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

by Mitchell Zuckoff

Also worrisome were the techniques used to stop or at least slow a fire from weakening the spindly steel frames that supported the towers’ floors. Because the floor system was so original, neither the new nor the old New York City codes included regulations that addressed the engineers’ plans to use sprayed-on fire retardants. Special tests could have determined those answers, but no one conducted them. In the end, Port Authority officials essentially guessed at what type of fire-resistant material to use and how much to apply to prevent the steel floor supports from buckling in a blaze. Initially, they insisted that the fireproofing was adequate, and that each floor was built to be airtight. If a fire did break out, they said, it would be locally contained and cause limited damage. Later, however, they installed a sprinkler system, too.

As the towers rose into the clouds, their size demanded that attention be paid. Positioned on a diagonal from each other, the buildings stood 131 feet apart, about the distance of a third baseman’s throw to first. Each exterior wall spanned 208 feet. The North Tower rose 1,368 feet, an imperceptible six feet taller than its twin, and its flat roof sprouted a 360-foot television and radio antenna. On clear days, visitors to an indoor observation deck on the 107th floor of the South Tower could see parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Windows on the World, in the North Tower, came with similar views plus fine wine and pricey food that earned mixed reviews.

By the summer of 2001, occupancy remained high and the buildings’ future seemed assured. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had endured early trials and a terrorist attack to become icons approaching a comfortable middle age. Still uninspiring, perhaps, but undeniable symbols of American ingenuity and financial might, as synonymous with New York as the Eiffel Tower was to Paris or the pyramids to Egypt.

The World Trade Center hummed with the usual activity of a normal Tuesday morning in September. Roughly 8,900 people were at work or visiting the North Tower.

The time was 8:46 a.m. AT THAT MOMENT, terrorist pilot Mohamed Atta gripped the controls inside the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 11. Thirty-two minutes had elapsed since the takeover began. After flying the Boeing 767 the full length of Manhattan island, Atta pointed the hijacked jet toward his target: the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES AFTER TAKEOFF, CARRYING EIGHTY-SEVEN hostages, five tons of cargo, ten thousand gallons of fuel, and five terrorists, American Airlines Flight 11 completed its forced conversion from a passenger jet into a 283,600-pound guided missile. Its nose aimed slightly downward, its right wing tipped upward, the silver Boeing 767 with red, white, and blue stripes and “AA” on its tail smashed into the north face of the North Tower at 8:46:40 a.m. Its violent arrival carved an airplane-shaped gash in the steel and glass that stretched at an angle from the 93rd to the 99th floor. As it entered the building, what remained of Flight 11 sliced through thirty-five exterior steel columns and heavily damaged two more. It severed six core columns and damaged three others. It shattered at least 166 windows. It broke the concrete floor slabs of the 95th and 96th floors eighty feet deep into the building. It launched a fusillade of flying debris that knocked or scraped fire-retarding insulation from forty-three core columns. It stripped the insulation from sixty thousand square feet of steel floor supports over several floors. It severed pipes that fed water into the fire sprinkler system. It stopped elevators in motion and cut off elevator service to at least the sixty upper stories. It sent glass and metal and office contents and body parts raining down a thousand feet to the plaza and the streets below. It altered the path of American and world history. All that damage too...

The crash immediately killed everyone on board Flight 11 and an unknown number in the plane’s path. But that was only the beginning. As the plane blasted through the tower’s core, it crushed the walls of all three emergency stairwells in its path, cutting off stair access to everyone on the 92nd floor and above. At the moment of impact, an estimated 1,355 people were inside those nineteen uppermost floors. That included roughly two hundred people dining or working at Windows on the World and attending a technology conference on the 106th floor. The survivors on those floors had no way down and no way out, although many didn’t yet know it.

Yet despite the damage, despite the death and destruction, in the immediate aftermath of the assault, the North Tower still stood. It absorbed the unthinkable blow, bending and swaying but not breaking. Even with its relatively spindly design and sparing use of steel, the tower had what engineers call “reserve capacity” that allowed it to support a far greater load than its own weight plus the weight of people and furnishings. When Flight 11 severed more than forty exterior and core support columns, the building instantly and automatically redistributed the load to undamaged neighboring columns. That kept the North Tower upright and prevented the immediate deaths of survivors in and above the impact zone, as well as more than seventy-five hundred men and women on lower floors who streamed toward undamaged stairwells to try to escape. With its load redistributed, the tower could have remained standing indefinitely, potentially allowing rescue workers to reach everyone who survived the initial damage. If not for the fires, that is.

Despite the explosions, less than half of the ten thousand gallons of jet fuel from Flight 11 burned in the initial fiery blasts. The rest sprayed through the impact floors and nourished fires that consumed combustibles from the plane and the office furnishings. Those fires fed off fresh air that flowed into the torn-open building. As flames gathered strength and spread, trapped survivors rushed toward sealed and broken windows in desperation. At the same time, the fires began to threaten the remaining support columns that already carried a heavier-than-normal load from their broken neighbors. Meanwhile, fires licked at the exposed steel of floor supports that were shorn of their fire-retarding insulation.

Building fires typically don’t get hot enough to melt structural steel columns, even relatively thin ones. But long before steel reaches its melting point, it loses strength. The weaker a steel column gets, the less able it is to carry its assigned or reassigned load. Similarly, fires could make unprotected steel floor supports sag, adding stress and pulling down on the exterior and core columns to which they were attached. Ultimately, if the structural steel in the impact zone became hot enough for long enough, or was forced to carry too much added weight, it would buckle. If that happened, everything above the impact zone would come crashing downward, creating an enormous moving mass that could overwhelm the entire North Tower. Put simply, it could cause total collapse.

Before Elaine could think, before she could act, a fireball of ignited jet fuel traveled down an elevator shaft and burst through the elevator doors. It illuminated the hallway with a brilliant orange flash of dragon’s breath. It consumed Elaine. The fire seemed to touch every part of her at once, as though she’d leapt into a cauldron, a scorching immersion that bathed her in unspeakable heat. Certain that she was about to die, Elaine screamed: “God save me!” The fire considered her open mouth to be an invitation to scorch Elaine’s lungs.

In simplified terms, ladder companies climb into buildings to find victims and create ventilation, while engine companies pump water.

he reminded firefighters of an essential truth about their work: “You show up, you put one foot in front of another. You get on the rig and you go out and you do the job, which is a mystery and a surprise. You have no idea when you get on that rig, no matter how big the call, no matter how small,

Fire had consumed the woman’s pants, blouse, and underwear. A zipper ran up her blackened chest, fused with her ruined skin. Dark tufts of fried hair sprouted from her head. A metal clip had melted against her scalp. Her eyelids were slits, clamped shut from burns or swelling. She shuffled forward. Her hands reached out, her twisted fingernails scorched white from heat.

She said she’d been waiting outside the North Tower for a shuttle to the ferry when she burst into flames. She didn’t know how or why.

As he stared toward the Twin Towers, Jay felt the strange and unfamiliar sensation of being overwhelmed. He’d spent years studying fire, learning its destructive ways and plotting creative, disciplined responses to every kind of catastrophe he could think of. Now, looking through a windshield the size of a big-screen television, Jay had a view that shamed his imagination: orange flames and gray-black smoke blasted from an enormous, angled hole in the topmost quarter of the North Tower, polluting a sky that had been as crystalline as a mountain lake. “Buckle up!” he called to his men. “We’re going to work.”

We have twenty floors of fire, Jay thought. As Chauffeur Mike Meldrum wove through traffic, and as rapid-fire voices on the truck’s radio confirmed the horror awaiting them, Jay’s mind raced. He didn’t know the exact point of impact, but he estimated that the lowest fire floor was about a thousand feet in the air, and he knew that each floor of the tower covered about forty thousand square feet, or nearly an acre.

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.

Dunn’s calculations meant that a team of firefighters like Jay’s unit could, at best, hope to defeat a fire in one corner of one upper floor of a building like the North Tower. That is, if they could reach it and had enough water to spray on it. Multiply that by a hundred, or a thousand, and the impossibility of the situation came into focus.

Even more disturbing and more prophetic were Dunn’s conclusions, published on the same pages, about how firefighters should expect panicked civilians to react: “People trapped in a burning high-rise who can’t be reached by your tallest ladder will leap to their death; they’ll try to escape by climbing down ropes or knotted bedsheets, and fall while doing so; they’ll scribble notes in desperation, telling of their location, and drop them from smoky windows; they’ll leave their last cries for help recorded on the telephones of dispatchers.”

At a melted desk beside the elevators sat the charred remains of a security guard, his badge still visible on his burned jacket, his body fused to his chair. Other firefighters stepped over piles of debris in the lobby that they only later realized were human remains.

An unknown number of people died instantly or soon after Flight 11 hit, as fire engulfed those impact floors.

With all three stairwells destroyed, and no possibility of rooftop rescues, people on the upper floors were beyond help.

Within six minutes of the crash, the first person fell or jumped. At least 110 more lives would end that way from the upper stories of the North Tower. Each thousand-plus-foot fall, each flailing or graceful ten-second descent, would end with a thud that sounded like a gunshot. With each loud bang, emergency responders in the lobby involuntarily flinched as one.

Chief Joe Pfeifer tried to offer reassurance. He pleaded with people trapped in the North Tower to await rescue. “Please don’t jump,” he said into a public address microphone at the lobby command post. “We’re coming up for you.” No one on the highest floors could hear him.

another person landed fifty feet from him on the plaza’s pink granite. On impact, the body disintegrated into a puddle of flesh, bone, and blood.

Most of the people who fell, jumped, or were swept from the building died instantly. But not all. Amid smoking debris on the plaza, Ernest Armstead, an FDNY emergency medical specialist, found a well-dressed woman in her fifties, with brown hair and tasteful earrings, who’d suffered catastrophic injuries that left only her head and right torso intact. Somehow, she remained conscious. He hung a black triage tag around her neck, to signify to other responders that she was beyond help. “I am not dead,” the woman insisted. “Call my daughter. I am not dead.” Shocked, Armstead stammered, “Ma’am, don’t worry about it. We will be right back to you.” He knew he was lying. Her wounds were incompatible with life. Armstead wondered if an air draft had somehow cushioned her fall. He wished he knew if she’d been a passenger on the plane, or a worker swept through an office window by the crash, or someone who’d leapt to escape flames, but he didn’t ask. He had to keep moving. As Armstead stepped away, the woman yelled: “I am not dead! I am not dead!” “They’re coming,” he told her as he moved on. “They’re coming.”

Jay knew that his fellow captain, five years his senior, was among the most decorated officers in FDNY history. Paddy Brown had movie-star looks and a bigger-than-life reputation: savior of a baby from a burning building, supervisor of a daring rope rescue, Golden Gloves boxer, marathon runner. He had a black belt in karate and a devoted following of yoga students. Before fighting fires, he served as a Marine sergeant in Vietnam. Decades later, Paddy Brown remained eager to take the next hill.

At that moment, a New York Police helicopter circled the Twin Towers, some 1,700 feet above where Jay stood. Officer Timothy Hayes, a pilot for the police aviation unit, had already despaired that thick smoke made rooftop rescues impossible. Now he spotted a large aircraft speeding toward his copter. “Jesus Christ!” he told his partner. “There’s a second plane crashing.” They pulled up and United Flight 175 flew beneath them. Seconds later, at 9:03 a.m., Jay Jonas heard a thunderous explosion.

Brian Clark on the 84th floor and Stan Praimnath on the 81st were among more than six hundred people who either remained on the thirty highest floors of the South Tower or had left and then returned to them during the first sixteen minutes after American Flight 11 struck the North Tower. Some might have heard the Port Authority public address announcer’s mild suggestion at 9:02 a.m. about an “orderly evacuation.” Stan didn’t; neither did Brian. Unlike Stan, Brian, and the others on the upper floors, by 9:03 a.m., an estimated thirty-two hundred men and women had already escaped from the South Tower, out of concern about the crisis in the North Tower. Another forty-eight hundred were somewhere between the lobby and the 76th floor, in elevators, stairwells, and offices. Some were in the process of evacuating, headed down toward the street, while others stayed fixed in place. Still others were in the process of returning to their desks.

To those workers’ great fortune, one of their leaders was a big man in a pinstripe suit named Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley’s vice president of corporate security. At sixty-two, Rick Rescorla had spent a lifetime honing his innate gift for knowing the best response to danger. His exploits as a platoon leader in Vietnam were the stuff of legend, featured in the book We Were Soldiers Once … and Young. He appeared on the book’s cover, a bayonet fixed on his M-16, an iconic image of a warrior moving forward. Rescorla had spent the previous eight years feeling certain that the 1993 bombing was only the first strike.

In the distance, beyond the Statue of Liberty, he spotted an object rushing toward him. Stan’s mind registered that it was gray, large, and loud enough for him to hear its roaring engines through the sealed windows. A second later, he understood that it was a passenger plane, with a U on its tail. Strangely, it seemed to be speeding directly toward him, its wings banking sharply, its nose level with his. It grew larger, then larger. Then it filled the windows. Stan dropped the phone and dived under his desk.

AT 9:03:11 A.M., less than seventeen minutes after American Flight 11 devastated the North Tower, United Flight 175 bored deep into the South Tower. The plane struck the tower’s south face, twenty-three feet from the midpoint, toward the southeast corner. The off-center jolt caused the upper floors to rotate like a boxer’s torso twisted from an unexpected blow. The entire building vibrated from rooftop to ground. The plane struck on a 38-degree angle, its right wing sharply higher than its left. The nose, pointed slightly downward, hit the slab of the 81st floor, near where Stan Praimnath trembled under his desk. The immediate impact lasted about six-tenths of a second.

Unlike in the North Tower, where Flight 11 destroyed all three stairwells, in the South Tower one exit route from the uppermost floors remained at least partially intact: Stairwell A. Although located in the central core, Stairwell A was positioned to the west of where Flight 175 entered and was shielded by heavy elevator equipment. That left the stairwell potentially usable for anyone who could reach it.

Structurally, the South Tower fared worse than its twin. The plane severed thirty-three exterior steel columns and ten core columns, causing the South Tower to immediately lean slightly to the southeast above the impact zone. The crash stripped fire-suppressing insulation from dozens of core columns and steel trusses that supported the building’s concrete floor slabs. Like the North Tower, the building absorbed the impact and remained upright, as promised by the dreamers and designers who built it. But the severed steel columns and the loss of fire-suppressing insulation portended a disaster caused by fire.

Fires from the fuel wouldn’t melt the intact steel beams, but they would burn hot enough to undermine the strength of the overburdened exterior and core columns, the structural elements that kept the South Tower upright. Now both Twin Towers faced existential threats.

In addition to everyone aboard Flight 175, the impact slaughtered an unknown number of people on the nine impact-affected floors, leaving others fatally or severely injured. The dead and injured included many of an estimated two hundred men and women who congregated in the 78th floor sky lobby during the initial haphazard go-don’t-go evacuation. The plane’s left wing shredded that floor, killing and maiming men and women as they waited for their places in packed lobby-bound express elevators, as well as others who hoped to catch local elevators to return to their offices. For a moment all was silent on the 78th floor, the darkness relieved only by the half-light of flaming embers. Moans and cries soon filled the void. A handful of bloodied survivors struggled to their feet amid severed limbs and lifeless coworkers crushed under steel and stone. The stench of scorched flesh and jet fuel mixed with swirls of smoke that sandpapered survivors’ throats and singed their eyes.

Terror gripped Brian as he felt the South Tower lean to the west, farther than he imagined possible without falling, as though the building would topple like a chopped oak into the Hudson River. It righted itself with a decisive jerk, which his engineer’s mind interpreted as the building’s steel bones realigning themselves.

Melissa Doi stopped talking, but Vanessa Barnes heard breathing. It seemed as though Melissa and her companions might have passed out from smoke inhalation. Just as she promised, the dispatcher stayed on the line. She called Melissa’s name more than sixty times.

Stan tried again, half-jumping and half-scrambling up the wall, his new rubber-soled shoes helping him gain traction. When Stan reached his apex, Brian hooked him and slung him over the wall. They fell backward in a heap, off the upturned desk and into a debris pile, with Brian on his back and Stan atop him. Overcome with emotion, Stan planted a kiss on Brian’s cheek. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Brian said, pulling back. He stood, brushed himself off, and straightened the tie he incongruously still wore. “I’m Brian,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Stanley. We’ll be brothers for life.” The stranger’s comment touched Brian, an only child who’d always wanted a sibling. Brian noticed that during his exertions he’d cut his right palm, too. To his surprise, and Stan’s as well, Brian took Stan’s wounded hand and pressed it against his. “In fact,” Brian said, “we’ll be blood brothers for life.” Their bond sealed, Brian draped his arm around Stan’s shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

Just take your guys upstairs in this building and do the best you can.” Jay saluted. “Okay, chief.” As he walked away, Jay thought Hayden had the air of a general who knew that some of the men he sent into battle wouldn’t return.

Jay had one more message for Ladder 6, about the unknown enemy who’d thrown two giant daggers into the heart of New York City: “They’re trying to kill us, boys. Let’s go.”

Upon their arrival, they found a mass casualty scene no manual or exercise could have prepared them for. Paramedics and EMTs came upon every imaginable body part, some with clothing or jewelry still attached, some burned or mangled beyond recognition. Among all the pieces, amid all the gruesome human wreckage, one image locked into the minds of several emergency responders who saw it: a girl’s foot, inside a pink sneaker. One EMT immediately thought of his own daughter, whose foot was the same size. He looked away, up to the sky to clear his mind, only to see people jumping from the North Tower.

Most headed down, but not all. Frank De Martini, Pablo Ortiz, and several other men from the 88th floor went up to break through walls and pry open doors in an effort to rescue people trapped on higher floors. With crowbars and flashlights, resolve and grit, they were credited with saving at least seventy people, reaching as high as the 90th floor.

Unaware that Flight 11 had cut through all three emergency stairwells, preventing escape from above, Elaine was surprised not to encounter people evacuating from the upper floors.

Although rooftop rescues had already been ruled out, a “lock release order” was transmitted to the building’s Security Command Center, so people trapped on burning, smoky floors might have at least a chance at fresh air. But the impact of Flight 11 had damaged the computerized system, and the rooftop doors remained locked. Survivors on the nineteen floors above the North Tower impact zone had nowhere to go.

CONCEIVED DURING THE RUN-UP TO U.S. ENTRY INTO WORLD WAR II, the Pentagon was designed in a rush to house what was then called the War Department. Its groundbreaking took place on September 11, 1941, sixty years to the day before 9/11.

it flew past him, so close that Aman swore he could see the faces of American Airlines Flight 77 passengers in the windows. Aman couldn’t say whether he spotted author and commentator Barbara Olson, sixth-grade student Bernard C. Brown II, pregnant flight attendant Renée May, or retired Rear Admiral Wilson “Bud” Flagg. All he could say with certainty was that the faces bore empty looks of despair.

The Pentagon’s four unrenovated wedges would have been more vulnerable to damage on September 11. On the other hand, Wedge Two was nearly empty, in anticipation of the next phase of construction, so even if the building damage had been greater, casualties there likely would have been fewer.

Dave Thomas skidded to a stop when he reached the ruins of Flight 77 on AE Drive. His gaze settled on what looked like five black dots on the ground. Then he recognized that the dots were the polished nails of a detached foot. He wondered why strands of seaweed waved in a creek flowing through the Pentagon breezeway. Then he realized he was looking at human hair and part of a scalp in water pouring from a broken main. Nearby he saw what looked like a field-dressed deer. No. Minutes earlier the butchered flesh had been a living, breathing person.