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

by Jim Dwyer

a basement that gave the trade center more space below the street than the majestic Empire State Building had above it.

Instead, the schedule had slipped, which was not surprising, given the contentious topic of commissions for people who earned their living by thinking and acting quickly.

As it happened, the safety rituals of modern airline travel—the instructions on the location of doors, life vests, emergency masks—were all the residue of seagoing laws enacted after the Titanic brushed against an iceberg and foundered in the North Atlantic in 1912.

In November 1990, the group made its first strike in the United States, targeting Meir Kahane, a radical rabbi and Israeli politician who had made himself into a human megaphone of Jewish empowerment and anti-Arab views. Kahane was assassinated after giving a speech at a hotel in midtown Manhattan.

They also found pictures of American landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. The gunman was quickly written off as a lone nut. City and federal officials overlooked blunt evidence that he had associated with quite a few men of similar ideological bent. In fact, most of the written material in his possession would not get translated for a long time.

The FBI, it developed, had had an informant inside the cell that carried out the bombing, but had fired him eight months before, in a dispute over his $500-a-week stipend. Afterward, the agency quietly hired him back—for $1.5 million—to penetrate other groups of Islamic radicals. The only person to be disciplined for the fiasco was the agent who had championed the informant.

In the eyes of the Fire Department’s senior commanders, the 1993 attack brought chilling lessons in what could go wrong when multiple emergency agencies respond to a disaster. The fire chiefs, while proud of having helped thousands evacuate, believed that their efforts at a coordinated response with the Police Department had simply collapsed.

In 1996, the Fire Department took charge of emergency medical response, and promptly stripped paramedics and emergency medical technicians of the ability to listen to police communications.

One of the deepest secrets of the two buildings was that their structural steel—webbed together in a novel, lightweight design—had never been fireproofed to the satisfaction of the trade center’s engineers or architects. No one had ever tested the fireproofing of the steel in two of the tallest buildings in the world. In fact, it was crumbling off. Not long after the bombing, the Port Authority began to replace the fireproofing, and by the morning of September 11, had completed about 30 floors of the 220 in the towers.

The structural engineer explained that not even a Boeing 707, the largest airplane flying at the time they were built, could knock them over.

Compared with the powerful load absorbed by the face of the towers from winds that blew every hour of every day, the truck bomb in the basement was puny.

What rips apart the aircraft is not the size of the bomb but a rupture in the fuselage at 35,000 feet, with the lethal force coming from the difference between the cabin pressure and the atmosphere. Those forces are not present even at the top of skyscrapers as tall as the twin towers, limiting the destructive energy of a conventional bomb to its size.

Flight 11 had hit 1 World Trade Center, the north tower, at 450 miles an hour, having traveled the full length of Manhattan Island, fourteen miles from north to south, in less than two minutes.

The towers had been designed by an architect who feared heights, and his antidote to acrophobia in the world’s tallest building had been skinny windows. That way, anyone unnerved by the unnatural height could look out while gripping both sides of the window.

To these outsiders, any commotion in the complex automatically became a pandemic, afflicting everyone, since the whole place could seem like a blur of aluminum and glass. The Sandler people wanted to make it clear to their families that the problem was in the other building.

At KBW, lunch was served for the entire company, not just the traders, every day. On Junk Food Fridays, the meals were entirely built around Whoppers and Big Macs and Kentucky Fried Chicken, huge orders sent up from fast-food joints in the neighborhood.

A fair number of the people at work had played college football, basketball, baseball, and not surprisingly, remained competitive weekend athletes.

Even though Vadas’s title was senior vice president, he worked on a trading desk—a position that afforded little privacy, a world of the heavily armored humor of men, hardly the venue for expressions of tenderness.

Across the two floors of KBW, decisions to go or stay were made one at a time.

Will DeRiso, a salesman, had always been anxious about working in the trade center, though his colleagues would often rib him for his worries.

Moreover, another reality kept KBW staff in their chairs. The traders made their money by staying on the phone, by being ready to move quickly. They did not leave for lunch.

Vanessa Lawrence, a Scottish-born artist who worked on the floor, had just had taken one step out of the elevator when the concussion ran through the shaft.

The building had easily absorbed the impact of the jetliner. The pinstripe columns that gave the towers their distinctive look—and kept the windows a mere twenty-two inches wide, comforting their height-fearing architect—were not simply ornamentation, or panic handles for acrophobiacs. They actually held the buildings up.

The towers stood like huge sails at the foot of Manhattan Island, with each face built to absorb a hurricane of 140 miles per hour. The wind load on an ordinary day was thirty times greater than the force of the airplane that would hit it on September 11. The mass of the tower was 1,000 times greater than the jet’s. Given the sheer bulk of the towers, it was not surprising that the building continued to stand after the plane hit.

“Watch CNN,” Stephen Tompsett, a computer scientist at the Risk Waters conference, e-mailed his wife, Dorry, using his BlackBerry communicator. “Need updates.”

With Beyea was Abe Zelmanowitz, another Blue Cross computer analyst who worked one cubicle over, separated by an aisle on the south end of the floor. Considering the distances between them—physical, cultural, religious—that they were now inches from each other in the stairwell might have seemed peculiar.

Though the shape of the disaster was barely forming in his mind, Thompson knew enough about its scale to pick up the public-address microphone and order an immediate evacuation of the building. His message went nowhere: the plane had destroyed the building’s public-address system.

Even the simplest advice, to wet towels and stuff them in the doorsills, became another avenue of frustration. The plane had severed the pipes, so there was no water pressure upstairs, for drinking, putting out fires, or dampening cloths.

Jules Naudet, a French documentary maker, was taping Pfeifer that day, and he pulled his camera up to record the plane as it burst into the north face of the north tower. They rushed into Pfeifer’s battalion car, and sped south with Engine 7. “That looked like a direct attack,” Pfeifer said in the car.

Trailing him throughout was the filmmaker, Jules Naudet, who rarely shifted the camera off Pfeifer even as the flames roared above them. For months, Naudet and his brother, Gedeon, had been making a documentary about the progress of a rookie firefighter as he grew into the job.

Now Jules Naudet recorded the first arrivals at what would become the largest rescue operation in New York City history. More than 225 fire units would go to the trade center, half of all the companies working that day.

Other firefighters heard the news at home or at their second jobs, grabbed their car keys, and headed in. In the brave, pell-mell rush to help, more than 1,000 firefighters would report.

Also there was Chief Pfeifer’s brother, Kevin, a lieutenant who was on duty with Engine 33. The brothers spotted each other in the north tower lobby when Kevin’s company arrived.

The FDNY could fight a fire on one floor, maybe two. They could not handle what confronted them now—at least five floors fully engulfed. The limitation was a matter not of bravery or skill or brawn, but of simple physics.

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.

Pfeifer told his first units to head for the 70th floor, a spot safely beneath the fire, the customary position for setting up forward operations. If all went as expected, the fire would burn upward, not downward. Other companies were assigned to respond to specific distress calls. Still others were assigned floors and told to make sure everyone had gotten out.

The next task for the chiefs was transporting the companies upstairs. They discovered that nearly all the building’s ninety-nine elevators were out of service. Many were stuck between floors with people trapped inside. At least two that had descended to the lobby were shut tight. The people inside were screaming, just a few yards from the fire command desk, but no one could hear them in the din.

Among the most experienced chiefs to arrive was Donald Burns, who had been a commander at the 1993 bombing and had written a thoughtful commentary on the event. “Without elevators,” he had noted, “sending companies to upper floors in large high-rise buildings is measured in hours, not minutes.”

The console at the fire command desk held few of the answers that Chief Pfeifer needed. Where was the fire? How fast was it spreading and where? Which stairwells were clear? The chief, it turned out, knew less than the people he was trying to rescue.

Few departments equal the rigor of New York City’s basic firefighter training, but its commanders went through little formal planning for complex events. The concept of “situational awareness”—using modern tools to provide information needed by people making life-and-death decisions in fast-moving environments—had become a foundation for military maneuvers, air-traffic control, power-plant operation, and advanced manufacturing. That concept had not taken hold at many fire departments, including New York’s.

In high-rises, fire radios had a poor record because the mass of the building often prevented radio signals from penetrating, and chiefs lost touch with firefighters on upper floors.

In the 1960s, individual firefighters were given their own radios. Four decades after that innovation, however, and thirty years after men on the moon beamed live television pictures across the cosmos, firefighters were still having a hard time using their radios in high-rise buildings.

No matter how hardy a handheld radio was—Motorola salesmen used to drop the Saber radios on the floor in a cocky demonstration of their ruggedness—its signal was generally too weak to reliably penetrate multiple floors without a booster.

The difference was that, unlike the Fire Department, the police had installed boosters in 350 locations across the city to amplify their signals. The Fire Department had only a handful of boosters in place.

Moreover, to install a booster system would have represented an entirely new way of doing things—never an easy sell in a department that resisted technological change. At the Fire Department, the loyalty of one firefighter to another, a soldierly bond, was at times extended to an attachment to gear and the old way of doing things. Technological ruts became enshrined as customs.

As a result, the department was forced to reissue the Motorola Saber radios it had just withdrawn, some of them fifteen years old. On September 11, many of the firefighters marched into the towers with these old radios, the identical ones they had carried eight years earlier when the bomb went off. This time, though, they had the powerful repeater. It had been tested only a few months earlier and had worked well. Even with the old radios, the prospects for communicating within the tower looked brighter than they had in 1993.

The Finest, as the police were called, and the Bravest, the nickname for the firefighters, did not like each other.

The police, for example, flew helicopters, and the city had drafted a plan to let firefighters ride in them at high-rise fires. This plan was revised after the 1993 bombing, but it was rarely used and infrequently rehearsed. And on this day the cooperation was no different. The Police and Fire Departments ran brave but completely independent rescue operations. They did not bicker; they simply did not communicate.

The consequences of a plane’s striking one of the towers had been envisioned many years earlier, even before the towers were built, by opponents of their construction who ran an ad in The New York Times with a lurid—and, as it turned out, prescient—illustration of an airliner striking the north face of the north tower.

On Sunday, November 7, 1982, officials replicated a plane crash high in one of the towers, a “disaster” to which city Police and Fire Departments, Emergency Medical Services, and the Port Authority all responded. The drill followed a real near-disaster that had made news the year before: an Argentine airliner came within ninety seconds of hitting the north tower when it had problems communicating with air traffic controllers. No terrorism was involved.