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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jim Dwyer
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August 14 - August 23, 2023
The answer came at 10:07, eight minutes after the collapse of the south tower. The pilot of Aviation 14, Tim Hayes, replied with a grim forecast. “Advise everybody to evacuate the area in the vicinity of Battery Park City,” said Hayes. “About fifteen floors down from the top, it looks like it’s glowing red. It’s inevitable.”
No matter how many times the police dispatcher repeated that message, none of the firefighters in the north tower—by a factor of ten, the largest group of rescuers in the building—had radios that could hear those reports. Indeed, many of them could not hear reports from their own commanders. The ESU police officers did spread the word as they evacuated, urging everyone they saw, firefighters and civilians and other rescuers, to leave at once.
“Be advised, just not one hundred percent sure—but it does appear that the top of the tower might possibly be leaning at this time,” Hayes said.
“The remaining tower, the north tower is leaning to the southwest at this time,” Hayes said. “It appears to be buckling in the southwest corner.”
That was at least the fourth time police officers in helicopters had broadcast warnings of ominous conditions at the top of the towers, yet another dire message carried solely on police channels. The rescue workers of New York City did not have a system for sharing that information: no common frequencies, no practice of working together at command posts, nothing they could count on beyond the serendipity of an encounter with someone carrying the right radio. Fred Ill, the captain of Ladder Company 2, who had radioed dispatchers early in the crisis to remind them about getting firefighters on
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The hotel lobby also became a launchpad for the arriving firefighters, many of whom had never worked in that part of Manhattan and knew little of the layout of the trade center.
Then it came: a rumble, the crashes, the blotting out of light, as if a cosmic drain had suddenly been opened, sucking away the ordinary, familiar shapes of everyday life.
Michael Benfante and John Cerquiera from the communications company Network Plus had carried the Port Authority marketing analyst Tina Hansen from the 68th floor in an evacuation chair, a rolling buggy that can slide down stairs for adults who normally use wheelchairs to get around.
John Abruzzo, a quadriplegic from a diving accident, had come down from the 69th floor in an evacuation chair flanked by ten of his colleagues from the Port Authority—Michael
The policeman stepped closer to Gertler, and whispered into his face. “You don’t understand,” he said. “The building is going to collapse.” That sounded like madness to Gertler, but having been told twice to get out, he turned and headed down the stairs.
Gertler looked to the south, toward the Marriott Hotel, which seemed to have been split open. He could see inside the rooms. How could that be? The south tower he could not see. But it had to be there.
“This looks really, really bad,” he said. “I know,” said Iliana. “This is bad for the country; it looks like World War Three.”
Lucas would remember that firefighters ran past, screaming at him to just drop the man and go, but the next documented hand on Rappa belonged to Pat Kelly, a firefighter from Squad 18.
For the group carrying John Rappa, the best way seemed to be a dash onto the plaza, directly from the mezzanine—to take their chances on the plummeting bodies and the peels of aluminum skin of the building that seemed to float and wobble toward the ground, giving the illusion of delicacy.
Go, said Jonas. At the 4th floor, though, Josephine Harris could not. Her fallen arches had collapsed. They were so close to getting out.
It is now 10:28, 102 minutes since the nose of American Airlines Flight 11 shot into the 98th floor of the north tower. The bangs are distant, then grow nearer and louder, and in stairway B, Josephine Harris and the men hear the approaching collapse: a bowling ball rolling down the steps. They curl in corners, or grab doors to use the frame as shelter, but the doors are hard to budge. The building is twisting. So are the door frames. Jonas pulls at the door from inside the 4th floor. It will not open. He yanks again, and it springs open, and the wind blasts ahead of the collapse—not a gust,
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He speaks at the moment of death, particularly for those at the top of the north tower, the 1,000 or so people who survived the crash of Flight 11 at 8:46 but have not been able to find an open staircase. Their fate was sealed nearly four decades earlier, when the stairways were clustered in the core of the building, and fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space. The top floors of the north tower, weakened by the unabated, uncontained fire, now crater in a tremendous rush. As the floors fall, they pick up speed: ten stories in a single second.
As the floors drop, the air has nowhere to go. So much of a skyscraper is nothing but air, empty spaces filled by people in buildings like 1 and 2 World Trade Center, putting little pieces of their daily lives onto these platforms.
Here is a desk drawer where Dianne DeFontes keeps her sensible shoes. The rack where Raffaele Cava first hung his hat, thirty years earlier. The couch in Frank De Martini’s office where his aides’ children nap on their afternoon at Daddy’s job. The big table up in Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, where the wealthy young men and women dine out of paper bags on Junk Food Fridays. The flower vases in Windows on the World that Christine Olender checks, so that the well-set tables of crystal and linen are as pleasing to the eye as the forty-mile vista of city and harbor, river and road.
They pry open a door, but it goes nowhere: they huddle, alive, in the last intact stub of the World Trade Center. Above them is only sky.
All across the northeastern United States, people were essentially on their own, stepping into the first minutes of a new epoch without the protections of an old world order whose institutions and functions seemed to have turned instantly decrepit.
Little of that reality emerged in the early days following September 11. In the haze of grief, the nation simply was staggering from the loss of life and the shock of realizing that it was now the single most desirable target for terrorists. In a world where zealots could see only icons to smash, the attacks made sense; in a world where people like Dianne DeFontes sat alone in an empty law office, eating yogurt and answering phones, the idea that the attack had fallen on the representatives of a superpower seemed hallucinatory.
In the first telling of the story of the trade center rescue, civilians played little role, except as helpless victims who were saved by the police and firefighters. That civilians had collaborated in the rescue—and indeed had been instrumental in saving many people on the high floors—simply did not make the early chronicles.
A few months after the Titanic went down, George Bernard Shaw commented that the disaster had led to an “explosion of outrageous romantic lying.”
One plane crash. Sixteen minutes later, another plane crash. Twenty-five minutes later, word of a third plane approaching—untrue, but certainly not outside the freshly staked borders of the plausible. Then, about thirty minutes after that, the first building falls. Twenty-nine minutes later, it was over. It was as if a car going ninety miles per hour were making a ninety-degree turn every few minutes. Each moment brought fresh demands, fresh hell. Speed
For no good reason, firefighters were cut off from critical information. This was as much a matter of long and bad habit as it was of the extreme circumstances.
The Fire Department’s reports after the 1993 trade center bombing had highlighted the poor coordination and communication among the emergency agencies.
Indeed, federal investigators concluded that it had been primarily the impact of the planes and, more specifically, the extreme fires that spread in their wake, that had caused the buildings to fall, and nothing that they termed a “design” flaw.
These assurances were reaffirmed after the 1993 bombing and again only a week before September 11. In a matter of minutes, the unthinkable had become inevitable.
The thickness of the fireproofing applied to the floors in two of the world’s tallest buildings seemed to have been based on little more than a hunch.
But the towers had not been built using seventeen-foot lengths of steel; the actual pieces in the floors were at least twice that length. When a thirty-five-foot length of steel, the true size used in constructing the floors, was tested in 2004, the federal investigators found that the fireproofing could not provide two hours of protection. Long before September 11, the floors in two of the world’s landmark skyscrapers had been more vulnerable to fire than was thought.
The revisions in New York had another dimension, one that was little remarked on by the new code’s champions in politics and the news media. In 1968, the city reduced the number of stairways required for tall buildings by half, and eliminated fire towers—reinforced stairs that would provide a smoke-free way to escape during an emergency.
By the time the codes were changed in 1968, though, more than fifty years had passed since young women, with no other way out, had gone to the windows of a building two miles from the trade center site to escape the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. At the start of the twenty-first century, young men and women in the prime of their days were, once again, leaping from windows to escape the heat of a tall building. The hijackers—and history—had left them no other way out.
“On the morning of September 11, 2001, the last, best hope for the community of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center rested not with national policymakers but with private firms and local public servants,” a staff report from the 9/11 Commission stated.
Even Roko Camaj, the window washer with the keys to the roof and an inside knowledge of the building, had not been able to get out. Indeed, above the 78th floor, only four people survived: Richard Fern and Ronald DiFrancesco found a staircase that was, relatively speaking, intact.
Others in that staircase survived the collapse, but could not escape. Mike Warchola, the fire captain on his last day of work, radioed from the rubble that he was around the 12th floor, although the staircase no longer went that high. It is likely that he was among the group that had stopped to help Judith Reese, the woman with asthma from Frank De Martini’s office. None of them made it out. In all, 2,753 people were killed at the trade center.
The immediate challenges these people faced were not geopolitical but intensely local: how, for instance, to open a jammed door, or navigate a flaming hallway, or climb dozens of flights of stairs. Civilians or rescuers, they had to take care of themselves and those around them.
The ferocity of the attacks meant that innocent people lived or died because they stepped back from a doorway, or hopped onto a closing elevator, or simply shifted their weight from one foot to another.
At least 1,500 people in the trade center—and possibly many more—survived the initial crashes but died because they were unable to escape from their floors or elevators while the buildings stood.
With 102 minutes in the north tower, and 57 minutes in the south, thousands of people had time to evacuate, and did.
Could the buildings withstand the direct impact of an airplane? Was the fireproofing adequate? Were there enough exits?
Approximately 12,000 people—nearly everyone below the crash zones—got out, creating an encyclopedia of survival: the towers stood long enough, the office workers formed a mass of civility, the responders helped steer and steady them.
In December 2002, Deborah Mardenfeld, who had been among the first people injured, left New York University’s Rusk Institute, where she had relearned how to use her shattered legs. She had been at the corner of Church and Vesey streets on her way to work at American Express when she was hit by cascading debris as the second plane hit the south tower. That morning, she arrived, unidentified and barely alive, at NYU Downtown Hospital as Jane Doe No. 1. Fifteen months later, she was the last of the 4,400 injured to go home.
Everything that once sat above and around the train station had disappeared. Trains rolled in and out, but the platform, swept every moment by wind and memory, could never be merely a place to catch a train.
How many people had actually jumped from either of the towers? And in many of the cases was “jumping” an accurate depiction of what bodies at 98.6 degrees do reflexively when confronted by 1,000-degree heat?
In one section, the analysts found that the towers should have had four exit staircases under the 1968 New York City building code, not just the three that were in each building. The planes’ impact had destroyed those three escape stairwells in the north tower, and two of the three in the south tower.
The NIST investigators also located notes showing that the Port Authority saw advantages in the new code because it required fewer exits and less fireproofing.
The interviews had been ordered in the fall of 2001 by Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, who sought to preserve accurate recollections before they were refashioned by collective memory.
The city finally argued that much of the oral histories were opinions and not public records. The newspaper sued, under New York’s freedom of information law, and in April 2005 the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ordered that the materials be released.
Radio communications were spotty. Each unit was forced to fend for itself.
