The summer was winding down. Autumn was just ten days away and the sky over New York City, Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, was crystal clear. Inside the 110-story Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, thousands of employees were reporting to work.
In the Windows of the World restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower, seventy-two employees were busy serving breakfast to an invitation-only crowd. The offices of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, with over six hundred employees, occupied five floors directly below the restaurant. Most were already at their desks getting a head start on their workday.
At 8:46 A.M., American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 with eighty-one passengers and eleven crew members aboard, smashed into the North Tower between the ninety-third and ninety-ninth floors.
Stunned pedestrians on the plaza below craned their necks upward toward the spectacular fireball produced by burning jet fuel. Most had the same thought: What a horrible accident.
Hundreds of personnel from the NYPD, FDNY, and Port Authority converged on the scene within minutes and immediately began implementing rescue procedures. But radio communications between the departments was problematic, because each agency used different radio frequencies, making it difficult to coordinate their efforts.
Among the many hundreds of first responders who took part in the rescue were police officer Robert Fazio; his partner, Moira Smith, from the Thirteenth Precinct; police officer John Perry, who had filed for retirement earlier that morning; and Dectective Joseph Vigiano and his brother, firefighter John Vigiano. Retired detective Donald Sadowy, who had helped solve the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, worked across the street at the World Financial Center as a security director. He rushed to the scene to offer his assistance.
Meanwhile, employees whose offices were below the impact zone began the evacuation process and made their way down almost ninety flights of stairs aided by coworkers and first responders. But on the uppermost floors, searing heat and blinding smoke was spreading quickly. The plane crash severed the elevator shafts. Debris from the explosion blocked the staircases, trapping those still alive. Without hesitation, Emergency Service Unit cops and firefighters donned heavy life-saving equipment and began the long, arduous climb up the North Tower stairs to rescue survivors and battle the blaze.
New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen arrived at the World Trade Center complex to confer with the chiefs of the Police Department and Fire Department.