Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center
The express elevator imprisoning Chris Young had two sets of doors, on opposite ends of the car. Each set had interior doors attached to the car and exterior doors connected to the building. Motors on the car’s roof were supposed to keep all interior and exterior doors shut until the elevator reached a landing. However, a loss of power like the outage caused by the South Tower collapse might allow people trapped inside to force open the doors to escape. Yet even that might not be enough.
Since 1996, the Port Authority had been installing devices called “door restrictors”1 that prevented passengers from forcing open stalled elevator doors even if power were lost. Designed to prevent falls down shafts, the restrictors acted like deadbolts. They lifted automatically within eighteen inches of a landing but otherwise could only be disengaged by a technician or a firefighter atop an elevator car’s roof. Of the 198 elevators in the Twin Towers, about half had been equipped with restrictors.
As minutes ticked by, the smoke and dust settled inside Chris’s elevator, but his fear rose. No one responded to his yells or his S-O-S alarms with the emergency button. Chris fought panic. Desperate to free himself, he pressed against a set of doors he’d tried earlier with no luck. This time, to his surprise, Chris felt them give. The loss of power apparently removed pressure from the motor atop his elevator. The car either didn’t have a door restrictor installed yet, or it had disengaged automatically.
Still breathing through his dress shirt, Chris wriggled his fingers into the crack. He pulled open the doors a few inches—to reveal a blank wall.
Chris rushed to the opposite doors to repeat the process. This time, light poured in. Chris pried the doors open farther and discovered that the car had stopped a little more than a foot from the floor of the North Tower lobby. He’d been only a hundred feet from where firefighters, Port Authority officials, and other emergency responders had operated the now empty command post for more than an hour after Flight 11 hit the North Tower.
Chris squinted against the sunlight, his eyes sensitive from more than ninety minutes2 stuck in a dark elevator. He stepped into a moonscape of broken stonework and shattered glass, coated with a pinkish-gray dust as thick and fluffy as a layer of fresh snow. He turned to his right, where he thought the seven people he’d spoken with had been, and saw the doors to that elevator open and no one inside. The lobby was empty, a modern ghost town after an unspeakable horror.
Confused, Chris pushed through a turnstile similar to the one he’d entered before so much changed in so little time, back when this was a normal day. Back when he was headed to the 99th floor, a floor Chris didn’t yet know had been gutted by a hijacked plane, to see Marsh & McLennan managing director Angela Kyte and other colleagues who were killed instantly or trapped by flames and broken stairwells, to deliver a box of materials for a PowerPoint presentation that would never be given.
Half in a daze, treading gingerly through the powdered debris, Chris felt as though his feet never touched the ground. He stepped through a broken window frame and headed toward a fire truck he spotted on West Street. But first he turned and looked toward the sky. The twisted steel and rising smoke made no sense. “Oh my God,” Chris said aloud.
He yelled to two firefighters helping an injured person: “Where should I go?”
One firefighter waved for him to follow them, but for reasons Chris couldn’t explain, he continued walking, onto Vesey Street, west toward the Hudson River.
He’d walked less than a hundred feet when he heard someone scream, “Run!”
It was 10:28 a.m.
As Ladder 6 began to evacuate the North Tower after the South Tower collapsed, Roof Man Sal D’Agostino asked Captain Jay Jonas if they could drop their heavy tools. If they weren’t going to rescue anyone, why carry irons and a roof rope? Even as he asked the question, Sal could have guessed the answer. Jay regularly preached to his men: “What’s a fireman without his tools? He’s a walking lump of carbon. Worthless.”
Jay barked, “We bring everything with us.”
Down they went, moving double-time for the first few floors, with Can Man Tommy Falco and Irons Man Billy Butler out front.
Around the twentieth floor, they came upon a heavyset woman in a purple dress, standing in a doorway, softly weeping. Her name was Josephine Harris, and she was a bookkeeper for the Port Authority, one week shy of her sixtieth birthday. She had limped down about one thousand steps from the 73rd floor, hobbled by fallen arches, a bad leg from having been hit by a car several months earlier, and assorted maladies. An office manager and others had helped Josephine to get this far, but she could go no farther and had sent her helpers ahead to safety. Now she was alone. Josephine might well have been the same woman Gerry Gaeta noticed as he helped Elaine Duch down Stairwell B.
“Hey, Cap,” said Tommy Falco, “what do you want us to do with her?”
Every fiber in Jay’s body wanted to speed up and get as far away as possible. Every human instinct told him to run, back to his firehouse then home to his family. But if a firefighter followed raw instincts, he’d never charge into a burning building. Ladder 6 had already moved past two burn victims they saw on the way in. They still hadn’t fought a fire or rescued anyone. If Ladder 6 survived this day, Jay wanted his men to look themselves in the mirror and say the phrase he lived by: “I was a fireman today.”
Jay turned to barrel-chested Irons Man Billy Butler, as powerful a firefighter as Jay had ever known. “Give your tools to the other guys,” Jay told him. “Take her arm, put it around your shoulders. We’ll stay together as a unit.”
Billy did as he was told, then turned to his new charge.
“What’s your name?”3 he asked.
“My name is Josephine.”
“Josephine,” Billy Butler promised, “we’re going to get you out of here today.”
When Cecilia Lillo reached Church Street, on the east side of the trade center, she let go of the stranger’s hand and watched him walk away, like a zombie through an apocalyptic landscape. As he disappeared, Cecilia wondered if she should have asked his name. Near the Millennium Hotel, she brightened at the sight of an ambulance from FDNY EMS Station 49: Carlos’s unit in Astoria. Eager to put their emergency rendezvous plan into effect, Cecilia waved her arms and called for help. But the ambulance was empty, and she realized that she was alone on Church Street.
Wondering where everyone had gone, Cecilia turned around to see the North Tower still burning. She knew nothing of a second plane, or that she’d survived the fall of the South Tower from inside the mall below the trade center. Cecilia agonized about her friends Nancy and Arlene, and about the security guard and everyone else who had disappeared in the smoke. But now her priority was to find Carlos.
Cecilia reached into her purse for her cellphone but discovered it must have fallen out during her ordeal. She grew frightened, upset that she couldn’t reach Carlos. Cecilia worried that he’d be terrified that something awful had befallen her. She zigzagged northeast, caught up with a group of stragglers, and followed them to Broadway, where she saw a police officer.
“I need to get hold of my husband—he’s a paramedic!” Cecilia told him.
“Sorry, hon,” the officer said, “we’re on different frequencies.” His offhand comment summarized the massive communication and coordination failures that plagued the entire response. He offered one piece of advice: “You gotta find a firetruck.”
None was in sight, but she spotted several buses congregated a few blocks up Broadway, near City Hall. Cecilia climbed onto one, not sure where it was headed. A woman who didn’t speak English rose, gave Cecilia her seat, and handed her a bottle of water. When the woman pantomimed washing her mouth and eyes, Cecilia realized that grime coated her face. She looked down and saw her clothes layered in filth and wondered if she might need to be decontaminated from hazardous materials.
As the bus headed uptown, another woman in a nearby seat mentioned the crash of a second plane and the fall of the South Tower. Her stress rising, Cecilia announced that she wanted to get off the bus. She resolved to return to the trade center, to find Carlos.
“They’re not going to let you go down there,” the woman said kindly. The bus was headed toward Woodhall Hospital in Brooklyn, and the woman urged Cecilia to stay aboard to be checked for injuries. She handed Cecilia her cellphone.
Cecilia tried Carlos but got no answer. As Cecilia dialed her sister’s number, images of her life with Carlos flashed in her mind. Every day since their first date, she had basked in the certainty that he would do anything to protect her. She expected that to be true for every day of the rest of her life, for herself and for the children they hoped to have together.
On their commute only hours earlier, Carlos was his usual kind self, expressing his love with a small act of thoughtfulness that on any other day she might have forgotten: he’d chosen the type of bagel she preferred for them to share. Inside the car, as she spread a napkin across his lap as he drove her to the train station, Cecilia had asked, “Why are you always trying to please me?” He just smiled. Cecilia already knew the answer. Carlos was the man she’d always dreamed of.
As Cecilia pressed the buttons of her sister’s phone number, she knew one more thing: even as Carlos helped to save lives amid the catastrophe of two burning skyscrapers and the chaos of untold victims, unless he was grievously hurt or worse, he’d somehow find a way to reach her. Or, if that failed, he’d call her family, to learn if she was safe. When her sister answered, Cecilia asked: “Have you heard from Carlos?”
“No,” her sister said.
Cecilia felt her chest clench.
Ladder 6 and Josephine resumed their evacuation, but at a much slower pace, frequently moving aside to let other fire companies pass. Step-step-step-step became step . . . pause . . . step . . . pause . . . step . . . pause. Jay stayed close behind Josephine and Billy, who still hadn’t learned the fate of the South Tower.
A voice in Jay’s head screamed: “We gotta get outta this building! Move fast!” But he kept that to himself, instead relying on his old habit of forced calm.
“Billy,” Jay said in his quiet voice, the one he used when he felt most anxious, “can you move a little faster, please?”
“Okay, Cap,” Billy said. Beads of sweat rolled down his face.
“Josephine,” Billy told her, “your kids and your grandkids want you home today. We gotta keep moving.”4
Josephine tried, but even as she clung to Billy’s thick shoulder, even as she wanted to get out, Josephine’s pain dictated their pace. She placed both feet on each step, rested, then repeated the process. Her bad leg threatened to give out, and she grew shakier with each downward flight.
Around the fifteenth floor, Ladder 6 and Josephine ran into Battalion Chief Rich Picciotto, a longtime study partner of Jay’s for promotional exams. Picciotto brandished a bullhorn, a rare tool among firefighters, because he remembered the communications and crowd control problems during the 1993 bombing.
“All FDNY, get the fuck out!”5 Picciotto boomed on his bullhorn. To anyone who could hear him over the radio, he yelled: “We’re evacuating, we’re getting out—drop your tools, drop your masks, drop everything. Get out, get out!” Dozens of firefighters heeded his lifesaving command and raced toward the exits.
However, some firefighters continued to linger, including a large group seen resting on the nineteenth floor. By some accounts they numbered as many as one hundred men.6 On his way out, a fire lieutenant told them, “Didn’t you hear the Mayday?7 Get out.” Without moving, one answered casually: “Yeah, yeah, we’ll be right with you, Lou.” Some straggling firefighters apparently didn’t know the South Tower had fallen. Others had become separated from their units and insisted on waiting to regroup. Still others refused to leave while fellow firefighters remained inside the building and rescue work continued. One firefighter who heard an evacuation order made his intentions clear, radioing back: “We’re not fucking coming out!”8
Jay didn’t know what was happening high above him in the North Tower, or even above or below him in Stairwell B, but with each step he imagined that he was inside a ticking bomb, each second bringing them closer to the moment when the North Tower followed its twin to the ground.
Jay’s nervous suspicion had merit. The collapse of the South Tower had sent a pulse of air pressure9 that appeared to fuel and intensify the fire high in the North Tower. Within four seconds of the South Tower collapse, flames erupted from south-facing windows on the North Tower’s 98th floor, and flared and brightened on three floors just below. Within two minutes of the South Tower collapse, fire spewed from the North Tower’s 104th floor, three floors higher than where it had previously been seen. The fires threatened the building’s integrity, weakening the steel of the North Tower’s core, floors, and exterior walls.
Observers with unique vantage points watched it happening. At 10:07 a.m., a police helicopter pilot radioed, “About fifteen floors down10 from the top, it looks like it’s glowing red. . . . It’s inevitable.” A second NYPD pilot added, “I don’t think this has too much longer to go. I would evacuate all people within the area of that second building.”
But with no clear communication links between police and firefighters, FDNY commanders didn’t hear those messages. Neither did would-be rescuers, some climbing higher, some catching their breath, and some slowly descending the North Tower. Yet even without warnings of impending collapse, a sense of impending doom spread.
At 10:12 a.m., from the North Tower’s 64th floor, engineer Pat Hoey sought fresh advice from a Port Authority Police dispatcher. During a call an hour earlier, Hoey had been told to wait in his office for rescuers, so that’s what he and a group of colleagues did, using tape and coats to seal out smoke. Now, he checked again.
Pat Hoey: “I’m in the Trade Center, Tower One. 11 I’m with Port Authority and we are on the 64th floor. The smoke is getting kind of bad, so we are going to . . . we are contemplating going down the stairway. Does that make sense?”
At that moment, eighty-seven minutes had elapsed since Flight 11 hit the North Tower. Thirteen minutes had passed since the South Tower fell. Roughly twelve hundred steps separated Pat Hoey from the lobby and possible salvation. Now, finally, Pat Hoey and his coworkers got different, better advice.
“Yes,” the dispatcher told him. “Try to get out.”
Ladder 6 and Josephine Harris continued down Stairwell B. When they reached a landing, Jay ran into another firefighter friend, Faustino Apostol, a lanky, easygoing aide to Battalion Chief William McGovern. Apostol made no move to leave.
“Faust, let’s go,” Jay insisted. “It’s time to go.”
“That’s okay,”12 Apostol replied. “I’m waiting for the chief.”
Jay, his men, and Josephine, kept moving. When they reached the twelfth floor, Jay found several firefighters from Ladder 5 gathered around a man suffering from chest pains. Their leader was Lieutenant Michael Warchola, a twenty-four-year FDNY veteran. Years earlier, when Jay was in Rescue 3, he and Mike Warchola lived in the same town and carpooled to work. They’d remained friends, and Jay knew that Mike had recently submitted his retirement papers. His last scheduled FDNY shift was two days away.
“Mike, let’s go,” Jay told him.
“That’s all right, Jay. You got your civilian, we got ours. We’ll be right behind you.”
“Don’t take too long.”
As their descent continued, Jay’s radio worked intermittently, crackling and squawking with calls for help, updates on fire company locations, and occasional moments of heroic grace under pressure. At one point, Jay heard Paddy Brown, the hard-charging, charismatic FDNY captain who’d urged Jay to skip the lobby check-in line and immediately start climbing.
“Dispatch, Captain Brown,13 Ladder 3. . . . I’m at the World Trade Center. . . . I’m on the 35th floor, okay? . . . Just relay to the command post, we’re trying to get up, you know. There’s numerous civilians in all stairwells. Numerous burn injuries are coming down. I’m trying to send them down first. Apparently, it’s above the 75th floor. I don’t know if they got there yet, okay?”
Paddy Brown intended to find out—Jay listened on the radio as he reinforced his reputation as a human engine with no reverse gear: “Three Truck, and we’re still headed up, all right?” Brown said.
“Okay,” the dispatcher said.
Ever the gentleman, even in the midst of disaster, Paddy Brown signed off as he kept climbing: “Thank you.”
By the time Ladder 6 reached the tenth floor, Jay relaxed enough to start calculating. He knew that Roof Man Sal D’Agostino carried a 150-foot rope, coiled in a bag on his shoulder. If they got trapped, they could use the rope to rappel down the outside of the building. They’d have to rig a harness for Josephine, but if their lives depended on it, they’d make it work. A few floors lower, Jay took a sip of optimism: “We may actually make it out of here.”
Before Jay could share that thought with his crew, hope went sideways: Josephine’s legs gave out. Wracked by pain, she fell to the floor in tears on the fourth-floor landing.
“Don’t touch me!” Josephine cried. “Leave me alone! Go! Leave me!”
As his exhausted men turned to him, Jay gritted his teeth and swallowed his frustration. He had no intention of leaving her there, but with Josephine immobile, they needed a new plan. Jay pried open the steel door from the stairwell to the fourth floor, to search for a chair they could use as a litter to carry Josephine the rest of the way down.
Jay discovered that it was a mechanical floor, not an office floor. He found only a flimsy stenographer’s chair and an overstuffed couch. Neither would work. Jay went deeper onto the floor. When he reached the far side of the North Tower from Stairwell B, a chill passed through him. The imaginary ticking bomb in his head grew louder. They’d carry Josephine out by hand, drag her if necessary. Upon deciding to return to the stairwell, Jay remembered the first rule he’d learned as a young firefighter: “Never run at a fire. If you’re running, you’re not looking.” He broke the rule and sprinted toward Stairwell B.
Five feet from the door, Jay felt a rumble, far worse than when the South Tower fell. The floor heaved. The time was 10:28 a.m., just over two hours after the hijacking of American Flight 11.
Jay lunged for the stairwell doorknob and pulled, but it wouldn’t open. He tugged again with all his might. The door swung toward him and Jay dived through, onto the fourth-floor landing of Stairwell B, nearly crashing into Tiller Man Matt Komorowski, who stood wide-eyed as the world rocked and rattled beneath his feet. The rest of Ladder 6 and Josephine were lower, on the steps approaching the third floor and below. Jay didn’t know what was happening, but he knew it was bad.
Almost a hundred stories above him, fires had weakened the building’s bones: steel floor trusses and core and exterior steel support columns. The south exterior wall became unstable. The wall automatically tried to shift its load to the core columns and adjacent exterior columns, but they’d been fatally weakened, too, and they couldn’t bear the extra burden. The upper floors sagged,14 pulling the exterior steel columns inward. Everything above the impact zone tilted to the south. Gravity went to work. The North Tower began to collapse on itself. As it did, bone-rattling vibrations of impending doom bounced Jay, his men, and Josephine against Stairwell B’s walls and floor.
The volume and violence intensified within seconds, as buckling floors grew closer. Compressed air sent a gale-force wind shooting down the length of Stairwell B, blasting everyone inside with a storm of dust and a hail of sheetrock fragments. The squall lifted Matt Komorowski off his feet and blew him down two flights of stairs, injuring his shoulder.
The sounds defied description. In all recorded history, only one other 110-story building had ever collapsed, and that was twenty-nine minutes earlier. Everyone who heard it from the inside took the experience to the grave. Maybe the sound and fury rivaled an Everest avalanche, or a volcanic eruption, or a rocket launch. Or maybe not. Nothing matched being inside five hundred million fiery, falling pounds15 of twisting steel, crumbling concrete, disintegrating office furnishings, shattering glass, and ending lives.
Curled in a ball, his eyes squeezed shut, his helmet knocked aside, Jay tumbled head over heels. As the noise grew closer, he braced himself for the crushing pain of a steel beam he anticipated would flatten him. Time slowed. Jay realized that the ticking time-bomb sensation in his mind had stopped. He accepted his fate, with thoughts of regret and disbelief: “I failed my men—I didn’t get them out,” and “I can’t believe I’m going to die right here in this stairway.”
After escaping from his elevator holding cell, Chris Young ran west down Vesey Street toward the Hudson River, never turning to look back. He reached a bench near the water as a dust storm overtook him, blotting out the sun and coating him in the powdered remains of the North Tower and all it contained. His mind blocked out how long he lay on the ground, sparing him the details of a terrifying memory. Chris still knew nothing about the planes, or about the fallen South Tower, and he didn’t know that the rumbling explosion he now heard and felt was the North Tower collapsing.
When the cloud passed, Chris pulled himself onto the bench. He unwrapped his dress shirt from around his head and tugged it over his T-shirt. Functioning but in shock, not sure what else to do, Chris walked north, toward the Marsh & McLennan office four miles uptown, where his day had begun. He wanted to collect a bag of personal items he’d left behind when he grabbed the box of materials for Angela Kyte.
As Chris walked, an EMT asked if he needed help.
“I’m fine,” Chris said. “I have to get back to my office.”
The EMT gave him a strange look and moved on.
Chris Young, aspiring actor, temp worker, and survivor, blended into the northbound horde of exiles from Lower Manhattan. The last person to escape from a World Trade Center elevator spoke to no one as he walked on.
Hours later, inside a conference room in the shell-shocked Midtown offices of Marsh & McLennan, Chris looked up to a television set as CNN replayed Flight 175 hitting the South Tower. He began to understand all he’d been through and broke down.
After the smoke and dust from the South Tower collapse cleared, EMT Moose Diaz settled his emotions. He exited the bus where he, a television cameraman, and several others had taken refuge. Just as Moose stepped back into the street, the North Tower buckled, following its twin to the ground. As smoke and debris chased him again, Moose ran several blocks north to an open hydrant near an improvised command post. Someone wiped his ash-covered face with a wet cloth. And then he returned to work, helping several asthmatics and a pregnant woman.
Moose had no radio, no helmet, but worst of all, no partners. He turned and walked back toward the World Trade Center to search for Paul Adams, whom he’d last seen when the South Tower began to fall. Moose ran into fellow Battalion 49 EMTs Kevin Barrett and Alwish Moncherry. The three men wept as they held one another for several minutes. Eventually, they made their way to an aid station set up at the recreation complex Chelsea Piers, at Twenty-Third Street and West Side Highway, where they prayed for news of their friends and colleagues Paul Adams, Roberto Abril, and Carlos Lillo.
Paul, meanwhile, had climbed back into his ambulance after dropping off patients at St. Vincent’s. While making a U-turn in front of the hospital, to return to the World Trade Center, Paul saw terrified faces looking south. One hundred and two minutes after being struck by American Airlines Flight 11, the North Tower was coming down. Paul drove toward whatever remained of the trade center. He again filled the rear of the ambulance. Paul also invited one man into the passenger seat and allowed another to ride on the hood. Back he went to St. Vincent’s.
Before Paul could return for more victims, the ambulance died of smoke inhalation in front of the hospital. Paul noticed a Port Authority police officer riding slowly past on a motorcycle. He asked for a ride, and the cop told him to hop on the back. Paul grabbed his trauma bag, jumped on, and returned to the scene to help anyone he could and to search for Moose, Roberto, Carlos, and the other Battalion 49 EMTs.
Twelve seconds after it began, twelve seconds that felt to Jay Jonas like two minutes, or maybe a lifetime, the din and the heaving stopped. Jay didn’t know it yet, but only a few of the lowest floors of Stairwell B had somehow survived relatively intact, entombed within a colossal mound of wreckage, a pile of ruins that began the day as the iconic North Tower of the World Trade Center.
In the crypt-like darkness, Jay took a breath. He gagged on smoke and dust and the faint smell of jet fuel and spit out silt while he rubbed his face and picked out debris from his eyes, nose, and ears. He heard others coughing nearby. Jay couldn’t see anyone, so he took roll call for Ladder 6: “Mike? Matt? Billy? Tommy? Sal?”
One after another they yelled back: “I’m here”—“Yep”—“I’m good.” All were banged up, but somehow all had survived, and none had serious injuries. Worst off was Mike Meldrum, woozy from a concussion.
“What about the woman?” Jay asked.
“Yeah, she’s right here,” Billy answered.
Josephine lived through the collapse clinging to the Irons Man’s boot. Billy and Tommy lifted mounds of fallen sheet rock and found her relatively unscathed.
Soon they discovered they weren’t alone inside the abbreviated remains of Stairwell B. Spread along the stairs of the lowest four floors, covered in dust but with only minor injuries, were six more firefighters: Battalion Chief Rich Picciotto, lieutenants Mickey Kross and Jim McGlynn, and firefighters Bob Bacon, Jeff Coniglio, and James Efthimiades.
A few steps below Jay was a fourteenth survivor inside Stairwell B: Port Authority Police Officer Dave Lim, who’d run toward the North Tower when he heard the plane crash and left his bomb-sniffing dog Sirius in the basement of the South Tower. Dave Lim had made it all the way up to the lower sky lobby,16 on the 44th floor of the North Tower, when United Flight 175 hit the South Tower. He spent the next hour shepherding North Tower survivors toward exit stairs and checking for stragglers on floors where he didn’t see firefighters already working. Dave joined the Stairwell B evacuation when the South Tower fell, only to slow his descent to help more people.
As Jay absorbed the situation, he imagined that the building must have sustained only a partial collapse. He thought they should flee immediately, before the rest crashed down. Jay didn’t expect to survive a second fall. He told Billy Butler to fashion his nylon webbing into a full body harness for Josephine. They’d haul her downstairs to whatever remained of the lobby. But Matt Komorowski, two flights down, called out to squelch that plan. Piles of blasted sheetrock and debris clogged the bottom of the stairwell.
As he considered his next move, Jay heard a radio call from Lieutenant Mike Warchola that reinforced his mistaken belief that large parts of the North Tower still stood. Jay saw his longtime friend not ten minutes earlier, helping a man with chest pain.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”17 Warchola called. “This is the officer of Ladder Company Five. I’m on the twelfth floor, B stairway. I’m trapped, and I’m hurt bad.”
“Cap,” called Sal D’Agostino, “you get that?”
“I got it,” Jay said. Mike Warchola was saying that he was trapped in the same stairwell, also injured, only eight stories above them. Ladder 6 was on its way.
Jay climbed toward the fifth floor, stepping over holes in the stairs, pushing aside or squeezing through piles of fallen sheetrock, using a twisted handrail to haul himself through debris and beyond gaps in missing steps. It reminded him of a stairwell in a tenement on the verge of collapse. When he reached the fifth-floor landing, Jay heard Mike Warchola call again for help. Halfway to the sixth floor landing, Jay ran into an immovable pile of debris.
“Mayday,” Warchola called a third time, his voice weak, his tone distraught.
Jay leaned into the blockage, trying desperately to clear a path, but it wouldn’t budge. Jay knew that calling for more men wouldn’t be enough; he’d need a crane to lift the load. Jay’s heart sank as he pressed the talk button and told his old friend: “I’m sorry, Mike. I can’t help you.”
He heard no reply.
Jay used his radio to call other firefighters, giving them Warchola’s last reported location. Not all his calls went through, but eventually among those outside the North Tower who heard Jay was another friend, Deputy Chief Nick Visconti. Visconti didn’t have the heart18 to tell Jay the truth: Mike Warchola couldn’t be inside Stairwell B on the twelfth floor of the North Tower. Anyone outside the wreckage could see that location no longer existed. Warchola and anyone else with him were buried somewhere in the canyons of rubble surrounding the surviving six stories of Stairwell B.
Jay climbed back down, navigating the broken walls and taking care not to fall into holes. Smoke and dust still filled the dark, damaged stairwell. Along the way, Jay pried open the door to the fifth floor and found a custodial bathroom. He knew that the toilet wouldn’t work, but it might come in handy if they were trapped more than a short time. He also found Chief Picciotto’s bullhorn and passed it down to him.
Jay felt most energized by his discovery of a torn-open freight elevator shaft. When he rejoined his troops on the fourth floor landing, Jay told them: “We’ve got our ropes. We can rappel down maybe to a subcellar and find the PATH train station.” From there, he said, they could walk the tracks in a rail tunnel under the Hudson River and emerge in Hoboken, New Jersey. His men looked at Jay like he’d lost his mind.
“Hey, Cap,” Tommy Falco said, “what if we can’t get in down below? It’s not like we can just run back up the stairs.”
“All right, killjoy,” Jay said, even as he stored away the idea. He’d consider it again if all else failed and they remained trapped for two or three days. Meanwhile, Matt Komorowski found sprinkler pipes on the third floor. If they got thirsty, they could break into them in the hope of finding water.
For now, there was nothing to do but wait.
As they settled in, Jay heard the radio squawk with a Mayday call from Battalion Chief Richard Prunty, an avuncular figure with a white walrus mustache, somewhere below them in the North Tower’s lobby. Chief Prunty said he was hurt, dizzy, pinned under a steel beam. Jay already knew they couldn’t reach him, but he and Lieutenant Jim McGlynn tried to keep the chief talking. Unsure whether Rich Prunty could be heard by potential rescuers outside the stairwell, Jay and Jim McGlynn relayed his pleas for help to anyone monitoring their radio channels.
An hour passed. Prunty was slipping away. They heard a final transmission: “Tell my wife and kids19 that I love them.”
The survivors inside Stairwell B had no idea what the world looked like outside their chrysalis. They didn’t know that Mayor Giuliani had ordered an evacuation of Lower Manhattan20 below Canal Street, an evacuation that sent hundreds of thousands of people through dust-covered streets uptown, across bridges, or onto tugs, ferries, fire boats, Coast Guard vessels, and pleasure craft that sailed from the smoldering island like a modern-day Dunkirk.
Jay and his crew coughed and rubbed dust from their eyes. They sat quietly. Most turned off their radios to conserve batteries, while Chief Picciotto, on the stairs a floor below Jay, put out a Mayday call on the command channel. Another hour passed.
Tommy Falco caught Jay’s eye. “Hey, Cap. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” Jay replied. “I’m making this up as we go along.”
Jay used a different frequency, the primary tactical channel, Channel 1, and put out Maydays of his own. Deputy Chief Tom Haring answered: “Okay, Ladder 6, I got you.”
Relief spread. Jay described their location. More captains and chiefs chimed in over the radio, old friends of Jay’s whose voices bolstered his spirits. They told Jay that every off-duty member of Ladder 6, along with Jay’s old company, Ladder 11, had joined the search. More radio calls, more promises, all with one theme: “I’m coming to get you, brother.”
Some of Jay’s radio contacts had questions that struck him as odd. They asked for more details of the survivors’ location, about how Ladder 6 had entered the North Tower, and where they’d parked their truck. One radio caller flat-out asked Jay how to find the North Tower. With no way to envision the smoking acres of rubble around him, Jay grew annoyed. He thought: “This is not that hard, gentlemen. My five-year-old daughter could follow these directions. It’s one of the big buildings on the corner.”
Jay urged Josephine and his men to be patient, assuring them that help was on the way. He guessed, incorrectly, that firefighters and other rescuers were overwhelmed by hundreds or even thousands of injured or trapped people. No one on the radio told him that responders could devote unlimited manpower to the fourteen people inside Stairwell B because they comprised the largest single group of known survivors.
Visibility improved enough for Jay to look out a small hole, but he could only see a wall of twisted steel. He and the others heard fires breaking out nearby. Explosions rocked the stairwell, pelting them with a shower of debris. Amid the barrage of noise and falling pieces of sheetrock, Josephine began to cry.
“I’m scared,” Josephine said.
“We’re all a little scared,” Jay told her. “Just hang in there.”
Jay was long over the frustration he’d felt earlier about Josephine’s slow pace. Josephine was part of Ladder 6, now. During the occasional debris storms, Mike Meldrum draped himself across her body. Sal D’Agostino wrapped her in his coat.
“As long as we’re here,” Sal told her, “nothing is going to happen to you.”
The explosions stopped. The wait continued. K-9 Officer Dave Lim used a radio to ask someone to check on his partner, Sirius, in the basement of the South Tower. He used his cellphone to reach his wife, Diane, who told him that she didn’t want to hang up21 until either she died or he did.
Another hour passed. Someone found a can of soda, so they passed it around. The dust settled more. A beam of light pierced a hole Jay hadn’t noticed previously in the stairwell wall above where he sat. Flecks of dust twinkled in the beam, like a sudden spotlight on a darkened stage. Jay stared at it until comprehension dawned.
“Guys,” Jay said. “There used to be one hundred and six floors above us, and now I’m seeing sunshine.”
Still Jay didn’t understand how much, or how little, of the building remained. As far as Jay knew, Mike Warchola remained alive, awaiting rescue eight flights above them.
Smoke and dust cleared further. Within ten minutes they could see through a manhole-sized hole in the stairwell wall to a firefighter from Ladder 43 walking in the rubble, about eighty feet away. They tied a rope around Chief Picciotto and lowered him out the hole to a place where he could stand amid the mound of twisted steel and masonry. Picciotto reached the firefighter and tied off the rope for others to use as a guide. Jay sent out members of his crew, one after another, along with Dave Lim, Mickey Kross, and Bob Bacon. Lieutenant Jim McGlynn stayed behind on a lower level of the stairwell with Jim Efthimiades and Jeff Coniglio, who hoped they could find Chief Prunty alive.
Jay remained inside the stairwell with Tommy, Sal, and Josephine, who still couldn’t walk. “Cap,” Tommy said, “we can’t leave her.” Jay told him they’d wait with Josephine until other firefighters arrived with a rescue stretcher to carry her out. Soon Lieutenant Glenn Rohan climbed into the wrecked stairwell with several other members of Ladder 43 to help the men on the lower levels and to evacuate Josephine. One of the newcomers addressed her as “ma’am.” Another called her “doll.”
Ladder 6 didn’t appreciate that. Sal firmly told them: “This is Josephine.”
Jay explained her immobility to Glenn Rohan, then reassured Josephine she’d be in good hands. It’d take some time to get a metal-ribbed stretcher called a Stokes basket, but she’d be going home soon.
Jay told Ladder 43 what he knew about Chief Prunty down below. When Jay mentioned that Mike Warchola was hurt somewhere above them, Glenn Rohan gave him a strange look but didn’t say anything.
Sal went out through the hole. Tommy followed, then poked his head back inside: “Cap, wait until you get a look at this.”
Jay looked out in disbelief. Nothing he’d experienced or imagined prepared him to see the smoking remains of New York’s two tallest buildings arrayed around him. The violence of the collapse had pulverized nearly everything inside, leaving no recognizable trace of furniture or computers or phones or carpets. Jay saw no sign of the more than twenty-seven hundred people22 who’d arrived at the Twin Towers that morning as workers, visitors, or emergency responders, or as airplane passengers and crew, but who’d soon be counted among the departed.
“Oh my god,” Jay told himself. “We got bombed. They used airplanes like missiles.”
Jay understood that the twelfth floor no longer existed. He realized that if he and the other survivors in Stairwell B had been a little higher or a little lower at 10:28 a.m., they’d almost certainly be dead, too.
Jay followed his men as they traversed the rope line toward West Street, navigating deep crevasses of misshapen steel, fighting to keep their footing on an inch-thick coating of talcum-like dust. At one point, they balanced along a foot-wide beam stretched across a pit of rubble, like explorers crossing a log bridge over a ravine.
Jay looked north and saw fire consuming the forty-seven-story building known as Seven World Trade Center, across Vesey Street from the tower remains. The Secret Service had an office in an adjacent building. As the Stairwell B survivors made their way across the rubble, fire reached an ammunition storage room there. The sound of gunfire convinced Dave Lim that terrorists were launching a ground assault. He reached for his service weapon, knowing that he carried forty-six rounds.23 Dave resolved to go down fighting, but he soon realized that wouldn’t be necessary. The gunshots stopped. (Hours later, at 5:21 p.m., WTC 7 collapsed24 with no one inside.)
As Stairwell B emptied of survivors, Lieutenant Glenn Rohan and three other firefighters climbed down through the dark. They forced their way into the remains of the lobby to search for Chief Prunty, who’d last been heard from about two hours earlier. They found him fifty feet below where they entered Stairwell B, pinned under a steel beam. They tried CPR but knew it was no use. Unable to lift the beam, they said a prayer and packed up. Before they climbed out, Glenn promised: “We’ll come back25 to get you tomorrow, chief.”
Jay kept a close watch on his men as they traversed the rubble. Finally, they faced a steep rise of broken masonry to reach West Street. Fellow firefighters dropped ropes down to them for one hard, final climb. Covered in filth, his eyes burning, Jay emerged on the street feeling spent. He looked back toward the pile and saw Josephine emerging from the stub of the stairwell, carried aloft by firefighters aboard a stretcher. A medic tried to usher Jay toward an ambulance.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Jay said. “Where’s the command post?”
Jay wanted to check in with the chiefs before leaving. He wasn’t driven by protocol or pride. From the radio traffic, Jay knew that scores of firefighters had been searching for him and the others in Stairwell B. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if someone got hurt or killed while looking for him after the survivors were safe.
Jay walked a block south to Liberty Street. Hundreds of firefighters milled around. They’d removed their helmets to observe a moment of silence, and now they were looking for a fire to fight, someone to help, or a lost comrade to bring home. They understood that many of their number were missing, though they didn’t yet know the magnitude of the loss. Deputy Chief Peter Hayden, who hours earlier sent Ladder 6 and so many other firefighters into the North Tower, stood atop a damaged pumper truck.
The chief looked down, Jay looked up. Each man’s eyes welled with tears.
“It’s good to see you,” Chief Hayden said.
“It’s good to be here,” Jay said.
Endless work remained, the shift wasn’t over, and Jay wanted to help. But he knew better. “My guys are shot,” Jay said. With a nod, the chief dismissed Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6. But first, Hayden offered a small piece of welcome news.
“Now you’re going to get promoted to battalion chief.”
His eyes moist, his body aching, Jay looked up at Chief Hayden. Jay had devoted countless hours to working, training, and studying, in the hope that someday he’d hear the career-defining words that he’d made chief. But now his mind was elsewhere.
As he walked away, Jay said simply: “It’s gonna be good to be around for that.”
After his ferry ride, on the train home to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Ron Clifford thought the worst of his personal ordeal was over, even as he understood that the nation’s had only begun. He watched as a woman who worked on Wall Street guzzled vodka straight from a bottle. He called his sister Ruth’s cellphone, hoping to tell her he was fine, so she wouldn’t worry. No answer, so he left a message.
Fellow passengers read out news updates from their BlackBerry devices about planes crashing into the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Rumors flew wildly around the train car about more planes, more targets, more death.
Ron fell into Brigid’s arms at the station. He apologized for ruining his clothes but was too spent to explain all that had happened. At home, Ron stripped out of his soiled blue suit and set aside his yellow tie. As he prepared to shower, Ron’s phone rang: David McCourt, his sister Ruth’s husband, sounded dazed.
“Hey,” David said, “do you know where Ruth is?”
Believing that Ruth had flown west from Boston several days earlier, along with Ruth and David’s four-year-old daughter Juliana, Ron said, “Huh? She’s in California.”
“I think she was on that flight,” David answered.
Ron’s mind refused to piece it together.
“What flight? What are you talking about?”
“I got a call from Allan Hackel,” David said, referring to the husband of Paige Farley-Hackel, Ruth’s close friend and Juliana’s godmother.
Ron remained fiercely in denial. He told himself that David had recently gone through cancer treatment, and that’s why he must be confused. Ron said he’d clear it up by calling Paige’s husband. “Give me Allan’s number.”
Hours earlier, Allan Hackel heard on his car radio that a plane struck the North Tower, but he’d dismissed it. “There’s a million planes flying,”26 Allan told himself. He focused on the direct route from Boston to Los Angeles. “I don’t think they’re going to New York to get to L.A.” But when Allan reached the advertising company he owned, his grown son Peter and daughter Jodi, from a previous marriage, crowded into his office.
“What?” Allan had asked. “Was that Paige’s flight?” Jodi embraced him. Allan’s mind went black. A single thought formed: “My life is gone.”
When Ron called, Allan sounded defeated. He assumed that Ron already knew the worst. “They were the two most beautiful, spirited girls that walked the earth,” Allan said tearfully of Ron’s sister, Ruth, and Allan’s wife, Paige. “And that gorgeous little girl.”
Ron refused to accept it: “What are you talking about, Allan?”
“They were here, and they were driven to the airport early this morning.”
Ron felt the bottom drop out, but still he clung to a whisker of hope. Allan told him that Paige was on a different flight from Ruth and Juliana. Ron went to his computer and joined countless people trying to determine what had happened to their loved ones’ flights.
Ron called his half-brother, Spencer, who lived in Boston, and told him to rush to Logan Airport to see what he could learn.
Jennieann Maffeo had wanted her sister Andrea to be notified about her burns before their parents, but the request got lost on her way to the hospital. Using the information Ron gave the ambulance driver, someone called Jennieann’s boss at UBS PaineWebber, who in turn called the Maffeo home in Brooklyn to deliver the news that Jennieann was alive, but grievously injured.
Just as Jennieann had feared, her elderly mother was too distraught to speak. Frances Maffeo gave the caller Andrea’s work number. Eventually, the telephone trail led Andrea back to Ron.
Ron leapt to answer the phone, thinking it might be news about Ruth and Juliana. Andrea heard anguish in Ron’s voice when she explained who she was. Ron set aside his fears for his sister and niece and tried to focus on Jennieann.
“Her arms,” Ron told Andrea. “My god, her arms are burned.” He was too distracted, too distraught, or too kind to tell Andrea the full extent of Jennieann’s injuries.
Jennieann’s boss didn’t know where she’d been taken, so Andrea asked Ron. He didn’t know either. “I saw horrendous things,” Ron said.
They talked briefly about what happened, about how he had come upon Jennieann in the Marriott lobby. Ron confided in Andrea that they were in the same boat: he was awaiting word about his sister and niece. They heard a click—another call on Ron’s line. Ron placed Andrea on hold, then quickly returned.
“I have to go,” Ron said. “My sister’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” Andrea said. “Can I do anything?”
“Just let me know how your sister is. She has to be okay.”
Andrea said she’d stay in touch, and she promised to pray for him.
At the command center at Chelsea Piers, Moose Diaz heard his name read among the missing emergency responders.
“No,” he called out. “I’m right here.”
He called his wife, Ericka, from a pay phone. Her cries made him weep again.
“Don’t go back in!” she pleaded.
“They won’t release me,” Moose told her. “The city’s locked down.”
“Come home now!”
Moose and another EMT commandeered an empty ambulance. Bringing along a group of EMT trainees who’d leapt into service, they ignored the citywide lockdown and drove off Manhattan island, across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, back to Battalion 49 in Astoria. He soon learned that his partner Paul Adams was accounted for, as was paramedic Roberto Abril. Carlos Lillo remained among the missing.
Exhausted, covered with bits of building and other remains, coughing and wheezing, Moose drove his car upstate to the little town where his day had begun nearly twenty-four hours earlier. By the time Moose arrived home, President Bush had already delivered his address from the Oval Office. “Missing” posters had already begun spreading around Manhattan. The Pentagon and an old coal mine in Pennsylvania still smoldered. Fighter jets, tankers, and radar planes ruled the skies over the United States. The country and large parts of the world braced for a future where the only certainty seemed to be war.
Ericka was dreaming of water when Moose reached their front stoop. She woke and opened the door to the ash-covered man she loved, a gentle man who loved to help people, a brave man who saved lives that day and nearly lost his own, an American man of Cuban/Palestinian/Haitian descent whose Arabic name meant Moses.
Together they sat on the floor and cried.
Andrea Maffeo rushed home from work to comfort her parents. She called one hospital after another, but no one had heard of Jennieann. Bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were closed to everyone except emergency responders and public safety workers. Andrea sought help from a family friend, a retired New York City police officer named Gaspere Randazzo.
“C’mon, we’re going to the city,” Gaspere told her.
Joined by Gaspere’s former partner, the two old cops flashed their badges and gained passage across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Andrea had never seen Manhattan so empty. An occasional emergency vehicle broke the eerie silence. Teams of firefighters walked through the streets, hunched, exhausted, covered in ash. An army in retreat.
They drove to the Beekman Downtown Hospital, but Jennieann wasn’t there. A nurse told Andrea to try the city’s major burn unit, at Weill Cornell Medical Center on Sixty-Eighth Street. After sorting out confusion about Jennieann’s name—she’d been registered as Jeannie—Andrea found her sister. She went upstairs to the burn unit and made what felt like the longest walk in creation. “How am I going to have my mother make this walk?” Andrea wondered.
A nurse named Mike greeted her warmly and asked what she knew.
“Her arms are burned,” Andrea said, echoing what Ron Clifford told her.
“It’s a little more than that,” Mike said.
“What you mean? How bad is she?”
Mike held Andrea’s hands. He explained that Jennieann had third-degree burns over more than 80 percent of her body. Fourth-degree might have been more accurate, but that level didn’t exist. Jennieann’s burns penetrated to her stomach and other internal organs.
Andrea steeled herself and entered the room. Jennieann was mummified in white gauze from neck to feet, with clear bandages on her face and head. Andrea could see that the tops of her sister’s ears and part of her nose had burned off. Fingertips as black as coal peeked out from the wraps. A ventilator breathed for her. Doctors had placed Jennieann in a drug-induced coma to spare her from pain. Her eyelids were swollen shut, but her corneas weren’t damaged. When the fireball from American Flight 11 raced down the North Tower, Jennieann might have shielded her eyes with her arms. If she recovered she might retain her sight.
Andrea began to whimper, then forced herself to stop, worried that Jennieann might hear her. She moved to the head of her sister’s bed.
“You’re here, you’re safe,” Andrea whispered. “You’re going to get help.”
Jennieann moved her legs.
“Did she hear me?” Andrea asked.
A doctor said it was muscle reflex, but outside, a nurse disagreed. “That was her way of telling you she heard you,” the nurse said. Andrea chose to believe it.
When Andrea returned home, Gaspere offered to walk her inside, but Andrea said no—his presence would immediately tip off her mother how awful it was. If Frances Maffeo could be spared for even a minute, Andrea wanted to give her that time.
The two women sat across from each other in the kitchen.
“How is she?” Frances asked.
Andrea put her head down on the table. The silence became too much to bear, so she forced herself to speak: “They don’t know if she’s going to make it through the night.”
Neighbors heard Frances Maffeo’s screams.