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

by Jim Dwyer

While she listened, Beverly dialed 911 on another line. The operators who fielded her calls and others’ said that emergency crews were on their way. Hang in there. No one had told the operators that stairway A in the south tower—the one that Richard Fern and his Euro Brokers colleagues had gone down—was open, so they could not tell anyone inside the building to use it. Instead, while they spoke, the operators typed shorthand versions of what they were hearing onto a computer screen.

The roof access doors had to be left unlocked. If they were connected to a buzzer system, they were supposed to be fail-safe—meaning that they would automatically unlock if power failed or calamity struck. The trade center, however, was exempt from the code. The Port Authority had decided to lock the doors and the Fire Department had chosen to go along with that decision, believing that such a policy would reinforce its message that down was the proper way to evacuate in a high-rise fire. As a result, three sets of doors blocked access to the roof in each tower.

There was a problem: the computer that operated the doors was not working properly. ACCESS DENIED, the screen blared. The security agents on 22 could not open the doors to the roof, or to the floors just below it, which were mechanical rooms and also required electronic access. For that matter, they could not even open their own door, from the inside. A deputy security director, George Tabeek, led a team of firefighters up to the 22nd floor in hopes of getting them out.

While some people in the command center at the trade center seemed to know about it, and spoke about it on their walkie-talkies, they could not communicate with the ordinary tenants on the upper floors. Those people did not know that there was a way out by going down—that there was, in fact, a passable staircase. Most of them were dialing not into the basement command center but into the city’s 911 call center—and no one there was aware of the escape route.

The words were calibrated precisely to the task. De Martini was issuing a warning; then he continued what he, Pablo Ortiz, and a few others had been doing for the past half hour, methodically freeing scores of people trapped from the 90th floor down, in offices and elevators just below the impact zone in the north tower. They had been efficient, De Martini and Ortiz, working with a crowbar and a long flashlight, as if rescuing people were the jobs that they had been hired for. The truth was that neither man had a role in the official evacuation or emergency plans for the buildings.

De Martini had seen something in the steel—Drohan was not sure what—that he did not like. The drywall had been knocked off parts of the sky lobby, exposing the elevator shafts, and revealing the core of the building. That had prompted his first radio alert, warning that the elevators might collapse. Now De Martini wanted inspectors from a structural engineering firm to come up to the 78th-floor sky lobby and take a look. He thought Drohan could bring them into the building.

For Frank De Martini to be worried about the structural integrity of even a small part of the World Trade Center was a giant leap. At his most expansive, De Martini could hold forth to young and old on the wonders of the place, the mighty machines that moved fresh air around the buildings, the giant pipes that carried water from the Hudson River for the cooling plant, the emergency generators that would keep computers running should all else fail.

This morning, the flaming balls of fuel, in pursuit of oxygen, raced up and down the shafts in the two buildings, burning many people in the cars, killing some immediately.

The elevator system that had made the trade center and buildings like it possible had become the carrier of devastation.

The six men were trapped by a feature of the trade center most cherished by its designers, and thoroughly despised by firefighters: the long elevator shafts devoted to express service. The firefighters’ objection was not to quick travel or efficient use of space; the problem was that the towers had no provisions for getting into the shafts anywhere but on the floors where the cars made regular stops.

To remove people from a car stalled in one of those shafts posed an enormous challenge: first, to find them—there were fifteen miles of elevator shafts in the towers—and second, to reach them.

Still, the Port Authority had promised after the 1993 catastrophe that it would strictly abide by building codes, and after internal debate, the resistors were installed, along with less controversial items like backup battery power for the lights and communications systems.

Someone warned that the job had to be done carefully, because the cable might be under high tension and could snap. Eisenstadt made the cut, the door slid open, and he and Bucaretti emerged to great jubilation. It had taken a squad of strong men, with access to a toolbox, nearly half an hour of pushing, searching, and snipping to open just one stuck elevator. The complex had 197 others.

For practically everyone still in the towers, including the men on the 78th floor with Trapp, who knew the buildings as well as anyone, the notion that they might collapse would have seemed farfetched indeed. As the towers deteriorated, people who chose to stay—as opposed to those trapped in elevators or on the upper floors—did so for many reasons. Almost universally, it seemed, they did not think the buildings could fall.

There was no further word or sightings of Pete Negron, thirty-four, father of two; or of Carlos DaCosta, forty-one, father of two; or of Pablo Ortiz, forty-nine, father of two; or of Frank De Martini, forty-nine, father of two—four men who worked anonymously for a faceless government bureaucracy. On the morning of September 11, 2001, they tore open walls with crowbars and shined flashlights and pried apart elevator doors on the 90th, 89th, 88th, 86th, and 78th floors, saving the lives of at least seventy people in the north tower. When last heard from, they were on their way to try to free more, no doubt believing that the building they were in would last long beyond their own old age.

One Port Authority police officer thought he saw thirteen people jump in just a matter of seconds. Minutes before, a firefighter, Danny Suhr of Engine 216, had been struck and killed by a body falling from the upper floors.

No one this close to safety wanted to dillydally, including Miller, who felt quite satisfied with his intuitions at this point. He had almost gone back upstairs with the others when the public-address system in the south tower said that it was safe. But he had not felt completely right about it, so he turned around and left. As a result, he had been on the 55th floor when the second jet ripped through the offices of his company on 80. Now, with his feelings proving 100 percent reliable, Miller had another one. He felt like clapping his hands, and so he did, rhythmically. It was nervous energy. He wasn’t trying to tell anyone to hurry up, at least not consciously. He was just having a hard time keeping himself occupied while he waited.

This was the rapid, full-building evacuation that had never been written into the trade center’s design or into the manual of its daily operations. Total evacuations were not part of life in tall buildings in the United States, so the plans did not envision thousands of people weaving down the three staircases in each tower.

Perry had only recently decided to leave the department to pursue a career in the law. Indeed, that morning he had been blocks away, literally handing in his retirement papers at Police Headquarters, when news spread that a plane had hit the trade center. Perry, in street clothes, asked the clerk for his badge back. He rushed downstairs to a police supply shop on the first floor, bought a thirty-five-dollar golf shirt with an NYPD logo and raced to the scene.

Most of the seventy-five stores had closed soon after the planes hit, giving the windowless concourse an eerie, tomblike quality as people sprinted through the corridors and sloshed through water that was ankle deep at points.

To keep the promise of “meeting or exceeding” the code, the Port Authority’s executive director, Charles Maikish, and its chief engineer, Frank Lombardi, took over space occupied by a record store, a five-and-dime, a restaurant, a bankrupt department store. These were demolished and turned into corridors, part of $34 million in improvements to the concourse. They had done underground what could not be done to the towers themselves: given more people better chances to get out.

The few PATH trains already en route at 8:46 had simply sped through the trade center station and headed back out without ever opening their doors, thanks to quick reflexes by the dispatcher.

As they ascended, they passed a Borders bookstore that filled the prime retail space at 5 World Trade Center, at the corner of Church and Vesey Streets.

The firefighters did not earn in a year what some baseball players got for a game, but here they were, charging into the teeth of the fire, driven by a collective sense of duty that tempered their individual fear.

Moreover, air-traffic-control officials in New York knew no more about the attacks than anyone watching television—and sometimes, less. Controllers at La Guardia Airport, unaware of the hijackings, had continued to send out flights until 9:07, five minutes after the second plane had struck the south tower, and nearly an hour after the first plane had been hijacked.

“I need the military,” Sheirer barked into his radio to a subordinate. He also wanted a message sent to the police helicopters circling overhead. Tell the pilots, he said, that under no circumstances could they allow another plane to hit the towers. Since the helicopters were not loaded with weaponry that could actually bring down a 767, what was Sheirer actually asking them to do? Fly into the path of a jumbo jet? Later, he would cite the order as a mark of the desperation that swept through the lobby in those moments.

More than 1,000 firefighters were now fighting for airtime on the same four or five channels, breeding considerable interference. Worse, the channels they were using in the north tower did not benefit from the amplification of the repeater, which had been abandoned because the chiefs had decided it was malfunctioning.

The impact zone of the south tower was closer to the ground than the ruined floors of the north; the nose of Flight 175 had entered at the 81st floor, sixteen floors lower than Flight 11 in the north tower.

The catastrophe could be seen for miles with the naked eye, across oceans and continents on television. To rescuers at the very base of the towers, the fires appeared to be in another world. They blazed so far beyond them, 1,000 vertical feet in the north tower, 800 in the south, they might have been looking at the light from distant, dying stars.

In one potentially critical area, the fire operations in the south tower differed from those in the north. Somehow, with enough fiddling, Palmer had been able to speak over his portable radio with his commander in the lobby of the south tower, using the specially amplified “repeater” channel. The chiefs in the other tower were having no similar success in communicating, although the same repeater served both buildings; in fact, the north tower commanders had stopped using the channel boosted by the repeater, believing that it was not working.

Like the chocks carried in his helmet, Palmer’s ability with radios was no accident. While working full time as a firefighter, he had earned an associate degree in electrical engineering, and had written technical articles about the use of two-way radios inside high-rise buildings and subways. Still, none of the clever equipment or advanced study would mean a thing unless he could get higher in the building, another forty floors above the first forty.

The evidence suggests that by this moment, about 9:30, fewer than 1,000 of the trade center workers had not yet left the building; of these, 600 would never leave. Perhaps 200 were already dead, killed when the plane hit.

He asked a friend, Jack Edelstein, to attend to some of his personal business. With every breath becoming a struggle, he asked Edelstein to pray with him. “Why don’t you say it and I’ll listen and say it along with you?” Edelstein said. “Of David. A psalm,” Biegeleisen began, speaking in Hebrew. “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it, the world and those that live in it … .”

Now, three decades after his big night out with Kitty, he was back in the trade center, once again on the 40th floor, collecting an elevator full of people—bleeding, broken, battered. The building he had come to in muscular youth was dying.

So poor was the coordination with other emergency agencies that fire dispatchers actually had to dial back into 911 themselves in order to reach police dispatchers.

The word had not gotten back to the fire commanders, to the 911 call center, or to broadcasters, so the information that stairway A was available did not circle back to the places where it might have done some good. Like the lifeboats that left the Titanic half-empty, stairway A remained little used.

An engineer from the Department of Buildings reported that the structural damage appeared to be immense. The stability of both buildings was compromised. In particular, the engineer was worried about how long the north tower would stand.

The emergency operations center had been shut because of fears that terrorists would fly a third plane into it. The expensive 800-megahertz interagency radios were all in the trunks of cars, unused, because no one with clout in the city government ever got around to pressing the issue. Peruggia himself was not carrying a fire ground radio that morning, because his ordinary assignment did not call for it. In the world capital of communications, he had only one way to get the engineer’s assessment to the chief of the Fire Department: to send a messenger dodging across acres of flaming debris and falling bodies. He would have to deliver this warning in person.

In this division of labor, no one had the quotidian task of shepherding people from the buildings to the ambulances. Moira Smith, policewoman, joined the security guards, firefighters, and Port Authority bureaucrats who had taken that job upon themselves.

By now, about ten minutes to ten, nearly fifty minutes after the south tower had been hit, a line of molten aluminum was pouring from a window on the corner of the 80th floor: the airplane was melting.

Fourteen floors up, a man on the 102nd floor was speaking to a 911 operator. He was a young man, he said. He had children. He did not want to die. He pleaded his case over and over: He did not want to die. He did not want to die. Suddenly, his words were drowned out by crashing noises, a terrible scream, an even worse silence.

In a span of ten seconds, the south tower pulverized itself and became a mammoth cloud of dust that blasted into the base of the north tower, curling up the shafts and stairways of its twin. Geometry dissolved, the two buildings had met.

Scientists would struggle later to describe the burst of power in terms that ordinary people could grasp. It was equal to 1 percent of a nuclear bomb. It was enough power to supply all the homes in Atlanta or Oakland or Miami for one hour. It was so strong, the earth shuddered in waves that were captured on a seismograph in Lisbon, New Hampshire, 265 miles distant. Yet it made no sense in the building next door.

Hanna carried a pager that sent not only phone messages, but also news headlines. For some reason, it had kept working through the descent. Hanna knew that terrorists had taken over airliners and were crashing them into buildings. He knew, as he neared the 27th floor, that the south tower had collapsed. Hanna did some calculations in his head. Everyone was leaving as quickly as possible. They were reasonably calm. If he spread word of the collapse, what would be gained? Nothing, he decided. And panic might set in. He held his tongue.

Pfeifer assumed there had been a local collapse; he had no idea that the other building had fallen to the ground. All morning, institutional prerogatives and customs and obstinacy had blanketed him and his colleagues in a thick fog of ignorance. The people fighting the two worst building fires in the nation’s history had no video monitors. No radio communications with other agencies. No way to get reports from police helicopters and only a limited ability to communicate among themselves.

At their feet, Pfeifer and his group found Father Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain who had been alongside them all morning, murmuring prayers. They opened his collar, felt no pulse.

While some firefighters in trouble gave mayday calls, there is no clear evidence that any chief specifically issued that most urgent of distress warnings.

Firefighter Rich Billy, in need of a break, had been left on the 27th floor by Lieutenant Hansson. Billy continued the ritual of clearing each floor—he counted eight people still on 27, including Beyea in his wheelchair and Zelmanowitz—and the firefighter felt he had taken over responsibility for Beyea. Billy recognized Captain Burke, an officer he had once worked with, and told him that he had taken charge of Beyea. It was evident that Rich Billy, on his own, could do little to evacuate Beyea.

Young was similarly mystified about why the doors were suddenly so easy to open. He would find out later that the collapse of the south tower had knocked out the power in its twin, and disabled the motor that normally kept the doors from opening between floors.

Yet the lack of coordination among the agencies, particularly between the Police and Fire Departments, would have other costs.