102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

by Jim Dwyer

Each hose could shoot 250 gallons of water a minute, enough to douse a fire spread across 2,500 square feet. With multiple hose lines, they might be able to battle a fire that stretched across a single trade center floor of 40,000 square feet, but not five floors, and certainly not, as it turned out, without water. So the three chiefs in charge at the lobby—Pfeifer, joined by Deputy Chief Peter Hayden and Assistant Chief Joseph Callan—decided that the companies would not extinguish the fire, but would concentrate on helping people evacuate.

“Without elevators,” he had noted, “sending companies to upper floors in large high-rise buildings is measured in hours, not minutes.”

The Finest, as the police were called, and the Bravest, the nickname for the firefighters, did not like each other. The saying went that the only thing the two departments could ever agree on was the date of their annual boxing match. Sometimes, they didn’t wait for that date, and fistfights broke out at rescue scenes. The corrosive nature of the relationship had far more serious consequences than a fat lip. To be completely effective, firefighters and police officers needed to share information, to act in concert, to anticipate what the other force might do as a disaster evolved. The decisions that commanders made were influenced by how quickly and accurately they sized up a situation based on what they learned both from their troops and their putative allies. But these two agencies didn’t train together often or well. They couldn’t talk to each other by radio because their frequencies did not match. And they didn’t share equipment.

Indeed, despite the trade center’s status as the city’s leading terrorist target, coordinated disaster drills were extremely rare events in the life of the complex.

“The time and place to ensure life safety in high-rise buildings is during the period that the building is being designed,” Chief John T. O’Hagan wrote in High Rise/Fire & Life Safety, his authoritative book on the dynamics of high-rise fire. As it happened, the World Trade Center was planned at a moment of radical transformation in the construction of tall buildings, and its owner, the Port Authority, availed itself of those changes in spectacular fashion. The new approaches made it possible for the Port Authority to build higher and cheaper, with the twin towers the first skyscrapers to use virtually no masonry in their construction. The changes of this era also allowed the Port Authority to turn far more of the towers over to rentable space—as opposed to safety and service functions, like stairways and elevators—than other skyscrapers. Some of those changes also made escape impossible for people on the upper floors after the attacks of September 11, 2001.