NINETEEN
“We Had a Lot of Dying and Fire Up There”
One of the first witnesses was Juan Suarez, a fifty-four-year-old ironworker who was on top of a twenty-five-story building going up on Madison Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. At 8:45 on the morning of September 11, he was at work when his buddy Artie looked west and said, “Hey, that plane’s flying kind of low.” It was so low that it seemed almost as if it was going to clip the Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, but it was well west of there, and Suarez lost sight of it as it headed south. Jim Farmer, a film composer, didn’t see it but he heard it. He was having breakfast at a small restaurant in Soho about twenty blocks north of the World Trade Center when he heard the sound of a jet—too loud and low to seem normal. Nature itself at that instant gave a sign of impending disaster:
“All the pigeons in the street flew up,” he noted.
At 8:45, David Blackford was walking toward work in lower Manhattan when he too heard the jet overhead and looked up in time to see it slam into the north face of the north tower.
“You could see the concussion move up the building,” he said.
“It was a large plane flying low,” Robert Pachino, another witness, said hours after the impact. “There was no engine trouble. He didn’t try to maneuver. This plane was on a mission.”
“We were walking down the block to vote,” said Barry Meier, a reporter for the New York Times who lives in downtown Manhattan. “We were walking down Greenwich Street with our daughter in the stroller. All of a sudden I heard a very high-pitched jet whine. We hear jets in this neighborhood a lot, but this was louder than I had ever heard it. It was closer to the ground than I had ever heard. I looked up and I saw a huge silver jet—I couldn’t tell the markings on it—flying closer to the ground than I had ever seen. It was surreal because it was a beautiful silver jet against a bright blue sky, a crystal clear sky. I thought, that plane is flying so low it may hit the tower. The plane was banking slightly. It continued to bank, and it just smashed right into the tower. There was a huge fireball. It was the sound of an explosion, and the fireball.”
In Brooklyn, in Fire Department headquarters, Pete Ganci was doing what he does every morning in his office, drinking coffee and talking with his chiefs about the previous day’s events. Ganci’s office faced west and gave him a view of lower Manhattan, including the skyline-dominating World Trade Center, and he happened to be looking that way when the plane hit the north tower. He yelled out at Danny Nigro, his chief of operations, to tell him what had happened, and Nigro and several others, including Ganci’s executive assistant, Fire Marshal Steve Mosiello, rushed into his office.
“For a few minutes, we just stood in awe of the sight,” Mosiello remembered later, “but we snapped out of that pretty quickly and we got into Pete’s car and drove toward the WTC. By the time we got to the Brooklyn Bridge, we knew this wasn’t just any ordinary fire and we went into high alert. So we got there pretty fast.”
Inside the north tower, Joe Disorbo, an engineer who worked on the 72nd floor, sat near a north-facing window, and that is why, at an instant before 8:46 and 26 seconds, he heard the whine of a jet and simultaneously saw a shadow, and then he felt the building shake. He had no way of knowing what had happened. Tim Lingenfelder, thirty-six, an office manager at a small investment banking firm, was sitting in his office on the 52nd floor of the north tower when the entire building shook and he saw chunks of rubble falling outside his window.
“That can’t be from here,” he said to himself.
Anne Prosser, twenty-nine, a banker, rode the elevator to the 90th floor and as the doors opened, she heard what seemed like an explosion.
“I got thrown to the ground before I got to our suite,” she said. “I crawled inside. Not everybody was at work.” She said she tried to leave but, until she got some help, she wasn’t able to because she couldn’t breathe with all the debris and dust choking the air.
The American Bureau of Shipping was on the north side of the 91st floor of the north tower, one floor below where the plane hit and on the same side of the building. Eleven people were in the office at the time, and all of them survived by walking down the stairs to safety. Several of them later said that their window shades were closed against the morning glare, or they were looking at their computer screens, so they heard but didn’t see the plane, and then felt the shock wave caused by the impact above them. Strangely, for the first few instants, nothing much happened, only a few books fell off shelves, and even knickknacks stayed where they were. But then the building started to sway back and forth as the impact wave radiated up and down the tower. George Sleigh, manager of the technical consistency department, was on the phone. He heard a roar and then he did see the plane—or, more accurately, the underbelly of the plane—when it was two or three plane-lengths away. And then, “everything just crumbled,” he said. “The plane came into the building and my office collapsed instantaneously.”
When Steve McIntyre pushed his way out of the ABS reception area toward the elevator banks and the building’s core, he heard water cascading down the stairwells—from pipes that had been severed in the impact—and he saw that gypsum sheets, Sheetrock, had formed an impenetrable plug between his floor, 91, and the one above it. That plug was to mean the difference between life and death; it marked the divide in the north tower between those who survived—people on the 91st floor and below—and the sixteen hundred who didn’t—on the 92nd floor and above.
Those outside knew immediately that a plane had hit the building—thinking either it was a terrible accident or an even more terrible act of terrorism—but most of those inside didn’t know what had happened. Some people thought the big boom they heard had come from the Staten Island Ferry. Greg Shark, a marine engineer and naval architect at the ABS, remembered that some electrical work had been taking place nearby, and he thought a huge acetylene tank had blown up. “It did not seem that a plane hit and exploded,” he said. “You felt this pressure go by you. It didn’t push you in any direction.” A cafeteria worker thought somebody had dropped a file cabinet—though she then told herself it would have to have been a very big file cabinet. Many people thought it was a bomb—1993 all over again. Susan Doyle of Kemper Insurance, on the 35th floor of the north tower, thought New York had been struck by an earthquake, but then she looked out the window and noticed that the rest of lower Manhattan seemed normal.
“Whatever had happened had happened just to us,” she said.
Tom Tella, a representative of a Dallas consulting firm, was making a presentation to oil-industry analysts when the thunderous boom interrupted the proceedings. Like Susan Doyle, he thought that an earthquake had struck New York, but his colleague, Scott Rees, who had actually been through an earthquake, thought otherwise. It was a bomb, Rees said.1
Within minutes, as the sound of the impact rolled outward in waves, orange flames and white smoke began billowing from the north and east façades of the north tower, and the smoke was carried eastward toward Brooklyn by the wind. Debris arched outward and fell, small bits at first glinting in the morning light. Flames shot out of windows and then people could be seen waving things to attract attention, white shirts or T-shirts, from the windows above where the plane had hit. And then bodies could be seen falling, brown dots hard to pick out against the surrounding avalanche of things. People on the streets, crowded with rush-hour traffic, stopped and stared, pointing and gasping when they understood that among the falling objects were people preferring to jump and die outside than to be burned to death inside.
“You heard an explosion,” said Clyde Ebanks, an executive of Aon, the insurance company, who was attending a meeting of representatives from around the country on the 103rd floor of the south tower. He was speaking of the impact of the plane at the tower next door. “Then you heard an explosion, I think it was from the east. It wasn’t major or huge, or at least that’s how I remember it. But there was smoke, black and gray, smoke everywhere and papers were flying, hundreds of them. We all huddled around the window and that’s when I could feel the heat. That’s when I knew that something major had happened, the heat. You could feel it through the glass. Then it started to smell like jet fuel.”
Those in the south tower who stood at their windows also had the best view of the grimmest spectacle of all, the people who held themselves over window ledges in a desperate effort to get air, and those who jumped or fell out of the north tower altogether and hurtled downward alongside the sheer gleaming face of the building. They watched transfixed in the south tower, or, as one of them later put it, they watched the way one watches a horror film on late-night television, not wanting to watch but unable to tear themselves away. They saw that some people who tumbled out of the broken windows had their hands over their faces, most likely because they were trying to protect their eyes from the smoke, or because they were trying to use their hands to filter out smoke and get some clean air. Videos show many people on the 103rd, 104th, and 105th floors, many shirtless in the heat, leaning out through broken windows. There were as many as four people at a window, piled on top of one another. Observers in a police helicopter saw other people on high floors who were unable to break windows, their faces pressed against the glass as they tried to breathe. Some of the jumpers could be seen at the jagged hole on the east side of the north tower, staggering there, apparently confused about where they were and what had happened. One of those who watched for a time from the south tower and then made a run for the stairs was Kelly Reyher, who worked for Aon, the insurance company.
“From what I could see it was sort of people were just trying to breathe so they were hanging out with smoke filling,” he said. “I think to some extent they just let go because they couldn’t hang on any longer, or it was too difficult to breathe, or it looked like in some cases people just chose their fate, and it was going to be one or the other.”
* * *
There were several thousand different experiences of the hour after 8:46, when flight 11 swept down the Hudson River going north to south and hit the north tower, and after 9:02, when flight 175, coming from the eastern tip of New Jersey and roaring over the Statue of Liberty, cut a diagonal gash into the south face of the south tower. But those almost uncountable experiences can be grouped into several basic kinds that together make up that day.
There were two kinds of experience inside each of the stricken towers—the experience of those above the floors where the planes hit and the experience of those below those floors. Or, more properly, there were three experiences, if you add in those who were on the floors that received the direct impact of the strikes. A few people on the floors of immediate impact were not killed right away and spent a few seconds or a few minutes or even close to an hour clawing through the smoke and the debris struggling to get to safety. We know from survivors of the impact in the south tower that even on the floors directly struck by the plane there were areas of temporary safety, where, say, the wing of the plane sliced through the building on a floor just above or below where people were working, leaving their work cubicle or trading room or office sealed off from the areas where fires were raging. Some of the people in those areas might have survived for a while, but as the flames got hotter, they would have found themselves cut off from an escape route facing the terrible choice: to burn to death or to leap into the void.
One of the three stairways that ran the entire height of the building in the south tower remained intact and passable on every floor, and seventeen people who started above the point of impact are known to have used them to get to safety, but not a single person above that point in the north tower survived. In the south tower a large number of people died on the 78th floor, which was a Sky Lobby where express elevators coming directly from the downstairs lobby connected to the several sets of local elevators that went to higher floors.
At least several dozen, possibly several hundred people who had come down from higher floors after the first plane struck, were there waiting for express elevators when the wing of flight 175 sliced into the Sky Lobby. One second the floor was full of people milling about, wondering whether to go down immediately or to go back up and fetch a Palm Pilot or a purse, and the next it was a scene of flames, smoke, pulverized plaster, and the bodies of the dead and injured. Judy Wein, who worked at Aon Corporation on the 100th floor, suffered a broken arm, three cracked ribs, and a punctured lung, but she survived. She tried to move some chunks of marble lying on the broken legs of Richard Gabrielle, an Aon colleague, but he cried out in pain for her to stop. He died when the tower collapsed, waiting for help to arrive. Only a very few people whose offices were below the points of impact were killed—and among those who did not survive, many had failed to evacuate before the towers collapsed because they were injured and unable to move or because, like Abe Zelmanowitz, they stopped to help others.
The survival of those below and the deaths of those at and above where the planes hit points to the major division inside the buildings. For the vast majority of those below, the experience of September 11 was a long, smoky, harrowing escape down one of the three stairwells near the tower’s core. Many of the same people who walked down and out of the towers on September 11 had done close to the same thing after the truck bombing of the Trade Center in 1993, though on September 11, many of the people in the towers knew from watching television that their buildings had not been bombed but hit by airplanes. Even so, as they descended the stairwells, they didn’t think that the towers, which seemed at that point to have stood up to the attack, would collapse.
The people above the point of impact, with a very small number of exceptions in the south tower and none in the north tower, didn’t or couldn’t get down any more, their ways blocked by the planes’ near amputation of the upper floors. At Aon Corporation, on the uppermost floors of the south tower, one man was thrown so hard against a wall by the impact of the second plane that he broke his back and couldn’t move. Judging from the calls that many of them made to loved ones in their last minutes, many of them knew they were going to die, though they probably assumed it would be from fire or smoke inhalation, not because the towers would collapse altogether. And, until they did collapse, some of them stayed alive on the upper floors, perhaps hoping that if they could only continue to breathe and not succumb to smoke inhalation, they might make it if only the fires below them would burn out or be extinguished. The cell phone calls made from participants in the Risk Waters Conference at Windows on the World indicate that everybody on the 107th floor was ordered down to the 106th floor, and there they waited for the help that never arrived. But the smoke from fires on the lower floors rushed up the elevator shafts, which operated like chimneys, and within minutes the smoke was so thick on the 106th floor that visibility was reduced to ten feet. Some of the staff of the restaurant were on the phone to the Fire Command Center in the lobby, and they got the advice for everybody to wet towels and keep them over their faces. But the water pipes were broken and there was no water. In a phone call to his wife, a waiter, Jan Maciejweski, said he was looking for water in the flower vases.
In the south tower, while a few people went down the single open stairway, many more went up, trying to get to the roof, only to find that access was blocked. We know this from a cell phone call that Roko Camaj, a window washer who was on the 105th floor, made to his wife. This is one of the most poignant of many poignant aspects of the September 11 disaster. After the 1993 bombing, the Fire Department had decided against rooftop rescues by helicopter, largely for safety reasons, and ever since then the heavy doors leading from the floors to the building’s sole roof exit were kept locked. And so, even though on September 11 a police helicopter hovered near the roof for a while looking for survivors, there were none to be found.3 Inside the building, Camaj had a key, but the key had to be used in conjunction with a buzzer controlled by a technician at a command post on the 22nd floor, where a video screen displayed the faces of anybody wanting to go on the roof, and nobody was at the command post.
This, of course, was unknown to those who tried to make their way to the roof in the south tower, some of whom had come up from lower floors rather than attempt to evacuate by going down. And once they learned that the doors to the roof were closed, it was too late, or they never found stairway A, the only safe route to the lobby.
“The belief that they had a rooftop option cost them their lives,” said Beverly Eckert, whose husband, Sean Rooney, died in the south tower.
And then there were those outside the buildings, either because they were just on the streets nearby when the planes hit and were showered by burning fuel or struck by debris, or because they were among the thousands of firefighters, police, Emergency Medical Service, Port Authority security, and other rescue workers who rushed toward the towers while everybody else was rushing away. Inside the tower staircases there was a grim two-way traffic, civilians coming down, firemen and others, but especially firemen, going up. Obviously, when the towers came down, all of those who were going up were crushed to death, in many cases their bodies never recovered. Of the total dead of 2,666 in the towers, 479 of them, which is 18 percent, were those who rushed in to save lives. Their tragedy is highlighted by the testimony of one Fire Department chief who said, weeks after the disaster, that in one of the two towers, every civilian below the point of impact had been evacuated and at the time of the collapse, only firefighters remained in the stairwells.
* * *
In the first few minutes after 8:46, a strange silence enveloped lower Manhattan, almost as though the urban organism was stunned, reeling from the knockout punch of a boxer when for a short time a temporary and welcome deafness prevails. And then, the sounds of disaster filled the air, first in the sounds of the sirens that began to shriek—ambulances, police cars, emergency services vans, fire trucks pouring into the area. Heavier debris began falling out of the gash in the tower. When a fire command station was set up in the lobby of the north tower, the people who leapt from the towers could be heard as they crashed onto the esplanade outside, making a shockingly loud sound, the sound of bodies breaking as they hit the ground.
At the instant the first plane struck the first tower, Lauren Manning was approaching the entrance on West Street. A sheet of flaming aviation fuel fell along the sheer face of the tower and Manning was burned on 90 percent of her body. Nearby, Jennieann Maffeo, a programmer at UBS Paine Webber who did not work at the World Trade Center, was waiting for a bus in the shadow of the towers, and she too was doused with flaming aviation fuel. Manning, miraculously, defying all medical prognoses, lived, though she had a long struggle, which is not yet over. Maffeo survived for forty-one days in a burn unit and then succumbed.
Chunks of debris were propelled outward and dropped, so that pedestrians and motorists experienced that nightmare come true—some lethally large object coming out of a clear blue sky and landing on or near them. One chunk flew a few blocks northward and hit the sixth-floor window of the fourteen-story office building at 75 Park Place, breaking the glass and then slamming to the street where two women lay amid broken glass and shredded pieces of insulation. Mike Diaz Piedra, forty-nine, who works at the Bank of New York, lay in the garage of 75 Park, unable to move his leg after getting run down by a crowd of people stampeding away from the Trade Center. People tripped but were pulled up by strong hands before they were crushed. One woman lost her bag and shoes but was pulled to a sidewalk and her belongings were returned to her.
“All of a sudden people went crazy,” Piedra said. “And then a man built like a refrigerator ran over me.”
Some people were lucky. Kathleen Dendy, fifty, had gotten her hair cut that morning, and that made her late for work, just late enough.
“I work on the ninety-ninth floor,” she said. “There are hundreds of people in my office. We start at eight-thirty in the morning.”
Rajesh V. Trivendi, forty, a computer programmer who was working on the 80th floor of the north tower, had to take his son to school.
“My scheduled time of arriving is seven,” he said. “Today I am late. I am fortunate, very fortunate.”
Joe Kosinski of Marsh & McLennan stayed home because his wife had given birth to a baby two days before. Otherwise he would have been at work on the 98th floor of the north tower, and he would be dead.
But 2,666 people were not lucky. Or, they didn’t appreciate the danger because it didn’t occur to them that the towers would come down, so they stopped to help other people and were killed when they did. On the 105th floor of the north tower, Stuart Meltzer, thirty-two, had begun his job as West Coast operations manager for Cantor Fitzgerald just a month before, called his wife, Lisa, and told her “Honey, something terrible is happening. I don’t think I am going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”4
Lorie Van Auken wasn’t home when her husband, Kenneth Van Auken, called from the 102nd floor of the north tower, where he worked for the bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald. But later she got the message he left for her: “I love you. I’m in the World Trade Center, and the building was hit by something. I don’t know if I’m going to get out, but I love you very much. I hope I’ll see you later.” Sadly, he didn’t.5
Some employees of Cantor Fitzgerald in Los Angeles called their office in New York to ask what had happened, and, when they got through to somebody, they put the conversation on the in-house public address system. “Somebody’s got to help us,” is what they heard in Los Angeles. “We can’t get out.… The place is filling with smoke.” And then the line went dead.6
Dan Lopez, who worked for Carr Futures, a few floors below where the plane hit the north tower, called his wife on his cell phone and left this message: “Liz, it’s me, Dan. My building has been hit. I made it to the seventy-eighth floor. I’m OK, but will remain here to help evacuate people. See you soon.”7 Liz didn’t see Dan soon. She never saw him again.
At that same moment, Susan Rescorla, at home in Morristown, New Jersey, got a call from one of her daughters telling her about the plane crashing into the north tower. Susan turned on her television and saw the second plane hit the south tower where her husband, Rick Rescorla, security chief at Morgan Stanley, was on the 42nd floor. She burst into tears.
“Within half an hour Rick was calling me on my cell phone and it was the last call he ever made,” Mrs. Rescorla said later. “He said, ‘Stop crying. I have to get my people out of here. If something happens to me I want you to know that you made my life.’”
* * *
Within a few minutes of the first crash, most of the Fire Department’s highest-ranking and most experienced officials were rushing from Brooklyn headquarters to the scene, and they knew as they did so that this was going to be the fire of their lives. Surveying the damage from the distance of the Brooklyn Bridge, Albert Turi, the deputy assistant chief of fire safety, realized that the problem was going to be beyond solving.
“I knew right from the start that there was no way this Fire Department could extinguish six or eight floors of fire, fully involved, in a high-rise building,” he said later. That expression, “fully involved,” is Fire Department jargon for a well-established fire, not a fire that is just getting started. “It’s just not possible, because we don’t have the means to do it.” Not long after that, he also understood that this was an extremely dangerous fire and that bad things were going to happen, and he told that to Ganci.
“Pete,” he said, “we’re going to lose some people here. It’s inevitable. It’s too tremendous. We’re probably going to lose some people.”
Turi knew that the problem was an especially difficult case of a high-rise fire, a kind of fire that has generated its own lore and literature among firefighters. A high-rise fire is one that can only be extinguished from inside the building where it is raging, since no ladder truck and no stream of water can reach the affected floors from the outside. High-rise fires require firefighters equipped with masks and thirty-pound compressed-air tanks (with about thirty minutes of breathing time) to walk up smoke-filled stairways carrying hose that can be attached to interior standpipes to provide water. If conditions are favorable, and if there is an interior sprinkler system to help, such fires can be put out. If not, as Vincent Dunn, a retired deputy chief in the FDNY, has written, “there is no alternate plan.” Then the only hope is that the building will stand and not too many people will die as the fire burns itself out.
“The best-kept secret in America’s fire service is that firefighters cannot extinguish a fire in a 20–30,000-square-foot open floor area in a high-rise building,” Dunn has written. “A fire company advancing a 2½-inch hose line with a 1¼-inch nozzle discharges only 300 gallons per minute and can extinguish only about 2,500 square feet of fire. The reach of the streams is only 50 feet.… A fully involved, free burning 20,000-square-foot floor area cannot be extinguished by a couple of firefighters spraying a hose stream from a stairway.”8
The first alarm to be sounded on September 11 came at 8:47 from a firebox inside the south tower—reporting on the crash of the plane into the north tower. Within minutes, Joseph Pfeifer, who had been at Church and Lispenard Streets only a few blocks away, became the first fire captain to arrive on the scene. On his way, he had called dispatchers to sound a major alarm, which means that engine companies, ladder companies, and rescue squads are dispatched from all over the city, and he set up a staging area at West and Vesey Streets, almost directly below the Trade Center. Pfeifer realized quickly that the main task was not to attempt to put out the fires but to evacuate the buildings and he sent the first firefighters arriving on the scene to begin rescue work. Half the firefighters who began climbing up carried hose and half didn’t. The first group would attempt to put out fires, or at least to keep them from spreading to unaffected areas; the second would try to rescue trapped people.
Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen and his two top deputies, William Feehan and Thomas Fitzpatrick, arrived at the Trade Center a few minutes later. What they saw was grisly and astonishing. Debris was raining down on the esplanade and so were the bodies of those who had jumped from the upper floors of the towers. Chunks of plaster were falling from the lobby ceiling and the glass in the twenty-foot-high lobby windows was shattering, a sign that the building itself was torquing. There were cries of astonishment, screams of profanity from the fire chiefs themselves as they saw what few, if any, of them had ever seen before; that, as one fire marshall, Richard McCahey, put it, “those little black figures that were in the corner of my eye were actually bodies.” When the firemen inside the lobby heard them hitting the ground outside, there were cries of “Oh my God, another one,” until McCahey ordered them to compose themselves.
“Relax, don’t be screaming that out,” he said. “We got a job to do, OK.”
Walter Kowalczyk, the senior Emergency Medical Service officer on duty that day, had seen and managed many disasters, including train wrecks and airplane crashes, but as he came into Manhattan through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel that morning, he knew immediately that this was something different.
“As you’re driving down West Street and you have to maneuver the vehicle to avoid driving over what appeared to be body parts as well as debris, my mouth went dry,” he said. “I had the sensation that I had a job to do. I had to ensure the safety of the E.M.S. workforce. But how do I do this if I can’t talk?”
Then the second plane hit the south tower, and a second command post was set up in the lobby of that building, along with a coordinating command post outside on West Street. More firefighters arrived and went into the stairwells as civilians came down, many to the mezzanine level where they were directed to the pedestrian bridge that crossed West Street toward the World Financial Center. Several firemen died after being hit by debris or, in at least one case, by a falling body.
It was all happening so quickly. It became difficult for the chiefs in the lobbies to keep track of the numbers and identities of the firemen who were heading for the stairs. When the second tower was hit, the chiefs began talking among themselves about the possibility that the towers might collapse, and about the need, if there really was a strong possibility of that, of ordering the men out of the stairwells.
“The potential and the reality of a collapse was discussed early on,” Peter Hayden, deputy chief of Divison 1 and therefore the official with authority for downtown Manhattan, said later. “But we were at a level of commitment. We also received numerous distress calls. We realized we had a lot of dying and fire up there.”
* * *
Among those in the north tower who never had a chance were Khamladai and Roshan Singh, who, like the several hundred guests and workers that morning at Windows on the World, all perished. How quickly and how painfully we don’t exactly know. We don’t know if they were among those who leaped, or if they were together or apart when they died. We don’t know anything about the last minutes of Zhanetta Tsoy either, whose employer, Marsh & McLennan, occupied the 94th to the 101st floors of the north tower, or about John and Silvia San Pio Resta, who worked on the 92nd floor of that tower. But more than fourteen hundred people died in the north tower, and it is clear from the calls that some of them made to loved ones that many of them, though choking on smoke, struggling to breathe, remained alive until the tower collapsed. Beverly Eckert was actually on the phone with Sean Rooney, her husband, when she heard the sound of an explosion and what she called “a sudden exhalation of breath,” and she believes that that was the instant the floor fell out from under him. Jill Rosenblum happened to be talking to her husband, Andrew Rosenblum, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the north tower, when the plane hit.
“All of a sudden, he said to me, ‘Did you hear that?’” she said. “I said ‘Did I hear what?’ and he goes, ‘It was a really loud bang.’ I said, ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ and he goes, ‘I’ll call you right back.’”
Rosenblum worked in a large, open trading area with long rows of desks and chairs, and as it filled up with smoke, which happened quickly, he and another fifty or so people went to the northwest corner of their floor. He managed to get through to Jill on his cell phone and when he did she could hear people, including her husband, coughing and gasping for breath. That last call from her husband has given her knowledge of at least a few facts about the last minutes of his life. She knows, for example, that at one point they were able to break a window by throwing a computer against it, and they got some fresh air into their room that way.
“You heard a couple of people saying, ‘Oh my God,’” she said, but they weren’t panicking. There was no screaming, no audible hysteria.
She and Andrew lost their connection and then, two minutes later, the south tower collapsed, a possibility that had not until then occurred to any of them, but, now that it had happened, she realized that the same thing could happen to the tower where Andrew and his fellow employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were gathered. She kept on dialing his number in a desperate effort to tell him that—since, very likely, from where he was, he didn’t know—and to tell him that he had nothing to lose by making an effort to get to a stairway and out of the building. She was unable to get through. Then, about four minutes before the north tower collapsed, her phone rang. She spent a long time saying “hello, hello, hello,” but there was nobody on the other end of the line. She dialed *69—“you know, where they give you the phone number”—and Andrew’s number played back, which means to Jill that he was alive and still on the 104th floor until the tower came down beneath and around and on top of them.
In all, 658 employees at Cantor Fitzgerald died on September 11.
* * *
A few floors lower down from Cantor Fitzgerald, on 87, John Paul DeVito and Harry Ramos were at work in the May Davis group, a small minority-owned investment bank that was recovering from some difficult times. The firm had been through some complicated litigation; shortly before, it had also paid a fine, without admitting wrongdoing, to settle a charge of illegal trading. Early in the morning of September 11, in fact, DeVito called the National Association of Securities Dealers to announce that May Davis was resuming normal operations. A new day beckoned. Things were looking up. And then American Airlines flight 11 hit the tower above them.
DeVito almost fell off his chair. Ramos braced himself in a doorway. Glass and debris and a storm of paper scraps filled the air, light fixtures crashed from the ceiling making holes that thick, white smoke began to pour through, and there was a sound, a kind of electrical snapping. Like many people, DeVito and Ramos thought a bomb had gone off. So did Adam Mayblum.
“I believe that there were 13 of us,” Mayblum wrote later in an e-mail he sent to friends. “I can only assume that we thought the worst was over.”
When Mayblum, DeVito, and Ramos went to the windows and looked down, they could see a crowd gathering at Battery Park City below and staring up. Still not sure what had happened, DeVito went out the doors of the May Davis office suite and into the elevator hall, and there he confronted the unimaginable.
“The floor was missing,” he said. “You could see a void with steel girders and fire and you looked at this void and you realized that what was a robust building a minute before was actually missing.”
DeVito, forty-five, the father of two daughters, was the chief operating officer of May Davis; Ramos, also forty-five and the father of two sons, was the firm’s head trader; Mayblum, thirty-five, was managing director. When DeVito returned to the May Davis office from the wrecked elevator lobby, he began screaming at the top of his lungs that everybody had to get out of there.
Few people have faced life-threatening emergencies, when the right action leads to survival and the wrong one to death, so few people know how they would react if the building they are in is hit by a jet plane. In the case of the employees of May Davis, some actually tried to pack up their desktop computers and take them with them. It’s an understandable, all-too-human reflex. People’s lives are in their computers, their e-mail correspondence, their on-line banking, their address books and business files. Some people went for the elevators, others to the stairs. One employee, a Chinese immigrant named Hong Zhu, an investment banker, was powerfully shaken and wanted to stay where he was, preferring the safety of the building to the uncertainties of the way out. DeVito found a half-gallon jug of water and he used it to help people wet bandannas they made from ripped-up shirts. Mayblum ripped his T-shirt into three strips, gave two to colleagues, and kept one for himself.
DeVito began to lead the way down stairway A, while Ramos stayed behind to urge stragglers to the stairs, among them Zhu. The group formed a human chain, with each person’s hand on the shoulder of the person in front, and they descended through the smoke. DeVito thought about going back up to ensure that everybody was evacuating the building, but he was dissuaded by a trainee, Jason Braunstein, who shouted at him, “John, what about your family?” But Ramos stayed upstairs, directing traffic, which now consisted of people he didn’t know, to the stairwell.
For the first ten flights or so, from 87 to 78, the stairwell was smoky but uncrowded and the May Davis group moved quickly. Past 78, the stairwell got more crowded, but even at the time, DeVito was impressed by how the evacuees made way so that burn victims and other injured people could be brought out ahead of them. By the 50s, DeVito said later, the traffic became two-way, office workers heading down, firemen, wearing their signature black fireproof coats and carrying air tanks, masks, and other equipment, going up.
“Do you want some water?” DeVito said, offering his jug.
“I don’t need no water,” a fireman answered, and kept climbing.
Above DeVito on the 53rd floor, Mayblum came across a man he later described as “very heavyset” sitting on the stairs and unable to move.
“I asked if he needed help or was just resting,” Mayblum wrote later. The man needed help, but Mayblum, who has a bad back, knew he would be unable to carry him down. The man, in any case, told Mayblum to go down and send help back up for him, and that is what Mayblum did.
A little later, Harry Ramos came upon the same man, and he stopped to talk to him. A minute later Hong Zhu, now walking briskly down the stairs, arrived also and stopped to help. The man was Victor Wald, who was walking down from his office at Avalon Partners on the 84th floor. Together, Ramos and Zhu helped Victor up and, with one of them on each side of him, carried him down a flight of stairs. It was hard and there was a long way to go, so Ramos and Zhu decided to try the elevators, even though a security guard had screamed at them to use the stairs. Zhu dropped a magazine onto the floor of a car and pushed the “down” button, thinking that if the car went down and then came back up and the magazine was still there, the elevator would be safe. But the doors didn’t close, so Zhu got in the elevator himself and went down to the 44th floor with it. Then he went back up to 52 to pick up Ramos and Victor. Back on 44, a Sky Lobby, their local elevator stopped and the express elevators weren’t moving. They knew they would have to walk.
While DeVito, Mayblum, and the others continued down, Ramos and Zhu struggled with Victor, getting down to the 39th floor where they went into the office of a credit union to rest a bit, and then one of those little events that highlight the absurdity of things took place. The phone rang; Zhu answered it and found himself talking to a customer of the credit union where Zhu did not work, insisting on knowing whether his accounts were safe.
“What do you mean accounts?” Zhu shouted back. “We need help.”
The customer insisted on knowing if his money was safe. Zhu hung up on him.
The building began to shake—the south tower next door was coming down, though they didn’t know it at the time. The three men, Ramos, Zhu, and Wald, got down to the 36th floor and there Victor said he couldn’t move anymore. Zhu yelled at him to sit down and slide on his behind, but Wald was simply unable to do that. While the men were struggling, a fireman came shouting that he would take charge of Victor and that the rest should get the hell out of there. Zhu did leave, but Harry Ramos stayed behind and Zhu could hear him saying, “Victor, don’t worry. I’m with you.”
Later DeVito thought a lot about his friend Harry Ramos and his refusal to leave Victor, a stranger.
“Harry was a beautiful person, a real pro,” he said. “Your word is your bond in our industry, and I think you have to see Harry saying, ‘I’m not leaving you,’ and that was his bond, his contract for life.”
When DeVito and the people got down to the plaza level, they ran into a cordon of police and firefighters directing them downstairs to the shopping level, telling them to keeping moving, and not to look outside. The plaza level was at the level of the main elevator banks, where thousands would normally have been coming to and fro, or sitting at the fountain with a cup of coffee from Starbucks, reading their newspaper or chatting with friends.
“What they said was, ‘Don’t look out, keep moving, don’t look out to the plaza,’ and the first thing you did was look, and you saw hell,” DeVito said. “It wasn’t littered with bodies, but you saw something that resembled human parts. It’s not like what you’ve seen in the movies, a field covered with bodies, but there was definitely a human element to it and masses and masses of debris.”
DeVito and the others went downstairs and came out the exit of Building Four onto Liberty Street and, as he remembered it, ten seconds later, the south tower began to come down.
* * *
Getting out of the north tower was easier in its way because it stayed up for an hour and a half after it was hit, a margin of time that was critical for some: the difference between living and dying. Shortly before the plane struck the north tower, six men, most of them employees of the Port Authority, got into an elevator at the 44th floor Sky Lobby, the elevator going to floors 67 to 74. As their car rode up, they heard a muted thud and felt the building shudder. The elevator swayed back and forth, stopped, and plunged downward. One of the men had the wits to push an emergency button, and, in a sense, he didn’t push it an instant too late. If he had pushed it earlier, all six of the men would now be dead.
When the men, who included a window washer named Jan Demczur, pried open the doors, they found themselves facing a wall with the number “50” stenciled on it. Because their elevator was an express to higher floors, there was no exit at the floor where they had happened to stop.
The men inside had no idea what had happened, but smoke was seeping into the elevator car and they knew that they had to get out, but they were unable to push out through the ceiling, and, in any case, they would only have succeeded in getting to where the smoke was coming from if they had. But Demczur, who had worked in construction in his native Poland, saw that the wall they were facing was ordinary drywall, Sheet-rock, and he began scratching at it with the metal edge of his window-washer’s squeegee, the only tool available. Atta and company had used knives to kill people, but the men in car 69-A didn’t have knives to use to save themselves. When Demczur, his arm aching, dropped the squeegee down the shaft, he used the one tool he had left, a short squeegee handle.
They cut a hole through three layers of Sheetrock and then punched through a wall of tiles, which they came to on the other side, and then one by one they squeezed through the hole they had made, finding themselves inside a 50th-floor bathroom. It was about 9:30, and by then the floor was empty except for some firefighters, astonished to see the six men emerge.
On their way down the staircases, one of the men, Shivam Iyer, an engineer with the Port Authority, said, “We heard a thunderous, metallic roar.” It was the sound of the south tower crumbling. “I thought our lives had surely ended then,” Iyer said.
The men finally emerged into the dust and paper on the street at 10:23, and they headed north. Five minutes later, the north tower came down.
“If the elevator had stopped at the sixtieth floor instead of the fiftieth,” Iyer observed, “we would have been five minutes too late.”
* * *
Many people in the south tower, including those on upper floors, began to evacuate their offices as soon as they got news that the first had been hit. Some of them took elevators or stairways as far as the ground floor lobby or to the Sky Lobbies on the 78th and 44th floors, where express and local elevators met. When they got there, however, they heard announcements being made by security personnel that the south tower was safe, and they returned upstairs to their offices. Witnesses said that in the elevator lobby on the 44th floor, a security official was shouting through a megaphone and urging people not to evacuate, and the public address system repeatedly broadcast a similar announcement throughout the tower. Many people paid no attention to the security personnel and they kept going to safety.
Surely those making the announcements did so for a reason that seemed to make sense at the time, but they have a grim wrongness to them in retrospect. One expert, Gary Lynch, a former fireman and now a consultant on corporate security for Booz, Allen, Hamilton, said that urging people to stay in the towers might have been established as policy in order to avoid the chaos that a simultaneous rush to the exits might cause. With firemen coming into the building, Lynch said, a mass evacuation could interfere with their ability to carry out rescue operations. In less dangerous situations—for example, in the almost routine bomb scares that some corporations receive—there is a general reluctance by management to encourage staff evacuations, which can cost a great deal of money in lost time and business, especially in the stock and financial markets. It could be argued, in the case of September 11, that security officials in the south tower couldn’t have been expected to anticipate that it too would be struck by a hijacked airplane. But, Mr. Lynch said, given that an airplane had struck the north tower and that chunks of debris along with thousands of gallons of aviation fuel were raining down on nearby buildings, that it was a staggering mistake to order people not to evacuate. It was a mistake that cost lives.
“I know for a fact that announcement killed at least four people in my company,” said Steve Miller, who worked on the 80th floor at Mizuho Capital Markets. “They were the senior Japanese management. When the announcement came on, they went back up. The rest of us kept going down.”
Clyde Ebanks of Aon Corporation walked down from the 103rd to the 78th floor of the south tower, and there, he said, he heard the go-back-to-your-office announcement over the P.A. system. “The security guys were saying that there was an accident in Building One but there was no need to evacuate unless you were having trouble breathing due to smoke. I remember that last part clearly. These announcements were a double-edged sword. They kept people calm but they also made people think they had time. So people were on the phone calling their families or their wives or whomever. I heard later that there was another meeting of Aon workers on the 105th floor, and they all decided to continue on with their meeting. I mean, as a person in the insurance industry, I know that an explosion in one building can spread to another.”
The announcement may have contributed to the death of Shimmy D. Biegeleisen, who worked in the offices of Fiduciary Trust International on the 97th floor of the south tower, though, in truth, no one will ever know with absolute certainty why he died. Biegeleisen was about to evacuate with fellow workers after getting news of the crash at the north tower, but, for some reason, he didn’t leave, even though many of his colleagues were already heading down the stairs. Biegeleisen’s wife, Miriam, who spoke with him on the phone, remembers with a kind of disturbing clarity hearing the announcement over the line—that the south tower was safe—and then in the months that have passed, she has continued to hear that same announcement as she has wondered if it explains her husband’s loss.
Biegeleisen was a senior vice president at Fiduciary Trust, and the company’s only Orthodox Jew; he was the man who wore the yarmulke and who left the office early on Fridays to be home in time for the Jewish Sabbath, which he spent with Miriam and their five children. Only the week before September 11, he had received a watch signifying twenty years of service. After the plane hit the north tower, he called home, and he stayed on the phone for the better part of an hour talking with Miriam and then with several family friends, who began arriving in the Biegeleisen home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. At first, he told Miriam just that something had happened, but that he would be all right. Biegeleisen was a veteran of the 1993 Trade Center bombing, when he had walked down the ninety-seven flights of stairs from his office to the ground, and, in the beginning, he seems to have assumed that that’s what he would do again. But his slowness in leaving—whether because of the announcement or for some other reason—meant that when flight 175 crashed into his tower, he was still on the 97th floor, well above the plane’s point of impact, and it was too late.
It is not clear exactly when Biegeleisen realized September 11, 2001, was not a repeat of February 26, 1993, but at some point it became clear to those he was talking to on the phone that he knew he was going to die. There was too much emotional chaos for family members to remember exactly whom he was talking to, but Biegeleisen said to one friend, “I’m not coming out of this,” and he asked him to take care of Miriam and their five children.
By this time, the Biegeleisen family and their friends were watching the disaster unfold on television, and they could see what Biegeleisen himself could not—the two towers burning side by side. The phone got passed from one person to another after another as friends and family desperately tried to stay in touch with Shimmy, as if, somehow, keeping him on the phone would keep him alive. At one point, in a three-way conference call, Biegeleisen complained to Gary Gelbfish, a vascular surgeon, that he could no longer breathe, and Gelbfish advised him to hug the ground and to put a wet towel over his mouth. Biegeleisen did go to the water cooler and wet a towel there, and then he decided to go to the roof along with the five colleagues who were trapped with him. But the heat was so intense, he couldn’t even get out into the hallway.
For a few minutes, it seems, Biegeleisen got off the phone and then, at 9:45, as more friends arrived at the Biegeleisen home, he called again. Miriam was too distraught to come to the phone so, again, he asked a friend of his to take care of her. “Tell Miriam I love her,” he said, and he lay down on the floor near his desk beneath the family pictures he kept in his office. Five days later, Biegeleisen was supposed to go to Jerusalem with his nineteen-year-old son, Mordechai, to spend the Jewish New Year with the Belzer Rebbe there, the leader of a two-hundred-year-old Hasidic sect. Instead, he was trapped in the World Trade Center where he began to recite a Hebrew psalm—“The Lord is the earth and its fullness.” Another friend came to the phone and told Biegeleisen to break a window, and he heard Beigeleisen call out, “Let’s go! Let’s break the window.” At 9:59, Biegeleisen told the friend that he was looking out the window; then he screamed “Oh God!” and the line went dead.9
* * *
After the first tower was struck, Felipe Oyola found his wife, Adianes, at the elevator bank of the 78th floor of the south tower. They had met seven years earlier when he was a cook and she was a cashier at a restaurant in Brooklyn. Now he was a supervisor of mail services at Fuji Bank where Adianes worked in the human resources and payroll departments. They were hugging when they heard the public address announcement that it was safe to return to their offices. Felipe went back to work first while Adianes stayed behind for a while talking with her boss and a coworker. Who was to think that there was any particular danger, that what had happened in the north tower would happen in the south tower? Felipe was on the 81st floor, which was above the point of impact of the second plane, but when it hit he managed, barely, to make it out to safety. Adianes worked on 82, one floor higher, above the point of impact, and she is missing.
* * *
On the 84th floor, three floors above where Felipe Oyola began his march down the stairs to safety, Brian Clark, the executive vice-president of Euro Brokers, heard a tremendous bang and out of the corner of his eye saw a flash of light outside his window. It was 8:46 A.M.
“The entire air space out my window was filled with flames,” he said. “It was just a huge fireball.”
He didn’t know it, but flight 11 had just struck the north face of the north tower, on the opposite side from where Clark could see. His first thought was that there had been an explosion on the floor above his and since he was the fire marshal for his quadrant of the 84th floor, his instinct was to jump up, grab his flashlight and whistle, and start moving his coworkers out of the building. Clark was a veteran of the 1993 bombing, which led him to take his fire marshal duties seriously. He went into the large Euro Brokers trading room on the east wall of the south tower, where there was a television, and he saw from the news being broadcast what had happened. It was 8:50, and he realized that the damage wasn’t in his building.
Clark called Dianne, his wife: “You won’t believe this but a plane has hit Tower One,” he told her. “Turn on TV. We’re OK here but I’m sure there’s a story developing that you’ll want to watch.”
So Dianne did start watching and a few minutes later she saw the plane hit the very building where her husband was and at a height that seemed to be near his floor.
Just at that moment, Clark was talking to two colleagues, Bobbie Coll and Kevin York, who had taken the elevator down a few minutes before, but then they heard the public address announcement that instructed people in the south tower to return to their offices, and they took the elevator back up. Given the inconceivability of a second plane hitting their tower and the dangers of falling debris outside, that announcement probably made sense to some of the Euro Brokers staff on the 84th floor, but it cost Coll and York their lives. Clark remembers word for word the announcement as it came repeatedly over the speakers:
“Building Two is secure; there is no need to evacuate Building Two; if you are in the midst of evacuating, you may use the reentry doors and the elevator to return to your office.”
In the instant when the plane hit his tower, Clark later recalled, “there was a loud sort of whompf. It wasn’t a huge explosion. It was something muffled, no flames, no smoke, but the room fell apart as the plane kind of torqued the building. Ceiling tiles fell from the ceiling; air conditioning ducts fell, door frames fell out of the wall.”
Clark later figured that while the fuselage hit a couple of floors below where they were, the raised right wing of the plane probably hit at about the 84th floor. The south and east walls got blown out, where the large trading room was, and the sixty-one Euro Brokers employees who died were mostly there. But in the smaller trading room on the west side of the building, there was just a muffled thud.
“My only moment of terror was the next ten seconds,” he said. “The tower swayed to the left, to the left, and to the left again. It seemed like it wasn’t going to stop. But then it did stop and righted itself. In the eight years I’d been there I’d experienced some swaying in strong wind, but not like that. It felt like the tower moved maybe ten yards. That’s when I thought it was all over.”
That moment in the south tower, when the second plane hit, was experienced with similar terror both by those, like Clark, who had not evacuated, and those, like Clyde Ebanks, who were in the process of walking down the stairs. Ebanks remembers that he had left the stairwell at the 70th floor and was just about to go into an office to look out the window when, suddenly, he felt the whole building shake.
“We were running back to the stairwell when we heard these popping sounds,” he said. “I think now, the popping sounds were coming out of the elevator shafts because of the fireball that was coming down. The popping sounds, I think, were the elevator doors opening up because of the fireball. I looked over to my colleagues and that’s when we all knew we had to get out of there fast. Up until then, we were moving but at a calm pace. Now we started to run. We now knew the building was on fire. We hoofed it down the stairs but people were still calm. Nobody was yelling or screaming.”
Brian Clark, who was on 84, had a longer way to go, and he started from a point above the floors where the plane hit. He ushered the seven people who were in the small trading room to the center core of the tower, where they usually went to get an elevator. He had several choices, to turn right to stairway C, to go straight to stairway B, or to turn left to stairway A. And he turned left to stairway A, probably because normally he turned left to go to the elevators, and even though he wasn’t going to the elevators, force of habit made him turn in that direction. It was a reflex that saved his life, and it is a reminder of one of the signal facts of the disaster in the south tower—that people saved themselves or they failed to save themselves by deciding, with no information on which to base their decision, what to do. Some ran for the stairs after the plane hit, ignoring the public address announcement, and they survived. Some tried to go to the roof, and they died. Some, presumably, tried stairway B or stairway C, and they died. A few, as we will see, were on stairway A, but they walked up instead of down, and they died. And then there were several, like Brian Clark, who used stairway A to go down, and they lived. Few, if any, of the victims and survivors made their decisions on the basis of experience or knowledge. For the most part, it was just dumb luck, or the lack of it.
“I led our group down three floors to 81,” Clark said. “The stairways go back and forth, a half landing in one direction and a half landing in another, and at one of the half landings, a very heavy woman who was walking up the stairs said, ‘Stop, you can’t go down.’ She was adamant. ‘You can’t go down, the floors are in flames.’ We stood there and argued. I was looking at her and saying to myself that her dress wasn’t on fire or anything. It didn’t make sense to me that we couldn’t go down. At that point I heard a voice crying, ‘Help, I can’t breathe. Is anybody there?’ I strained to hear it. When I was sure I could I grabbed Ronnie DiFrancesco, one of the colleagues who had accompanied me, and said, ‘Come on, Ronnie, let’s get this guy.’
“We were able to push the drywall aside in the stairwell and get onto the 81st floor. As I did, I had this distinct image of Bobbie Coll and Kevin York putting their hands under this heavy woman’s arms and starting to ascend. My flashlight was like a high beam on a foggy road at night. All you could see was this black smoke and this single beam of light. But the guy who was calling for help could see the light and I heard him saying, ‘Praise the Lord, I’ve been saved!’ Then he asked me, ‘Can you see my hand,’ and I couldn’t, but then I saw this hand sticking out of a hole waving to get attention, just the hand. The first thing he says is, ‘One thing I’ve got to know. Do you know Jesus?’ My reply was, ‘I go to church every Sunday.’”
The man was Stanley Praimnath, who worked for Fuji Bank. Clark helped to pull him out of the closed space where he was trapped. It was as though he were in a cave, standing up but trapped. Clark doesn’t know exactly how he did it, a burst of adrenaline probably, but he told Praimnath to jump, and Clark pulled as hard as he could and he made it out and the two of them fell into a heap on the floor.
“I’m Brian. Who are you?” Clark asked.
“I’m Stanley.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Stanley. Now let’s get out of here.”
“All that time, I was fine,” Clark remembers. “I was squinting a little in the smoke but I was breathing normally. I was in control, or something was in control of me. I wasn’t in a panic.
“We started down. There wasn’t a minute’s hesitation. The first few floors were tricky. Drywall was blown over the stairs and there was a lot of water from the sprinkler system I suppose dribbling over the stairs, so they were kind of slippery. But that was just two or three floors. You could see through cracks in the drywall into the floors, and you could see fires, but they weren’t very big. I don’t know, maybe the fires were starved for oxygen, but they weren’t shooting out at us. It was all very empty. The stairwell was dimly lit by emergency lighting, and I had my flashlight. There wasn’t much noise, and there were no other people.”
This is probably because, coming from the highest floors and having stopped to pull Stanley out of the rubble, Clark was one of the last people down and out of the south tower. Everybody else had already evacuated ahead of him, everybody but DiFrancesco who, bothered by the smoke and having heard the heavy woman warn of fires in the stairwell, walked up to the 91st floor. He sat there for a while, not knowing what to do, and then he thought of his wife and child at home and an intense desire to see them again came over him. He began walking down, several flights behind Clark and Praimnath. He was the last person to get out of the south tower to safety.
At around the 73rd floor Clark and Praimnath broke into fresh air. At 68, they ran into the only other person they would encounter in the stairwell. It was somebody Clark knew, a man named Jose Marreno, who also worked at Euro Brokers. Marreno, a fire marshal like Clark, had a walkie-talkie. He had been talking on it to another Euro Brokers executive named David Veirra, and he told Clark that Veirra needed help and he was going to walk back up the stairs to give it to him.
“I said, ‘Come on Jose, come down with us,’” Clark said, “but he said, ‘No, Dave Veirra needs my help,’ and I said, ‘Well, OK.’ I didn’t know the building was going to come down.”
At the 44th floor, which is another express elevator stop, Clark and Praimnath found a Port Authority security guard and a badly injured man lying on the floor. The security guard told Clark to call for a medic and a stretcher. Clark and Praimnath got down to the 31st floor and went into a conference room where there was a telephone. It was now 9:40. Clark called home to tell his wife where he was and that he was OK. Then he called 911, and it was like a Saturday Night Live parody:
“I’m on the 31st floor of Tower Two and there’s an injured man on 44 who can’t move,” Clark said to the 911 dispatcher. “They need a medic and a stretcher.”
“Hold on a second,” the supervisor said. “I’m going to have to have you talk to my supervisor.”
Clark waited on the line for thirty or forty seconds, and when somebody else came to the phone, he described the situation again. Again he was put on hold. Another thirty or forty seconds passed and a third person came on the line.
“Listen, I’m only going to say this once, and then I’ve got to go,” Clark said, and one more time he told them that they needed to send a medic and a stretcher to the 44th floor. Then he hung up and he and Praimnath continued down.
What’s striking is that neither man had any sense that there was any particular danger anymore. The possibility that the tower might come down never occurred to either of them. At one point someplace between the 20th and the 30th floors, Clark even said, “Hey, let’s slow down. We’ve come this far, there’s no point in breaking an ankle.”
When they arrived at the plaza level, which is usually thronged with people, they found what looked to Clark like an abandoned archaeological site, a moonscape, all white and gray. They stared at it for half a minute, disbelieving. From the plaza level they took the escalator down to the shopping concourse level.
“A woman was there who told us to go down the hall to where Victoria’s Secret was, turn right, and go out by Sam Goody,” Clark said. The underground passage took them to Building Four of the Trade Center and they exited there onto Liberty Street, which they crossed, dodging debris. They had made it. They were safe.