Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11: A gripping biography of triumph over tragedy

by Mitchell Zuckoff

Jay leapt to an inescapable conclusion, one that would be overwhelmingly shared among his colleagues: from a firefighting standpoint, the numbers didn’t compute. Jay felt confident that the men of Ladder 6 and the rest of the FDNY would do whatever they could, whatever their bosses asked of them, whatever the public needed of them, but they couldn’t defeat this fire. At most, they could limit its spread until, in a best-case scenario, it burned itself out while they rescued as many people as they could. Jay also understood that the great vertical distance between the ground and the fire meant that many, perhaps most, of the thousands of civilians inside the tower would be forced to rely on themselves and one another if they were to escape.