Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center
Forty-seven minutes after takeoff, carrying eighty-seven hostages, five tons of cargo, ten thousand gallons of fuel, and five terrorists, American Airlines Flight 11 completed its forced conversion from a passenger jet into a 283,600-pound guided missile.1 Its nose aimed slightly downward, its right wing tipped upward, the silver Boeing 767 with red, white, and blue stripes and “AA” on its tail smashed into the north face of the North Tower at 8:46:40 a.m. Its violent arrival carved an airplane-shaped gash in the steel and glass that stretched at an angle from the 93rd to the 99th floor.
As it entered the building, what remained of Flight 11 sliced through thirty-five exterior steel columns and heavily damaged two more. It severed six core columns and damaged three others. It shattered at least 166 windows. It broke the concrete floor slabs of the 95th and 96th floors eighty feet deep into the building. It launched a fusillade of flying debris that knocked or scraped fire-retarding insulation from forty-three core columns. It stripped the insulation from sixty thousand square feet of steel floor supports over several floors. It severed pipes that fed water into the fire sprinkler system. It stopped elevators in motion and cut off elevator service to at least the sixty upper stories. It sent glass and metal and office contents and body parts raining down a thousand feet to the plaza and the streets below.
It altered the path of American and world history.
All that damage took less than one second.
A wheel from the left wing landing gear crashed through the North Tower’s central core, embedded itself in an exterior column on the far side, ripped the steel beam from the building, and flew with that piece another seven hundred feet to the south, landing on Cedar Street. Another wheel also passed entirely through the tower; unencumbered by building parts, it flew twice as far to the south.
The crash immediately killed everyone on board Flight 11 and an unknown number in the plane’s path. But that was only the beginning. As the plane blasted through the tower’s core, it crushed the walls of all three emergency stairwells in its path, cutting off stair access to everyone on the 92nd floor and above. At the moment of impact, an estimated 1,355 people2 were inside those nineteen uppermost floors. That included roughly two hundred people dining or working at Windows on the World and attending a technology conference on the 106th floor.
The survivors on those floors had no way down and no way out, although many didn’t yet know it. Scores called 9-1-1 as well as family members and friends, while others sent emails. They delivered oral and written messages that spanned the emotional spectrum, from panicked pleas to calm appeals. Some expressed their greatest concern not for themselves, but for the loved ones whom they worried they would soon leave behind.
Yet despite the damage, despite the death and destruction, in the immediate aftermath of the assault, the North Tower still stood. It absorbed the unthinkable blow, bending and swaying but not breaking. Even with its relatively spindly design and sparing use of steel, the tower had what engineers call “reserve capacity” that allowed it to support a far greater load than its own weight plus the weight of people and furnishings. When Flight 11 severed more than forty exterior and core support columns, the building instantly and automatically redistributed the load to undamaged neighboring columns. That kept the North Tower upright and prevented the immediate deaths of survivors in and above the impact zone, as well as more than seventy-five hundred3 men and women on lower floors who streamed toward undamaged stairwells to try to escape.
With its load redistributed, the tower could have remained standing4 indefinitely, potentially allowing rescue workers to reach everyone who survived the initial damage. If not for the fires, that is.
The North Tower’s external steel columns cut through the Boeing 767’s fuel-filled wings like the blades of an egg slicer. Fireballs visible for miles exploded from the entrance wound and from blown-out windows on the east and south sides of the tower. More fireballs raced up and down elevator shafts, blowing out doors and walls as far down as the basement levels. Toxic clouds of hot, thick smoke poured up and down the central core and gushed out of the broken building. No longer was the morning sky an unblemished blue.
Despite the explosions, less than half of the ten thousand gallons of jet fuel from Flight 11 burned in the initial fiery blasts. The rest sprayed through the impact floors and nourished fires that consumed combustibles from the plane and the office furnishings. Those fires fed off fresh air that flowed into the torn-open building. As flames gathered strength and spread, trapped survivors rushed toward sealed and broken windows in desperation. At the same time, the fires began to threaten the remaining support columns that already carried a heavier-than-normal load from their broken neighbors. Meanwhile, fires licked at the exposed steel of floor supports that were shorn of their fire-retarding insulation.
The secondary effects of the crash were in full swing.
Building fires typically don’t get hot enough to melt structural steel columns, even relatively thin ones. But long before steel reaches its melting point, it loses strength. The weaker a steel column gets, the less able it is to carry its assigned or reassigned load. Similarly, fires could make unprotected steel floor supports sag, adding stress and pulling down on the exterior and core columns to which they were attached.
Ultimately, if the structural steel in the impact zone became hot enough for long enough, or was forced to carry too much added weight, it would buckle. If that happened, everything above the impact zone would come crashing downward, creating an enormous moving mass that could overwhelm the entire North Tower. Put simply, it could cause total collapse.
Although the impact of the B-25 bomber on the Empire State Building in some ways resembled the crash of Flight 11, fundamental distinctions between the buildings’ designs made the two events vastly different. No building like the North Tower had ever experienced such an assault, so no one could say for certain what might happen next. Like everything else about the morning of September 11, this was uncharted territory.
When Flight 11 struck, Elaine Duch had just stepped through the glass door outside her office on the 88th floor to meet a messenger, Vaswald George Hall, and his document-laden flatbed cart. Hall was fifty, the father of four, a police officer in his native Jamaica before arriving in the United States seventeen years earlier. He’d recently scored high on a civil service exam and hoped to start a new career.5
Before Elaine could guide him through the larger, double doors of the Port Authority’s real estate department, an explosion roared from above. The building swayed and moaned as though threatening to dive into the Hudson. The floor rippled and rocked beneath her sneakers like the deck of a ship in high seas.
Before Elaine could think, before she could act, a fireball of ignited jet fuel traveled down an elevator shaft and burst through the elevator doors. It illuminated the hallway with a brilliant orange flash of dragon’s breath. It consumed Elaine. The fire seemed to touch every part of her at once, as though she’d leapt into a cauldron, a scorching immersion that bathed her in unspeakable heat. Certain that she was about to die, Elaine screamed: “God save me!”
The fire considered her open mouth to be an invitation to scorch Elaine’s lungs.
All around her, ceiling tiles popped from their frames. Light fixtures crashed to the floor. Gypsum drywall boards burst from their anchors. Elevator doors ruptured off their tracks. The fireball from Flight 11 passed as quickly as it arrived on the 88th floor, with the growl of an engine and the shush of a snuffed-out candle. It left behind a smoky haze and small fires in the far reaches of the corridors.
And it left behind Elaine.
In shock, yet still on her feet, Elaine glanced down and saw charred tatters of her cream-colored top melted to her skin. Blackened remnants of her skirt made gruesome tattoo marks on her exposed legs. Her face and arms shone bright red, as though she’d fallen asleep on a broiling beach. Her jacket seemed to have burned away entirely. The sulfurous smell of her scorched hair mixed with the lingering odor of jet fuel. Smoke rose from her like mist from a morning lake. When the fire embraced her, it cut through her watchband and sent her watch skittering to the floor. Her key case leapt from her hand. Elaine’s glasses were askew but intact, having miraculously protected her eyes. Her only other unscathed body parts were her feet, shielded by her sneakers. Vaswald Hall, the messenger who’d been just feet away from her, was gone; Elaine didn’t know where.
The fireball burned more than three quarters of her skin, from her scalp to her ankles. Her burns were mostly third-degree, which destroyed Elaine’s nerve endings. For the moment, that was a blessing. The absence of nerve endings blocked her ability to feel pain and allowed her to only partly comprehend the severity of her injuries. Elaine’s immediate concerns were embarrassment at her disheveled seminakedness, confusion about what just happened, and worry about the strange sizzling sounds all around her.
Elaine walked zombie-like into the real estate office, her arms outstretched, stepping across shattered glass from the door she’d passed through less than a minute earlier.
Startled by the plane’s impact, the rising smoke, and the building’s pronounced sway, Port Authority workers and several employees of the trade center’s new leaseholder, Silverstein Properties, scurried through the office, some invoking the memory of the 1993 bombing. Everyone halted at the sight of Elaine. People she’d worked with for decades asked one another with alarm, “Who’s that?”
Two longtime colleagues, Joanne Ciccolello and Gilbert Weinstein, rushed over. They patted Elaine’s head and body with their bare hands to extinguish smoldering embers. Elaine saw the horror in their eyes as they tapped and brushed away sparks. Alarmed by her exposed, damaged skin, Elaine ran to her desk and grabbed an off-white cardigan and tied it around her waist as an improvised wrap skirt. Her modesty partially restored, Elaine grabbed her purse. Years earlier, someone stole her pocketbook when she worked on the 63rd floor. She still winced at the hassle of losing her license and belongings, and she was determined not to let it happen again.
Ten miles away, at a chemical company in Bayonne, New Jersey, Elaine’s twin sister, Janet, looked up from her desk to see her boss standing over her.6 He said that a small plane had slammed into the World Trade Center. Probably no big deal.
Janet sprinted outside, to a parking lot where she could see across the sparkling bay to Lower Manhattan. She spotted flames and smoke bursting from the World Trade Center tower with the giant antenna on top. Janet knew that Elaine worked on the 88th floor of the North Tower, which looked to be around the affected level. But, seized by fear, Janet couldn’t remember which of the buildings had an antenna on top.
Frustrated that she didn’t know which Twin Tower held her twin sister, Janet rushed back inside. She called Elaine’s desk phone, but the call wouldn’t go through. Janet tried Elaine’s new cellphone, but it rang unanswered, buried deep in Elaine’s abandoned tote bag.
A howl from an engine followed by a powerful boom launched FDNY Captain Jay Jonas to his feet.
For Jay, sudden loud noises were almost as motivating as fire alarms. He abandoned his Wheaties and ran outside as his mind spun through a catalog of horrendous sounds. Jay guessed that a freight truck must’ve driven off the nearby Manhattan Bridge, where he and his ladder company had been only hours earlier on the overnight shift in response to a scaffolding collapse.
Out on the street, firehouse watchman Ray Hayden already understood that the awful noise hadn’t come from something as ordinary as a truck or a bridge. Hayden had seen a passenger plane screech overhead, heading toward the World Trade Center. Other buildings in the cramped Chinatown neighborhood blocked his sightline, but Hayden heard enough and rushed back inside to alert the troops.
The watchman’s assumptions proved correct. New York’s emergency airwaves burst to life with calls between FDNY dispatchers and a battalion chief7 who’d been responding to a gas leak on a street corner less than a mile uptown from the Twin Towers. Within seconds, the chief radioed: “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.”
The radio reports quickly escalated.
“The World Trade Center, Tower Number One, is on fire,” said an officer from FDNY Engine 6, a half mile west of the sixteen-acre complex. “The whole outside of the building. There was just a huge explosion.”
The first report of victims came from Captain Eugene “Jack” Kelty of Engine 10, located across the street from the towers: “World Trade Center, ten-sixty,” he said, using the code for a major emergency with the possibility of multiple casualties. “Send every available ambulance, everything you’ve got, to the World Trade Center now.”
As Jay reached the sidewalk on Canal Street, he heard watchman Ray Hayden yell over the firehouse intercom: “A plane just crashed!8 A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!”
Jay turned west to face toward the towers, about a mile downtown. He couldn’t see them, but as Jay scanned the sky, he saw an ominous plume of rising black smoke.
“How big a plane?” Jay called to the watchman.
“It was a big fucking plane!” he answered.
Jay rushed inside and told Ray to sound the alarm to turn out Ladder 6 and also Engine 9, which shared the firehouse. Neither company had yet been ordered to respond, but Jay felt certain that both would soon be called to duty. In simplified terms, ladder companies climb into buildings to find victims and create ventilation, while engine companies pump water. But those rules applied more neatly to a six-story tenement fire; skyscraper fires had their own rules and made different demands on all firefighters, regardless of company assignments. Jay understood instinctively that a fire fed by jet fuel and a wealth of combustibles, caused by an airplane crashing into an upper floor of one of the Twin Towers, would make unique and vicious demands.
Jay raced into his office to pull on his bunker gear: fire-retardant pants, thick rubber boots, and a heavy black-and-yellow turnout coat. Stuffed in its pockets were gloves, a flashlight, and a smoke hood, along with items more typical for a mountain climber: rolls of nylon webbing and steel carabiners, which had as many potential uses as there were possible disasters. Jay had employed similar gear during the rescue of two firefighters in 1995, and he’d written an FDNY training bulletin on improvised rope rescues. He grabbed his air mask, a twenty-pound device as essential to a firefighter as scuba gear is to a diver. His black helmet, with a bold red 6 and captain above the brim, awaited him in the truck.
As Jay dressed, the battalion chief who witnessed the crash into the North Tower added more chilling details, and another alarm, to the initial report that he had issued only twelve seconds after impact. “We have a number of floors on fire,”9 Chief Joseph Pfeifer told the Manhattan FDNY dispatcher. “It looked like the plane was aiming toward the building. Transmit a third alarm throughout; the staging area [is] at Vesey and West Street”—the intersection at the northwest corner of the trade center property.
A third alarm meant a call for a dozen engine companies, seven ladder companies, an elite rescue unit, communications teams, multiple chiefs, and assorted support crews. As Jay anticipated, that included his unit, Ladder 6. Eventually, more than two hundred fire units,10 with more than a thousand firefighters, would swamp the scene, along with more than one hundred ambulances and the FDNY’s Hazmat team. Some would come without being called, desperate to help however they could. Because the crash occurred close to the 9 a.m. shift change, many firehouses had double their usual complement of firefighters. Few if any of “New York’s Bravest” wanted to avoid the fight. Trucks that normally carried six men zoomed toward the trade center with twice that number, “riding heavy” in firefighter parlance.
The FDNY responders also would soon include a charismatic, pious, sometimes joyously profane sixty-eight-year-old chaplain named Father Mychal Judge. His lifesaving skills included leading scores of people to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he, too, had found rescue. A day earlier, the silver-haired Father Mychal had rededicated a renovated firehouse in the Bronx, where he reminded firefighters of an essential truth about their work: “You show up,11 you put one foot in front of another. You get on the rig and you go out and you do the job, which is a mystery and a surprise. You have no idea when you get on that rig, no matter how big the call, no matter how small, you have no idea what God’s calling you to. But He needs you. He needs me. He needs all of us. . . . So keep going.” When Mayor Rudy Giuliani reached the trade center, he’d call out to Father Mychal: “Pray for us.” The priest assured the mayor that he would, as always.
Captain Jay Jonas, Chief Joe Pfeifer, and every other firefighter who sped toward the scene understood that this would be a big one. Maybe the biggest one ever. For his part, Pfeifer wanted some semblance of order from the outset. At a minimum, he wanted to steer rescuers into the tower as quickly as possible. Pfeifer continued his radio call: “As the third-alarm assignment goes into that area, the second-alarm assignment report to the building!”
As Jay Jonas mustered his troops, he knew that they’d be among the firefighters going in.
Inside the Marriott lobby, Ron Clifford heard an explosion, followed by a deep rumble that shamed the previous night’s thunderstorm. Vibrations rose up from the soles of his polished shoes, reverberating through his body and everything around him, as though he and the entire hotel were tuning forks. Ron thought a storage tank in the basement might have ruptured. Yet the lobby walls, fixtures, and ceiling remained intact. He looked around and saw people trying to regain their bearings.
Confused, Ron glanced toward the revolving doors that led to the North Tower lobby. On the other side of the glass, he saw a chaotic scene. Ron smelled what he thought was kerosene. He heard screams. His mind flashed to the 1993 attack and his conversation on a sailboat the previous weekend with the retired World Trade Center engineer. Still, he didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
As Ron stared at the North Tower lobby, he saw smoke fill the soaring space where moments earlier he’d admired the view. People rushed toward the blown-open revolving doors he’d just come through. Not fully processing the situation, Ron briefly fixated on the broken doors. “My god,” he thought, “it must’ve been some kind of pressure to do that.”
Fleeing people entered the hotel lobby and rushed past him, eyes wide, faces gripped by fear. Ron’s gaze settled on one person who moved differently, more slowly and clumsily than the others. Through a foggy veil of fuel particles and fumes, a short, stout figure marched awkwardly yet determinedly toward him. His first thought: a homeless person in tatters. Then his mind sharpened: it was a woman, nearly naked, horribly burned.
Fire had consumed the woman’s pants, blouse, and underwear. A zipper ran up her blackened chest, fused with her ruined skin. Dark tufts of fried hair sprouted from her head. A metal clip had melted against her scalp. Her eyelids were slits, clamped shut from burns or swelling. She shuffled forward. Her hands reached out, her twisted fingernails scorched white from heat.
The woman moaned in agony. Ron resisted an urge to recoil and banished an impulse to join the fleeing herd. As Ron stared at the woman, her burned lips formed a word that rooted him in place: “Help.”
As everyone else ran to save themselves from the explosion that rocked the building and filled the North Tower lobby with smoke, fumes, and debris, Ron stepped toward the oncoming figure. Without medical training, with no idea what happened, Ron didn’t know what to do for her. But he knew he had to do something.
“Okay,” Ron told the woman, “we’ll get some help.”
He eased her down onto the marble floor. Her ravaged skin and what remained of her hair still smoldered. Heat and vapor rose from her body. Ron wished he could call his sister, Ruth, who’d spent a decade running a day spa, to draw upon her skin care expertise.
Ron thought water might help. He told the burned woman to wait as he ran into the restroom where minutes earlier he’d straightened his yellow tie. Remembering how clean the lavatory was, Ron snatched an empty garbage bag from its container and partly filled it with cool tap water. He ran back to the woman, still on the floor, alone in the crowd as people coursed toward an exit like deer from a forest fire.
Ron knelt and gently poured water on her burned arms, legs, and body.
“Help!” Ron called to passers-by. He stood and shouted: “Emergency! Help! Can anybody help us?!” No one stopped. No one replied.
He dropped back to the woman and the wet floor. A closer look showed that she had been burned head to ankle, as though she’d stood under a molten waterfall. Only the ragged tops of her New Balance running shoes were partly intact. The rubber soles were melted to the bottoms of her feet.
Despite her shock and pain, somehow the woman remained coherent and able to speak. She told Ron her name: Jennieann Maffeo.
He pulled out a notebook as she told him where she worked. She said she’d been waiting outside the North Tower for a shuttle to the ferry when she burst into flames. She didn’t know how or why. As flaming debris and fireballs rained down, Jennieann had been swept into a frightened crowd, unable to see, on legs burned to the muscle. She’d somehow stumbled into the North Tower lobby, then passed through the blown-open doors to the Marriott lobby, and into Ron Clifford’s path.
At Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, FDNY paramedic Carlos Lillo sprinted toward EMT partners Moose Diaz and Paul Adams, his eyes wild and brimming.
“A plane hit the towers!”12 Carlos yelled. “We gotta go!”
As they raced to their ambulances, Moose heard Carlos shout: “My wife’s in there!”
Moose remembered a locker room conversation during which Carlos said he’d drilled Cecilia about how to find an escape route in any emergency, and how he’d made her promise to find an FDNY ambulance to summon him. Carlos had also told Moose about the promise he’d made to Cecilia about not risking his life to look for her if anything like the 1993 bombing happened again. Moose understood that those promises might soon be tested.
As they tore away from the hospital, the EMTs and paramedics radioed dispatch to say they were leaving their assigned district to cross the river to Manhattan. Sirens blaring, lights blazing, the two ambulances raced along Queens Boulevard. Through the passenger seat window, Paul Adams caught a glimpse of smoke pouring from the upper floors of the North Tower. The radio barked a report: a code 1040—airplane crash—at the World Trade Center. Chatter came across the airwaves about a “small airplane” striking the building. Paul thought about the single-engine Cessnas he piloted. He stared at the multistory gash and turned to Moose. “That ain’t no small airplane,” he said.
Moose fell silent. Fighting nerves, he reminded himself of all he knew about responding to a major catastrophe with multiple casualties. As he ran through the protocols in his head, Moose thought the North Tower looked like a lit cigarette standing on its filter end.
Alone inside an express elevator descending toward the North Tower lobby, Chris Young landed from his third unsuccessful antigravity test. As he did, he heard a roar. A blast of warm, dusty air and a sickly-sweet scent flooded his senses. Lights popped from ceiling frames but remained lit. The elevator car screeched and shuddered to a stop, knocking Chris off his feet.
Curled into a ball, Chris briefly wondered if his jumping up and down had somehow derailed the elevator as it descended. Then he remembered 1993. He couldn’t be sure, but the noise he had heard sounded as though it came from below. “Another bomb under the World Trade Center,” he thought.
Chris saw the “L” illuminated on the elevator car’s digital control panel, but he didn’t know how close it had stopped to the lobby. Heart racing, breathing fetid air, he stood and took stock. Relieved that he wasn’t hurt, Chris gathered his wits. He pressed a red emergency button that set off a ringing alarm.
After several minutes with no response, he noticed a second button with the outline of a firefighter’s helmet. He pulled the alarm button to silence the ringing and pressed the fire hat. An automated computer voice assured him that his emergency call had been received and would be answered shortly.
The voice repeated itself without pause for the next fifteen minutes.
Dressed and ready, Captain Jay Jonas climbed into the front seat of the red-and-white firetruck, a tractor-trailer model called a tiller rig, designed for the tight turns of Chinatown streets. He looked around to see a fire crew he’d match against any in New York City, or anywhere else for that matter.
The men of Ladder Company 6, Jay’s men, held job titles that evoked an earlier era of firefighting or the credits from a superhero movie. “Roof Man” Sal D’Agostino brandished a long rope and hand tools; “Can Man” Tommy Falco, who years earlier had asked Jay to lead the company, carried a loaded extinguisher; “Chauffeur” Mike Meldrum drove the big truck; “Tiller Man” Matt Komorowski steered the rear wheels from a raised perch atop the back end; and aptly named “Irons Man” Billy Butler, the strongest among them, wielded special pry bars to get them into and out of trouble.
Sirens screaming, lights flashing, hearts pumping, Mike Meldrum and Matt Komorowski pulled the truck out of the firehouse and pointed it west on Canal Street. The street rose as they approached an entrance to the roadway that led toward the Manhattan Bridge. The higher elevation gave Jay a panoramic view of Lower Manhattan that had never been more breathtaking.
As he stared toward the Twin Towers, Jay felt the strange and unfamiliar sensation of being overwhelmed. He’d spent years studying fire, learning its destructive ways and plotting creative, disciplined responses to every kind of catastrophe he could think of. Now, looking through a windshield the size of a big-screen television, Jay had a view that shamed his imagination: orange flames and gray-black smoke blasted from an enormous, angled hole in the topmost quarter of the North Tower, polluting a sky that had been as crystalline as a mountain lake.
“Buckle up!” he called to his men. “We’re going to work.”
In the silence that followed, Jay wondered: “How many people13 need our help right now, right at this very minute?” As he calculated the possible toll and considered the job ahead, Jay couldn’t conceive the disaster’s true cause: “My god,” he thought, “what a horrible accident.”
Others in the FDNY understood immediately, with various degrees of precision, that this was no accident. In one of his earliest radio transmissions, Chief Joe Pfeifer used the word “aiming” to describe the route he saw the plane take to the North Tower. Less than three minutes after impact, at 8:49 a.m., Lieutenant William “Billy” McGinn from Squad 18, a Special Operations Command unit based in Greenwich Village, displayed even deeper insight.
Without knowing about Mohamed Atta’s “We have some planes” comment a half hour earlier aboard American Flight 11, or that United Flight 175 had also been hijacked and at that moment was pointed toward Manhattan, or that two F-15 fighter jets from Cape Cod were racing toward New York, Billy McGinn told a dispatcher: “Looked like it was intentional. Inform all units coming in from the back it could be a terror attack.”14 An FDNY dispatcher acknowledged the new reality: “Ten-four. All units be advised.”
As Jay gaped at the burning tower from the front seat, he silently counted the number of upper floors that appeared to be belching smoke. We have twenty floors of fire, Jay thought. As Chauffeur Mike Meldrum wove through traffic, and as rapid-fire voices on the truck’s radio confirmed the horror awaiting them, Jay’s mind raced. He didn’t know the exact point of impact, but he estimated that the lowest fire floor was about a thousand feet in the air, and he knew that each floor of the tower covered about forty thousand square feet, or nearly an acre.
Jay leapt to an inescapable conclusion, one that would be overwhelmingly shared among his colleagues: from a firefighting standpoint, the numbers didn’t compute. Jay felt confident that the men of Ladder 6 and the rest of the FDNY would do whatever they could, whatever their bosses asked of them, whatever the public needed of them, but they couldn’t defeat this fire. At most, they could limit its spread until, in a best-case scenario, it burned itself out while they rescued as many people as they could. Jay also understood that the great vertical distance between the ground and the fire meant that many, perhaps most, of the thousands of civilians inside the tower would be forced to rely on themselves and one another if they were to escape.
Jay’s instant assessment wasn’t idle speculation or defeatism. Two years earlier, one of Jay’s firefighting heroes had published a prescient manual that seemed to eerily anticipate the situation awaiting Ladder 6 as it sped down Canal Street.
When Jay was a young firefighter, FDNY Deputy Chief Vincent Dunn was the highest-ranking officer he’d ever met. Awestruck at the time by Dunn’s encyclopedic knowledge and his unbridled confidence, Jay told his wife, Judy, “I want to be like him.” In the two decades that followed, Dunn became a nationally acclaimed expert on high-rise fires, unafraid to tell inconvenient truths. In 1999, Dunn wrote: “The best-kept secret15 in America’s fire service is that firefighters cannot extinguish a fire in a twenty- or thirty-thousand-square-foot open floor area in a high-rise building. A fire company advancing a 2½-inch hoseline with a 1¼-inch nozzle discharges only three hundred gallons per minute and can extinguish only about twenty-five hundred square feet of fire.”
Dunn’s calculations meant that a team of firefighters like Jay’s unit could, at best, hope to defeat a fire in one corner of one upper floor of a building like the North Tower. That is, if they could reach it and had enough water to spray on it. Multiply that by a hundred, or a thousand, and the impossibility of the situation came into focus.
Dunn took his reasoning one step further: “City managers and department chiefs will not admit this to the public if they want to keep their jobs, but every fireground commander is aware of this vulnerability. What really occurs at a high-rise fire involving an entire floor or more is a controlled burn rather than a suppression operation.”
Even more disturbing and more prophetic were Dunn’s conclusions, published on the same pages, about how firefighters should expect panicked civilians to react: “People trapped16 in a burning high-rise who can’t be reached by your tallest ladder will leap to their death; they’ll try to escape by climbing down ropes or knotted bedsheets, and fall while doing so; they’ll scribble notes in desperation, telling of their location, and drop them from smoky windows; they’ll leave their last cries for help recorded on the telephones of dispatchers.”
As a student of Dunn’s work and of firefighting in general, Jay knew all of this. He also suspected that he couldn’t count on the building’s sprinklers or water supply pipes to be much help, if any, because a plane that cut through the tower likely damaged or destroyed the systems that delivered water. Jay’s assumption on that score was correct.
Jay knew that the drive to the scene wasn’t the time to instruct his men on the overwhelming, to some extent theoretical, problems they faced. Jay controlled his breathing. He applied a trick that he’d learned from his mentors: the more excited he became, the slower and quieter he’d force himself to speak.
“This . . . is . . . going . . . to . . . be . . . a . . . big . . . operation,” Jay told his men. “There’s going to be guys that are operating all day, and we’ll have a small part of it. And we’ll just do the best we can.”
Jay sensed the adrenaline coursing through his men. Mike Meldrum’s intensity expressed itself as a heavy foot on the gas as they crossed Broadway in the Tribeca neighborhood, speeding toward the Financial District.
“Mike, slow down,” Jay told the chauffeur, a beefy twenty-year veteran with a handlebar mustache. “We’ll get there. But if you’re going this fast, we might not get there, you know?” Mike eased off the pedal.
Even as Jay displayed outward calm, anxiety crept up his spine. As the North Tower loomed larger and larger, as smoke and flames licked higher, Jay thought back to a conversation he’d had two weeks earlier. A friend who was a lieutenant knew that Jay had been awaiting his overdue promotion to battalion chief. He asked if Jay was nervous. “Well,” Jay answered, “after the busy places that I’ve worked, there isn’t too much they’re going to throw at me that I’ve never seen before.”
As Mike Meldrum and Matt Komorowski turned the truck onto Vesey Street, Jay mentally revised his answer. He told himself: “This is really bad. . . . I never saw this before.”
On the 64th floor, before Cecilia Lillo began her multifloor delivery and food run, she circled back to her desk to check her email. An explosion announced the arrival of American Flight 11 some thirty floors above.
“Mommy!” she screamed and burst into tears.
Remembering 1993, Cecilia feared that a bomb had split the tower vertically, like an ax through a piece of firewood. The building swayed, lights flickered, a secretary at a nearby desk shrieked her boss’s name. Another Port Authority worker struggled for balance as she stood changing into her work shoes. Cecilia saw a large white block, maybe a piece of concrete, or a computer, or something else entirely, plummet past a window.
“Let’s go!” one of her coworkers shouted as she rushed with several others to a stairwell. Cecilia lurched toward a cabinet to clip her cellphone to an inside pocket of her purse. When she turned around, the other women were gone. Running through the floor in the new black flats Carlos had bought her for their anniversary, Cecilia searched for her boss but couldn’t find her. Neither did she see her Cuban-born friend Nancy Perez or another friend, Arlene Babakitis, a bighearted mother of two sons who’d spent nearly thirty years at the Port Authority.
On the far side of the floor, Cecilia saw several Port Authority workers, including one of her favorite managers, Patrick Hoey, a silver-haired father of four who oversaw bridges and tunnels. He and the others around him made no move to leave. After speaking to a police sergeant, Pat Hoey announced to his staff: “Listen up, everybody.17 They told us not to leave. They are sending police up, and we need to wait here. We are going to be fine.”
Cecilia respected Pat Hoey, but she had other plans. Clutching her purse, she scrambled toward the center of the floor to find a stairwell, just as she’d vowed to Carlos during their Caribbean vacation four months earlier. She repeated it to herself like a mantra: someone who loves me will be waiting outside.
On the 88th floor, two of Elaine Duch’s colleagues, Dorene Smith and Anita Serpe, led the badly burned woman gingerly toward the empty office of Alan Reiss, director of the Port Authority’s World Trade Department, which oversaw the trade center property. He was on street level18 when the plane hit, meeting with other agency officials in a delicatessen to consider the anticipated effects of the new property lease.
In Reiss’s absence, about two dozen19 men and women congregated with Elaine in his office, in the building’s southwest corner, on the far side of the tower from Flight 11’s point of impact. Still, smoke from the fires ignited by the fireball seeped in through cracks between the office door and its frame.
As Elaine and the others awaited instructions, several workers scrambled through the debris and the overturned furniture of the 88th floor, looking for anyone who might be hurt and seeking an open stairwell. Leading the searchers was architect Frank De Martini, a Port Authority construction manager. When the plane hit, Frank had been enjoying coffee with his wife, Nicole, a fellow architect who worked in the South Tower. While Frank led the search, Nicole joined Elaine and the others taking refuge in Alan Reiss’s office.
Coincidentally, Frank De Martini had been featured a few months earlier in a History Channel documentary, boldly describing the towers’ strength. “This building was designed20 to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it,” Frank had told the filmmakers, unwittingly citing the flawed decades-old report that didn’t consider damage from a fuel explosion. “I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door—this intense grid, and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.” If only that had been true.
Another man scouring the 88th floor for an escape route was Port Authority architect Gerry Gaeta.21 When the plane hit, Gerry leapt over his desk and ran out of his office. “That’s a bomb,” he told his staff. “Let’s get out of here.” He found the halls filled with smoke and fire. Windows on the building’s northeast corner were blown out completely. At the centermost stairway, Stairwell B, Gerry and others found a hole where the stairs used to be. At Stairwell A, the southernmost stairway, he saw gypsum wallboards, crumpled and on fire, blocking the door. Gerry entered the real estate department office and saw furniture tossed around as though a hurricane had blown past.
With no apparent way out and the situation growing desperate, someone on the floor used a two-way radio to call for help from the Port Authority police.
“Uh, we’re on the eighty-eighth floor,”22 the caller said. “We’re kind of trapped up here and the smoke is, uh, is—” The transmission cut off, but another radio call followed quickly, using the building’s designation as the “A” tower and making a clear reference to Elaine.
“We also have a person that needs medical attention immediately.”
“What’s the location?” the dispatcher asked.
“Eighty-eighth floor, badly burned.”
“Eighty-eight?”
“Tower A, south side, eighty-eighth floor.”
As Elaine sat in Alan Reiss’s office with her colleagues, a lens from her glasses suddenly cracked, a delayed reaction to the heat blast. She took the glasses off, handed her purse to her friend Anita Serpe, and made a close examination of her injuries. As Elaine looked at her legs, she thought the peeling red skin on her calves resembled melting candle wax, dripping toward her sneakers.
Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 reached the staging area at the corner of Vesey and West Street less than ten minutes after Flight 11 hit. With help from Tiller Man Matt Komorowski, Chauffeur Mike Meldrum parked in a semicircular driveway at the foot of the North Tower. Several other fire companies had already arrived, and more pulled in simultaneously.
Hail-sized pieces of building debris rained on the truck as Jay, Mike, Matt, Sal, Tommy, and Billy jumped out. With their silver emergency air cylinders bouncing against their backs, they ran to a pedestrian bridge that spanned West Street, taking cover under it as flames and smoke erupted from floors a quarter mile in the sky above them. Three times the Ladder 6 crew ran back to the truck to fetch tools, rope, and other equipment, then each time retreated from the falling junk under the pedestrian span. Finally, a break came in the debris storm. Jay called out, “Okay, ready . . . set . . . go!”
As they ran toward the North Tower, Jay glanced to his left. Sprinting alongside him was New York City’s civilian fire commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, who’d previously been a longtime firefighter and a top union official. As they approached the tower doors, Jay saw two badly burned people with no hair and melted clothes. Their injuries were so severe that he couldn’t tell their gender. Every instinct urged Jay to halt and help them, but then he thought, “We stop and help these two people, or we go upstairs and help a hundred.” He spotted two paramedics and waved them toward the burn victims, then rejoined his men and entered the lobby as frightened evacuees poured out.
Inside, Jay saw slabs of decorative stonework and marble tiles smashed on the floor, enormous windows shattered from their frames, and a bank of elevators destroyed by fireballs that had blown down the shafts and incinerated everything in their path. At a melted desk beside the elevators sat the charred remains23 of a security guard, his badge still visible on his burned jacket, his body fused to his chair. Other firefighters stepped over piles of debris in the lobby that they only later realized were human remains.
Amid the horror and the wreckage, Jay saw a heartening sight: an assembly of firefighting all-stars, lining up for assignments from the chiefs at a security desk being used as the FDNY command post. As he fell into line among them, Jay spotted Captain Terence “Terry” Hatton, leader of elite Rescue Company 1, which specialized in saving trapped or injured firefighters. Six foot four, with a boyish face and a booming laugh, Terry Hatton’s can-do vocabulary relied heavily on the word “outstanding.” He’d never apply it to himself, but others often did: over two decades, he’d earned nineteen commendations24 for bravery. His wife, Beth Petrone-Hatton, was at that moment working alongside Mayor Giuliani, whom she’d served as an executive assistant for eighteen years. The mayor had officiated at their wedding three years earlier.
Clustered around Terry Hatton, Jay saw other Rescue 1 members he knew, including Lieutenant Dennis Mojica and firefighters Kenneth Marino, Dave Weiss, and a good friend named Gerry Nevins. When Gerry wasn’t saving lives in New York City, he raised pigs, goats, and chickens with his wife and two young sons on a small farm a few miles from where Jay lived. Nearby was another friend, Lieutenant Pete Freund, whom Jay had seen hours earlier at the scaffolding collapse at the Manhattan Bridge.
Jay saw Commissioner Von Essen lean close to catch the ear of Deputy Chief Peter Hayden, the highest-ranking FDNY officer at the scene. Soon, authority would shift to Chief of Department Peter Ganci Jr., who was still in transit. Ganci would establish a new command post outside the tower, across West Street. In the meantime, Jay admired how cool Pete Hayden seemed amid the chaos. Jay heard Hayden tell Von Essen, “There’s no way we’re putting this out. This is strictly a rescue mission.”
Hayden had been incorrectly told that as many as fifty thousand people25 worked in the two buildings and as many as seventy thousand visited daily, including shoppers and commuters in the PATH train station below. In fact, the combined number of people inside the two towers at the moment Flight 11 struck was far lower, somewhere between 14,000 and 17,400.26 Yet even those numbers represented an overwhelming fire rescue challenge for the FDNY.
Standing alongside Hayden was the first boss on the scene, Battalion Chief Joe Pfeifer, who’d called in the initial report. Shortly after he arrived, Joe Pfeifer noticed his only brother, Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer, in the lobby. Joe quickly briefed Kevin, who nodded and led five members of Engine 33 toward a stairwell. Chief Pfeifer returned to the task at hand, juggling a two-way radio and a telephone as he took reports from firefighters and Port Authority officials around him, as well as calls from workers and safety wardens on upper floors, and people trapped on elevators pleading for rescue.
Numerous calls for help poured in from workers at Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank with offices spread across floors 101 to 105. More than 650 Cantor Fitzgerald employees had arrived to work early that morning, as usual, to get a jump on the markets. Calls also came from employees of commodities broker Carr Futures, a smaller firm tucked among the giants on the North Tower’s upper floors. In addition, more than 350 employees and consultants had already arrived in the offices of Marsh & McLennan on the 93rd to 100th floors, where actor and temp worker Chris Young had just dropped off materials for a presentation. The huge insurance and financial company was the sole occupant of all but one of the floors directly in the path of Flight 11. The exception was the 93rd floor, which Marsh & McLennan shared with Fred Alger Management, an investment firm with thirty-five employees at work. An unknown number of people died instantly or soon after Flight 11 hit, as fire engulfed those impact floors.
Four emergency calls to Port Authority Police came from Christine Olender, assistant general manager of Windows on the World. Thirty-nine, born on the Fourth of July,27 despite the crisis Christine retained the polite effervescence of the pompom girl and homecoming queen she’d once been.
“We’re getting no direction up here,” Christine told Officer Steve Maggett. “We’re having a smoke condition. We have most people on the 106th floor—the 107th floor is way too smoky. We need direction as to where we need to direct our guests and our employees, as soon as possible.”
“We’re doing our best,” Maggett answered. “We’ve got the fire department, everybody. We’re trying to get up to you, dear. All right, call back in about two or three minutes, and I’ll find out what direction you should try to get down.”
Christine called back three more times, each time speaking to Officer Ray Murray. With each call she grew more frightened. On her fourth and final call, Christine said: “The situation on 106 is rapidly getting worse. . . . We . . . we have . . . the fresh air is going down fast! I’m not exaggerating. . . . What are we going to do for air?” In desperation, Christine asked permission to break a window.
Ray Murray sat in a windowless, plaza-level office at Five World Trade Center, yards from the unfolding disaster, but his only view was a video monitor that showed bodies in the driveway outside the North Tower. He suspected28 that Christine and hundreds of others on the North Tower’s upper floors were beyond saving, but during each call he offered hope. “You can do whatever you have to,29 to get to the air,” he told her.
Ray Murray was affable and well liked, thirty-two years old, six years on the Port Authority Police Department. In addition to Christine’s, he answered more than fifty emergency calls30 during the first half hour after Flight 11 hit the North Tower. Ray juggled calls from his bosses and worried family members, including his own wife; he fielded inquiries from NBC, ESPN, a CBS affiliate in Seattle, New York’s Channel 11, a German radio reporter, and a local rabbi; and he answered security companies whose alarms rang wildly inside the towers. Above all, Ray offered reassurance to men and women calling from upper floors, advising every one to find a stairwell if possible. “If you can get to the stairs, go down the stairs,” he told a woman on the North Tower’s 83rd floor. “If not, you get on the ground. We’re going to get people up there.”
Ray Murray didn’t know if that was true, but it was all he could offer.
As they strategized to rescue as many survivors as they could, FDNY chiefs Hayden and Pfeifer concluded that none of the North Tower’s ninety-nine elevators appeared to be working, although a battalion chief later used one to reach the sixteenth floor.31 Without elevators, firefighters bearing upwards of eighty pounds of equipment would have to walk up fifteen hundred or more steps to reach people in desperate need of help. That is, if time, stairway access, and physical strength permitted.
Adding to the difficulties, communication and coordination immediately proved to be critical problems32 for most of the firefighters sent upstairs. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone. FDNY handheld radios had worked poorly, sometimes not at all, during the response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1999, the department purchased new ultra-high-frequency Motorola radios33 designed to vastly improve communications inside steel and concrete buildings. But shortly after the new radios went into service, a New York firefighter lost in a house fire couldn’t be heard calling for help. Disputes arose about whether the radios were faulty or if they weren’t being used properly. Either way, in early 2001, the FDNY reissued its old analog radios, the same ones that were ineffective in 1993. Those radios had the same shortcomings now.
After the 1993 bombing, the Port Authority had installed what was known as a “repeater” system at the World Trade Center. The system was designed to boost FDNY radio signals in emergencies by amplifying and rebroadcasting them. Chief Pfeifer tried to activate the repeater almost as soon as he arrived in the North Tower lobby. He tested it with help from Battalion Chief Orio Palmer, an authority on radio communications, who nineteen years earlier had worked alongside Jay Jonas as a probationary firefighter during a Bronx tenement rescue. After several unsuccessful attempts to use the repeater, Pfeifer decided that they couldn’t count on it. The outdated radios, though proven inadequate, would have to suffice.
Not only couldn’t firefighters reliably talk to one another inside the building, they didn’t have access to information from outside sources. The FDNY had a notoriously fraught relationship with the New York Police Department, built on more than a century of competition and cultural differences. The Finest and the Bravest used different radio frequencies and different equipment. As a result, FDNY chiefs inside the North Tower couldn’t communicate with police helicopters hovering above the building. Independent of one another, fire chiefs and police officials determined almost immediately that helicopter rooftop rescues would be impossible34 because of fire and smoke. Still, police chopper pilots could have shared information in real time about the fire’s progress and the building’s structural integrity. Fire chiefs in the North Tower lobby also didn’t have access to the extensive local and network television coverage of the crisis scene, rendering them almost blind to the destruction directly above them.
Making matters even worse from a communications standpoint, Flight 11’s impact had wiped out the North Tower’s public address system, preventing firefighters in the lobby from offering survivors hope of help on the way. Yet even if that message had reached the uppermost nineteen floors, it wouldn’t have made a difference. With all three stairwells destroyed, and no possibility of rooftop rescues, people on the upper floors were beyond help.
In their desperation, office workers clustered at the windows at the highest floors to escape the fire, heat, and smoke. Within six minutes of the crash,35 the first person fell or jumped. At least 110 more lives would end that way from the upper stories of the North Tower. Each thousand-plus-foot fall, each flailing or graceful ten-second descent, would end with a thud that sounded like a gunshot. With each loud bang, emergency responders in the lobby involuntarily flinched as one.
The falling or jumping victims fulfilled the awful predictions of Captain Jay Jonas’s mentor, high-rise firefighting expert Vincent Dunn. They also echoed a tragedy that had occurred ninety years earlier, one mile uptown. In 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them women and teenage girls, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.36 Trapped above the flames in that ten-story building, roughly fifty women and girls leapt or fell to their deaths. Nearly a century later, the calamity remained seared in the collective memory of FDNY members and many New Yorkers.
Unaware that the upper stairwells were impassable, or that the public address system was broken, Chief Joe Pfeifer tried to offer reassurance. He pleaded with people trapped in the North Tower to await rescue. “Please don’t jump,”37 he said into a public address microphone at the lobby command post. “We’re coming up for you.”
No one on the highest floors could hear him.
On the marble floor of the Marriott lobby, the air around them a greasy haze, burn victim Jennieann Maffeo told Ron Clifford she worried about a coworker who’d been standing beside her at the shuttle stop. She felt certain he’d been killed. Jennieann didn’t tell Ron the man’s name, but she almost certainly meant Wai-ching Chung, the shy database executive whose niece worked in the South Tower.
Jennieann listed her medications and told Ron she had asthma and a severe allergy to latex. Ron recorded it all in his notebook.
Jennieann also gave Ron her boss’s name and phone number. She instructed Ron to tell her boss to call only her sister, Andrea. She begged him, “Please don’t call my mother and father. They’re old and sick and they’ll be very upset.” Ron promised.
“I’m going to die,” Jennieann said.
“No, you’re not,” Ron answered. “You’re going to be fine.”
Even as he said it, Ron wondered with rising anger why no help came. Several more times he called for aid, but a seemingly endless stream of people rushed past, headed toward an exit at the south end of the hotel lobby.
By 8:57 a.m., little more than ten minutes after the crash in the North Tower, FDNY commanders had asked a Port Authority police officer and building workers to immediately evacuate the unaffected South Tower,38 based on their belief that the entire trade center property was unsafe. At 9 a.m., the commanding officer of the Port Authority Police ordered an evacuation of all civilians in the entire World Trade Center complex. But communication problems thwarted the evacuation order. Sent out only over a radio channel used by Port Authority Police commanders, it didn’t reach Port Authority Police officers or other emergency responders.
Almost like the children’s game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled or lost entirely when passed from one person to the next, evacuation messages didn’t reach at least some of the people who needed them most. The orders weren’t passed to 9-1-1 operators, who fielded calls not only from people trapped in the damaged North Tower, but also from workers in the unaffected South Tower seeking guidance whether to stay or leave. As a result, at least some 9-1-1 operators and FDNY dispatchers told callers in both buildings not to evacuate,39 and to instead wait until emergency workers reached them.
For instance, shortly after Flight 11 hit the North Tower, a man on the 92nd floor of the South Tower called Port Authority Police: “We need to know40 if we need to get out of here, because we know there’s been an explosion. I don’t know what building.”
An officer told him: “Do you have any smoke . . . smoke conditions up in your location at [Tower] Two?”
The caller answered: “No, we just smell it, though.” After several interruptions and crosstalk, the caller persisted: “Should we stay or should we not?”
The officer told him: “I would wait till further notice. . . .”
“Okay, all right,” said the caller. “Don’t evacuate.”
Callers received different advice41 from other Port Authority Police dispatchers, some of whom consistently told civilians to leave.
Although a majority of emergency responders entering the North Tower along with Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 were firefighters, they weren’t alone. Also responding were members of the NYPD, which sent elite officers from its Emergency Service Unit. In addition, at least three plainclothes police officers without radios or protective gear climbed high into the North Tower. They checked floors for trapped civilians and refused orders by their chiefs42 to leave.
Port Authority Police officers responded in droves as well. Among them was Officer David Lim, who’d been working in his office in the South Tower when Flight 11 hit next door. When he heard the explosion, Dave worried that the explosion marked a repeat of the 1993 bombing. He turned to his bomb-sniffing dog, a yellow Labrador retriever named Sirius that Dave considered the smartest dog he’d ever known.
“Maybe they got one by us,43 Sirius,” Dave told his partner, who moonlighted as the pet of Dave, his wife, and their two children.
Dave locked Sirius in a cage in the South Tower basement and ran toward the North Tower. On the way, he spotted a body next to a bandstand set up for a scheduled concert on the Austin J. Tobin Plaza. As he radioed a report to dispatch, another person landed fifty feet from him on the plaza’s pink granite. On impact, the body disintegrated into a puddle of flesh, bone, and blood. Dave kept moving, into the North Tower.
Most of the people who fell, jumped, or were swept from the building died instantly. But not all. Amid smoking debris on the plaza, Ernest Armstead, an FDNY emergency medical specialist, found a well-dressed woman in her fifties, with brown hair and tasteful earrings, who’d suffered catastrophic injuries that left only her head and right torso intact. Somehow, she remained conscious. He hung a black triage tag around her neck, to signify to other responders that she was beyond help.
“I am not dead,”44 the woman insisted. “Call my daughter. I am not dead.”
Shocked, Armstead stammered, “Ma’am, don’t worry about it. We will be right back to you.”
He knew he was lying. Her wounds were incompatible with life. Armstead wondered if an air draft had somehow cushioned her fall. He wished he knew if she’d been a passenger on the plane, or a worker swept through an office window by the crash, or someone who’d leapt to escape flames, but he didn’t ask. He had to keep moving.
As Armstead stepped away, the woman yelled: “I am not dead! I am not dead!”
“They’re coming,” he told her as he moved on. “They’re coming.”
As Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 awaited their assignment, a rakish FDNY captain named Patrick “Paddy” Brown urged Jay to immediately follow him into a stairwell on the hunt for survivors. “Jay, don’t even bother45 reporting in,” Brown said. “They’re just gonna send you upstairs. Come with me.”
Jay knew that his fellow captain, five years his senior, was among the most decorated officers in FDNY history. Paddy Brown had movie-star looks and a bigger-than-life reputation: savior of a baby from a burning building, supervisor of a daring rope rescue, Golden Gloves boxer, marathon runner. He had a black belt in karate and a devoted following of yoga students. Before fighting fires, he served as a Marine sergeant in Vietnam. Decades later, Paddy Brown remained eager to take the next hill.
“This is a little too big not to follow procedure,” Jay told him. “Let me get my name on paper that I’m here.” Paddy shrugged and led his Ladder 3 crew to Stairwell B, the only one of the three North Tower stairwells that opened onto the lobby level. The other two opened onto the mezzanine level, just above.
At that moment, a New York Police helicopter circled the Twin Towers, some 1,700 feet above where Jay stood. Officer Timothy Hayes, a pilot for the police aviation unit, had already despaired that thick smoke made rooftop rescues impossible. Now he spotted a large aircraft speeding toward his copter.
“Jesus Christ!” he told his partner. “There’s a second plane46 crashing.”
They pulled up and United Flight 175 flew beneath them. Seconds later, at 9:03 a.m., Jay Jonas heard a thunderous explosion.