Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

by Mitchell Zuckoff

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 people2 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.

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 hundred3 men and women on lower floors who streamed toward undamaged stairwells to try to escape. With its load redistributed, the tower could have remained standing4 indefinitely, potentially allowing rescue workers to reach everyone who survived the initial damage. If not for the fires, that is.

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.

The fireball burned more than three quarters of her skin, from her scalp to her ankles. Her burns were mostly third-degree, which destroyed Elaine’s nerve endings. For the moment, that was a blessing. The absence of nerve endings blocked her ability to feel pain and allowed her to only partly comprehend the severity of her injuries.

He also suspected that he couldn’t count on the building’s sprinklers or water supply pipes to be much help, if any, because a plane that cut through the tower likely damaged or destroyed the systems that delivered water. Jay’s assumption on that score was correct.

Coincidentally, Frank De Martini had been featured a few months earlier in a History Channel documentary, boldly describing the towers’ strength. “This building was designed20 to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it,” Frank had told the filmmakers, unwittingly citing the flawed decades-old report that didn’t consider damage from a fuel explosion.

“I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door—this intense grid, and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.” If only that had been true.

FDNY handheld radios had worked poorly, sometimes not at all, during the response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1999, the department purchased new ultra-high-frequency Motorola radios33 designed to vastly improve communications inside steel and concrete buildings. But shortly after the new radios went into service, a New York firefighter lost in a house fire couldn’t be heard calling for help. Disputes arose about whether the radios were faulty or if they weren’t being used properly. Either way, in early 2001, the FDNY reissued its old analog radios, the same ones that were ineffective in 1993. Those radios had the same shortcomings now.

Just as parts of American Flight 11 tore through the North Tower, the right engine of Flight 175 passed entirely through the South Tower and blew through the building’s northeast corner. It damaged the roof of a neighboring building before landing fifteen hundred feet north of the tower, near the corner of Murray and Church Streets. The right landing gear followed a similar trajectory.

Damage from the fuselage and the 156-foot wingspan stretched across nine floors, from the 77th to 85th floors. The two additional impact floors, compared to Flight 11’s damage, resulted from the more banked approach. The impact shattered 433 windows on the south, west, and east facades. It cut the pipes for fire sprinklers. It destroyed nearly all elevator service, severing cables and

trapping occupants, although one freight car from the lobby to the fortieth floor remained operable. 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...

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. Flight 175 carried more than nine thousand gallons of jet fuel, plus fourteen tons of flammable luggage, mail, seats, food, and electrical equipment. The impact floors contained tons of office furniture, carpets, and other combustibles. Fires from the fuel wouldn’t melt the intact steel beams, but they would burn hot enough to undermine the strength of the ov...

Evacuees smashed the glass of vending machines in stairwell landings and handed Jay and his men bottles of Poland Spring water. One man removed Tommy Falco’s helmet and drenched Tommy’s head and neck to keep him from overheating. “Good luck,” the man said before moving on. The lights were on and the air inside the stairwell was relatively clear, but the smell of jet fuel lingered.

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.

Fifteen years earlier, Ron earned the nickname the Flying Fireman20 when he fell five stories from a fire escape, surviving thanks to telephone and cable wires he struck on the way down.

At first, Terry didn’t want to see the human remains that he knew were all around him. But soon he surrendered to the responsibility and trained his eyes to distinguish between the countless man-made items and the untold pieces of burned flesh, bone, teeth, and cartilage in the grass and soil.

Once Terry became a witness to death, he couldn’t stop seeing it. Remains were everywhere, small bits of men and women who at that moment should have been landing in San Francisco. Some larger parts, too, including part of a torso; a charred buttock; a piece of spinal cord with five vertebrae; and a foot with three toes that tree-climbing arborists,24 sent by investigators, would find in the hemlocks. All the remains would require DNA matching, dental records, or other means of positive identification. Somewhere near where Terry stood was a napkin-sized piece of skin, charred at the edges, whose source was never in doubt: the intact Superman logo tattoo25 on the flesh of Joey Nacke’s shoulder.

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.

Authorities estimated that by the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, more people will have died5 of an illness related to Ground Zero than in the attacks.

Roughly three thousand children6 under age eighteen lost a parent on 9/11, including 108 babies born in the months after their father’s death. Each one needed some kind of explanation.

Into their eighties, Lee and Eunice traveled repeatedly to Guantanamo Bay to represent Peter, Sue, and Christine during the run-up to the military prosecutions. When U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, Eunice told a reporter she felt overcome by complicated feelings.17 “It was tears and mixed emotions that you shouldn’t be happy for a man’s death,” Eunice said. “Then we came to the reality that this man was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people across the world. I feel so great for the justice—we waited ten years for this.”

During the 2006 trial of al-Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, a prosecutor asked Lee Hanson to express his family’s loss. “They took away our dreams,” Lee said as jurors wept. “They took away our future. . . . Peter and Sue were just so much, so good, and so alive, and they lived life and they loved people and they loved their families. And we’re going to miss all the celebrations. . . . All of those occasions when Christine would have graduated from kindergarten and from the first grade and so forth and so on. And I decided I was going to try to stick around long enough to make sure I got to her wedding someday. All those things are gone. And it is, it is so sad.”

You can’t stop it, but this is something that you can do. To be out of the smoke and the heat, and to be out in the air. It must have felt like flying.”

Ron told himself that Ruth must have been a beacon of calm at the very end. He thought she must have comforted Juliana, holding her close as their plane veered wildly then dipped low over Manhattan, perhaps whispering an Irish lullaby in her ear. A thought both harrowing and strangely comforting entered Ron’s mind. At the instant of Ruth and Juliana’s murders, when Flight 175 pierced the South Tower, he’d been nearby. He’d felt the shock wave in every cell of his body.

Jay and the men of Ladder 6 carried Josephine one last time, as pallbearers.