That morning in early September struck me as the most beautiful I had ever seen in New York City. My 7:00 a.m. run through Central Park began with more habit than awareness until my heart rose above 125 beats per minute. “Blood to the brain,” I muttered as I awakened on the road, slipping past lethal bike racers and into the pack of strangers pounding a beat to the Reservoir. The palette of the park dripped early autumn. Rust was forming in red maples. Misnamed redbuds were rioting pink. Sixty-five degrees, a breath of a breeze and a sky that pilots call “clear and a million.” Transparent. Sapphire. Vision for a million miles. “God, what a beautiful day,” I whispered as I huffed along the park’s West Drive, dodging hills of black granite sequined with mica. So beautiful. Clear and a million. September 11, 2001.
As I ran, a silver Boeing 767-200ER—striped in red, white and blue—rose from the runway at Boston Logan International Airport. American Airlines Flight 11 was on a “milk run” to Los Angeles International. Passengers settled. Announcements were made. In coach, flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney began the prep for breakfast. Fifteen minutes into the trip there was a burst of violence in first class.1 Ong quietly used a radiotelephone to call her company’s Southeastern Reservations Office in North Carolina.2 The twenty-five-minute call was recorded. “Okay, my name is Betty Ong. I’m [flight attendant] number three on Flight 11. The cockpit is not answering their calls...we can’t breathe in business class. Somebody’s got mace or something. Our number one got stabbed. Nobody knows who stabbed who and we can’t even get up to business class because nobody can breathe.” Minutes later Ong reported, “the first-class galley flight attendant and our passenger is [sic] stabbed. We can’t get to the cockpit; the door won’t open.” Amy Sweeney was on the other end of coach on another of the plane’s radiotelephones. She reached American’s Boston base station. The call was not recorded but Sweeney reported the seat numbers of four of the hijackers. American’s Boston station manager asked Sweeney to look out the window for landmarks. He told the FBI that Sweeney replied, “I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!”3 About this time, Betty Ong asked the American Airlines managers who had assembled on her line to “please pray for us.”4
In Manhattan, about fourteen blocks from the World Trade Center, firefighters from downtown’s Battalion 1 were checking a routine natural gas leak at the intersection of Lispenard and Church Streets.5 6 At 8:46 a.m., their curiosity turned to the roar of two General Electric CF-6 turbofan engines furiously compressing the autumn sky into 100,000 pounds of thrust.7 A camera crew shooting a documentary about the life of a rookie in the Fire Department of the City of New York caught the men as their eyes rose the length of the World Trade Center’s north tower and intersected with the fireball that consumed Betty Ong, Amy Sweeney and eighty-five other innocent souls on the plane. American Flight 11, traveling at approximately 440 miles an hour, gouged through half the width of the tower and blasted a hole, vertically, from the 93rd to the 99th floor.8 “Holy shit!” one fireman yelled.9 On FDNY radio channel 15, at 8:47 a.m., Battalion 1’s chief, Joseph Pfeifer, made the first call to the Manhattan Fire Dispatch Operations Center located in Central Park. “We just had a plane crash into the upper floors of the World Trade Center. Transmit a second alarm and start relocating companies into the area.”10 Seconds later, Battalion 1’s Engine 10 radioed, “Engine 1-0, World Trade Center, 10-60!”
“10-60” is FDNY code for a catastrophe. The voice from Engine 10 shouted, “Send every available ambulance, everything you’ve got, to the World Trade Center now!”
I was in New York City by happenstance. My home was outside Washington, DC, but I did my writing and editing at the 60 Minutes offices in a high-rise near the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West 57th Street. I was preparing a story on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, which seemed, at the time, an urgent public health risk. But soon, Mad Cow Disease would be the furthest thing from my mind. Our world, and my life, changed as I prepared to leave my hotel room on Central Park South. I aimed the TV remote control for a parting shot at CBS’s morning news. The remote dropped slowly to my side when I noticed a Special Report and live pictures of smoke erupting from One World Trade Center. Early word was a small plane hit the building. That didn’t seem likely to me. It was clear and a million.
Battalion Chief Pfeifer’s truck pulled into the shadow of the wounded tower. His next call to Manhattan Dispatch was meant to remove any doubt about what he witnessed. “We have a number of floors on fire,” Pfeifer radioed. “It looked like the plane was aiming toward the building.”11 Within three minutes, fire units that had not been assigned to the World Trade Center began raising their hands. “Do you want us to bring the high-rise unit?” one station asked. The dispatcher replied, “Bring everything you got!”12 One of the department’s elite rescue trucks called dispatch. “Rescue 2 to Manhattan...are we assigned to any of your boxes in lower Manhattan?”
“10-4, Rescue 2,” the dispatcher replied. “Start out to Box 8087.”
The box numbers marked fire alarm stations the public could use to call for help. On the organizational maps of the FDNY every address was assigned a box number. Box 8087 marked One World Trade Center.
Peter J. Ganci Jr. was supposed to have jury duty that day but he convinced himself he didn’t have time. The highest-ranking uniformed officer in the FDNY decided to make good with the court another day. Ganci had devoted most of his adult life to the department—thirty-three years. He had served in the army with the 82nd Airborne and joined the FDNY as soon as he came home.13 Ganci began as a probationary firefighter and rose through all eight ranks, but he was no bureaucrat. In 1982, when Ganci was a young lieutenant in command of Ladder 124, he crawled into an inferno to save a five-year-old girl. The department’s investigation found that Ganci shimmied on his hands and knees into the burning apartment, pushed flaming furniture out of his way and crawled out with the girl while giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The department citation for gallantry noted that the child certainly would have died had Ganci not acted “with disregard for his own life.”14 No wonder Ganci’s two sons followed him into the FDNY. Ganci’s daughter married a fireman.
Now, at the age of fifty-four, Ganci’s starched white shirt collar was pierced by a pentagon of stars. His helmet shield was gold and read Chief of Department. Behind the shield, the formerly white helmet was gray with years and indelibly smudged with soot. Halfway up the crown was a ring of yellow reflective triangles. Ganci had tied the chin strap behind the crown to get the damn thing out of his way. There were dents in his headgear and in some spots the paint was worn to bare metal. The helmet was a metaphor for the man. Ganci was visibly tough and handsome. Not tall, but trim. If he’d been an actor, he would have been cast to play the chief of department. Ganci’s soft blue eyes were framed by deep, radiating wrinkles. His hair was charcoal with faint streaks of ash. Ganci was friendly, sociable, even more so when armed with his preferred scotch. He was sometimes profane and always trying to quit smoking. Maybe he wasn’t your first choice for a guest at a tea party. But in a service that was all about saving lives from the horror of fire, no one would quite equal his experience or dedication. Peter J. Ganci Jr. was the indispensable man.
The office of the Chief of Department looked out on Manhattan from the higher floors of headquarters in Brooklyn. Ganci had a grand view across the East River. He was taking in the beauty of the day when he witnessed American Flight 11 ripping through 1 WTC. Ganci shouted to his second in command, Chief of Operations Daniel Nigro, “Look out your window! A plane just hit the World Trade Center.”15 Several staff chiefs ran into the boss’s office. A few thought he was joking.16
Ganci, Nigro and Ganci’s executive officer, Steven Mosiello, headed down to the garage on level C-1 and piled into Ganci’s car.17 Mosiello slid in behind the wheel. The chief’s top aide was a close friend. In the Long Island suburb of Massapequa, Ganci and Mosiello lived across the street from one another. Most days, by sunrise, they drove to headquarters together. As they raced over the Brooklyn Bridge, Ganci assessed the burning tower and radioed to Manhattan Dispatch, “Car 3 [Ganci] to Manhattan, K. Car 3 and Car 4 [Nigro] are arriving together responding down. Transmit a fifth alarm for this box. Get us a staging area somewhere on West Street, K.”18 On the radio, the use of the letter K was a throwback to the days of the telegraph when K was transmitted to signal the end of a message. In the twentieth century, when the FDNY began using radios, it kept the K. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, firefighters spoke it, unconsciously, as terminal punctuation. Ganci’s “fifth alarm” order automatically summoned twenty-two engine companies and fourteen ladder companies. Before the morning was out, four additional five-alarm responses would be called to the World Trade Center. Speeding over the bridge, Chief of Operations Dan Nigro measured the enormity of the fire and knew there was no way to put it out. The FDNY had never faced an inferno across that many floors in a high-rise. Raising his voice above the siren, Nigro told Ganci, “This is going to be one of the worst days of our careers.”19
“Hi, honey. It’s me. A plane hit the building. Um, I’m okay. The building’s on fire. We’re trying to get out. I love you. I’ll see you later.”20 Frank Spinelli, forty-four, hated to leave the message for his wife, Michelle. Now she was going to worry and he didn’t want to put her through that. He’d spent twenty years on Wall Street as a foreign exchange trader. Seven months before 9/11 he won a new job at the trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of One World Trade Center. Each morning, Spinelli rose long before dawn to commute from Short Hills, New Jersey, to catch the end of the trading day in overseas markets. The focus of his life was Michelle and their three children: Nicole, eighteen; Christopher, fourteen; and Danielle, eight. Nicole Spinelli told me, “He would kiss us goodbye in the morning and it was just one of those things that you’d maybe roll over and just be, like, ‘Dad, it’s too early.’ But he told me one time, ‘Nikki, I kiss you and your brother and sister goodbye in the morning to let you know that, if anything ever happened to me at work, you would always know that I loved you.’”21 Cantor Fitzgerald’s five floors began at floor 101, two stories above the grotesque gash in the tower. Spinelli and more than 650 Cantor co-workers were trapped.
Sirens split the morning. Pedestrians cringed as powerful air horns packed a physical punch. The FDNY’s armada of engines, ladders and specialty trucks rolled at the sound of a woman’s voice on the dispatch frequency ordering seemingly endless lists of divisions, battalions and companies. Half of the city’s 281 firehouses emptied. In Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, firefighters writhed into worn black flame-resistant bunker coats. Yellow-and-silver reflective stripes orbited the chest, arms and waist. On the back, “F.D.N.Y.” stood across the shoulders in yellow capitals. Near the bottom and just above the hem, the last name of the firefighter was lettered: Ryan, Feinberg, Jovic, Mercado, Freund, Vega, Sweeny, O’Rourke, Regan. The Irish were overrepresented because of the potato famine in 1845 that pushed an immigrant wave into New York Harbor. In the Civil War, thousands of Irishmen formed their own units in the Union Army. When the modern FDNY was organized in 1865, the year after the war’s end, returning Irish troops filled its roster. Even today, the tradition of service is passed down through fathers, sons and brothers. So, if a captain yelled “Mulligan” or “O’Hagan” in a firehouse, he might get more than one answer.
Racing to the battlefield were 121 engine companies, 62 ladder companies and 100 ambulances. Boastful rigs—labeled The Pride of Hell’s Kitchen, The Pride of Midtown—trailed the stars and stripes from their decks. Many firefighters tightened their grip on unfamiliar handholds because the rigs labored under twice the normal crew. Firehouses were changing shifts at 9:00 a.m. At many or most, both shifts answered the call. One thousand firefighters, paramedics and emergency medical technicians were in pursuit. The most senior among the uniformed firefighters, sixty-three-year-old Joseph Angelini Sr. had forty years on the job, but he still preferred to “ride the back step” of Rescue 1. His son, Joe Jr., thirty-eight years old, was aboard Ladder 4. The youngest was twenty-two-year-old Michael Cammarata with Ladder Company 11. He had scored a perfect 105 on the FDNY entrance exam. This was his fifth month on the job. He hadn’t attended his official graduation yet. Cammarata was a thoughtful son. As he answered the alarm, he called his father’s voice mail. “I am going to the World Trade Center. A plane just hit it. Just tell everyone I’m alright,” he said. A thousand names were lettered on a thousand bunker coats, but each firefighter knew the other by only one. It is a carefully observed tradition in the FDNY that firefighters call one another “brother.”
Chief Albert Turi’s staff car came to a stop on the east side of the burning tower. He hurried to the trunk and shoved his arms into his bunker coat which read “F.D.N.Y. Chief of Safety.” In the hierarchy, Deputy Assistant Chief Turi reported directly to the chief of department. But the organizational chart wasn’t the reason Turi had Pete Ganci’s ear. They were close friends who had risen together from the time they were probationary firefighters. Turi was in Ganci’s wedding party.22 It was Turi’s job to analyze the danger and safeguard the brothers as best he could. Dozens of firefighters were already scaling the stairwells to rescue the wounded and the trapped. Turi was facing the most hazardous calamity of his career but as he pulled on his boots, his attention was seized by a deafening roar.23
“Holy shit! What’s going on with the flight patterns?” firefighter Scott Holowach said to the fireman next to him. Chief of Department Ganci was standing nearby. “Chief, there is a second plane that hit the other tower!” Holowach reported.
“No, no, no,” Ganci replied. “It’s another explosion.” Ganci assumed the blast he heard was a secondary eruption in the already burning 1 WTC.
“Chief, I witnessed it,” Holowach protested.
“Are you sure?” Ganci asked.
“Chief, I’m 100 percent positive I watched a plane hit the other tower.”24
Others had seen it too. “Marine 6 to Manhattan, urgent!”
At 9:03 a.m., seventeen minutes after the first impact, an FDNY fireboat called dispatch. “Urgent” was an official understatement used on the radio rarely and carefully. It signaled the highest priority, a call that must be handled before all others.
“Marine 6, go,” answered the dispatcher.
“You have a second plane into the other tower of the Trade Center! Major fire!”
“Mayday! Mayday!” An unidentified engine company exploded onto the frequency. “Another plane hit the second tower! K!”
United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767-200 scheduled from Boston to Los Angeles, vaporized into Two World Trade Center at 540 miles an hour.25 The south tower was lacerated from floor 77 through 85.26 The plane’s right engine passed entirely though the building and landed more than a quarter mile away near the corner of Murray and Church Streets.27 In the first attack, on 1 WTC, American Flight 11 severed all three emergency stairwells. But in 2 WTC, United Flight 175 just missed a corner of the building’s central core.28 One stairway to the top survived.29
Eight miles north, on the south end of Central Park, I hurried out of my hotel and waved down a taxi. “World Trade Center,” I said. The cabbie, listening to the news on the radio, shrugged, “They ain’t going to let you near it.”
“Well, get as far as you can,” I urged.
I started flipping through my memories of the Trade Center. This wasn’t my first rush to the twin towers. In February 1993, a frantic CBS News National Desk assistant sent me to what was reported to be a subway accident in the World Trade Center’s extensive underground transit hub. There’s a maxim in journalism: “First reports are always wrong.” That would be true enough on that day. In 1993, I wouldn’t have expected to be sent to such a big story. I had been with CBS News only four years, not even a start at an organization where the contributions of correspondents were metered in decades. But the New York correspondent on duty had misplaced her pager. I was the only guy the desk could find. This would be the beginning of my education into the fanatics who hijacked one of the great religions of Abraham and their obsession with the dual symbols of American economic might.
The twin towers began to rise from lower Manhattan in 1968. They were meant to make a statement. Each, at the time, was the tallest building in the world and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was building two of them. Ayn Rand’s fictional architect, Howard Roark, would have admired the simplicity: austere aluminum-sheathed columns soaring 110 stories as though they were needed to hold up the sky. They’d been drafted in the mind of Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki, but the genius behind the construction was a thirty-four-year-old structural engineer named Leslie Robertson. His innovation created open floor plans by almost eliminating interior columns. Each tower was built around a core of steel—this much was typical. But Robertson took the load that would normally be supported by interior columns and moved it to the outside—to the facade. Half the weight of the buildings was carried at the core; half was distributed to the exterior.30 The two load-bearing systems multiplied their strength when they were bolted together by the floors.31 Additional strength was added by a steel structure at the top of each tower. The so-called “hat truss” encompassed the top four floors and was intended to support the weight of a rooftop mast and television antenna.32 Both towers wore a hat truss but only 1 WTC lofted a mast. Robertson’s ingenious arrangement saved everything that mattered: money, weight and time.33 The towers were overengineered to survive hurricanes and one other force that had never been contemplated before. Opponents of the project argued that the towers, at 1,368 feet and 1,362 feet respectively, were too tall. They might be hit by a plane lost in fog. In the late 1960s, critics took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with an artist’s impression of an airliner approaching the towers. Robertson took this seriously. He was also mindful of the foggy day in 1945 when a B-25 Mitchell bomber collided with the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building.34 The World Trade Center towers became the first skyscrapers in history designed with an airliner collision in mind.35 The engineering analysis imagined the impact of one of the larger planes of the day: a Boeing 707.
In February 1993, I could see the buildings were strong. I pulled up at 1 WTC to find smoke raging from the entrance of the parking garage. Firefighters emerged as black silhouettes except for the oval where their Scott Air-Pak facemasks shielded them from brow to chin. I knew enough to look for a white helmet among all the black: a chief officer.
“What do you have down there?” I asked.
“A bomb,” the chief said.
I was stunned and pretty sure he must be wrong. Remember, it was 1993. It would be another two years before I would find myself standing before the ruined Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. “Bomb” was not an answer I had imagined nor one I was eager to stick my neck out reporting. “Gas main?” I offered. “Maybe a transformer?” The white helmet with the gold shield announcing “Chief, Battalion,” panned slowly left and right. “There’s nothing down there that could do this,” he emphasized. “There’s a huge hole blown through five floors of the parking structure.”
The blast propelled smoke up all 110 floors. Power was out, elevators dead. Office workers felt their way down blackened stairwells and emerged into light snow, their faces layered with soot. Depending on their altitude and abilities, it took evacuees between one and nine hours to descend.36 Six people were killed, more than one thousand were injured.
That night, we set up a “live truck” to report from the scene for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Shortly before air, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, one of our producers with deep contacts at the FBI called to tell me the bureau was confirming a bomb. That fulfilled my need for two independent sources of information. Before I broke the news to the nation, there was one person I wanted to report to first. I called home. I was so heartsick that someone would try to kill so many innocents that I shared the news with my wife, Jane. I needed to hear her strength.
The investigation of the bombing would reveal that a Sunni Islamic extremist named Ramzi Yousef had engineered a 1,310-pound homemade bomb inside a rental van. The FBI made its first arrest when one of Yousef’s co-conspirators reported the truck stolen and went back to the rental office to get his $400 deposit.37 I thought, with enemies like these, we might not have much to worry about. Yousef was captured in Pakistan in 1995. No one understood at that time that Ramzi Yousef had a Pakistani uncle who was angry, ambitious and patient. Yousef took up residence in the “Supermax” federal prison on the plains of South-Central Colorado. His uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would never see his nephew again and would never take his eyes off the World Trade Center. Yousef’s failure set in motion his uncle’s plan to ensure the destruction of the twin towers eight years later. That night, in February 1993, on the Evening News, I included a fact that I found astounding. On any given day, forty-thousand people worked in the twin towers.38
The bombing was my first experience with the Fire Department of the City of New York. In 2001, the department was the second largest in the world after Tokyo. Eleven thousand uniformed firefighters and four thousand paramedics answered about one-and-a-half-million calls each year.39 The annual budget is nearly $2 billion.
The Fire Department of the City of New York is so singular, so storied, that no one thinks it odd that it places its name before the name of the city it serves, leading to the somewhat backward acronym, FDNY. Its shield, the department symbol, is a stylized version of the Maltese Cross, an eight-pointed star. The cross originated nearly one thousand years ago when the Knights of St. John became the first organized firefighters. During the first Crusade, Muslim Saracens defended their occupation of the Holy Land with a new type of bomb composed of naphtha in a glass jar. Hurled from a castle wall, the bomb set attacking crusaders ablaze. The Knights of St. John specialized in dousing the flames with blankets and evacuating the wounded. Their cross became the international symbol of firefighters.
Two towers burned above Chief Peter Ganci as he waved his arms in the middle of West Street. “Gary!” Ganci yelled. “Right here.” Ganci was flagging down the department’s Field Communications Unit, known as Field Com. “Right here” was where Ganci wanted his incident command post. It was directly across from 1 WTC, roughly where the command post had been after the bombing in 1993. “Set it up right here,” Ganci told Field Com Lieutenant Gary Gates.40 Field Com was the central nervous system of Ganci’s command. Firefighters trained in communications kept track of the incoming rigs and their assignments. Lieutenant Gates set up an aluminum stand with what looked like a metal suitcase on top. This was the Command Board on which each fire unit was recorded with color-coded magnetic nameplates. Engines were noted in black, ladders in red, battalions in gold. Unit numbers were written on the plates with a marker. Ganci’s incident command post oversaw three other command posts: one in the lobby of each tower and another in the Marriott Hotel which stood between them. Ganci ordered West Street cleared of fire trucks. He intended to use the six-lane road for ambulances. To organize communications, he assigned unique radio channels to each building.41 But the feeble handheld radios that the department called “handie-talkies” tormented him. He looked at his black radio wrapped in a fake leather case and shouted, “Goddamn it! The radios aren’t working!”42 43 44 After the bombing in 1993, the FDNY discovered the signal of its handheld radios couldn’t ascend the vertical expanse of the Trade Center. A “repeater” system was installed to boost the signal. But on 9/11 the repeater wasn’t working in One World Trade Center.45 46 Firefighters rising toward the inferno were cut off from their officers and each other. Off-duty firefighters who wedged themselves onto rigs at shift change didn’t have radios at all.
Even when the radios worked, Ganci faced a shortage of facts and a surplus of rumors. Word spread from law enforcement that another plane was inbound. There was no third plane targeting Manhattan, but after the warning, Ganci tried to stop the upward flow of firefighters. “There’s another plane in the air,” he radioed. “I don’t want anybody to go into the towers. Everybody stay put.” Ganci wondered aloud why the military was not yet shooting down hijacked airliners. He told the assembled chiefs at the command post, “Make sure no companies go in right now. There’s another plane up in the air. We don’t know what’s going on.”47
At the command board, Chief of Safety Al Turi turned to Ganci. “Pete, we’re going to lose some people here. It’s inevitable. It’s too tremendous.” Ganci said nothing. He simply nodded in agreement. In his head, Turi estimated as many as a dozen firefighters could be killed.48
Across the East River in Brooklyn Heights, the Maltese Cross was embroidered with the words Engine 205 and 118 Truck.
“Truck” is what fire companies call their ladder rigs. A brass plaque on the narrow red-brick building at 74 Middagh Street informed passersby that the firehouse had been built in 1929 under the administration of Mayor James “Jimmy” Walker. Walker was a character from a colorful day. He was a notoriously corrupt womanizer. During the days of prohibition, Walker’s police department often found his honor enjoying a refreshing beverage in a speakeasy. To the right of the plaque, the red overhead door was open. Engine 205’s side of the house was empty. The men of 205 rolled when the first plane hit. The crew of Ladder 118 was left behind to cover Brooklyn until the second attack. L-118 lumbered onto Middagh Street, shooing pedestrians with its air horn. She was an older truck, a 1991 Seagrave Tractor Drawn Aerial—a “tiller rig”—that looked something like an eighteen-wheeler. In three quick turns, L-118 mounted the Brooklyn Bridge. There is an iconic photo of the burning towers taken from Brooklyn. Black smoke engulfs the top third of each building. On the bridge, in the center lane, you can make out 118.
Leon “Express” Smith Jr., forty-eight, tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Smith, the “chauffeur” in fire department lingo, was a member of the Vulcan Society, the FDNY’s association of black firefighters. People who met him could not forget his face, which was dominated by a remarkably generous mustache that flowed far beyond the corners of his smile. Smith liked internal combustion engines. He liked building them, overhauling them, and he knew how to coax compression out of the Detroit Diesel thundering behind his seat. His nickname, “Express,” had been earned over nineteen years. Somehow, he always seemed to be the first to arrive at a fire. The rig’s ladder could reach one hundred feet into the air. But because she was so long, 118 had a second driver riding high astern—“the tiller”—who guided the rear end around tight Brooklyn corners. Up front in the cab, next to Smith, rode Lieutenant Robert “Bobby” Regan, also forty-eight years old. Regan was the officer in charge. His name was the first listed on the green chalkboard mounted in the firehouse’s white-tile garage. Across the top of the board the chalk noted “Date: 9/11. L-118. Lt. Regan—officer.” The rest of 118’s crew continued down the column: “Smith, Cherry, Vega, Davidson, Agnello.” Lieutenant Regan was nicknamed “Dizzy Dean” after the hall of fame pitcher. In his off-hours, he coached Little League. Over the summer, Regan’s team won the district championship by one run. The run had been batted in on a single off the bat of twelve-year-old Brendan Regan, the coach’s hero and his son.
The span of the 118-year-old Brooklyn Bridge shortened before them. Smith and Regan could see black clouds rolling furiously from the towers. Three firefighters in the back of the tractor would have to twist and shoulder each other for a look. Pete Vega had the best view. The sight of the catastrophe from his tiller cab would have made any firefighter curse the distance. On the radio, Lieutenant Regan received orders to evacuate 3 WTC, the Marriott Hotel. The night before, the twenty-two-story hotel had been nearly sold out. In 825 rooms, there were more than 1,000 guests.
To those on the Brooklyn Bridge, Ladder 118 began to blur under the demanding foot of “Express” Smith. On the outside of the tractor, on Bobby Regan’s door, they might have made out the FDNY’s modern logo featuring the New York City skyline dominated by austere twin towers.
My taxi came up short, nosing into blue NYPD sawhorse barricades that severed the West Side Highway along the Hudson River. The barricade was superfluous. All eight lanes were jammed with thousands of people trudging north, shoulder to shoulder. Their eyes projected disbelief and the dawning realization they had escaped downtown. I bailed out of the taxi and ran against the current. “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” I repeated as I stumbled through the crowd. I figured I had two miles to run before I reached the towers. Small obstacles littered the roadway. They felt like stones spilling at my feet left and right. The crowd was so tight, I couldn’t see what they were. After a few blocks, there was a parting of the pack and I saw what was tripping me: high heels, hundreds of pairs of women’s shoes, abandoned for speed.
I reached the Tribeca neighborhood, a few blocks from the towers, running as I had an hour before in idyllic Central Park. My right thumb flipped open my Motorola cell phone. I called the CBS News National Desk to find out what we knew. By then, the newsroom was crowded with producers, reporters and photographers who rushed to work without being called. Dan Rather was on the air, anchoring continuously. The desk assistant told me, “The Pentagon is on fire.”
American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, had left Washington Dulles International Airport bound for LA at 9:37 a.m. Thirty-seven minutes after the second tower was struck in New York, American Flight 77 exploded into the west wall of the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. The impact, at 530 miles an hour, killed fifty-nine passengers and crew along with five hijackers.49 In the military headquarters, 125 lost their lives.50
The National Desk continued to fill me in, “There’s been a car bomb reported at the State Department and a plane has crashed into the president’s compound at Camp David in Maryland.” That last one struck me as odd. President George W. Bush was in Florida. Remember what reporters say about “first reports.” We would soon find out neither the State Department nor Camp David had been attacked. But with the Pentagon ablaze, the scope of 9/11 was greater than I had been capable of imagining. Now I was thinking about my wife and our young son and daughter. Our home and their schools were a few miles from the Pentagon. Nothing seemed beyond the reach of the unfolding catastrophe. Everything I loved—my country, my wife, my son and my daughter—seemed held at risk by a force we did not know.
A traffic jam of fire equipment hardened around the World Trade Center. Firefighters bailed out of their trucks to pursue the FDNY doctrine known as “aggressive interior attack.” Fighting fire from the inside is the only way given a skyline no escalade can reach. Ganci’s hope was to evacuate everyone below the impact zones and use handheld hoses connected to the buildings’ standpipes to cut a path through burning stairwells for survivors trapped on the higher floors.51 There had been 198 elevators in the two towers. Now, only one was operating in each. In 1 WTC the lone elevator rose from the lobby to the 16th floor.52 In 2 WTC the surviving elevator climbed to the 40th.53 Firefighters heaved fifty pounds of protective gear plus another fifty pounds of equipment.54 When smoke in the stairwell grew heavy, each lowered his face into the Plexiglas mask of an Air-Pak and pulled the elastic straps over his head. Reaching behind with his right hand, he pushed in, then rotated a knob that opened the flow of compressed air into the regulator near his mouth. There would have been a quick, sharp chirp, chirp, chirp from a device called a Personal Alert Safety System. The chirp assured the firefighter that his PASS alarm had been armed automatically by the pressurized air. If the fireman was motionless for thirty seconds, the PASS would erupt into a piercing ninety-five-decibel wail. Firefighters drop everything at the call of the PASS to rush to the aid of a downed brother.
Ganci learned the rumor of a third plane targeting New York was false. He ordered reinforcements up the stairwells. One of the early engine companies at 1 WTC reached the 54th floor in forty-five minutes.55 But the ascending legion did not know that American Flight 11 destroyed the fire sprinkler system and severed all three emergency stairwells.56 57 58 Above the 92nd floor, 1,355 people had only one way out.59
The first member of the FDNY to lose his life was killed at 9:32 a.m. near West and Liberty Streets. Firefighter Daniel “Danny” Suhr, thirty-seven, was struck by a fellow human being hurtling to earth at approximately seventy miles an hour.60 Many victims above the burning floors leaned through smashed windows and clung to the outside of the towers. At least 111 fell or jumped.61 One anonymous couple held hands as they tumbled through the last moments of their lives. A fire marshal reported that a body hit every thirty to forty seconds.62 Firefighter Richard Boeri was in the soaring lobby of 1 WTC preparing to start his climb, when he was rendered immobile by the sight of jumpers disintegrating on the plaza. “I think we saw like eighteen people jump,” Boeri recalled. Then, one of the officers in the lobby said, “Turn around. Let’s concentrate on who we can save. We can’t save those people anymore.”63 Outside the entrance of 1 WTC, a firefighter bent his neck skyward to watch for desperate souls in flight. In the breaks between jumps—like a traffic cop—he signaled people waiting in the lobby. “Stop! Stop! Stop!” he yelled until the next falling victim hit the plaza. “Come on! Run! Run! Run!” was the signal to those in the lobby that it was momentarily safe to escape with their lives.64 65 One plunging soul caught the eye of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The mayor raised his hand to his mouth and recoiled. Giuliani rushed to the FDNY incident command post on West Street as soon as his police detail told him about the first plane. Ganci had moved the command post from its first location in the middle of the street. Chief of Safety Al Turi insisted on shifting it twenty yards farther from the World Trade Center to the entrance of an underground parking garage. There, two wide lanes ducked beneath the American Express building. The garage could be a refuge, Turi reasoned, if falling windows began to shoot shards of glass into the command post. Giuliani asked Chief Ganci if helicopters could rescue victims from the roof. “My guys can save everyone below the fire,”66 Ganci said. Giuliani understood the implication. Flying helicopters through the flames was not an option. Giuliani recalled saying, “God bless you, Pete.” The mayor told reporters that the number of souls lost that day would be “more than any of us can bear.”
Ganci believed he had time to work with. No steel high-rise in the history of the world had ever fully collapsed because of fire.67 None of Ganci’s chief officers at the incident command post expressed concern about a total collapse as company after company of “brothers” heaved up smoky stairwells.68 69 The chiefs estimated they had twelve hours before a partial collapse of some of the floors. For planning, Chief Turi cut the estimate in half. Based on a maximum time of six hours, he recommended to Ganci that all FDNY personnel be clear of the towers in two hours. Then the inferno would be left to burn itself out. The plan was tried and true. Other high-rise fires had been dealt with in the same way. Ganci agreed to Turi’s timeline.
His tactics might have been different had he known that each of the 300,000-pound airplanes blasted away the spray-on fire resistant foam applied to both buildings’ steel during construction.70 A subsequent study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that both buildings would have survived the impact of the aircraft and the heat of the fires had it not been for the loss of the thermal insulation.71 In 1968, the requirements of the city’s building code relied on two assumptions: the fireproofing would always remain intact and the sprinkler system would work. Now, neither was true. Structural steel begins to lose significant strength and stiffness at 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit.72 In some locations, the jet fuel infernos raged at 1,832 degrees.73
In stratospheric offices the sun was extinguished by rising smoke. Operators for 9-1-1 received 130 pleas for help from inside the towers. The recordings tell us what little is known about the fight to survive. An unnamed 9-1-1 operator tells a caller, “Alright. Hold one second, sir. Try to stay calm okay? I know—is there any towels in the area? Okay, listen, everybody, wet the towels. Listen. Lie on the floor. Everybody wet the towels, put it over your head, lie on the floor, okay?” The 9-1-1 recordings were released by court order five years after the attack. In respect for the dead, the judge redacted the words of the callers, leaving only the reaction of the emergency operators.
“Okay, listen please do not break the window,” one operator urges. “Don’t break the windows because there’s too much smoke outside. If you break the window, you guys won’t be able to breathe.” In another recording we can infer the caller’s plea to 9-1-1: “We are,” the operator says. “We’re trying to get up there, sir. Like you said, the stairs are collapsed, okay? Put the wet towels over your head and lie down. Okay, listen. Listen. Listen to me. Listen to me. Okay? Listen, don’t—try not to panic. You can save your air supply by doing that, okay?”
Manhattan Dispatch noted each caller’s location and reported to Ganci’s command post.
“Manhattan calling Field Com, K.”
“Field Com, go ahead Manhattan.”
“Alright Field Com, you ready to write? I got...building one and building two, everything we have up to now.”
“Give me building one.”
The list of the survivors’ locations revealed the immensity of the vertical battlefield. Tearful prayers were reduced to numbered targets.
“Okay, building one: 9-2 floor; the 106th floor; the 89th floor; 104th floor; the 100th floor, the northeast side; the 8-8 floor; the 8th floor, east side; the 105th floor; the 68th floor; 106th floor, northwest; 103rd floor, room 1-0-3; 83rd floor, room 8-3-11. Let me know when you are ready for building two.”
Field Com replied, “Proceed with building two.”
“Okay, the 82nd floor, west side; the 88th floor; 89th floor; 73rd floor, west side; 105th floor, east side; 104th floor, east side; 47th floor; 73rd floor, west office; 83rd floor, room 8-3-0-0 and 80th floor, northwest. That is what we have at this time.”
“Field Com received.”
One of the calls from that 83rd floor of Two World Trade Center was from Melissa “Missy” Doi, a thirty-two-year-old financial analyst. The only child of a single mother, Doi had dreamed of being a ballerina. She graduated from the prestigious all-girl Spence School in Manhattan, which boasted alumnae including Gwyneth Paltrow, Kerry Washington and daughters of the Carnegie, Post and Astor families. Later, after graduating from Northwestern, she returned to her native New York City seeking fortune more than fame. Doi brightened and lightened every meeting at IQ Financial Systems—a firm creating software for Wall Street. Her complexion was light brown. Her hair was absolute black, pulled back in a tight, professional style. But the feature no one could fail to notice was her illuminating smile that tickled her eyes to laughter. At the moment the 9-1-1 operator answered her call, Doi can be overheard nearing the end of the Hail Mary prayer: “Holy Mary mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
“9-1-1 operator, good day.”74
“I’m on the 83rd floor! I’m on the 83rd floor!” Doi shouted into the phone. The nose of United Flight 175 had hit two floors below her. Part of the right wing ripped into Doi’s 83rd floor.75 The twenty-four-minute conversation between Melissa Candida Doi and a 9-1-1 operator is among the few in which we have the caller’s words. The recording was entered into evidence in the 2006 federal trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman, who ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiring with the 9/11 hijackers. Moussaoui will spend the rest of his days in the federal Supermax prison in Colorado.
“Ma’am, how you doin’?” The operator speaking to Missy Doi was a woman. Listening to the recording, I suspect she’s middle-aged and experienced. Her voice is earnest and empathetic.
“Are you going to be able to get somebody up here?” Doi asked. I’m struck by the youth in Doi’s pleading soprano.
“Of course, ma’am, we’re coming up to you.”
“Well there’s no one here yet and the floor is completely engulfed. We’re on the floor and we can’t breathe. And it’s very, very, very hot!”
The operator was right, there was a firefighter rising toward Doi. Chief Orio Palmer of Battalion 7 was well-known for his unusual first name which, of course, earned him the moniker “Cookie.” Palmer shared something in common with Doi, the once aspiring ballerina. He loved to dance, albeit to rock. Palmer was so devoted to the classics (Led Zeppelin in his case), his three young children called him “the music man.”
Chief Palmer had rushed into the lobby of 2 WTC precisely ten minutes after the plane hit. He took the working elevator as far as it would go. Palmer radioed, “This is Battalion 7, on floor 40 in tower 2. We’ve got one elevator working up to the 40th floor staffed by a member of Ladder 1-5, K.”76 Palmer headed up the stairwell with six men from Ladder Company 15 trailing behind. No one who heard Palmer’s voice on the radio was surprised he was leading the charge. How could it have been otherwise? At age forty-five, Palmer was known as the fittest man in the department. He was an accomplished marathon runner who had won the FDNY’s annual fitness medal repeatedly. Palmer’s gallantry and leadership that morning remained unknown until nearly a year after 9/11. The only audio recording of his radio transmissions was lost in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. When the CD was discovered in 2002, the audio revealed that Palmer and others had climbed far higher than anyone had known.
Palmer was rising toward Missy Doi at a rate of one floor a minute. At 9:42 a.m., a fellow FDNY officer, Battalion 9 Chief Edward Geraghty, radioed Palmer. “Orio, I couldn’t find a [elevator] bank to bring me up any higher. I’m on the 40th. What can I do for you?”
“You’re going to have to hoof it up,” Palmer replied.77 “I’m on 69 now.”
Palmer was the advance scout, telling firemen on the floors below how to navigate the best route and sending survivors to the 40th floor where they could find the working elevator. At 9:47 a.m., Palmer radioed to Ladder 15, “I’m standing in ‘Boy’ stairway on the 74th floor, no smoke or fire problem. The walls are breached so be careful.”
“10-4, I saw that on 68,” Ladder 15 replied. “We’re on 71. We’re coming up behind ya.”
Palmer was now nine floors below Missy Doi and rising fast.
“Are the lights still on?” the 9-1-1 operator asked Doi.
“The lights are on, but it’s very hot! Very hot! We are all the way on the other side of Liberty [Street] and it’s very, very hot!” The fire below Doi was raging at a little over one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. On the east and south sides of 2 WTC the floor trusses were failing. The steel, robbed of its fireproof insulation by the impact of United Flight 175, began to sag. On one end, the weakening trusses were pulling the load-bearing columns of the facade inward; on the other end, they were straining their connections to the central core.78 With the weight of one third of the tower above them, the trusses would last fifty-six minutes.
“I don’t see any air anymore. All I see is smoke,” Doi reported to 9-1-1.
“Okay, dear. I’m so sorry. Hold on. Stay calm with me, stay calm.”
Doi begged, “Please!” The earnestness in her voice broke. It is unclear whether the gasps between her words were forced through smoke or tears.
“What floor you on, Orio?” radioed a fireman assigned to Ladder 15.
“Stairway on 75,” Palmer replied. “Go to the south stairway and continue up.” On his pathfinding ascent, Orio Palmer ran into another fireman. Ron Bucca, forty-six, was pretty fit himself. He was a twenty-nine-year military vet who still served in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces intelligence officer working in counterterrorism. In 1986, Bucca earned the nickname “the flying fireman” after he fell five stories from a tenement fire escape. It took him a year to recover, but he did—with an intense physical fitness regimen. Bucca had climbed all seventy-five flights. He hadn’t known about the working elevator to the 40th floor. In truth, Bucca didn’t have to be there at all. Years earlier, he had been promoted to Fire Marshal. His job was investigating fires, not fighting them. Still, he came, to challenge the largest inferno of his life. Bucca and Palmer directed injured survivors to follow the vertical trail they had cleared. From his radio transmissions, we know Palmer reached the 78th floor, the bottom of the gash blasted into the tower by the 767. “Ladder 1-5,” Palmer called. “We’ve got two to three pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines [fire hoses].” After thirty-seven flights of stairs, Palmer was finally out of breath. The horror of the 78th floor added an edge to his voice. Palmer keyed his mic to request that his next message be passed on to the incident command post. “Radio...” gasp, “Radio that...” gasp, “78th floor, numerous 10-45 Code Ones.” Fatalities, more than he could count, were strewn across the 78th floor. The four floors above 78 were heavily damaged. The nearest survivors to Palmer were likely five floors above him on 83—including Missy Doi and her five co-workers.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Doi said to the operator.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, say your—”
“I’m going to die.”
“Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am, say your prayers,” the operator counseled.
“I’m going to die,” Doi repeated. In the recording, I do not hear panic. Her voice sounds as though she had come to a realization. “I’m going to die,” was self-empathy reconciling with the inevitable. The two women on the telephone line—strangers who would never meet—formed an intimate bond. “We’ve gotta think positive,” the operator urged. “Because we have to help each other get off this floor. Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay calm.”
“Please God!” Doi called out.
“You’re doing a good job ma’am—you’re doing a good job...”
“It’s so hot! I’m burning up!” Doi said. Then she asked whether her mother could be patched into the call. The operator explained she had no way of making a third-party connection.
Five floors below, Orio Palmer began directing the firefighting attack. He radioed the men of Ladder 15 who were still headed up. “I’m going to need your firefighters, ‘Adam’ stairway, to knock down two fires. Get a house line [connection to a building standpipe] stretched. We can get some water on it and knock it down, K.” Palmer had discovered the only stairwell that was intact above the point of impact. If he could extinguish the fire in stairway A, more than six hundred people would have a way out.79 Ladder 15 replied, “Alright, 10-4, we’re coming up the stairs. We’re on 77 now on the B stair. We’ll be right to ya.” Before this recording was discovered, investigators estimated that firefighters reached no higher than fifty stories.
“Battalion 9, I need ya on the floor above 79,” Palmer advised his fellow chief. “We have access stairs going up to 79, K.”
“Alright, I’m on my way up, Orio,” Battalion 9 responded. At 9:57 a.m. it appears the one elevator stopped working. A member of Ladder 15 radioed, “Trapped in the elevator in the elevator shaft. You’re gonna have to get a different elevator. We’re chopping through the wall to get out.” Other members of Ladder 15 were stuck in a stairwell. “Orio,” one of them called on the radio, “we’re on 78 but we’re in the B stairway, trapped in here, we’ve got to put out some fire to get to ya.”
“Wait! Wait! We hear voices!” Melissa Doi reported to her 9-1-1 operator. “Hello! Help!” she shouted into the burning room. Then she screamed, “HELLP! HELLP!” Doi asked the operator, “Can you find out if there’s anybody on the 83rd floor? We think we heard somebody!” What Doi heard is unknown. But based on the records I have studied, it is plausible that Orio Palmer, Ron Bucca and perhaps some of the men of Ladder 15 continued climbing the intact Stairway A, fighting the fire as they rose.
Having received no answer, Doi returned to the call. “Can you...can you stay on the line with me, please? I feel like I’m dying.”
“Are they inside with you yet, dear?” the operator asked.
“No,” Doi said. “Can you find out where they are? Can...”
That was Missy Doi’s last word. By my count, the operator called her name without response more than sixty times over the next thirteen minutes. “Melissa! Do not give up, please! Do not give up, Melissa! Oh, my God. Melissa! Melissa!”
A structural engineer working in the city’s Office of Emergency Management foresaw what no one could imagine. The OEM happened to be headquartered in 7 World Trade Center, across the street from the towers. The engineer warned EMS Division Chief John Peruggia that both buildings could falter at any moment. Peruggia sent a runner to the incident command post about two blocks away. “You see Chief Ganci and Chief Ganci only,” Peruggia told Emergency Medical Technician Richard Zarrillo. “Tell him the building integrity is severely compromised and they believe the building is in imminent danger of collapse.”80
“Who the fuck told you that?” Ganci fired back at the messenger. Ganci’s expression was a mix of determination and fear.81 82 “Listen, I was just at OEM,” Zarrillo repeated. “The message I was given was that the buildings are going to collapse; we need to get our people out.”83 Zarrillo had hardly stopped speaking when a roar and seismic tremor overwhelmed the command post. “What the fuck is this!” Ganci yelled.84 85
At same instant, Battalion Chief Orio Palmer keyed the mic on his handheld radio, still directing the firefighting and rescue, “Battalion 7 to Ladder 15...” There was no time for a reply. At 9:58 a.m. the exterior columns along the east wall buckled. The failure raced around the corners to the north and south faces. Two WTC tilted to the southeast and foundered on the floors where Orio Palmer was climbing toward Missy Doi.86 The south tower, which was built over the course of three and a half years, was gone in five seconds. The building had burned for seventy-three minutes.
“...to Manhattan, urgent!” An unidentified firefighter began shouting before he keyed his mic.
“Go ahead, K.”
“One of the buildings, the entire building has collapsed, major collapse in one of the towers!”
“Which tower? K.”
“Tower 2! Tower 2! The entire tower, major collapse!”
The dispatcher radioed Ganci’s incident command post. “Manhattan to Field Com.”
“Manhattan to Field Com.”
“Manhattan to Field Com, K.”
“Manhattan to Field Com.”
“Manhattan to Field Com, K.”
An unidentified screaming voice broke in on the frequency, “Have them mobilize the army! We need the army in Manhattan!” The dispatcher replied, composed, steady, “All units stand by. Everybody try to calm down. Manhattan to Field Com, K.”
“Manhattan to Division.”
“Manhattan to Car 9 [borough commander of Queens], urgent.”
“Manhattan to any unit operating at the fifth alarm, West Street and Liberty, for tower 2. Any unit, K.”
Silence spoke of inconceivable loss.
About sixty officers and firefighters were standing at the incident command post as the tower fell before them.87 Chief Ganci, Chief Turi and the rest dove into the adjacent parking garage that Turi had imagined as an emergency shelter. They managed only fifteen to twenty steps before they were overwhelmed by a cascade of choking dust that blotted out the sun.88 The dust was so dense the men felt they were drowning with their last breath stuck in their throats. Some who had Air-Paks shared their masks with those who did not. Darkness was total. When the roar subsided, survivors slowly rose from the ramp. They were coated in gray like victims felled by the ash of a volcanic eruption. Some reached for flashlights which feebly failed to penetrate the fog. Chief Turi could not see the hand in front of his face. He moved by memory up the ramp toward West Street. After a few yards he walked headlong into a tree. The startling collision was a relief. In the blackness, the feel of bark told Turi he’d made it outside. “My God,” Turi thought to himself. “We just lost two hundred-fifty men.” Chief Ganci stumbled out of the garage disoriented, choked and nearly blinded by ash.89 The staff chiefs gathered, looking like they had been shaken in a bag of flour. “Pete, get everyone, everybody out of the north tower,” Chief Turi urged Ganci. “If it happened there [2 WTC], it’s going to happen here [1 WTC]. We’ve got to get everybody out.” With his hand radio, Ganci immediately and repeatedly ordered the evacuation of all FDNY from 1 WTC. I have not found any evidence that Ganci’s order was heard by Manhattan Dispatch nor anyone else.
Among those missing after the first collapse were “Express” Smith, “Dizzy Dean” Regan and all the men of Ladder 118. Regan had been leading his men up the floors of the Marriott in search of civilians who were trapped or disabled. They reported by radio they were on the 15th floor and working their way up.90 Moments later 2 WTC crushed the hotel. Manhattan Dispatch could offer only information and for a time, the dispatcher broadcast into silence. “Be advised in the area at the Marriott Hotel, receiving reports of firefighters trapped and down.” There was no response on the radio.
Firefighter Mike Brennan burst onto the frequency, “4 Truck OV. Mayday! Mayday! I’ve fallen several floors.” Firefighters identify themselves by their rig and their job. “OV” stands for Outside Vent, the ladder company fireman who uses tools to break open ventilation from the outside of a burning building. “4 Truck OV. Mayday! Mayday! I’m running out of air!” Pete Ganci overheard Brennan’s distress call on his hand radio. Just then, another truck company called to Brennan, “Hey, brother. We gotcha. We gotcha. Turn on your PASS [alarm]. We got a roof rope. We’ll come and get you.”91 92 Many other mayday calls were going unanswered. Ganci could hear them—dozens of his men pleading for help.
Turi, chief of safety, wanted everyone three blocks north. He grabbed a bullhorn and herded survivors up West Street. Ganci gave orders to set up a new command post in the direction Turi felt was secure. Then the chief of department gave his officers and friends their orders. Chief of Operations Nigro was to head north and inspect the far side of the still standing 1 WTC. Executive Officer Mosiello was ordered to head north and organize search and rescue teams. North was the direction of safety. The more dangerous assignment was to head south to track down the mayday calls in the twisted steel. Pete Ganci gave that assignment to himself. With First Deputy Fire Commissioner William Feehan at his side, Ganci turned and headed toward the collapse.93 “Chief, where are you going?” Steve Mosiello asked Ganci.
“Steve, I’m going to take a walk down here. Get me two trucks.”94 “Two trucks” was a request for two ladder companies—twelve firefighters. A few minutes later, having assessed the catastrophe, Ganci called Mosiello on the radio. “Steve, I want two of my best trucks. Rescue squads, two of my best trucks.” The rescue firefighters were assembled. Ganci radioed, “Steve, I want you to bring those two trucks to me. Stay on the west side of West Street. I’m south of our last command post.”
“Okay,” Mosiello replied. “I have the trucks coming. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”95
As I ran toward the World Trade Center, the West Side Highway became West Street. Dazed firefighters, covered in gray and streaked in blood, were laboring north. Fresh companies hurried south in clean black bunker gear. Because of other skyscrapers, I had lost sight of the towers until I was nearly on them. I was awed by the sight of smoke raging from 1 WTC. Endless black clouds were borne on an easterly wind and rose over the harbor to Brooklyn and beyond. Still, my immediate emotion was something like joy. I assumed the north tower was blocking my view of its twin. Amid the smoke and chaos, I did not recognize that 2 WTC was gone. I imagined the forty thousand people I expected in both towers had a chance.
Inside 1 WTC, firefighters were also unaware of the collapse. A chief crackled onto Tactical Frequency 1. “Command to all units in One World Trade Center, evacuate the building!” Few heard the order. The signal wasn’t getting through. A chief on the 35th floor grabbed a bullhorn: “All FDNY, get the fuck out!”96 Many followed the order, but others refused to abandon the wounded and the disabled. One company of firefighters who were obeying the evacuation order discovered forty to sixty disabled civilians lying on the 12th floor. The civilians had been told to wait there because their immobility was blocking the evacuation routes. The firefighters stopped their descent and began lifting each individual down the stairwell.97 Other firefighters refused to leave while there were still brothers on the floors above. Captain Patrick “Paddy” Brown, forty-eight, of Ladder Company 3, was leading his men up from the 35th floor. Brown was a Marine Corps veteran who came to the FDNY after two tours in Vietnam.98 Brown radioed, “This is 3 Truck and we’re still heading up...” His voice, which had inspired a generation of young firefighters, would never be heard again.
I could see West Street was filled with debris. A fire truck I noticed appeared to be cut in half by a collapsed pedestrian bridge. My eyes rose the height of 1 WTC, past the burning floors, to the mast and TV antenna projecting from the roof. Odd, I thought. The mast seemed to be swaying slightly like a metronome—left, right, left—nearly imperceptible. I made sense of it as an illusion conjured by the heat tormenting the air. I was wrong. The upper third of the tower was tilting to the south. The steel was weakening under the relentless heat.99 One World Trade Center was losing its will to survive.
You’ve heard people describe terror as unfolding somehow in slow motion. I can tell you it is true. As I squinted at the wavering mast, the collapse of the north tower began. The failure started at the hideous wound gouged by the initial impact. It appeared to me that the top third of the building fell one story then paused. It seemed to drop another floor and pause. Then, another. But the stop-action pace was entirely in my mind. The floors were pancaking with heartbreaking acceleration. In a person’s limitless ability to fool himself, I thought it would stop. Just a few more floors. Surely it would stop. But the reality that viewers of television saw was the sixth tallest building in the world thundering to earth as its twin sister had twenty-nine minutes before. Someone behind me and on my right screamed, “God! Nooooooo!” with such force, he seemed to be trying, with breath alone, to reverse the weight of gravity and the course of history. Entirely on instinct, before I realized what I was doing, I felt my knees hit the pavement. My vision blurred with tears as I reached out to God in prayer for the people in the tower. “Take them, Lord,” I said. “Take them all with no pain!” I believed I had just witnessed the deaths of as many as forty thousand people—their souls rising in ash that exploded into the sky. Standing before the collapse was the most wrenching experience of my life. As I write, eighteen years later, tears still come. If you were there, you know the feeling; the horror—the enduring disbelief, even now, that such a catastrophe was possible. I still feel something like a fist squeezing the blood from my heart and the air from my lungs. For me, a new emotion was composed in the moment—a combined sense of fragility and overwhelming loss—hollowness. Nothing I’ve seen since—combat in Afghanistan and Iraq; the 2011 tsunami in Japan; war in Somalia, South Sudan and Congo—has recalled the feeling of tipping backward into an abyss. For anyone on that corner, at that moment, it seemed the end of time.
Near the center of the human brain, there is a pair of primitive, almond-shaped, structures called the amygdalae. They process fear and are designed to save your life. The amygdalae are faster than conscious thought. They’re the reason you leap back to the curb before you think “That bus almost killed me!” And so, I have no memory of rising from my knees, just an awareness, milliseconds later, that I was in motion, sprinting from a hurricane of ash, ten stories high, roaring through the canyons of lower Manhattan and enveloping the world.
“Three-three to Manhattan, urgent!”
“Three-three.”
“The other tower just collapsed! Major collapse! Major collapse!”
A second voice broke in on the dispatch frequency.
“Urgent! Urgent!”
“Unit calling Urgent, K.”
“We had a collapse of the second tower. Everybody’s running from there. This is...” The transmission ends.
FDNY paramedic Karen Lamanna survived the first collapse, sheltering inside her ambulance. Now, she was trapped on the street watching the second tower cascade toward her. “I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t breathe,” she remembered. “I’m going to die here alone,” Lamanna said to herself. “It felt like forever and every once in a while, I would squeak out, help! just so I could hear a human voice.”100
The shudder of the earth blurred my vision. I could hear steel colliding with the street. The air thickened to paste. Somewhere behind me, Chief Albert Turi was among those running north. Unable to breathe, he dropped to the ground near a young firefighter and covered their heads with his bunker coat. “We’re going to die here!” the fireman said. “We’re going to die, I can’t breathe.”
Turi replied, “I just went through this twenty minutes ago. We’re not dead yet.”101
The hurricane struck with such fury it blew away any thought of survival. Then...there was silence. No sirens. No screaming. Stillness descended like the calm after a heavy snow. Gray ash swirled in the streets and climbed into drifts. I walked among survivors in shock. They stumbled aimlessly, blinded by dust, camouflaged in ash. Color was gone; skin color, hair color, clothing—all were gray. The living looked like ghosts and the dead had disappeared. I turned and headed back toward what would come to be known as Ground Zero. In the middle of Greenwich Street, I found a jet engine. It was small, not like the big turbines that lifted the wings of the airliners. I recognized it as an auxiliary power unit that had been housed in the tail of one of the planes. My eye was drawn to a flash of yellow—a crushed taxi—not much more than a foot tall. Around me, engines, trucks and ambulances were flattened or incinerated. The department would later count ninety-one vehicles destroyed. A black, two-door Mercedes sedan had landed, upside down, on top of one engine.
A hysterical voice, gasping for air, broke onto the frequency. “Can anybody hear me?”
Manhattan Dispatch replied, “Go ahead.”
“I’m a civilian. I’m trapped inside one of your fire trucks. I can’t breathe much longer. Save me!”
“Unit transmitting a mayday. Where are you? K.”
“It’s north of the World Trade Center. I was on the street. Please, help me!”
The voice seemed to be a man’s although some firefighters thought they heard a woman. That was the last transmission.
I came to Ground Zero at Vesey Street. Wreckage burned across sixteen acres. White smoke swelled from a mountain of broken steel beams and twisted rebar, but I was more surprised by what I did not see. There were no bodies on my approach. No sign of humanity. No sign of our modern world. Imagine what filled the towers, the desks, phones, computers, filing cabinets, carpets and drapes. None of that was apparent. There was only powder, swirling, sticking to windows, lampposts, people and the sky. Out of this cloud fell one thing that had survived—paper—millions of pages, wheeling down one thousand feet. The flurries lasted for hours; stock receipts, pages from desk calendars, greeting cards, memos written with great urgency before 8:48:40 a.m. I noticed a loose picture lying in the ash. It was a family on vacation. Dad. Children. Someplace warm. Someplace safe.
The FDNY dispatcher tried to reach Chief Ganci or any of his top officers. “Manhattan announcing. Any division or any staff chief at the scene of the World Trade Center? K.”
Silence.
“Any division chief or any staff chief at the scene of any of the World Trade Centers? K.”
Silence.
“Manhattan to Mobile Command Center, K.”
Silence.
Then, a voice from Ground Zero replied, “Mobile Command Center to Manhattan, K.”
“Mobile Command Center, what chief do you have at your Mobile Command Center? K.”
“Negative on any chief, K. Right now, we’re all alone. The second building came down. I can’t see. So, we have no contact with anybody at this time, K.”
I flipped open my phone, but the cell system had crashed with the buildings. I found myself living what had been a recurring nightmare that had awakened me for years. In my dream, I witness an enormous event but I have no way to report the story. Every phone I try is dead. Looking up from my useless Motorola, I noticed an ash-shrouded pay phone. “No way,” I muttered. With the advent of cell phones, I had stopped carrying change. So, even if the pay phone did work, I’d be separated from the newsroom by the width of a quarter. I swept the dense ash off the chrome and picked up the receiver. Dial tone. I learned later the phone company had a standing emergency plan to switch pay phones to coin-free mode in case of emergency. I started punching buttons.
The phone rang at my home outside Washington, DC. My wife, Jane, lifted the receiver. The caller was one of my producers, who came to the point. “Have you heard from Scott? Do you know where he is?”
The producer who was near the collapse was searching for me and sensibly assumed I would have called my wife. The fact that I had not is something of which I’m occasionally reminded.
“No, I haven’t heard,” Jane replied.
With no thought of reassurance, the producer continued, “The buildings collapsed. The cops told everyone to run for the [Hudson] river; we can’t find him.”
Jane is a former award-winning reporter. She was once one of my competitors and a formidable one. Later, she built a successful advertising agency, starting with nothing but a desk and a phone. Jane is not easily shaken nor given to worst-case thinking.
“Let me know what you hear,” she said. The receiver found its way back into its cradle.
I punched the last digits on the pay phone to ring the CBS News National Desk. Bill Felling, the national editor, picked up. “Bill, I’m at the World Trade Center, do you need me to file a report?” I imagined there might be several correspondents at the scene. Maybe some had “live trucks” and were already on the air. I could hear shouting in the newsroom and the steady roar of a powerful organization pulling together every resource it had in the world. In the tumult, Felling missed what I had said. “How far are you from the World Trade Center? We don’t have contact with anyone downtown.”
“Bill,” I repeated, “I’m at the World Trade Center. I can reach out and touch it.” He patched me through to the television and radio networks and I began to describe the collapse, the devastated cityscape and the firefighters scaling broken steel in the search for survivors. CBS News was on the air for ninety-three hours—no commercials, no breaks. Hundreds of men and women worked to exhaustion to separate fact from rumor and present solid information and analysis when America needed it most. It had been sixty-three years since CBS’s Edward R. Murrow invented broadcast news, painting vivid images of history as the Nazis seized Austria. All that Murrow started, all that we had become, prepared us for this day. In the storied history of CBS News—this was our finest hour.
The American people needed pictures, interviews and firsthand reporting. Accurate information is the lifeblood of a democracy in crisis. I discovered the mistaken report that a plane hit Camp David had been passed from sources in Washington after this radio exchange between the FAA and the Air Force Northeast Air Defense Sector:
“United 93, have you got information on that yet?” NEADS asked.
The FAA controller responded, “Yeah, he’s down.”
“When did he land?”
“He did not land.”
“Oh, he’s down, down?” NEADS asked.
“Yes. Somewhere up northeast of Camp David.”
United Flight 93 was the fourth plane in the attack. It had been delayed at the international airport in Newark, New Jersey.102 For reasons we do not know, it flew much longer than the other hijacked airliners toward its intended destination, San Francisco, before the terrorists turned toward the East Coast.103 The delays gave at least five of the passengers time to learn, by phone, about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Unlike the other three hijacked planes, the cockpit voice recorder on Flight 93 survived. The 757, with forty passengers and crew plus four hijackers, was twenty minutes away from its target, either the White House or the US Capitol.104 Microphones in the cockpit picked up passengers ramming what sounds like a service cart into the cockpit door. A hijacker at the controls rocked the plane violently to throw the passengers off their feet. One passenger is heard saying “...in the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die.”105 Apparently, the passengers were close to breaking through. One hijacker said in Arabic, “Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?” Another replied, “Yes, put it in and pull it down.” There were shouts of “Allah is the greatest!” as the aircraft rolled onto its back. It was diving at 580 miles per hour when it disintegrated, nose first, in an empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
In Manhattan, 10 million square feet of American ambition and audacity had towered over one of the world’s greatest cities. Now, 1.8 million tons of ruins filled the basement floors of the World Trade Center and hulked above ground in a mountain of misery.
Chief Albert Turi organized two ladder companies to search for Chief Ganci and Deputy Commissioner Feehan who had gone in search of victims of the first collapse.106 But another search party with a rescue dog named “Bear” was already walking over the jumble of steel. Bear pawed at an opening with his right foot. The firefighters saw nothing but Bear insisted. They dug through the metal until they found a bunker coat labeled “F.D.N.Y. Chief of Dept. Ganci.”
It was apparent that Ganci died instantly. FDNY Lieutenant John Mendez witnessed the recovery of the chief’s body as it was carried into a building across West Street. Mendez told investigators, “We ended up in the back of the atrium as they were pulling his body out. A fireman was carrying his remains down the stairs—his head—and the other firefighters were carrying the rest of his body in a [rescue] basket. Chief Turi was there. We started crying. They placed his body on the ground and we all kneeled around it and prayed.”107 Ganci was carried to an ambulance guarded by a chief and a captain. “I told you I wouldn’t leave here without Pete,” Chief Turi said, breaking the news to Ganci’s chief of staff, Steven Mosiello. “He’s in the ambulance—dead.”108 Mosiello was handed Ganci’s gold helmet shield which read Chief of Department. It had been found near the body.109 A few hours later the body of First Chief Deputy Feehan was pulled from the wreckage. He was laid in the ambulance next to Ganci.110 Feehan—who was said to know the location of every fire hydrant in the city by heart—was two weeks shy of his seventy-second birthday.
When Ganci and Feehan set out from the parking garage, they knew total collapse of 1 WTC was likely imminent. Yet, they turned their backs on safety because no cry for help could go unanswered.
Turi and Mosiello took a police car to Massapequa on the south shore of Long Island to tell Ganci’s wife, Kathleen, that the chief was gone.111 Mosiello turned down an offer of a helicopter. He needed a long drive to think of what to say.112
By midday, I stood before tall remnants of Minoru Yamasaki’s design. Part of the facade at the base of one of the towers was standing. Shards of aluminum rose about ten stories like spires from a netherworld. They were jagged at the top. Their neo-Gothic arches at the bottom were the only hint of what had stood here half an hour before. To my right I could see Seven World Trade Center was burning. It had been shot through with shrapnel. On the far side of the debris pile, to the south, another high-rise was ablaze. I shouted to a police captain leading officers into the devastation. “What about casualties? What have you seen?”
“Uncountable!” he yelled, as he rallied his men. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
The air swelled with the wailing, undulating cry of high-pitched electronic alarms. They were all the same, rising up the scale of notes and down the other side—Wheeeee-hooo, Wheeeee-hooo, Wheeeee-hooo—overlapping, out of sync, like crickets on a summer night. They were the Personal Alert Safety System (PASS) alarms of more than three hundred firefighters. Cries for help from dead men would wail three hours, then fade one by one as the batteries were exhausted.
Surviving firefighters dug for their brothers with their hands. “Indescribable,” one firefighter told me. “We’re standing on the roof, digging down. There’s stuff and people everywhere.” Civilian volunteers poured onto the site. Men under hard hats, who had been on a construction job nearby, arrived in military formation. “What do you hope to do here?” I asked Fred Clark, a carpenter who helped build the towers in the ’60s. “I’m here to find somebody still alive,” he said without breaking stride. Another firefighter told me, “Everybody’s working together, the whole city is trying to get people out.”
I ran into the superb CBS News producer Janet Klein and CBS News cameraman Brian Nolan. Brian was carrying several industrial dust masks, the paper kind strung on an elastic band. A quick-thinking desk assistant in the newsroom sent the masks because the ash in the air was a hazard, a greater hazard than we knew at the time. I wasn’t entirely happy to see Brian. He was battling lung cancer and there was no way the ash was going to help. I said, “You shouldn’t be here, man, you don’t have to do this. There’s plenty to do uptown.” With weary eyes and irony in his smile, he silently made it clear I could stop wasting words and time. “Let’s start shooting,” Brian said. It would be the biggest story of his career and the last full year of his life.
Fresh ambulances rushed in but I noticed they did not rush out. “You can read a couple of things into that,” Dr. Lincoln Cleveland told me. He ran to the scene from New York University Hospital. “Either people are buried and they’re going to start bringing out the wounded, or just everybody died,” he said. Doctors from the FDNY Bureau of Health Services broke into a drugstore adjacent to the World Trade Center and set up an emergency surgical center. The number of survivors was so small, they never saw a patient. One firefighter used an ax to cut himself out of a collapsed stairwell. Two Port Authority cops used pistols to shoot out a window that held up their escape.113 The survivor who was trapped the longest was Port Authority Police Sergeant John McLoughlin. He was discovered the next day.
I returned to Ground Zero every day for two weeks to watch thousands of rescue workers from throughout the United States climb the mountain and burrow in. Motivated by hope of a miracle, they worked in shifts all day, all night, for weeks. But no one was found alive after the first thirty hours.
Late in the afternoon, a sudden roar behind me triggered an instinctive cringe. I hunched the muscles in my back and squeezed my eyes shut. Jet engines, too low, too close. “Shit! Another one,” I shouted. My eyes followed the roar toward the Hudson River where two US Air Force F-15 Eagles streaked like arrowheads toward the sea. They wheeled left, past the Statue of Liberty, around the tip of Manhattan, then left again up the East River. I could make out air-to-air missiles slung under their wings. In a couple of minutes, they were back. I had seen this pattern a hundred times, in Iraq, during the war in 1990/91, but I never imagined I would see fighters flying combat air patrol over an American city.
In the early evening, two firefighters marched past me with an American flag draped from a pole. I had no idea where they found it. They climbed a dozen feet up the pile, planted the Stars and Stripes, stepped back, drew themselves to attention and snapped a salute. The surrendering sun cast an orange glare and firefighters wept into the twilight’s last gleaming.
Across Vesey Street, opposite Ground Zero, 7 World Trade Center had been burning furiously for hours. This office building, clothed in red granite, was “only” forty-seven stories tall. It had been added to the complex in 1985. At the base of the building, I spotted a half-dozen firemen. They too had collapsed, exhausted, heartbroken, taking a minute before going back into hell. They didn’t seem concerned that heavy panes of glass were popping out of window frames hundreds of feet above and disintegrating nearby in the street. I was interviewing them when a police officer ran up, waving his arms at the burning building. “This one’s coming down. Get out of here, NOW!” I said what reporters always say in moments like this: “Okay, officer, we’ll just be another minute.” Instead of arguing, the cop sprinted away without another word—unusual in my experience. The firefighters, accustomed to following orders, rose as one body and scuffed their boots up the street. It was almost time to broadcast the CBS Evening News, so I followed them out in the direction of a “live truck” a couple of blocks away. When I arrived, a producer was shouting, “We need you on the air now! Seven World Trade collapsed and we’re going live!”
“No, it didn’t,” I told him. “I just came from there.”
“It collapsed!” he insisted. “We’re going to you live.”
“I’m telling you,” I said, raising my voice. “I was there ninety seconds ago. It’s standing!” The engineer operating the truck turned to me with no expression. “Look,” he said. His fingertips twisted a large black rubber knob counterclockwise, rewinding a cassette in a videotape machine. He jabbed at the controls and the white “play” button illuminated. On the screen, 7 World Trade Center buckled. All forty-seven stories dropped like someone pulled the corner from a house of cards. Okay, officer, we’ll just be another minute, I remembered saying. If I had been another minute, I wouldn’t be here now. Engineers had been watching the four corners of the roof of 7 World Trade Center through spotting scopes. They’d seen it sagging on its way to imminent collapse. The officer hadn’t been speculating that the tower might go. He was telling me it was going—right then. I went on the air.
By evening, the last plaintive PASS alarm fell silent. The remains of the department’s eldest firefighter, sixty-six-year-old Joseph Angelini Sr., were found with the men of Rescue 1. His son, Joe Jr., was killed with the crew of Ladder 4. The youngest in the FDNY, twenty-two-year-old Michael Cammarata, who left the reassuring phone message for his dad, died with the men of Ladder 11. Battalion 1 Chief, Joseph Pfeifer, had been among the first on the scene after witnessing the beginning of the attack. Within minutes, he ran into Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer, in the lobby of 1 WTC. He watched his younger brother head up the stairs. They would never meet again.114 In 2018, Joseph Pfeifer became the last of the surviving 9/11 chiefs to retire. Steve Mosiello, who brought the heartbreaking news to Chief Ganci’s wife, survived but did not escape. Ten years after 9/11 he lost his life to esophageal cancer believed to have been triggered by the toxic dust at Ground Zero.
That morning, I was privileged to witness the greatest act of gallantry ever granted to an American city. How small the firefighters looked to me as each stood for a moment taking the measure of the inferno. Then, having assessed the odds, the meaning of their lives was plain. Fear did not bind them. Love of family did not hold them fast to safety. Long ago they had decided what they would do on this day. Each placed his life in trade for the mere chance of saving another.
Four weeks after September 11, twelve-year-old Brendan Regan accepted the championship award for his Floral Park, New York, Little League team. His father, Lieutenant Bobby Regan of Ladder 118, had not been found. He would have admired his son’s brave face beaming under a weary and frayed New York Yankees 1999 championship cap. A few days after the ceremony, I met Brendan and his sister, sixteen-year-old Caitlin, at their Long Island home. Buzz-cut, lanky and freckled, you’ve seen Brendan before. He’s in every Little League scene Norman Rockwell ever painted. We talked about the hit that won the championship that summer. I wondered about his dad’s reaction. “What did he say?” I asked. Sweet memory pulled a grin across Brendan’s face. “Nice hit,” he quoted. Caitlin wore a maturity beyond her years. I had the sense she had tried it on only recently. Her memories were of her dad’s firefighter schedule, often twenty-four hours on and forty-eight off. “I was really happy that he was around,” she told me. “I notice a lot of my friends’ dads work into the night. I was always really thankful that my dad was around a lot and he spent a lot of time with us.” I asked Brendan what he would say to his dad if he could. I immediately regretted the question. I’d gone too far. Darkness crossed his innocence. He struggled silently with all the things he could have said, would have said, still wanted to say. He settled on a message: “We have practice tonight.”
A little more than two months later, New Year’s Day 2002, Lieutenant Regan’s body was discovered. He was wearing a medallion of Saint Florian, the patron saint of chimney sweeps and firefighters. Engraved on the back were the words “We love you, Caitlin, Brendan and Donna.”115 All six men of Ladder 118 were killed. But their Brooklyn firehouse roommates on Engine 205 survived.
The body of Frank Spinelli, the currency trader who left the calm, reassuring message for his wife, was found two weeks after 9/11. It was a few days before his forty-fifth birthday. His wife, Michelle Spinelli, and their eight-year-old daughter, Danielle, baked his birthday cake anyway. “I just knew,” Danielle told me, “that if he were here, he would want a cake, so I just decided to make it with my mom.” In their living room, I sat with Danielle, her fourteen-year-old brother, Chris, and big sister, eighteen-year-old Nicole. Frames on tabletops enclosed memories of ski trips, beach trips; a handsome family, rejoicing in its youth. Danielle was unassailably sweet, buoyant and precocious. I sensed an innocent wisdom so I asked: “People all over the world are trying to make sense of this. Kids and grown-ups alike don’t really understand why this would happen. What do you think when you try to understand it?” I’d been right about the wisdom. “I think that these people just took my dad away from us for no good reason,” Danielle said. “I don’t know why. If they met him—” her eyes lit up at the thought “—I know they’d change their mind.”
The number killed at the World Trade Center was 2,753.116 That is 254 more than the number of Americans killed on D-Day.117 The catastrophe could have been far greater. September 11, 2001, was the first day of school for many children and a primary election day. Fewer than half of the usual occupants of the towers had arrived for work by the time the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m.
The remains of more than one thousand victims have yet to be identified. Among those still missing are Battalion 7 Chief Orio Palmer and Leon “Express” Smith. The Ladder 118 chauffeur with the reputation as the first to arrive, will be among the last to leave. The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has never stopped working to extract DNA from bone fragments that were discovered in the days, months and even years after 9/11. In 2017, the ME announced that new DNA technology allowed it to identify the 1,641st victim. It had been two years since the previous identification. In 2018, the ME reported that the remains of 59 percent of the victims had been identified.118 Among them was Melissa Doi, who was identified three years after her call to 9-1-1.
In 2019, the remaining 7,930 fragmentary remains were stored seventy feet underground in a section of the National September 11 Museum. The 2,500 square foot repository is between the foundations of the towers. It is not open to the public but family members have access to an adjacent private room to explore their memories. This hallowed section of the museum has become a Tomb of the Unknowns.119 On its exterior wall, the public sees an artist’s impression of that day’s sapphire sky. The words of the Roman poet, Virgil, are written across the blue field: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”
In the span of an hour and a half, twenty-three New York City police officers were killed, alongside thirty-seven officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and three hundred forty-three members of the FDNY. Three hundred forty-three, the largest loss of life of any emergency service in history. I look at that number on this page and it’s impossible for me to measure. They volunteered when they could have been home. They rushed to the cataclysm before the radio called. They climbed twenty-five, fifty, seventy-nine floors and with every step, they sacrificed themselves to clear a path for others. Their rescue work was a spectacular success. The authoritative study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology estimates there were 17,400 people in the two towers combined. Of the total, 87 percent evacuated. Of those who were below the points of impact, 99 percent survived.120
None of those who came to the rescue knew why the buildings had been attacked or by whom. But for them, it didn’t matter what 9/11 was about, they knew what they were about. Each firefighter, paramedic and EMT had raised his or her right hand and sworn to faithfully execute their duties on behalf of the citizens of the City of New York. Even more, they had committed to acting with courage in defense of one another. In 1099 AD, the Knights of St. John became the first to forge this bond despite, or perhaps because of, the horror of fire. They dowsed burning men with their capes as Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem hurled naphtha from towering walls. Nine hundred years later, the bond held, as Islamist heretics rained fire on men and women still wearing the Maltese Cross.