he tried to shake off the images as he headed west down Liberty Street from 1 World Financial Center toward the Hudson. His cell phone rang. A friend announced that another plane had just hit the Pentagon. This is completely out of control.

Halfway to the river, still reeling, Varela heard a rumbling. He turned around to see the South Tower implode and started to run. He didn’t stop until he had his hands on the steel railing separating the water from the land. But before vaulting over the rail he turned around to look. Which direction is the building falling? He knew there would be no escaping if the tower toppled toward him like a pine tree. Instead he saw that it was collapsing within its own footprint.

As the plume of ash, dust, and smoke barreled toward him, Varela noticed a boat at the seawall. He bounded over the railing and leapt onto the bow of fireboat John D. McKean. When he hit the deck, Varela felt his leg buckle and almost snap. A mass of people jumped on after him, falling onto the deck, landing on him, and the boat rocked under the weight of the leaping hoards. Varela worried it might capsize. He stumbled over people on his way to the far side of the deck, away from the avalanche, then curled in on himself, choking as everything went black.

When the air cleared a bit, Varela saw casualties all around him. Somebody was nursing a broken leg. Others complained about pain in their arms. He saw the same woman that Sullivan had noticed, splayed out beside the bow pipe. It looked as if she had landed face-first on the steel deck. He hollered to a nearby firefighter that she needed medical attention—that she was unconscious and might already be dead. There was little anyone could do on the boat, so reaching a triage center, quickly, was imperative. But other lives needed saving, too.

Still coughing and gagging, Varela yanked off his gray-green long-sleeved cotton shirt, tore off a strip, and wet it with water he found dribbling from some leaky hose on deck. He tied the makeshift filter around his face and then tore off more strips for a few fellow passengers. He heard commotion near the bow on the starboard side. People were yelling. Someone was in the water.

Tammy Wiggs had kept her eyes fixed on the burning buildings while she trailed Karen Lacey, walking west from the New York Stock Exchange. “The whole sky was littered with things falling.” At first she thought everything fluttering through the sky was only paper. Then she spotted movement and recognized the shapes as people. “I saw dead bodies. I saw bodies jumping out of the building.”

Like “a little puppy dog” Wiggs continued following Lacey. “I thought she must know what she was doing because she was so certain about getting home. . . . I didn’t realize it meant going that close to the buildings.” She continued to dial her sister’s number. “I wanted her to be the person that was taking care of me at that point and not somebody that I barely knew,” she explained years later, through tears. “I just wanted her to tell me what to do.” What she couldn’t know then was that the corner of 3 World Financial Center where her sister’s Lehman Brothers office was located would soon be sliced by fragments of a crumbling trade center tower.

At one minute before ten o’clock, Wiggs and Lacey exited the winding paths of Battery Park City and stepped onto the plaza at the southwestern corner of North Cove. Their destination—New York Waterway’s World Financial Center ferry terminal—now lay just 500 feet away. They faced 2 World Trade Center head on. Wiggs was looking directly at the South Tower when it began to fall.

She didn’t hear a noise or feel the ground shake. Instead she noticed the building suddenly growing smaller. Seconds later the pulverized tower erupted out onto the plaza. Desperate for cover of any kind, Wiggs and Lacey ducked behind a ticket booth—a structure so small it reminded Wiggs of the old-fashioned phone booths she had seen in London during her study abroad. “I looked up and saw the mass of what was coming down,” she said. “I realized, this is not going to do anything to help.” So she shot for the water’s edge.

While Wiggs may have been a novice at her job, she was no novice around water. In fact, she had been a lifelong sailor. “If anything, the water’s calming to me,” she said, explaining that she had sailed seashells and blue jays as a child, then advanced to 420 sailboats, which she’d raced in the Junior Olympics and in the Women’s World competition in Yokohama, Japan. “Growing up a sailor, you live a sailor.” She recalled beginning mornings by listening for flags flapping—the sound that would tell her whether she’d spend the day bobbing aimlessly through a windless sky or whipped around so fast she’d flip her boat and wind up swimming.

The breeze on this warm September morning was “probably blowing at least 10 knots,” recalled Wiggs. “If it hadn’t been a windy day then I wouldn’t be here today.”

When a piece of burning rubble flew at her face, Wiggs fled to the river by instinct. “It was the opposite of where the whole mess was coming from,” and water seemed like the only way out.

She and Lacey clambered over the three-foot-high steel railing atop the seawall. A police officer standing on a nearby stone light pillar cautioned them: “Ladies, don’t jump.” Wiggs’s first impulse was to obey. After all, he was a police officer. Maybe jumping into New York harbor wasn’t such a good idea.

But by the time the two women had made it over the railing—its top section curved inward, toward the sidewalk, making it a particularly awkward climb—the officer amended his position. “Don’t jump . . . yet,” he said.

Perched on a seven-inch-wide ledge, suspended some five to ten feet above the river’s surface, clutching the railing behind her back, Wiggs pondered his last word: “yet.” That “yet” constituted equivocation. It revealed that no one, not even a police officer, had any idea what was coming next.

The plume of gray-black smoke had thickened and swelled, mushrooming up as the building crumbled down. The wave of dust cauliflowered up and out, shattering windows and blowing out the immense panes of glass in the dome of the nearby Winter Garden. The mass barreled down, and Wiggs struggled to draw breath.

She gulped what air she could from the choking cloud that had engulfed her, then released her grip on the rail at the small of her back. She reached blindly for the hand of the woman beside her. Then, together, they jumped. Time stretched as the two plunged through the dense black air. Split seconds sprawled into an eternity.

A fraction of an instant later, Wiggs’s five-foot-three-inch, 120-pound frame plunged into the river. Cold seized her chest. Frantic to flee, she kicked back to the surface, stretching her body long, clawing at the water. But after a few strokes she faltered. The current was ripping. It tugged her downstream. The pall of black smoke thick with particulates—a clenched hand covering her nose and mouth—left her gasping. The airless sky above the river’s surface offered no oxygen, so Wiggs dove. “I couldn’t breathe at all because of the smoke and particles. I went under the water hoping to find oxygen,” she explained. “It doesn’t make any sense, I know, but that was the desperation: There’s no oxygen left in this air so the only other thing to try is under the water.” She kicked off her shoes, but clung to her purse. “I knew my ID was in there. I wanted my parents to have my ID to identify my body.”

The drop was farther than Wiggs had expected and the water cold and salty. “I thought we were jumping to swim across,” she explained years later, conceding that the very idea seemed embarrassingly absurd to her now. “Running wasn’t going to be fast enough and for some reason I thought swimming was going to be faster.” She also thought that being in the water could somehow protect her from the cloud. But when she kicked back to the surface, the air felt thick, heavy, solid. She bobbed up and down three or four times on her fruitless search for oxygen underwater. Then, just as she thought she “didn’t have another breath in me” the sky began to clear.

Her original impulse to swim the mile to New Jersey had brought her about 10 feet from the Manhattan shoreline. Now she realized how quickly the current was dragging her out to sea, and that she couldn’t breathe well enough to swim.

Even strong, experienced swimmers who’ve planned to take a dip into the Hudson’s waters have been known to misjudge the challenges. The first person to swim around Manhattan Island was 18-year-old Robert Dowling. On September 5, 1915, his circumnavigation took 13 hours, 45 minutes. Today, synchronizing their routes to maximize the tides, swimmers can circumnavi gate the island in half that time. Races around Manhattan Island, across the English Channel, and between Catalina Island and the Southern California coast are considered to be the Triple Crown of open-water swimming—demanding tests of physical and mental stamina.

But even much shorter swim events, such as Cove to Cove—the annual half-mile swim from South Cove to North Cove in Battery Park City—are timed to make sure swimmers don’t have to fight the powerful currents. One experienced swimmer who participated in the 2004 Cove to Cove explained that she’d started the race feeling confident, encouraged by reports of the evening’s strong favorable current, but soon realized she had “completely underestimated” her Hudson swim, explaining that any benefit she might have gained from the current was counteracted by the choppy water. The river’s vastness had left her floundering and disoriented (accidentally swimming east toward the seawall instead of north) and having difficulty gauging how far she’d actually swum from one moment to the next. Others have likened swimming in the Hudson to enduring a washing machine’s spin cycle.

And now, here was Wiggs, in over her head in more ways than one. When, finally, the air lightened from coal-black to haze gray, Wiggs spotted the pointed bow of a boat, its maroon hull about 15 feet away. Thinking that the vessel was under way, she panicked. She worried about getting chopped up by the propellers. “We’re in the water! We’re in the water!” she screamed, over and over.

“Who’s in the water?” a voice called back through the fog.

Then Wiggs noticed a thick rope stretched overhead. It was the bowline leading to the boat where the man stood, calling down. The boat was not under power after all. With a few strokes, she made her way back to the seawall, bloodying her hands as she clawed at the rough cement surface, struggling to secure a grip. Finally her fingertips located a beveled-edge joint where two slabs met. She dug her close-clipped nails into the notch and kicked to tread water, battling the pull of the current.