102 Minutes Quotes

“The people fleeing in 2001 did not face oily smoke from the burning garage on the lower floors, as those in 1993 had. And the tenants had the advantage of the stairwell improvements made by the Port Authority. As a result, in less than an hour's time, thousands of people, including many who had stared at their fingernails during fire drills, had successfully climbed down the stairs. That was the good news. Now they had to be routed down the escalators from the mezzanine to the lobby, and to do that, they had to get past the windows that looked out onto the plaza. The view froze many of them. The stairs had been windowless, the roaring fires unseen, the anxiety powerful but lacking shape. Now the evacuees found that however terrible the pictures playing in their heads on the way down may have been, the reality on the plaza turned out to be worse. Charred body parts. Shoes. Pieces of plane. Flaming debris. Luggage. A windowpane covered in blood. Red garments that looked as if they had been quickly discarded. In fact, they were what was left of people from the upper floors of the north tower. The impact on the evacuees was palpable. Some gasped. Cops at the top of the escalators thought they could see panic in their faces.”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“The catastrophe could be seen for miles with the naked eye, across oceans and continents on television. To rescuers at the very base of the towers, the fires appeared to be in another world. They blazed so far beyond them, 1,000 vertical feet in the north tower, 800 in the south, they might have been looking at the light from distant, dying stars.”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“… the impulse to try, to make an effort, had a momentum more powerful than the sense of futility.”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“The towers had been designed by an architect who feared heights, and his antidote to acrophobia in the world’s tallest building had been skinny windows. That way, anyone unnerved by the unnatural height could look out while gripping both sides of the window.”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“The structural engineer explained that not even a Boeing 707, the largest airplane flying at the time they were built, could knock them over. The”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“One of the deepest secrets of the two buildings was that their structural steel—webbed together in a novel, lightweight design—had never been fireproofed to the satisfaction of the trade center’s engineers or architects. No one had ever tested the fireproofing of the steel in two of the tallest buildings in the”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“smoke or dust.”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas killed”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

“They dropped in silence, fleeing horrors that were beyond speech.”
― Jim Dwyer, 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers