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

by Jim Dwyer

For all the spears launched, however, the city did not organize a single joint drill involving all the emergency responders at the trade center in the eight years after the 1993 attack. The last joint drill appears to have been the one held in 1982, preparations for a plane crash that did not come for nineteen years.

Some emergency-response experts and politicians suggested that the location of the bunker was unwise, given the trade center’s status as a terrorist target, but the mayor brushed off the critics as people mired in the “old ways” of thinking.

Now, the first time the bunker was truly needed, the agency and its officials were homeless. They arranged to relocate to a specially outfitted command bus that had been prepared as a backup headquarters. The redundancy in the planning, however—to use a phrase popular in emergency-management circles—only served to reinforce the misjudgment of the original arrangement.

The radios were new and ready to use. It was just that no one outside OEM was willing to talk on them yet. The fire chiefs kept them in the trunks of their cars. As for the police chiefs, the radios never left the shelves.

So many people from the upper floors were jumping, even now, just minutes after the crash, that the chief went over to the public-address system, not realizing it had been rendered inoperable by the plane. “Please don’t jump,” he spoke into the dead microphone. “We’re coming up for you.”

Finally Chief Callan, the assistant chief who was Hayden’s boss, tried to establish a baseline. Just how bad was this communication gap? He got on the radio, using code to identify his rank. “Four David to any unit Tower 1, upper floor,” he called out. “Four David to any unit Tower 1, upper floor.” If there was an answer, he could not hear it.

A founding principle of the modern skyscraper is the presumption that it will resist and contain fire. No one can stream a hose of water at the 60th floor of a tower, more than 700 feet above the ground. Tall buildings have to be capable of putting any fires out, or at least come close to it. The lives of the people inside rely on that principle.

Once the towers were open, the Port Authority refused to permit natural gas lines in the building, concerned for what a fire supplied with potent fuel might do to the structure. The chefs at Windows on the World, one of the nation’s highest grossing restaurants, had to cook using electricity.

Under prevailing theories about the modern, “fireproof” building, the tenants on other floors were in no danger, and did not need to leave. At this moment, no floors in the south tower were on fire. Moreover, people and flaming metal were dropping onto the plaza between the two towers, a common exit point, and the crisis appeared to be confined to the north tower.

The people at the fire-command desk in the south tower lobby had no view whatsoever of the fire that raged in the north tower. They could not look directly into the gaping holes of the north tower, as tenants on the upper floor of the south tower could; they did not see people step up to the windows in the north tower and jump, some holding hands; the papers on their desks were not singed, as they were in offices on the 98th floor.

In all, each tower had ninety-nine elevators, all of them built and installed by Otis Elevators, the company that made the modern skyscraper into a practical reality.

One of the lower-tier reasons for the “defend in place” strategy, according to the National Fire Protection Agency, was to avoid disruption to businesses. Closing the trade center was not something anyone would dare order casually, as Maikish had discovered in 1993.

Earlier this week tempers flared with several people. Don’t feel badly about that. We are all human and this is a stressful time. There is no getting around it. Redouble your efforts at patience. With yourself and your colleagues. A

Yesterday, Jennifer and Abdel’s daughters took a nap on the couch in my office. There, in front of me, lay the hopes of humanity. Don’t let this net lease keep us from seeing a much, much bigger and more important picture. —Frank

Someone switched on the radio, and a disk jockey was making jokes about how drunk the pilot must have been to crash into the trade center.

Help had arrived and almost certainly it was Ortiz and De Martini; any official rescue parties were still mustering in the lobby. With the path to the stairway now clearly marked by the man with the flashlight,

The sprinklers, the fireproofing, the smoke venting systems were all supposed to kick in automatically. This network of emergency systems succumbed, one by one, on September 11, replaced by a lethal web of obstacles. Only when people like De Martini and his crew took it upon themselves to attack those barriers—broken rubble, stuck doors, disorientation—could people go free.

And below 92, across all or parts of ten floors, dozens of people had been unable to open doors, or walk through burning corridors to the stairs and find their way past the rubble. Then help appeared. With crowbar, flashlight, hardhat, and big mouths, De Martini and Ortiz and their colleagues had pushed back the boundary line between life and death.

In the riot of papers and debris scattered by the first airplane strike, Sheehan spotted a single sheet that looked interesting. He picked it up. It was an itinerary for someone traveling to Los Angeles. The realization slammed into his mind. That had not been the crash of a little Cessna. “Oh, my God,” Sheehan said. “It was a commercial plane.” At that moment, he and the woman he had been helping heard the roar of yet another one.

As he spoke, Praimnath spun his seat around so he was facing in the direction of the window, though he was not staring out. His window looked south over New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, the light trails of froth cut in the slate-colored water by the steady traffic of ships and tugs and ferries. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed an unfamiliar shape on the horizon. Praimnath turned slightly, to look square out the window. An airplane. It was heading toward his office, toward his window, it seemed. He could see the red and blue marking and the letter U as it approached. He dived under his desk, screaming to God, as his colleague in Chicago listened on the phone and watched the television screen in horror.

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.

By the middle of the twentieth century, real estate values on the southern tip of Manhattan had dwindled, and the area had lost the vigor that carried it from New York’s earliest days as a Dutch port.

The job of building the trade center became the work of what was then known as the Port of New York Authority, an agency that had access to mighty rivers of cash—it operated many of the toll bridges and tunnels in the region—and was under the control of the governors of New York and New Jersey through a board of directors. Not coincidentally, the governor of New York then was Nelson Rockefeller, David’s brother.

The reason the Port Authority turned to the new code for its big project was simple: it would make the trade center much cheaper to build.

In March 1911, about two miles from where the World Trade Center would be built, 146 people died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A locked exit door had trapped scores; a rickety fire escape collapsed, killing others. The image of young girls, leaping to their death from ninth-floor windows because they had no other way to escape the flame and smoke, was seared into the consciousness of that generation and the next.

Fewer Stairwells A change in the New York City building code in 1968 reduced the number of stairwells required in tall buildings. The World Trade Center, completed in 1970, had fewer escape routes than the Empire State Building, completed in 1931.

In 1959, a fire in a stairwell at Our Lady of Angels school in Chicago killed ninety-six children and three nuns.

Finally, just as the Titanic was required by the British Board of Trade to have the same number of lifeboats as a ship one-quarter its size, the building code generally required the same number of exit stairways—three—for a building 75 feet tall as for one 1,350 feet high. So a 110-story skyscraper had to provide no more capacity for escape than a six-story building. The building code’s limited stairway requirements not only embraced the implausibility of a total building evacuation for very tall buildings, but enshrined it.

Complicating matters, two of the three stairwells in each tower did not bring people out to the street, but actually deposited them in the mezzanine lobby, which was “a major building design flaw,” Chief Donald Burns of the Fire Department had noted in a report about the 1993 bombing. These exits to the mezzanine required people to get on escalators to bring them to the street level, causing backups in the stairwells that stretched tens of floors up.

In fact, twenty-three years earlier, when McCormick was first starting work in the trade center, his dad had implored him to find a job elsewhere. Chief McCormick believed that the towers were among the most dangerous buildings in the city. The son regarded his warning as alarmist. Now the father was dead, and the son was trying to avoid looking at the floor numbers, averting his eyes as he moved at shuffle speed, praying that when he looked up he would discover progress. God, he whispered, please let me get to the 25th floor. Then: God, please let me get to the 20th floor.

Michael Hingson, fifty-three, who worked on the 78th floor for a firm that specialized in disaster recovery of data, walked down with his guide dog, Roselle, a three-year-old yellow Labrador. Hingson had been blind since birth. He and Roselle brought David Frank, a guest from California, down with them. All three were offered water.

Heeran had called his father, Bernie Heeran, a retired firefighter, a few minutes after the first plane hit, when the smoke on the 104th floor had already become unforgiving. Bernie Heeran knew his son needed a buffer of fresh air to buy a bit of time so that rescuers might have a chance to reach him. “Get everybody to the roof,” Bernie Heeran told his son. “Go up. Don’t try to go down.”

This order briefly touched off a snit by the height-fearing architect, who had designed the twenty-two-inch windows to comfort those similarly afflicted, but he eventually agreed to increase their width at the top of the building. That created work the automated machine could not do. So Camaj and a partner cleaned those wide windows by hand, sudsing them up as they hung from the side of the building, 1,300 feet in the air, in a basket with harnesses.

Camaj had been featured in a children’s book, Risky Business, and had appeared in a documentary about the building. The book captured Camaj’s fascination with the job, the sense of independence that came from working alone in an isolated setting. “It’s just me and the sky,” he said in the book. “I don’t bother anybody and nobody bothers me.” On September 11, however, as he tried to head for the roof, Camaj was traveling with a crowd.

And the only way to rescue people from the roof was by helicopter, a method that could not be counted on to evacuate masses of people, certainly not anywhere near the number that a single intact staircase could accommodate.

At mandatory fire drills held in the tenant offices every six months, the building fire-safety directors focused solely on safe ways to descend the stairs. While that doctrine had sound reasoning behind it—flame and smoke rise—it overlooks human nature, which drives people to get outside of a building on fire. In the trade center, getting outside either meant the street, a quarter mile down, or it meant the roof, twenty or thirty flights up.

Even if there had been, hundreds of people still might have headed up the stairs on September 11. They faced the brutal truth that all the planners and drills had evaded. They had nowhere else to go. The roof offered fresh air. There was no ceiling to collapse, no furniture to burn, no floors to buckle. It seemed like a place removed from the hazard, a holding station that might buy time until rescuers arrived.

The roof offered fresh air. There was no ceiling to collapse, no furniture to burn, no floors to buckle. It seemed like a place removed from the hazard, a holding station that might buy time until rescuers arrived. A rooftop had often served as a refuge in terrible New York fires.

Martin Wortley of Cantor Fitzgerald told his brother over the phone that he was hoping to leave by helicopter, and would head up the stairs in the north tower. Those who had been in the towers when the bomb had gone off in 1993 had heard countless times about how the helicopters had settled softly on the roofs and carried people to safety.

Those who had been in the towers when the bomb had gone off in 1993 had heard countless times about how the helicopters had settled softly on the roofs and carried people to safety. Bob Mattson, a banker with Fiduciary Trust International and now trapped in the south tower, had been one of those lifted to safety that day. It had been the work of Police Department pilots, but for many, it had been an earthly approximation of heavenly intercession. This was nothing like 1993, Detective Greg Semendinger thought as he and his copilot, Officer James Ciccone, circled the buildings in Aviation 6, one of the smaller police helicopters.

This was nothing like 1993, Detective Greg Semendinger thought as he and his copilot, Officer James Ciccone, circled the buildings in Aviation 6, one of the smaller police helicopters. He had landed a police helicopter on the north tower after the bombing eight years earlier and had lifted people off the roof who could not make it down the stairs. Today, he could barely see the upper floors of either tower. Semendinger and Ciccone had arrived ...

“We’re going to be unable to land on the roof due to the heavy smoke condition at this time,” Hayes radioed in from just off the north tower at 8:58. They had barely stopped talking when Hayes spotted United Flight 175 roaring toward them through the sky. “Jesus Christ, there’s a second plane crashing,” he yelled to Walsh. They pulled up quickly and the plane shot beneath them, bursting through the south tower, and sending a giant ball of flame coughing out the other side. Within minutes, the roof of that tower had also vanished behind the smoke.

By nightfall, eight helicopters were ferrying ESU teams to the roofs of both towers. The cops descended through the buildings to escort the aged or infirm up the stairs. When the commander of the Aviation Unit later recorded the events of the day, he recalled the amazed faces of exhausted firefighters who had climbed for two hours and more, only to find fresh teams of police officers coming down the stairs.

A month after the bombing, the New York City Fire Chiefs Association sent Mayor David N. Dinkins a letter. “This was nothing more than sheer grandstanding, a cheap publicity stunt done at the expense of public safety,” the chiefs wrote. “The people removed via helicopter were in no danger until the Police Department arrived and gravely jeopardized their safety by this stupid act.” The tenants simply should have waited for the smoke to clear and then walked down the stairs. At least, that was how the chiefs saw it.

So urgent was the need to breathe that people piled four and five high in window after window, their upper bodies hanging out, 1,300 feet above the ground. They were in an unforgiving place.

Many of those who did not jump or fall from the windows were heaped in stacks along the frames, just as another generation had at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire ninety years earlier. This time, helicopter pilots broadcast descriptions of what they were seeing. Kelhetter: Aviation 3 has a couple of people hanging off the windows about five floors from the top. There’s at least fifty people hanging on. An

From his helicopter, Greg Semendinger saw just the highest order of desperation. Get to the roof, he wanted to yell, as he flew closer to the building. Another order came from the ground, this time from an ESU lieutenant, Steve Reardon: Reardon: Be advised that no one is to rappel onto the top of the building.

But Semendinger held out some hope. From his vantage point, the northwest corner of the north tower roof was pretty clear of smoke. Unfortunately, the automatic window-washing machine had stopped on its rooftop track at that precise location, making a landing impossible.

The only remaining option, and it was a long shot, would be to lower the hoist and perhaps pull up a few people from the roof. It would take patience. Only two people at a time could be lifted because of the 600-pound weight limit.

Semendinger knew that if anyone did make it to the roof, imploring him for help, he would face a torturous choice. His life. The lives of his crew. Those of the people on the roof. As it turned out, the decision was made for him.