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

by Mitchell Zuckoff

NONE OF THE 9-1-1 operators Brian spoke with asked him how high he’d been inside the building, conditions on the upper floors, or details about which stairwell he’d used. As a result, they never learned potentially lifesaving information that might have helped firefighters or trapped people in the South Tower who survived the crash and then called 9-1-1 for guidance. Amid the chaos, overwhelmed 9-1-1 operators never learned that Stairwell A remained relatively intact above the South Tower impact zone, at least to the 91st floor and possibly higher. No evidence exists that any person who called 9-1-1 from above the impact zone was urged to seek out Stairwell A as a potential path to survival.

When Brian Clark made his 9-1-1 call, nearly seven thousand people had already escaped the South Tower, while more than a thousand remained between the lobby and the 76th floor, heading downward if they could. More than six hundred people were on the 77th floor and above. Those numbers didn’t include the emergency responders who flooded into the South Tower after United Flight 175 struck. Time was becoming an enemy, but not everyone understood that. A 9-1-1 caller on the 73rd floor, below the impact zone, told an operator that oxygen was running out, only to be instructed not to leave the floor. A police dispatcher gave a similar order to a man on the 88th floor, in the offices of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods: “You have to wait until somebody comes there.” Meanwhile, the Stairwell A escape route remained nearly empty.

as upper-floor survivors called for help, and as firefighters rushed inside, the South Tower experienced ominous structural changes. Shortly after 9:30 a.m., bursts of smoke spouted from the building’s north side, on the 79th and 80th floors, possibly from shifting floor slabs or the sudden ignition of pools of unspent jet fuel. Simultaneously, threats to the building’s integrity worsened. Intact core columns strained under the added burden previously borne by the severed columns. External columns on the tower’s east side supported added loads that had shifted from the severed columns. The remaining external columns also struggled to hold up sagging floors. The strain caused the exterior columns to bow inward, like straws trying to support a brick. All the while, unchecked fires undermined the strength of steel columns throughout the impact zone, contributing to a threat that almost no one imagined. The South Tower neared its breaking point.

At 9:52 a.m., gasping for breath, sounding stressed but in control, Orio reached for his radio. Roughly forty-five minutes had passed since he rushed into the burning South Tower, rode an elevator up forty floors, then scaled more than seven hundred steps. Now, he faced the twin forces driving his professional life: a fire to fight, and people to help. “We’ve got two isolated pockets of fire!” Orio radioed Lieutenant Joe Leavey of Ladder 15, who’d reached the 70th floor. “We should be able to knock it down with two lines.” Encountering the bloodbath in the sky lobby, Orio described what the man in the red bandanna, Ling Young, and others experienced more than a half hour earlier: “Seventy-eighth floor, numerous ten-forty-five, Code Ones.” In FDNY terms, Orio was describing a floor filled with fatalities. But others, still alive, needed rescue.

We’re young men! We’re not ready to die!”

THE FORCES OF catastrophe and heat had gnawed at the South Tower impact zone for fifty-six minutes. The fires weakened and added stress to its remaining core columns, its exposed steel floor supports, and its load-bearing exterior walls. The clock read 9:59 a.m. Passengers and crew members of United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania fought to prevent a fourth building strike. The Pentagon and the North Tower burned. Countless millions watched on live television. Thick gray smoke gushed with greater intensity from the South Tower. The weakened east wall, where fires had been the most intense, lost the strength to withstand the inexorable pull of gravity. As the east wall failed, its multi-million-pound burden shifted through the building’s core to the adjacent north and south walls. But those walls were compromised, too. The damage from Flight 175 and the resulting fires made the load too much to bear. Sapped of their fortitude, the steel wall columns bowed farther and farther inward. Floors sagged deeper and deeper. The end began. Above the impact zone, twenty-five stories tilted as one, to the east and south, then went into free fall. The plunging upper floors overwhelmed the undamaged lower floors with a mass impossible to resist. Down it all went, almost straight down. The roar of steel, concrete, furnishings, and so many lives crumbling to the ground was a seismic event. It registered as a minor earthquake on sensors throughout the Northeast. It lasted about ten seconds. A c...

ROUGHLY EIGHT THOUSAND people escaped the South Tower. But 619 people remained on the 77th floor and higher, and eleven stood in the lobby, when it fell. That didn’t include emergency responders and others whose exact final locations were unknown. Among the dead were men and women who almost certainly would have lived if they’d evacuated immediately or soon after but who remained inside because they were told not to leave or because they stayed to help others.

He heard loud thumping noises, not like gunshots but strange, awful thuds. Another glance revealed the source: the impact of bodies falling or jumping from great heights.

He watched a couple jump together from the North Tower, holding hands. In the woman’s other hand, she gripped her purse, for comfort or eventual identification, or by habit, perhaps.

A rumble became a whump, then crescendoed into a roar, bass notes of destruction pierced by the treble of human shrieks. In the distance, Cecilia saw the escalator inside the North Tower lobby disappear in a cloud of smoke and dust. She couldn’t see Arlene, but she locked eyes with Nancy, perhaps ten yards away, her arms outstretched, her face contorted in fear. Amid the cacophony, Cecilia didn’t hear Nancy scream, but she read her unmistakable body language: “Help me!” Before Cecilia could respond, a gust of smoke enveloped Nancy, the security guard, and everyone and everything else between Cecilia and the entrance to the North Tower lobby. Cecilia spun around, away from the danger, to run east toward the exit onto Church Street. Before she could take a step, the world went black.

As they strapped the woman onto a stretcher, Moose and Paul heard a volcanic rumble, then a boom, then a Dante’s choir of screams. EMT Kevin Barrett yelled, “Moose, run!” The South Tower began its collapse. Moose tripped over the stretcher as the woman fought to unbuckle herself. Moose mentally downgraded her condition from heart attack to anxiety attack. He helped her off the stretcher and screamed: “Ma’am—just go! Go straight, go straight!”

Jay rushed to the north side of the North Tower. He pressed close against the narrow windows but could see nothing but smoky white dust. He returned to find his friend Billy Burke with a strange look on his face, his head tilted, as though he doubted what he’d seen. Jay expected him to say that part of the North Tower had broken off high above them. “Is that what I thought it was?” Jay asked. But he’d underestimated the damage. “The other building … just … collapsed,” Billy replied. That made no sense. Jay had fought countless fires and studied countless more, and he’d never heard of a skyscraper collapsing from fire. But the look on Billy’s face convinced him it must be true. Jay instantly understood that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had just died in the South Tower, including some of his brother firefighters. He also grasped that the building where he and his men stood, which had been burning more than fifteen minutes longer than its twin, was in grave, imminent jeopardy.

Jay hesitated. He put great stock in following orders and maintaining discipline, especially in the midst of a chaotic fire response. Jay hadn’t heard a command on the radio ordering them to evacuate, and he didn’t want to break ranks. But Jay also knew that he couldn’t rely on his radio, so maybe he’d missed a Mayday order to evacuate. Jay made his decision. He walked over to his men, all still catching their breath: “It’s time for us to go home.” He didn’t explain his reasoning, or even that the South Tower had fallen. At that moment, just after 10 a.m., Jay and his men were among roughly eight hundred people still inside the North Tower stairwells. Nobody moved. The men of Ladder 6 stared back at Jay, teetering between confusion and defiance. As far as they were concerned, the South Tower still stood, civilians in the North Tower still needed rescuing, and they still had a job to do. Leaving wasn’t an option. Moments like these were why they became firefighters.

It was shortly after ten. About a half hour had passed since Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. In that brief time, the South Tower had crumbled, the evacuation of the North Tower continued, the horror of people falling or jumping to the World Trade Center plaza had worsened, and the heroes of Flight 93 had fought their final battle.

Someone tried to kill all of us, out of blind ideological hatred, in the most brutal way. They tried to kill us by hurtling Americans at us.”

Searchers would find twisted silverware for first-class service, the blunt end of a spoon implanted in a tree, knives that might have belonged to the hijackers, and a weathered but intact copy of the handwritten terror instructions titled “The Last Night.” At the base of a hemlock tree they’d find a SunTrust bank card belonging to terrorist pilot Ziad Jarrah that would help investigators trace the flow of money that financed the attackers and the attacks.

not far from Barry Hoover’s ruined house, on the grass near a red bandanna, Terry spotted a detached male face. Something about the misshapen features and the complexion convinced him that it belonged to one of the four men who rained death on the little borough of Shanksville and beyond.

“Hey, Cap,” said Tommy Falco, “what do you want us to do with her?” Every fiber in Jay’s body wanted to speed up and get as far away as possible. Every human instinct told him to run, back to his firehouse then home to his family. But if a firefighter followed raw instincts, he’d never charge into a burning building. Ladder 6 had already moved past two burn victims they saw on the way in. They still hadn’t fought a fire or rescued anyone. If Ladder 6 survived this day, Jay wanted his men to look themselves in the mirror and say the phrase he lived by: “I was a fireman today.” Jay turned to barrel-chested Irons Man Billy Butler, as powerful a firefighter as Jay had ever known. “Give your tools to the other guys,” Jay told him. “Take her arm, put it around your shoulders. We’ll stay together as a unit.” Billy did as he was told, then turned to his new charge. “What’s your name?” he asked. “My name is Josephine.” “Josephine,” Billy Butler promised, “we’re going to get you out of here today.”

Around the fifteenth floor, Ladder 6 and Josephine ran into Battalion Chief Rich Picciotto, a longtime study partner of Jay’s for promotional exams. Picciotto brandished a bullhorn, a rare tool among firefighters, because he remembered the communications and crowd control problems during the 1993 bombing. “All FDNY, get the fuck out!” Picciotto boomed on his bullhorn. To anyone who could hear him over the radio, he yelled: “We’re evacuating, we’re getting out—drop your tools, drop your masks, drop everything. Get out, get out!” Dozens of firefighters heeded his lifesaving command and raced toward the exits.

However, some firefighters continued to linger, including a large group seen resting on the nineteenth floor. By some accounts they numbered as many as one hundred men. On his way out, a fire lieutenant told them, “Didn’t you hear the Mayday? Get out.” Without moving, one answered casually: “Yeah, yeah, we’ll be right with you, Lou.” Some straggling firefighters apparently didn’t know the South Tower had fallen.

JAY’S NERVOUS SUSPICION had merit. The collapse of the South Tower had sent a pulse of air pressure that appeared to fuel and intensify the fire high in the North Tower. Within four seconds of the South Tower collapse, flames erupted from south-facing windows on the North Tower’s 98th floor, and flared and brightened on three floors just below. Within two minutes of the South Tower collapse, fire spewed from the North Tower’s 104th floor, three floors higher than where it had previously been seen. The fires threatened the building’s integrity, weakening the steel of the North Tower’s core, floors, and exterior walls. Observers with unique vantage points watched it happening. At 10:07 a.m., a police helicopter pilot radioed, “About fifteen floors down from the top, it looks like it’s glowing red… . It’s inevitable.” A second NYPD pilot added, “I don’t think this has too much longer to go. I would evacuate all people within the area of that second building.”

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.

The sounds defied description. In all recorded history, only one other 110-story building had ever collapsed, and that was twenty-nine minutes earlier. Everyone who heard it from the inside took the experience to the grave. Maybe the sound and fury rivaled an Everest avalanche, or a volcanic eruption, or a rocket launch. Or maybe not. Nothing matched being inside five hundred million fiery, falling pounds of twisting steel, crumbling concrete, disintegrating office furnishings, shattering glass, and ending lives.

TWELVE SECONDS AFTER it began, twelve seconds that felt to Jay Jonas like two minutes, or maybe a lifetime, the din and the heaving stopped. Jay didn’t know it yet, but only a few of the lowest floors of Stairwell B had somehow survived relatively intact, entombed within a colossal mound of wreckage, a pile of ruins that began the day as the iconic North Tower of the World Trade Center.

As they settled in, Jay heard the radio squawk with a Mayday call from Battalion Chief Richard Prunty, an avuncular figure with a white walrus mustache, somewhere below them in the North Tower’s lobby. Chief Prunty said he was hurt, dizzy, pinned under a steel beam. Jay already knew they couldn’t reach him, but he and Lieutenant Jim McGlynn tried to keep the chief talking. Unsure whether Rich Prunty could be heard by potential rescuers outside the stairwell, Jay and Jim McGlynn relayed his pleas for help to anyone monitoring their radio channels. An hour passed. Prunty was slipping away. They heard a final transmission: “Tell my wife and kids that I love them.”

He guessed, incorrectly, that firefighters and other rescuers were overwhelmed by hundreds or even thousands of injured or trapped people. No one on the radio told him that responders could devote unlimited manpower to the fourteen people inside Stairwell B because they comprised the largest single group of known survivors.

“I’m scared,” Josephine said. “We’re all a little scared,” Jay told her. “Just hang in there.” Jay was long over the frustration he’d felt earlier about Josephine’s slow pace. Josephine was part of Ladder 6, now. During the occasional debris storms, Mike Meldrum draped himself across her body. Sal D’Agostino wrapped her in his coat. “As long as we’re here,” Sal told her, “nothing is going to happen to you.”

Not including the hijackers, 2,977 men, women, and children were known to have been killed on the four planes and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Among the dead were 1,462 people in the North Tower, 630 in the South Tower, 421 emergency responders in New York, 246 passengers and crew members on the planes, and 125 men and women in the Pentagon. No one died on the ground at Shanksville.

the FDNY chief who led recovery efforts died of cancer traced to toxins from Ground Zero. Ronald Spadafora was the 178th member of the FDNY to die of 9/11-related illnesses. No one expected him to be the last. Authorities estimated that by the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, more people will have died of an illness related to Ground Zero than in the attacks.

“There was an accident,” John said, fighting sobs. “Your mommy is in heaven and she won’t be coming back. She’s up in heaven and she’s an angel now.” Weeks earlier, Tara had used similar words to help Colin understand why he had only one grandmother. Tara wasn’t sure she’d been clear. Now, as John fell silent, Colin erupted in sobs. He’d understood his mother after all.

“It was obvious pretty quickly that we would be bombing Afghanistan, and I felt so bad for those people. What happened to those young men, what terrible things had shaped them into people who were willing to kill innocent people? … Something bad has to happen, whether it’s environment or genetics or society, and I think we bear some responsibility as a nation for our foreign policy. That’s one of the scary things right now: Are the decisions being made radicalizing more people?”

Nasypany grew emotional when he talked about the passengers and crew of Flight 93. “They did my job,” he’d say. “They basically did what I was going to have to do in the long run, because I was not going to let another aircraft—I couldn’t let another aircraft go into D.C.”

IT’S UNCLEAR EXACTLY how Alayne Gentul died, but there’s evidence she wasn’t inside the South Tower when it crumbled. Unlike the fragmented remains of people trapped in the collapse, Alayne’s body was found intact, across the street, still dressed in her red blazer. Her husband, Jack, understood the implication: Alayne apparently was one of the scores of men and women who jumped or fell to their deaths. Jack had hoped that she was unconscious from smoke inhalation, inside the building when it fell. But if Alayne chose an ending on her own terms, he accepted that.

Carlos’s death was honored in numerous tributes, but one carried special meaning for Cecilia. A few months before 9/11, on one of their daily commutes, they noticed an industrial property across from an elementary school in Astoria, Queens. The trash-strewn lot saddened Carlos, who told Cecilia he thought it would make a fine place for a father to toss a ball or enjoy a milkshake with his child. The City of New York acquired the property in 2007. Today it is an oasis of green space and flowering trees, a haven for city parents and children, named Carlos R. Lillo Park.

Ron never rescheduled the September 11 meeting he’d considered crucial a day earlier. He learned that the man he was supposed to meet had left the Marriott after the first explosion. Ron decided that he didn’t want to risk working with someone who just possibly might have brushed past without stopping when he and Jennieann huddled on the lobby floor.

CAPTAIN JAY JONAS and the men of Ladder 6 soon realized that if they hadn’t encountered Josephine Harris inside Stairwell B, they might have been among the dead. If they had stuck to their original double-step evacuation pace, they might have caught up to Chief Richard Prunty in the lobby where he died. If they’d rushed faster, they might have been just outside the North Tower, where the collapse crushed Chief of Department Peter Ganci Jr., First Deputy Commissioner William Feehan, and numerous others. Or, if they’d hung back like some other firefighters, if Jay hadn’t ordered an immediate retreat when the South Tower fell, Ladder 6 might have been higher inside the tower, with no time to rescue themselves or Josephine.

The escort from the Chinese men was among thousands of tributes, official and unofficial, to the heroism of New York firefighters, Port Authority and New York City police officers, and other emergency responders. In the weeks and months that followed, amid funerals and tears, the accolades built into a national outpouring of gratitude. Among the dead were 343 FDNY firefighters and paramedics. The loss dwarfed the FDNY’s previous worst day, in 1966, when a fire in a Manhattan brownstone killed twelve firefighters. Those lost on 9/11 included more than a dozen of the friends and colleagues Jay encountered that day in person or on the radio: Chief Richard Prunty; captains Paddy Brown, Billy Burke, and Terry Hatton, who died without knowing that his wife was pregnant; lieutenants Pete Freund, Dennis Mojica, and Mike Warchola; and firefighters Faustino Apostol, Andy Fredericks, Scott Kopytko, Kenneth Marino, Gerry Nevins, Doug Oelschlager, and Dave Weiss. Lieutenant William “Billy” McGinn, who worked under Jay years earlier in Ladder 11, and who immediately warned that “it could be a terrorist attack,” was also among the dead. Chief Joseph Pfeifer’s brother, Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer, died in the collapse of the North Tower. The FDNY’s annual fitness award was renamed for Battalion Chief Orio Palmer, whom Jay saw in the North Tower lobby before Orio led the charge up the South Tower. Also killed was Firefighter James Riches, whom searchers found in what had been the North Tower ...

With the camera rolling, they credited her with their survival and she lavished them with praise. “They are [the most] strong, brave, caring, kind people I have ever met,” Josephine said. “When I was scared, they held my hand. They took off their jackets and gave them to me when I was cold. They told me not to be afraid, they would get me out. And they did. They are magnificent.” Josephine was made an honorary member of Ladder 6, and they bestowed upon her a title even higher than Chief. Her jacket read GUARDIAN ANGEL.

Josephine Harris was pronounced dead at age sixty-nine. Her funeral mass was conducted by Cardinal Edward Egan, archbishop emeritus of New York, with luminaries including former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was laid to rest inside a blue steel coffin, its silken interior embroidered with an image of a firefighter walking hand in hand with an angel. Jay and the men of Ladder 6 carried Josephine one last time, as pallbearers.

As his own retirement neared, Jay sat one autumn afternoon inside a Bronx firehouse whose red door displayed two angels kneeling with a hunched firefighter. Above it, in elaborate script, was inscribed THE DAY THE ANGELS CRIED, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. Jay poured black coffee, closed his office door, and returned to 9/11. He told how Ladder 6 climbed into Stairwell B of the North Tower, how they saved Josephine and she saved them, and how so many innocent, brave people died at the hands of murderous zealots. Scene by scene, stair by stair, Jay told the story of heroes named Irons Man Billy Butler, Roof Man Sal D’Agostino, Can Man Tommy Falco, Tiller Man Matt Komorowski, Chauffeur Mike Meldrum, and himself, Captain Jay Jonas. Hours passed, and night fell. At the story’s end, Jay leaned back in his chair and said softly: “I was never so proud to be a fireman as I was that day.”