FIREFIGHTER RICHARD CARLETTI, peering up at the South Tower, had noted a sudden change. It “started to lean. The top thirty floors leaned over … I saw the western wall start to belly out.” The columnist Pete Hamill saw the walls “bulge out,” and heard “snapping sounds, pops, little explosions.” The explosive noises—to some they seemed “real loud”—were followed by a sort of “groaning and grinding.”
High in the tower itself, Aon’s Kevin Cosgrove finally lost patience with the 911 operator. “Name’s Cosgrove,” he said. “I must have told you a dozen times already. C.O.S.G.R.O.V.E. My wife thinks I’m all right. I called and said I was leaving the building and that I was fine … There are three of us in here … Three of us … Two broken windows. Oh, God … OH …!” Against a background of huge noise, Cosgrove screamed. Then the line went dead.
Beverly Rooney, still on the phone to her husband, heard sounds she, too, recalled as sounding like an explosion, followed by a crack, followed by a roaring sound. “The floor fell out from under him,” she thought. “It sounded like Niagara Falls. I knew without seeing that he was gone.”
Rooney and Cosgrove and so many others were gone. Then, and in little more than the time it takes to read these words, the South Tower itself was gone.
“The entire structure just sank down on to itself with a colossal whoosh,” reported the British journalist David Usborne, who had watched from the park in front of City Hall. “For a second, the smoke and dust cleared enough to reveal a stump of the core of the building … But the clouds closed in again and nothing more could be seen. All of us simply stood and gaped, hands to our faces.”
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IN THE STUDIO AT ABC, Peter Jennings had been juggling the cascade of brutal news, his eye on one live monitor, then another. “It may be,” he said, puzzled by the vast new plume of smoke that had appeared where the South Tower had been, “that something fell off the building.” Jennings asked a colleague closer to the scene what had happened.
“The second building that was hit by the plane,” Don Dahler told him, “has just completely collapsed. The entire building has just collapsed … It folded down on itself, and it’s not there anymore.” The famously unflappable Jennings allowed himself an on-air “My God! My God!” Then, as if in the hope that he had misheard, “The whole side has collapsed?”
Dahler said it again. “The whole building has collapsed … There is panic on the streets. Thousands of people running … trying to get away.”
It was 9:59 A.M. One of the tallest buildings in the world had collapsed in no more than twenty seconds. “From a structure,” in the words of a witness, “to a wafer.”
IN THE WAKE of the roar there was darkness—an all-enveloping, suffocating, blinding dust cloud—and cloaked in the cloud a mass of humanity, rushing pell-mell for refuge.
Fire chief Ganci and his senior aides, and Zarrillo, the EMT who had brought word of a possible collapse, rushed into the garages of adjacent buildings. “I took ten or fifteen rolling steps into the garage,” Zarrillo recalled, “and hugged into a corner, an indentation, and I felt two or three guys get in behind me … The dust, the cloud, came rolling in.”
Chief Peruggia, still outside Building 7, became aware of the cloud as he answered a woman reporter’s question. “I grabbed the female, threw her through the revolving doors of Number 7 … Everything came crashing through the front … Next thing I remember I was covered in glass and some debris … I had shards of glass impaled in my head … I was able to get all this debris and rubble off me and cover my face with my coat so that I could breathe. It was very thick dust. You couldn’t see.”
When the building began to fall, EMT Jody Bell had been strapping a hysterical patient into a stair chair. “Everybody’s like, ‘Run for your lives!’ ” he remembered. “She’s hyperventilating … It’s like, a tidal wave of soot and ash coming in my direction. My life flashed before my eyes … I started to run—took about ten steps, and the lady started screaming, ‘Don’t leave me!’ … I got ahold of myself. ‘Wait, what the hell am I doing?’ I turned back, got her out of the chair. I said, ‘Ma’am, can you run?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ She took off. I’ve never moved so fast … The dust was like snowfall. The cars are covered … I’m breathing in mouthfuls … The scene was totally blacked out.”
Firefighter Timothy Brown had just left the South Tower, where he had seen people—only their legs and feet visible through the door of a stranded elevator—being “smoked and cooked.” On his way to fetch medics when the tower fell, he had ducked into the lobby of the Marriott, the eight-hundred-room hotel adjoining the Trade Center.
“Everything started blowing towards us that wasn’t nailed down … I’m guessing that the wind at its height was around 70, 75 miles an hour … You couldn’t see anybody … You couldn’t hear anything. It was becoming our grave … I thought it lasted four minutes … You could hear an eerie silence at first, and then you could start to hear people starting to move around a little bit, people that were still alive.”
Sixteen of some twenty firefighters who had been on a stairwell in the hotel were not alive. The collapsing tower had sliced the Marriott in two.
Spared thanks to their final dash, Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath had sheltered outside a church. They “stared in awe, not realizing what was happening completely … You at least thought people had a chance—until that moment. Then this great tsunami of dust came over … I suppose it was a quarter of an inch of dust and ash, everywhere.”
To Usborne, the British reporter, the dust was a “huge tidal wave, barrelling down the canyons of the financial district … The police went berserk, we went berserk, just running, running for our lives … we were in a scene from a Schwarzenegger film … thousands of Hollywood extras, mostly in suits for the office, with handbags and briefcases, just tearing through the streets of the city. Every few seconds we would snatch a look behind us.”
Columnist Hamill remembered dust blossoming perhaps twenty-five stories high, leaving the street a pale gray wilderness peopled by “all the walking human beings, the police and the civilians, white people and black, men and women … an assembly of ghosts.… Sheets of paper scattered everywhere, orders for stocks, waybills, purchase orders, the pulverized confetti of capitalism.”
INSIDE THE NORTH TOWER, few were even aware of the collapse. “We felt it,” one said. “Our tower went six feet to the right, six feet to the left … it felt like an earthquake.” “You just heard this noise that sounded like the subway train going by,” said another, “multiplied by a thousand.”
“It didn’t register,” recalled James Canham, a firefighter who was on the 11th floor. “There was the sound of the wind blowing through the elevator shafts … air pressure coming in … the entire floor enveloped in dust, smoke … Then I had gone right into the stairwell. There had to be twenty people piled up—I mean actually in a pile … I told them to grab the railing … to grab the belt loop of the person in front of them … If it was a woman … the bra strap. I told them, ‘Hold the bra, with the other hand hold the railing, and make your way down.’ Panicking and crying as they were, they were listening … on their way … coughing … disoriented.”
On hearing by radio of the South Tower’s collapse, police officer David Norman—on the 31st floor—could not comprehend what the operator told him. “To think that a building of one hundred and some stories had fallen was like, you know, not believable … He then explained that there was no South Tower, that it was absolutely gone.”
A great burst of energy, generated by the fall of the South Tower, had translated into a blast of air and dust shooting into the North lobby and on up into the building. For a while it was pitch black. Debris rained down, fatally for some—including the Fire Department chaplain, Mychal Judge. He died in the lobby, hit on the head by flying debris, as he returned from giving last rites to the dead and dying outside.
Fire chief Pfeifer, still running operations in the lobby, knew nothing at first of the collapse on the other side of the plaza. Thinking that something catastrophic was going on
The order did not reach battalion chief Richard Picciotto, on the 35th floor, but he took the decision on his own initiative. “All FDNY, get the fuck out!” he hollered on his bullhorn. And, over the radio, “We’re evacuating, we’re getting out, drop your tools, drop your masks, drop everything, get out, get out!”
Outside, meanwhile, Fire Department chief Ganci had sent his command group off in one direction while— with just one colleague—he headed back toward the North Tower. He went back, an aide explained simply, because
