inbound. Watch your back.”
There was no third hijacked airplane heading to New York. Some in the North Tower, meanwhile, were still unaware that even one airplane had hit the building. “What happened?” enquired Keith Meerholz, who had escaped with minor burns. “A plane hit each tower,” a fireman confided, “but don’t tell anyone.” He did not want evacuation to become panic.
For those still alive on the higher floors of the tower, the grim ordeal continued. They were stranded, unable to go down—because of blocked stairways and jammed elevators—or up, with the faint prospect of rescue by helicopter, because of the locked doors.
Down on the 27th floor, from which most workers would escape, a man in a wheelchair named Ed Beyea waited patiently with Abe Zemanowitz, a colleague who had stayed protectively at his side. So far below the point of impact, with emergency services on the scene, real danger perhaps seemed remote. Yet neither man would survive.
Outside, paramedic Carlos Lillo was crying as he worked. His wife, Cecilia, worked on the tower’s 64th floor, and he was frantically worried about her. Cecilia would get safely down and out of the building. Carlos, who lost touch with his comrades, died.
The dying had begun in a horrific way for the firefighters. “The Chief said, ‘You’re going into the lobby command post,’ ” Paul Conlon remembered. “He pointed to the entrance of Two World Trade Center [the South Tower] … It was probably two hundred yards … There were people jumping … Dan Suhr said something like, ‘Let’s make this quick …’ We got about halfway there, and Dan gets hit by a jumper.”
Daniel Suhr, aged thirty-seven, had been with an engine company from Brooklyn. “It was as if he exploded. It wasn’t like you heard something falling and you could jump out of the way … We go to pick him up. He’s a big guy … Someone picked up his helmet … One of the guys says, ‘He still has a pulse.’ … I called the Mayday … The guys were doing CPR. The ambulance came up pretty quickly.”
Suhr, dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Hospital, was the first firefighter to die, first on a list that, it would soon become clear, was to be numbingly long.
Communications, crucial to any firefighting operation, failed dismally that day. “We didn’t have a lot of information coming in,” Chief Joe Pfeifer recalled of the Command Center in the North Tower lobby. According to the Fire Department’s own investigation, the portable radios in use on 9/11 did not “work reliably in high-rise buildings without having their signals amplified or rebroadcast by a repeater system.”
“We didn’t receive any reports of what was seen from the helicopters,” Pfeifer said. “It was impossible to know what was done on the upper floors, whether the stairwells were intact or not.” “People watching on TV,” Deputy Chief Peter Hayden said, “had more knowledge of what was happening a hundred floors above us than we did in the lobby.”
As their chiefs worked blind, men struggled up the North Tower weighed down by equipment. Company followed company on the strenuous ascent into the unknowable. Of those they had come to rescue, some 1,500 souls had already died or were going to die, those trapped above the impact zone and the injured, handicapped, severely obese, or the elderly, for whom movement was difficult. Of the roughly 7,500 civilians who had been in the North Tower before the attack, however, 6,000 would manage to leave the building by 10:00 A.M.
Of perhaps 7,000 people in the South Tower, some 6,000 are thought to have made their way to safety by 9:30. Of about a thousand who remained, 600 would die.
Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, the man Clark had pulled from the wreckage on the 81st floor of the South Tower, had continued to make their painful way down. Slithering at first over ceiling tiles and sheet rock, they sloshed through water, groped through smoke, hurried past fingers of flame. Then the way seemed clear for the long trudge down to safety. “Let’s slow down,” Clark said as they reached the mid-20s. “We’ve come this far. There’s no point in breaking an ankle.” There no longer seemed any need to rush.
High above, hope of escape had withered. Sean Rooney, an Aon insurance executive, had tried to reach the roof and been defeated by the locked doors. From the 105th floor, on the phone to his wife, Beverly, he said, “The smoke is very thick … the windows are getting hot.” Some two hundred other people were trapped in a nearby conference room.
Below, too far below, firefighters were still climbing, climbing. One group, that reached the 70th floor, found numerous victims with serious injuries. Chief Orio Palmer, who got to the 78th floor, reported that there were many “Code Ones”—firefighterspeak for dead. Palmer could see pockets of fire but, speaking as though there would be time to do the job, said he thought it should be possible to put them out.
Emergency operators had continued to log piteous calls:
09:32 105 FLR—
PEOPLE TRAPPED—OPEN ROOF TO GAIN ACCESS
09:36 FC STS THEY ARE STUCK IN THE ELEVATORS … STS THEY ARE DYING
09:40 MC STS PEOPLE PASSING OUT
09:42 PEOPLE STILL JUMPING OFF THE TOWER
09:39 FC MELISSA STS FLOOR VERY HOT NO DOOR STS SHE’S GOING TO DIE … STILL ON PHONE … WANT TO CALL MOTHER
Emergency workers in the South Tower lobby were overwhelmed by the number of injured people who could go no further.
Outside, butchered corpses. “Some of them had no legs,” said Roberto Abril, a paramedic, “some of them had no arms. There was a torso with one leg, with an EMS jacket on top. I guess somebody just wanted to cover it. We kept going back, but at one point it was useless because most of the people that could get out were already walking.”
EARLY THAT MORNING, a handful of high-ranking firemen had pondered the unthinkable. How long would the fires burn on the upper floors, chief of safety Al Turi wondered, before there were partial collapses? Three hours, perhaps? He shared his concern with chief of department Peter Ganci and other colleagues. “The potential and the reality of a collapse,” deputy division chief Peter Hayden said, was discussed early on. “I think we envisioned a gradual burning of the fire for a couple of hours and then a very limited type of collapse—the top fifteen or twenty floors all folding in.”
Rick Rescorla, security chief for Morgan Stanley, saw it coming from the start. “Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse,” he forecast right after the strike on the North Tower, “and it’s going to take the whole building with it.” He ordered his staff to evacuate at once, even though they were based in the South Tower—at the time still undamaged.
When the top of the South Tower in turn became an inferno, the same thought occurred to firefighter Richard Carletti. “Tommy,” he told a colleague as they stood staring upward, “this building is in danger of collapse.”
Only months earlier, Frank De Martini, construction manager for the New York Port Authority, had dismissed the notion of one of the towers collapsing. “I believe the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door,” he said in an interview. “And the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing the screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting … The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it.”
An early design study had indeed suggested that the Trade Center would survive were a Boeing 707, the largest airliner of the day—“low on fuel and at landing speeds”—to strike one of the towers. Now, the buildings had been hit by far larger, far more powerful, 767s heavily laden with fuel. On 9/11, De Martini became concerned early on, and asked that structural inspectors be summoned. He was himself to die that day.
By about 9:50, photographs analyzed much later would show, the South Tower’s 83rd floor gave the appearance of drooping down over the floor below. Video footage showed a stream of molten metal cascading from a window opening near one corner. A minute later, a police helicopter pilot warned that there were “large pieces of debris hanging” from the South Tower. They looked as though they were about to fall.
Even earlier, at 9:37, a man on the 105th floor of the South Tower had called 911 with a frantic message. As regurgitated ten minutes later by a computer, it read in part:
STS FLOOR UNDERNEATH—COLLAPSE
In the welter of calls pouring in, that message went unread—or misread. The 911 caller had in fact been
