Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center
Around 9:30 a.m., inside Stairwell B of the North Tower, Elaine Duch, her colleagues-turned-caretakers Gerry Gaeta and Dorene Smith, and their fellow evacuees couldn’t tell how badly the building had been damaged. Most still didn’t know the cause.
When they emerged in the main lobby, they saw blown-out windows, broken walls, and water from severed pipes streaming down from the mezzanine level. Gerry thought it resembled Niagara Falls. As they sloshed through six inches of water, Gerry still gripped the knot in Elaine’s sweater while Dorene held the empty sleeve.
“Burn victim!”1 Gerry yelled. “Where do we take her?”
Someone pointed to the entrance to the Concourse-level shopping mall, toward the building known as Five World Trade Center. The subterranean route would take them under the outdoor plaza, where bodies and burning debris continued to fall, and where high above, the South Tower had begun its death spiral. Soon, two medics spotted Elaine. Each took an arm and sped her through the Concourse. Gerry’s legs ached from the seventeen-hundred-stair descent, and he knew he couldn’t keep up. He told the others to run ahead. Dorene jogged alongside, staying as close as she could to Elaine as they reached an exit onto Church Street, where ambulances awaited them.
“I’m hurt,” Elaine announced to anyone in earshot. “Help me.”
Dorene helped her hobble toward the street. Elaine turned to her and asked: “How’s my hair?”
“It’s fine, Elaine,” Dorene lied. “It’s fine.”
As they moved toward the fleeing masses, EMT Moose Diaz turned to his partner Paul Adams: “This is the big kahuna, man.”
They headed past St. Paul’s Chapel toward the Millennium Hotel, where scores of men and women from the towers gathered outside. The moment anyone left the North or South Tower, their status changed from evacuees to terrorism survivors.
The injured streamed toward Moose and Paul, bleeding, badly burned, some hyperventilating, some with chest pain, some with broken bones. Protocol called for the EMTs to triage the wounded, to prioritize treatment by issuing green tags to those with relatively minor injuries, yellow for more serious needs, and red to those who needed immediate care to survive. Black was for hopeless cases.
Paul told Moose they had no time for triage tags, blowing past a lieutenant who insisted otherwise. Convinced that the implausible might happen and the burning towers might fall, Paul yelled to Moose: “These people should be getting the fuck out of here!”
Two women approached them, one whose terrible burns served as their own triage tag. Her blouse was melted to her peeling skin. A sweater partly covered her ruined flesh. For the moment, she’d been spared from pain by the fireball’s destruction of her nerve endings. The woman had a single polite request for Moose and Paul, issued in a hoarse, smoke-strained voice.
“Could you help me?”
It was Elaine Duch, with Dorene Smith still at her side.
Moose and Paul dropped everything and eased Elaine onto their stretcher, with Moose talking softly to her all the while. “What happened?” Moose asked.
“I felt a hot flash,” Elaine answered. She asked him about her burned and matted hair. Moose told her not to worry.
Elaine looked for Dorene. “Please don’t leave me,” Elaine begged. “Come with me to the hospital.” Dorene promised she would.
A priest from St. Paul’s Chapel seemed to appear from nowhere. He asked Elaine, “Are you Catholic?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind if I give you your last rites?”
“Please do,” Elaine said.
The priest knelt next to the stretcher and delivered the sacrament as quickly as he could, so Elaine would be properly reconciled with God. At the prayer’s end, Moose and Paul lifted Elaine into the back of 45 Adam, as Dorene scampered aboard. Elaine made Dorene promise that she would call her twin sister, Janet. Elaine repeated Janet’s phone number multiple times, like a mantra, to be sure.
Paul jumped behind the wheel and drove two miles uptown to St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center on Twelfth Street. In the back, Moose cut away whatever he could of Elaine’s clothing and gently bandaged her wounds.
“Am I going to die?” Elaine asked. A hush fell over the ambulance. No one answered.
Ron Clifford and his newfound helpers, the hotel nurse and the man from Long Island, led burn victim Jennieann Maffeo from the Marriott lobby. As they reached the street, a photographer spotted their little group. The resulting image captured Jennieann swaddled in the white tablecloth and Ron holding her up. His yellow tie remained bright. He stood out from the crowd, just as his sister, Ruth, had advised.
They emerged to find a burning Federal Express truck, broken glass, scattered debris, ash-covered people and vehicles, with a hellish soundtrack of sirens and screams. Ron glanced up and thought the towers looked as if they were melting. He heard loud thumping noises, not like gunshots but strange, awful thuds. Another glance revealed the source: the impact of bodies falling or jumping from great heights.
A firefighter with the white helmet of an officer stepped toward them out of the smoke and ash. The towers groaned as fires warped their insides. “Run!” the firefighter told them. “Run, run, run!” Yet he ignored his own advice; instead of leaving, the chief or captain led a group of fellow firefighters toward the dying buildings. Ron marveled at their bravery.
“Can you run?” Ron asked Jennieann.
“I’ll try.”
The group tottered in unison across West Street to a line of waiting ambulances. Medics rushed to help Jennieann, as Ron passed along information she gave him about her latex allergy, her asthma, and her boss’s telephone number. As they loaded her aboard, Ron told Jennieann: “You have to make it now, after all we’ve been through.”
Then Ron Clifford stood at the curb, watching the ambulance pull away.
Still climbing higher inside Stairwell B of the North Tower, Captain Jay Jonas remained focused on the steps ahead and his men around him. Determined to keep Ladder 6 together, Jay took regular head counts. “This is the mother of all high-rise buildings,” he told his crew. “I can’t afford to be looking for you guys.”
During their third ten-floor march, Jay realized that two of his men had fallen behind. They’d been delayed when they stepped aside to let evacuees helping one another pass two abreast on the stairs. “Wait here,” Jay told the men still with him. He found the missing men and reassembled his team on the 27th floor.
By then, the number of descending civilians in Stairwell B had slowed to a trickle. Roughly an hour had passed since Flight 11 hit the North Tower, and nearly all the able-bodied men and women below the impact zone had fled.
By one estimate,2 1,250 people evacuated the North Tower in the first few minutes, even before United Flight 175 hit next door. Another 6,700 men and women left before ten o’clock. Yet along with more than nine hundred civilians still heading for the exits, more than two hundred firefighters remained inside the North Tower, either climbing or resting for the next upward push.
“All right, everybody take a knee, get some water,” Jay said. They’d try to make up for lost time and shoot for the fortieth floor on their next effort. They exited Stairwell B through a door that led into a hallway on the 27th floor.
As they rested, they were joined by a friend of Jay’s, firefighter Andrew Fredericks, a nationally known fire service instructor from Squad 18 whose obsession with hose techniques earned him the nickname Andy Nozzles. Andy was still mourning three fellow firefighters who died three months earlier in a Father’s Day fire he’d helped to fight in a Queens hardware store. He’d written a tribute to the men that laid bare his emotions that night. “Emptiness is the only way3 to describe the way I felt,” Andy wrote. “I kissed my kids and hugged them and watched the news and cried.”
While they caught their breath, Jay, Andy, and Ladder 6 also encountered the leader of Engine 21, Captain William “Billy” Burke Jr., tall and lean, the son of a retired deputy chief. In his free time, Billy Burke was a photographer, a Civil War aficionado, and a summertime lifeguard on Long Island. Jay and Billy went back years, to when Jay was a lieutenant and Billy served under him.
At 9:59 a.m., as Jay greeted his old friend, an earthquake seemed to rock Lower Manhattan. The floor heaved, and the North Tower swayed. A whoosh of air crested into a roar, then subsided. The lights switched off. The North Tower righted itself and the men and women inside regained their balance, if not their equilibrium.
Alone on the floor of his elevator car, oblivious to everything beyond the walls of his box, Chris Young occasionally heard loud cries amid sirens and fire alarms. Nothing sounded like human agony, only some kind of vague emergency unfolding nearby. He knew nothing of planes or fires or people falling and jumping to their deaths. Several times he tried calling out to the people in the other elevator but got no response. As his anxiety rose, Chris tried to pry open the doors, but they wouldn’t give. To pass the time and calm his nerves, he alternated between sitting and pacing.
More than an hour had passed. At 9:59 a.m., Chris’s enclosed world shook. The rumbling intensified, accompanied by a roar. The lights flickered and went out, then a few seconds later came back on. Gusts of smoke and dust blew into his elevator car. Still suspecting that the crisis had been caused by a bomb under the trade center, now Chris thought a second bomb had detonated. Terrified that he would soon die, he again rolled into a ball. Seconds felt like minutes.
The rumbling stopped. Struggling to breathe, Chris took off his blue dress shirt and wrapped it around his head as a filter against the smoke and dust. He rose and pressed the fire hat button, but this time the electronic voice didn’t answer. He toggled the alarm button on and off in three short spurts, three long spurts, then three short ones again: the S-O-S distress signal in Morse code. No answer. He shouted: “Is anybody there?”
No one was. Emergency workers had evacuated the North Tower lobby. The seven people who’d been trapped in the nearby elevator had freed themselves. Not knowing any of this, Chris grew afraid. He thought about his mother. He comforted himself again with monologues, but they weren’t enough. He thought again about the moment when he’d felt most self-assured: on a college stage, performing Man of La Mancha.
Chris’s voice bounced off the elevator walls as he sang its most famous lyrics, about an ordinary man who faces overwhelming odds yet wills himself to be a hero:
To dream the impossible dream,4
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong,
To love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable star.
Around 9:30 a.m., after guiding Jennieann Maffeo into the ambulance, Ron Clifford went looking for refuge and a safe place to phone home. Ron ran across West Street, about a hundred yards to Three World Financial Center, the American Express Tower. He curled up on the lobby floor, reeking of fuel and smoke. Ron looked down and saw charred pieces of Jennieann’s skin clinging to the elegant clothes that his sister, Ruth, had helped pick out for his meeting.
Ron shifted his view to the horrors outside. He watched a couple jump together from the North Tower, holding hands. In the woman’s other hand, she gripped her purse, for comfort or eventual identification, or by habit, perhaps. It confused Ron. “That’s weird,” he thought. “Why is she carrying her purse if she knows she’s going to die?” The image replayed itself on a loop in his mind.
Ron reached Brigid, who was racked by worry as she watched CNN. “It’s pretty bad here,” he told her, his voice on the verge of cracking. “I’m on my way.”
“As long as you’re okay,” she said.
“I’m alive. I’m okay. I love you.”
Ron thought about returning to the towers to see if he could help anyone else. Then he thought of his family, and a mantra took shape in his mind, one he repeated multiple times: “Monica’s birthday. Got to get home to Monica’s birthday.”
Looking out at the Twin Towers, even with their damage Ron couldn’t imagine that the giants might fall. But he worried about the North Tower’s teetering communications antenna, a 362-foot mast that was the most prominent feature that distinguished the twins from each other. “That big antenna is going to tip over,” Ron thought, “and it’s going to take out a couple of streets.”
Ron rushed to the ferry terminal, jumped over the gate, and climbed aboard just as the boat left the pier, overloaded with passengers desperate to get home or simply away. A young man showed off a piece of one of the planes, a grisly souvenir that he’d grabbed as he ran away. Other passengers shamed him for it, and he slunk away.
As the ferry reached Hoboken at 9:59 a.m., passengers burst into screams and cries as they watched the South Tower tilt.
“Holy shit!” Ron said aloud.
After delays and detours, as 10 a.m. neared, Cecilia Lillo and her friends Nancy Perez and Arlene Babakitis exited Stairwell C at the mezzanine level, one floor above the lobby. They gasped in horror as they looked out the windows onto the debris-strewn trade center plaza. Cecilia desperately wanted to exit there immediately, to find her husband, Carlos, or, as they’d planned, to locate an FDNY ambulance and ask another paramedic to radio him.
But emergency workers wouldn’t let them out onto the plaza, for their own safety. Cecilia looked longingly out the tall windows and saw an airplane part painted the patriotic colors of American Airlines. She stopped and shuddered as she began to grasp what had happened.
“It wasn’t a small plane,” Cecilia thought. “That’s why the building shook the way it did.”
“Keep moving!” someone yelled.
Emergency responders and Port Authority officials ushered everyone single file toward motionless escalators, to walk down to the lobby level. Like schoolgirls on a fire drill, Cecilia held Nancy’s hand and Nancy reached back to hold Arlene’s. At the bottom of the escalator, Cecilia let go of Nancy’s hand and prepared to sprint outside, toward West Street, as she’d done after the 1993 bombing. But a man in a white shirt blocked her way and told her to turn left, toward the blown-open revolving doors to the Concourse mall.
“Walk fast, don’t run,” the man said, pointing her toward the exit at Five World Trade Center that led onto Church Street.
With Nancy trailing several yards behind, and Arlene farther back, Cecilia quick-stepped down an east-west mall corridor, to a spot near a Banana Republic store. Had she turned right, another corridor would have taken her directly to the South Tower. Instead, she veered to the center of the polished stone floor, toward a security guard she recognized who on normal days checked IDs at the elevator turnstiles. He faced the oncoming pedestrian evacuees and waved them onward, toward the exits. As she passed, Cecilia overheard him say “Five minutes.”
Cecilia didn’t know what he meant, but the guard’s comment disturbed her. She turned around, back toward where she expected to see Nancy and Arlene, to scream that they should run. As Cecilia turned, the clock struck 9:59 a.m. The ground shook. A rumble became a whump, then crescendoed into a roar, bass notes of destruction pierced by the treble of human shrieks.
In the distance, Cecilia saw the escalator inside the North Tower lobby disappear in a cloud of smoke and dust. She couldn’t see Arlene, but she locked eyes with Nancy, perhaps ten yards away, her arms outstretched, her face contorted in fear. Amid the cacophony, Cecilia didn’t hear Nancy scream, but she read her unmistakable body language: “Help me!”
Before Cecilia could respond, a gust of smoke enveloped Nancy, the security guard, and everyone and everything else between Cecilia and the entrance to the North Tower lobby. Cecilia spun around, away from the danger, to run east toward the exit onto Church Street. Before she could take a step, the world went black. Cecilia went down. The force of the collapsing South Tower funneled through the North Tower lobby and channeled underground through the Concourse mall corridors, throwing her to her knees.
“Please don’t let me die!” Cecilia prayed.
She feared for her friends, who’d been only steps behind her, but she focused her thoughts and energy on her promise to Carlos that she’d escape on her own. “I have to get up!” she told herself. Cecilia began to crawl when another burst of pressure from the falling tower next door propelled her forward, lifting her onto her tiptoes. She feared the store windows would shatter and flay her with flying glass.
As she fought to keep her balance—“Please, God, please don’t let me fall!”—yet another pressure burst hurled her headlong toward a marble pillar outside a Gap store. Somehow, she remembered Carlos’s advice: she skidded onto her side and curled into a fetal position, her arms wrapped around her head.
Afraid that the ceiling might collapse, Cecilia lay motionless, knees pulled toward her chest, arms protecting her head, one hand still gripping her purse. She slowly opened her eyes but saw nothing. Gripped by panic in the pitch darkness, unsure if she was buried alive or dead, Cecilia screamed.
“Help! Is anybody out there? . . . Carlos! . . . Carlos!”
She heard the voice of a man she didn’t know: “Don’t worry, I’m going to come for you.”
Cecilia unwrapped one arm from her head and held out her hand. She guided the man with her voice as he crawled toward her until he touched her fingertips. Together, they rose unsteadily to their feet. Afraid to take even one step in the dark, worried that they’d fall into a hole in the floor and plummet to the parking levels below, Cecilia remembered having seen several firefighters farther down the mall corridor before everything went black.
“Anybody out there?” Cecilia cried. “Anybody have a flashlight?”
From around a corner, where the Gap store led toward the PATH trains, several lights came on and shone in their direction. The firefighters clustered around Cecilia, the stranger who still gripped her hand, and several others, and formed them into a tight circle. With flashlights pointed to the floor, they led the group to a stationary escalator for the climb up to the street-level exit outside Five World Trade Center.
“My husband is going to be out there,” Cecilia told the man beside her. “He’s a paramedic.”
Carlos Lillo radioed his partner Roberto Abril that he was between two buildings near where they separated, which Roberto interpreted to mean a passageway between the North Tower and Six World Trade Center, near the northwest corner of the complex. Roberto tried to get there but couldn’t. A short time later, he ran into a boss, EMS Captain Joseph Rivera.
“Listen,” Roberto said, “I’m missing my partner.5 We got separated for some reason and I need to go back. I need to find him.” Rivera told Roberto to care for the injured people all around them while he searched for Carlos.
Before the South Tower fell, numerous emergency responders had seen Carlos at one point or another, helping people even as he continued to ask if anyone had seen his wife. Paramedic Manuel Delgado saw Carlos on the east side of the Trade Center, on Church Street, with tears streaming down his face as he worked. The sight struck Delgado as strange, because Carlos always seemed to be smiling. At first, Delgado thought his friend was overwhelmed by the enormity and needed to get away from the scene. Then Carlos gestured toward the North Tower and told him, “My wife’s in there.”
“Listen, man,”6 Delgado said, “this is God’s will. You’ve got to help me with the people. Snap out of it. We’ve got a lot of patients. You’ve got to help me here.” Carlos kept working, and eventually Delgado lost sight of him.
After dropping off Elaine Duch at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Moose and Paul drove their ambulance back to the staging area at Vesey and Church and resumed work. A woman who’d escaped from one of the towers appeared to be having a heart attack. A lieutenant called to them: “You got a cardiac patient—take her!” The time was 9:59 a.m.
As they strapped the woman onto a stretcher, Moose and Paul heard a volcanic rumble, then a boom, then a Dante’s choir of screams.
EMT Kevin Barrett yelled, “Moose, run!”
The South Tower began its collapse.
Moose tripped over the stretcher as the woman fought to unbuckle herself. Moose mentally downgraded her condition from heart attack to anxiety attack. He helped her off the stretcher and screamed: “Ma’am—just go! Go straight, go straight!”
But there was nowhere to go, no way to outrun the tsunami of smoke and debris. It caught Moose as he ran and slammed him to the ground. It engulfed him, choked him, coated him. He tried to keep moving, but he banged headfirst into a metal scaffolding pole. He lost his helmet and went down. People rushed past, grabbing him, moaning, falling. He helped when he could, even as he kept moving. His mind whirled to a decade earlier, when he had run out of oxygen during a scuba dive at a Pennsylvania quarry. Death beckoned.
Everything grew quiet. The South Tower had come to rest in a smoking pile, and all Moose could hear were agonized cries. But smoke and ash still enveloped him, and Moose felt his lungs running out of air. A hand grabbed his leg and he began to panic, costing him more precious oxygen. Moose reached down to help but feared being dragged down, so he pulled away from the grasping hand. His lungs burning, the world still dark with smoke, Moose fought the urge to lie down and accept his end.
Feeling with his hands, still moving, he looked for a place to curl up and die. But then he thought about his phone call with his wife, Ericka, and how she said she loved him and to be careful. Moose began to cry at the thought of leaving her and their sons. He silently scolded himself: “I told her I was going to be all right, and I’m doubting myself now. I shouldn’t have told her.” The thought of breaking his word kept Moose moving.
Moose started to run, but he still could barely breathe, so he slowed down. He feared he couldn’t keep his promise to Ericka. Then Moose saw a light.
The white beam, strong and bright enough to cut through the smoke and haze, bobbed oddly up and down. Behind it was a man with a white beard and long hair. Moose wondered if he was already dead. He choked out a question through his tears: “Are you Jesus Christ?”
“No,” said the bearded man. “I’m not Jesus. I’m a cameraman.”
Moose looked more closely: the bobbing light sat atop a shoulder television camera.
“I’m going to die,” Moose said.
“No, you’re not,” the cameraman said.
“Damn, you saved my life.”
They hugged, and the cameraman began to cry, too. “I’ve had enough of this job,” he said as he grabbed Moose. “We’ll do this together.”
Moose and the cameraman felt their way down the street and came upon a city bus. They pushed open the door and went inside. Trying to turn on the ignition, Moose pressed a button and compressed air from the brakes created a brief blast that cleared the smoke. Seeing people all around, Moose and the cameraman pulled more than a dozen people onto the bus: men in suits, women in business skirts, a group of construction workers, anyone they could reach. They huddled for a few minutes, hugging one another.
When the South Tower began to collapse and the woman who thought she was having a heart attack ran from Moose and Paul’s stretcher, Paul ran, too. He tripped over a fire hose, and by the time he rose, he couldn’t find Moose. Paul sprinted to a tall gate at the entrance to the Millennium Hotel’s parking garage. A small overhang shielded him from the rain of debris, but he felt smothered by smoke and ash. Alongside him was a man with a small gold shield who Paul thought was an FBI agent.
Paul covered his face with his helmet, then used it to protect the man at his side. His lungs filled with soot. It felt as though he’d plunged his face into a barrel of dust and breathed deep. It occurred to him that he was inhaling a pulverized building, concrete, glass, carpet, chemicals, and who knew what else. Plus whatever remained of the people who’d been inside, the emergency responders and executives, the secretaries and messengers, the custodians and security guards, along with the passengers, crew, and whoever had flown a Boeing 767 into the South Tower on that beautiful summer morning.
Minutes passed. Paul’s eyes burned. Choking, desperate for air, Paul began to hyperventilate. On the verge of collapsing, he forced himself to slow his breathing until the plume dissipated. Seeing an opening, Paul grabbed the man with the gold shield and ran to an ambulance parked about twenty feet away on Church Street. Using a master key he kept on a chain attached to his work belt, Paul helped the man inside and gathered about a dozen other people needing help. He drove to St. Vincent’s Hospital and dropped them off.
When its twin fell, the North Tower lobby filled with blinding dust and debris,7 plunging everyone into pitch darkness and forcing FDNY commanders to flee. Flashlights guiding their escape, they climbed frozen escalators from the lobby to the mezzanine, where Chief Hayden stumbled8 on a body. A beam of light revealed it was Father Mychal Judge, the senior FDNY chaplain, last seen in his clerical collar and his white helmet, praying for the horror to end. Judge had suffered an apparent heart attack during the collapse. Efforts to revive him failed, and five men carried his slumped body to St. Peter’s Church, a scene captured by Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton.
As they abandoned the North Tower command posts for safer locations, fire bosses didn’t immediately know what happened. A fireboat on the Hudson River reported the South Tower’s total collapse, but none of the FDNY commanders heard the announcement. Nevertheless, as they searched in the artificial darkness for an exit, Chief Joe Pfeifer used his handheld radio to order all firefighters to immediately evacuate the North Tower: “Command to all units in Tower One, evacuate the building!”9 But again, communication failed.
Jay Jonas and his men didn’t hear the order, and neither did scores of other firefighters still responding to the last order they had received: go upstairs and help everyone you can. The evacuation message apparently did get through to at least some firefighters, but the rest had to figure out for themselves what had happened and decide what to do next.
Inside Stairwell B, the lights flashed back on within thirty seconds after Jay heard an explosion and felt the North Tower shudder. Still on the 27th floor, Jay told Captain Billy Burke: “You check the south windows, I’ll check the north windows. We’ll meet back here.”
Jay rushed to the north side of the North Tower. He pressed close against the narrow windows but could see nothing but smoky white dust. He returned to find his friend Billy Burke with a strange look on his face, his head tilted, as though he doubted what he’d seen. Jay expected him to say that part of the North Tower had broken off high above them.
“Is that what I thought it was?” Jay asked. But he’d underestimated the damage.
“The other building . . . just . . . collapsed,” Billy replied.
That made no sense. Jay had fought countless fires and studied countless more, and he’d never heard of a skyscraper collapsing from fire. But the look on Billy’s face convinced him it must be true. Jay instantly understood that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had just died in the South Tower, including some of his brother firefighters. He also grasped that the building where he and his men stood, which had been burning more than fifteen minutes longer than its twin, was in grave, imminent jeopardy.
Jay hesitated. He put great stock in following orders and maintaining discipline, especially in the midst of a chaotic fire response. Jay hadn’t heard a command on the radio ordering them to evacuate, and he didn’t want to break ranks. But Jay also knew that he couldn’t rely on his radio, so maybe he’d missed a Mayday order to evacuate.
Jay made his decision. He walked over to his men, all still catching their breath: “It’s time for us to go home.” He didn’t explain his reasoning, or even that the South Tower had fallen. At that moment, just after 10 a.m., Jay and his men were among roughly eight hundred people10 still inside the North Tower stairwells.
Nobody moved. The men of Ladder 6 stared back at Jay, teetering between confusion and defiance. As far as they were concerned, the South Tower still stood, civilians in the North Tower still needed rescuing, and they still had a job to do. Leaving wasn’t an option. Moments like these were why they became firefighters. Jay didn’t realize that his men hadn’t heard his conversation with Billy Burke, so they didn’t know the danger they faced. But he did know that he’d given them an order.
“What?” Jay demanded. “I said, ‘Let’s go!’”
The men of Ladder 6 rose, grim-faced and reluctant, to retrace their steps downward in Stairwell B, along with Andy “Nozzles” Fredericks and Billy Burke.
At some point in their evacuation, they lost touch with Andy. Jay thought he must have returned upstairs. Separately, Billy Burke radioed the men of his company to head for the exits—“Start your way down,”11 he told them. “We’ll meet at the rig.” But Billy didn’t join them or Ladder 6. He remained inside the North Tower to help two other men on the 27th floor.
Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz were close friends12 who worked as computer programmers for Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. At forty-two, weighing nearly 300 pounds, Ed had relied on a wheelchair since a diving accident as a young man left him paralyzed. Abe was fifty-five, an Orthodox Jew who lived with his older brother and his family. Both bachelors, Ed and Abe exchanged DVDs, shared meals and musical tastes, and played computer games of chess and golf. Ed couldn’t get down the stairs, and his pal Abe refused to leave him. Abe had already told Ed’s aide to leave because she had children at home. Billy Burke made the pair his responsibility, and so Billy, Ed, and Abe became a trio.