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

by Mitchell Zuckoff

Five feet from the door, Jay felt a rumble, far worse than when the South Tower fell. The floor heaved. The time was 10:28 a.m., just over two hours after the hijacking of American Flight 11. Jay lunged for the stairwell doorknob and pulled, but it wouldn’t open. He tugged again with all his might. The door swung toward him and Jay dived through, onto the fourth-floor landing of Stairwell B, nearly crashing into Tiller Man Matt Komorowski, who stood wide-eyed as the world rocked and rattled beneath his feet. The rest of Ladder 6 and Josephine were lower, on the steps approaching the third floor and below. Jay didn’t know what was happening, but he knew it was bad. Almost a hundred stories above him, fires had weakened the building’s bones: steel floor trusses and core and exterior steel support columns. The south exterior wall became unstable. The wall automatically tried to shift its load to the core columns and adjacent exterior columns, but they’d been fatally weakened, too, and they couldn’t bear the extra burden. The upper floors sagged, pulling the exterior steel columns inward. Everything above the impact zone tilted to the south. Gravity went to work. The North Tower began to collapse on itself.