There are many heros named in this amazing piece: Voices from the top of the towers
By The New York Times
archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com
NEW YORK ? They began as calls for help, information, guidance. They quickly turned into soundings of desperation, and anger, and love. They now are the remembered voices of the men and women who were trapped on the high floors of the twin towers.
From their last words, a haunting chronicle of the final 102 minutes at the World Trade Center has emerged, built on scores of phone conversations and e-mail and voice messages. These accounts, along with the testimony of the handful of people who escaped, provide the first sweeping views from the floors directly hit by the airplanes and above.
These last words give human form to an all but invisible strand of this catastrophe: the advancing destruction across the top 19 floors of the north tower and the top 33 of the south, where loss of life was most severe Sept. 11. Of 2,823 believed dead in the attack on New York, at least 1,946, or 69 percent, were killed on those upper floors, an analysis by The New York Times has found.
Rescue workers did not get near them. Photographers could not record their faces. If they were seen at all, it was in glimpses at windows, nearly a quarter-mile up.
No single call can describe scenes that were unfolding at terrible velocities in many places. Taken together, the words from the upper floors offer not only a broad, chilling view of the devastated zones, but the only window onto acts of bravery, decency and grace at a brutal time.
Eight months after the attacks, many survivors and friends and relatives of those lost are pooling their recollections, tapes and phone records, and 157 have shared accounts of their contacts for this article. At least 353 of those lost reached people outside the towers. These are intimate, lasting words. The steep emotional cost of making them public is worth paying, their families , for a clearer picture of those final minutes.
Many also hope the history of the day is enlarged beyond memorials to the unquestioned valor of 343 firefighters and 78 other uniformed rescuers. It is time, they say, to account for the experiences of the 2,400 civilians who also died that day.
The farther from the impact, the more calls people made. In the north tower, pockets of near-silence extended four floors above and one floor below the impact zone. Yet remarkably, in both towers, even on floors squarely hit by the jets, a few people lived long enough to make calls.
To place these fragmentary messages in context, The Times interviewed family members, friends and colleagues of those who died, obtained times of calls from cellphone bills and 911 records, analyzed 20 videotapes and listened to 15 hours of police and fire radio tapes.
The Times also interviewed 25 people who saw firsthand the destruction wreaked by the planes, because they escaped from the impact zone or above it in the south tower, or from just below it in the north.
8:00, north tower, 107th floor, Windows on the World, 2 hours, 28 minutes to collapse
"Good morning, Ms. Thompson."
Doris Eng's greeting was particularly sunny, like the day, as Liz Thompson arrived for breakfast atop the tallest building in the city, Thompson remembers thinking.
Familiar faces occupied many of the tables in Wild Blue, the intimate aerie to Windows that Eng helped manage, according to two people who ate there that morning.
Thompson, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, was eating with Geoffrey Wharton, an executive with Silverstein Properties. At the next table sat Michael Nestor, deputy inspector general of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and one of his investigators, Richard Tierney.
At a third table were six stockbrokers. Eng had a treat for one of them, Emeric Harvey. The previous night, one of the restaurant's managers, Jules Roinnel, gave Eng two impossibly-hard-to-get tickets to "The Producers." Roinnel says he asked Eng to give them to Harvey.
Sitting alone at a window table overlooking the Statue of Liberty was a relative newcomer, Neil Levin, executive director of the Port Authority. He sat waiting for a banker friend, said Levin's wife, Christy Ferer.
Every other minute or so, a waiter, Jan Maciejewski, swept through the room, refilling coffee cups and taking orders, Nestor recalls. Most of the 72 Windows employees were on the 106th floor, where Risk Waters Group was holding a conference on information technology.
Already 87 people had arrived, including top executives from Merrill Lynch and UBS Warburg, according to the conference sponsors. Many were enjoying coffee and sliced smoked salmon in the restaurant's ballroom.
A picture taken that morning showed two exhibitors, Peter Alderman and William Kelly, salesmen for Bloomberg, chatting with a colleague.
In the lobby, 107 floors below, an assistant to Levin waited for his breakfast guest. But when the guest arrived, he and Levin's aide luckily boarded the wrong elevator, Ferer would learn.
Upstairs, Levin read his newspaper, Nestor recalled. He and Tierney were curious to see whom Levin, their boss, was meeting. But Nestor had a meeting downstairs, so they headed for the elevators, stopping at Levin's table to say goodbye. Behind them came Thompson and Wharton. Nestor held the elevator, so they hopped in quickly, Thompson recalled.
The doors closed, and the last people ever to leave Windows on the World began their descent. It was 8:44 a.m.
8:46, north tower, 91st floor, American Bureau of Shipping, 1 hour, 42 minutes to collapse
The impact came at 8:46:26 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 measuring 156 feet from wingtip to wingtip and carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel, was moving at 470 mph, federal investigators estimated. At that speed, it covered the final two blocks to the north tower in 1.2 seconds.
The plane ripped a path across floors 94 to 98, directly into the office of Marsh & McLennan, shredding steel columns, wallboard, filing cabinets and computer-laden desks. Its fuel ignited and incinerated everything in its way. The plane's landing gear hurtled through the south side of the building, winding up on Rector Street, five blocks away.
Three floors below the impact zone, not a thing budged in Steve McIntyre's office. He found himself in front of a computer that was still on.
Then came the whiplash.
A powerful shock wave quickly radiated up and down from the impact zone. The wave bounced from the top to the bottom of the tower, three or four seconds one way and then back, rocking the building like a huge boat in a storm.
"We've got to get the hell out of here!" yelled Greg Shark, an American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) engineer and architect, bracing himself in the swaying while he stood outside McIntyre's office.
Somehow, they were alive. In their accounts of hunting for a way out, they provide a survey of a border territory, an impregnable zone through which the people imprisoned above never would pass.
McIntyre, Shark and nine other employees, all uninjured, hustled out of the ABS reception area in the northwest corner and turned left toward the elevators and stairways in the tower's core.
McIntyre recalls peering into a dim, shattered stairwell, billowing with smoke. He heard nothing but water cascading down the stairs. The water almost certainly came from severed sprinkler pipes. He looked up.
The stairwell was blocked from above ? not by fire or structural steel, but by huge pieces of the light gypsum drywall, often called Sheetrock. In huge hunks, the Sheetrock formed a great plug in the stairwell, sealing the passage from 92, the floor above. Some was also going down the stairs, but it made a slightly less formidable obstruction.
McIntyre hardly could have known it, but he stood at a critical boundary. Above him, across 19 floors, were 1,344 people, many of them alive, stunned, unhurt, calling for help. Not one survived.
Below, across 90 floors, thousands of others also were alive, stunned, unhurt, calling for help. Nearly all of them lived.
Bad as this staircase was, the two other emergency exits were worse, McIntyre later said. So he went back to that first staircase. He slipped down two flights of grimy gypsum. Unhurt, he stood and noticed lights below. He remembers calling: "This way!" His ABS colleagues joined the exodus from 91.
One flight above them, on the 92nd floor, employees of Carr Futures were doing what the ABS people had done: hunting for a way out.
They did not realize they were on the wrong side of the rubble.
On the 92nd floor, Damian Meehan scrambled to a phone at Carr Futures and dialed his brother Eugene, a firefighter in the Bronx. "It's really bad here ? the elevators are gone," Meehan told him.
"Get to the front door, see if there's smoke there," Eugene Meehan recalled urging him. He heard his brother put the phone down, then followed the sounds drifting into his ear. Yelling. Commotion, but not panic.
Damian Meehan returned and reported that the front entrance was filled with smoke.
"Get to the stairs," Eugene remembered advising him. "See where the smoke is coming from. Go the other way."
Then he heard Damian for the last time.
"He said, 'We've got to go.' Or he said, 'We're going,' " Eugene Meehan said. "I've been racking my brains to remember.
"I know he said 'we.' "
9:00, north tower, 106th floor, Windows on the World, 1 hour, 28 minutes to collapse
With thickening smoke, no power and little sense of what was going on, the restaurant fast was becoming an isolation zone, where 170 people scrambled for bits of news.
"Watch CNN," Stephen Tompsett, a computer scientist at the conference, e-mailed his wife, Dorry, using his BlackBerry communicator. "Need updates."
Videos from two amateur photographers show that the smoke built with terrifying speed at the top of the building, cascading thicker from seams in windows there than from floors closer to the plane. Early on, Rajesh Mirpuri called his company, Data Synapse, coughing, and said he could not see more than 10 feet, his boss, Peter Lee, would remember. Peter Alderman, the Bloomberg salesman, also told his sister about the smoke, using his BlackBerry to send an e-mail message: "I'm scared."
Doris Eng, the restaurant manager, and her staff, following their emergency training, herded people from the 107th floor down to a corridor on the 106th near the stairs, where they used a special phone to call the Fire Command Center. The building's policy was to immediately evacuate the floor on fire and the one above it. People farther away, such as those in Windows on the World, were to leave only when directed by the command center "or when conditions dictate such actions."
Conditions were deteriorating quickly, though. Glenn Vogt, the restaurant's general manager, said that 20 minutes after the plane hit, his assistant, Christine Olender, called him at home. She got his wife instead, Vogt said, because he was on the street outside the trade center. Olender told Vogt that they had heard nothing on how to leave. "The ceilings are falling," she said. "The floors are buckling."
Within 20 minutes of the crash, a police helicopter reported to its base that it could not land on the roof. Still, many put their hopes on a rescue by someone, some way.
"I can't go anywhere because they told us not to move," Ivhan Luis Carpio, a Windows worker, said in a message he left on his cousin's answering machine. "I have to wait for the firefighters."
The firefighters, however, were struggling to respond. Commanders had no way of knowing if any stairwells were passable. With most elevators ruined, firefighters were toting heavy gear up stairwells against a tide of evacuees. An hour after the plane crash, they were 50 floors below Windows.
Downstairs, authorities fielded calls from the upper floors. "There's not much you could do other than tell them to go wet a towel and keep it over your face," said Alan Reiss, the former director of the world trade department of the Port Authority. But the plane had severed the water line to the upper floors. Maciejewski, the waiter, told his wife in a cellphone call that he could not find enough to wet a rag, she recalled. He said he would check the flower vases.
The room had almost no water and not much air, but there was no shortage of cellphones or BlackBerries. Using them and a few intact phone lines, at least 41 people in the restaurant reached someone outside the building. Peter Mardikian of Imagine Software told his wife, Corine, that he was headed for the roof and that he could not talk long, she recalled.
Garth Feeney called his mother, Judy, in Florida. She began with a breezy hello, she later recalled.
"Mom," Feeney responded, "I'm not calling to chat. I'm in the World Trade Center, and it's been hit by a plane."
9:01, north tower, 104th floor, Cantor Fitzgerald, 1 hour, 27 minutes to collapse
Two floors below Windows, the disaster marched at an eerily deliberate pace, the sense of emergency muted. The northwest conference room on the 104th floor held only one of many large knots of people in the five floors occupied by Cantor Fitzgerald. There, the smoke did not become overwhelming as quickly as at Windows.
In fact, Andrew Rosenblum, a Cantor stock trader, thought it would be a good idea to reassure the families. With his wife, Jill, listening on the phone from their home in Rockville Centre, N.Y., he announced to the room: "Give me your home numbers," his wife recounted.
As the list grew, Rosenblum realized that 40 or 50 colleagues were in the room, having fled the smoke. "Please call their spouses, tell them we're in this conference room and we're fine," he said to his wife.
Rosenblum handed pieces of paper with the numbers to friends who had shown up. They called the families on cellphones.
In the equities-trading area in the southern part of the 104th floor, looking toward the Statue of Liberty, Stephen Cherry and Marc Zeplin pushed a button at their desk to activate the squawk box, a nationwide intercom to other Cantor offices across the country. "Can anybody hear us?" Cherry asked. A trader in Chicago who was listening in later said that she managed to reach a firehouse near the trade center. "They know you're there," the trader told them.
Mike Pelletier, a commodities broker in a Cantor office on the 105th floor, reached his wife, Sophie, and was then in touch with a friend who told him that the airplane crash had been a terrorist attack. Pelletier swore and shouted the information to the people around him, she said.
In Rockville Centre, on the front lawn of the Rosenblums' house, Debbie Cohen dialed the numbers on the yellow pieces of paper she had been handed by Jill Rosenblum.
"Hello? You don't know me, but I was given your number by someone who is in the World Trade Center," she said. "About 50 of them are in a corner conference room, and they say they're OK right now."
9:02, south tower, 98th floor, Aon Corp., 57 minutes to collapse
Those in the south tower were still spectators, if wary ones. "Hey Beverly, this is Sean, in case you get this message," Sean Rooney said on a voice-mail message left for his wife, Beverly Eckert. "There has been an explosion in World Trade One ? that's the other building. It looks like a plane struck it. It's on fire at about the 90th floor. And it's, it's ? it's horrible. Bye."
Even in Rooney's tower, people could feel heat from the fires raging in the other building, and they could see bodies falling from the high floors. Many soon began to leave. The building's staff, however, announced that they should stay ? judging that it was safer for tenants to stay inside an undamaged building than to walk onto a street where debris was falling.
That instruction would change at the moment that Rooney, who worked for the insurance company Aon, was leaving a second message for his wife, at 9:02.
"Honey, this is Sean again," he said. "Looks like we'll be in this tower for a while."
"I'll talk to you later," Rooney said. "Bye."
As Rooney spoke, United Flight 175 was screaming across New York Harbor.
9:02, south tower, 81st floor, Fuji Bank, 57 minutes to collapse
Yes, Stanley Praimnath told the caller from Chicago, he was fine. He had evacuated to the lobby of the south tower, but a security guard told him to go back. Now, he was at his desk in Fuji Bank. "I'm fine," he repeated.
As he would tell his story later, those were his final words before he spotted it.
A gray shape on the horizon. An airplane, flying past the Statue of Liberty. The body of the United Airlines jet grew larger until he could see a red stripe on the fuselage. Then it banked and headed directly toward him.
"Lord, you take over!" he remembers yelling, dropping under his metal desk.
At 9:02:54, the nose of the jetliner smashed directly into Praimnath's floor, about 130 feet from his desk. A fireball ignited. Steel furnishings and aluminum plane parts were torn into white-hot shrapnel. A blast wave hurled computers and desks through windows, and ripped out bundles of arcing electrical cables. The south tower then seemed to stoop, swinging gradually toward the Hudson River, ferociously testing the steel skeleton before snapping back.
Along the impact zone of the south tower, floors 78 to 84, however, the stairs had to divert around heavy elevator machinery. So, instead of running close to the building core, two of the stairways serving those floors were built closer to the perimeter. One of them, on the northwest side, survived.
Praimnath could see a shiny aluminum piece of the plane, lodged in the remains of his door.
The plane, entering at a tilt, raked across six floors. Three flights up was the office of Euro Brokers, on the 84th floor. Most of the company's trading floor there was annihilated. Yet even there ? at the bull's-eye of the airplane ? other people were alive: Robert Coll, Dave Vera, Ronald DiFrancesco and Kevin York, among others. Within minutes, they headed to the closest stairwell, led by Brian Clark, a fire warden on the 84th floor.
A fine powder mixed with light smoke floated through the stairwell. As they approached the 81st floor, Clark would recall, they met a slim man and a heavyset woman. "You can't go down," the woman screamed. "You got to go up. There is too much smoke and flame below."
This assessment changed everything. Hundreds of people came to a similar conclusion, but the smoke and the debris in the stairwell proved less of an obstacle than the fear of it. This very stairwell was the sole route out of the building.
This plain opportunity hardly read that way to the band of survivors who stood on the 81st floor landing, moments after the plane crash. They argued the alternatives, with Clark shining a flashlight into his colleagues' faces, asking each, "Up or down?" The debate was interrupted by shouts on the 81st floor.
"Help me! Help me!" Praimnath yelled. "I'm trapped. Don't leave me here!"
With no further discussion, the group in the stairs turned in different directions. As Clark recalls it, Coll, York and Vera headed up the stairs, along with the heavyset woman, the slim man and two others he could not identify.
Clark and DiFrancesco headed toward Praimnath, the man yelling for help. Praimnath saw the flashlight beam and crawled toward it, over toppled desks and across fallen ceiling tiles. He finally reached a damaged wall that separated him from the man with the flashlight.
From both sides, they ripped at the wall. A nail penetrated Praimnath's hand. He knocked it out against a hard surface in the darkness. Finally, the two men, still separated, could see each other.
"You must jump," Clark told Praimnath, whose hand and left leg were now bleeding. "There is no other choice."
As Praimnath hopped up, Clark helped boost him over the obstacle. They ran to the stairwell and headed down. Flames licked in through cracks in the stairwell walls. Water from severed pipes poured down, forming a treacherous slurry.
Meanwhile, DiFrancesco took a detour in search of air, climbing about 10 floors, where he found the first group to go upstairs. They could not leave the stairwell; the doors would not open. Exhausted, in heavy smoke, people were lying down, DiFrancesco included. "Everyone else was starting to go to sleep," he said. Then, he recalled, he sat up, thinking, "I've got to see my wife and kids again." He ran down.
9:05, south tower, 78th floor, Elevator Sky Lobby, 54 minutes to collapse
Mary Jos cannot say for sure how long she was lying there, unconscious, on the floor of the sky lobby, outside the express elevator. Her first recollection of stirring is when she felt searing heat on her back and face. Maybe, she remembers thinking, she was on fire. Instinctively, she rolled over to smother the flames. She saw a blaze in the center of the room, and in the elevator shafts.
That was terrifying enough. Then, she gradually noticed something worse. The 78th-floor sky lobby, which minutes before had been bustling with office workers unsure whether to leave the building, was filled with motionless bodies.
The ceilings, the walls, the windows, the sky lobby information kiosk, even the marble that graced the elevator banks ? everything had been smashed as the second hijacked plane dipped its left wingtip into the 78th floor.
Lying amid the deathly silence, burned and bleeding, Mary Jos had a single thought: her husband. "I am not going to die," she said, remembering her words.
At the instant of impact, a busy lobby of people ? witness estimates range from 50 to 200 ? was struck silent, dark, all but lifeless. For a few, survival came from having leaned into an alcove.
As Judy Wein came to, she had her battered body to deal with: Her right arm was broken, three ribs were cracked and her right lung had been punctured. In other words, she was lucky. Wein yelled out for her boss, Howard Kestenbaum. When she found him, she said, he was expressionless, motionless, silent. Karen Hagerty, who had joked amid the chaos about having two cats to go home to, showed no signs of life when a colleague, Ed Nicholls, saw her. And Richard Gabrielle, another Aon colleague, was pinned to the ground, his legs apparently broken by marble that had fallen on them.
A mysterious man appeared at one point, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher. As Judy Wein recalls, he pointed to the stairs and made an announcement that saved lives: Anyone who can walk, get up and walk now. Anyone who can perhaps help others, find someone who needs help and then head down.
In groups of two and three, survivors struggled to the stairs. A few flights down, they propped up debris blocking their way, leaving a small passageway to slip through.
A few minutes behind this group was Ling Young, who also survived the impact in the sky lobby. She, too, said she had been steered by the man in the red bandanna, hearing him call out: "This way to the stairs." He trailed her down the stairs. Young said she soon noticed that he was carrying a woman on his back. Once they reached clearer air, he put her down, and went back up.
9:35, north tower; 104th floor, Cantor Fitzgerald; 106th floor, Windows on the World; 53 minutes to collapse
So urgent was the need for air that people piled four and five high in window after window, their upper bodies hanging out, 1,300 feet above the ground. They were in an unforgiving place.
Elsewhere, two men, one of them shirtless, stood on the windowsills, leaning their bodies so far outside that they could peer around a big intervening column and see each other, an analysis of photographs and videos reveals.
On the 103rd floor, a man stared straight out a broken window toward the northwest, bracing himself against a window frame with one hand. He wrapped his other arm around a woman.
Behind the unbroken windows, the desperate had assembled. "About five floors from the top you have about 50 people with their faces pressed against the window trying to breathe," a police officer in a helicopter reported.
Now it was unmistakable. The office of Cantor Fitzgerald, and above it, Windows on the World, would become the landmark for this doomed moment. Nearly 900 would die on floors 101 through 107.
In the restaurant, at least 70 people crowded near office windows at the northwest corner of the 106th floor, according to accounts they gave relatives and co-workers. "Everywhere else is smoked out," Stuart Lee, a Data Synapse vice president, e-mailed his office in Greenwich Village.
Soon, though, a dozen people appeared through broken windows along the west face of the restaurant. Vogt, the general manager of Windows, said he could see them from the ground, silhouetted against the smoke.
By now, videotapes show, fires were rampaging through the impact floors, darting across the north face of the tower.
In the northwest conference room on the 104th floor, Andrew Rosenblum and 50 other people temporarily managed to ward off the smoke and heat by plugging vents with jackets. "We smashed the computers into the windows to get some air," Rosenblum reported by cellphone to his golf partner, Barry Kornblum.
But there was no hiding.
As people began falling from above the conference room, Rosenblum broke his preternatural calm, his wife, Jill, recalled. In the midst of speaking to her, he suddenly interjected, without elaboration, "Oh, my God."
9:38, south tower; 97th floor, Fiduciary Trust; 93rd floor, Aon; 21 minutes to collapse
"Ed, be careful!" shouted Alayne Gentul, director of human resources at Fiduciary Trust, as Edgar Emery slipped off the desk he had been standing on within the increasingly hot, smoky 97th floor of the south tower.
Emery, one of her office colleagues, had been trying to use his blazer to seal a ventilation duct. To evacuate Fiduciary employees who worked on this floor, Emery and Gentul had climbed seven floors.
Now the two of them, and the six or so they were trying to save, were in serious trouble.
As Gentul spoke to her husband on the phone ? he could overhear what was happening ? Emery got up and spread the coat over the vent. Next, he swung a shoe at a sprinkler head.
"The sprinklers aren't going on," Gentul said to her husband, Jack Gentul, who listened in his office at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, where he is a dean. No one knew the plane had cut the water pipes.
"We don't know whether to stay or go," Gentul told her husband. "I don't want to go down into a fire," she said.
Like Emery, Gentul had herded a group out before the second plane hit. A receptionist, Mona Dunn, saw her on the 90th floor where workers were debating when or if to leave. Gentul settled the question. "Go down and go down orderly," she said, indicating a stairway.
Together, Gentul and Emery went to evacuate six people on the 97th floor who had been working on a computer backup operation, Gentul told her husband.
Emery was hunting for a stairwell on the 97th floor when he reached his wife, Elizabeth, by cellphone. The last thing Mrs. Emery heard before she lost the connection was Alayne Gentul screaming from somewhere near Ed Emery, "Where's the stairs? Where's the stairs?"
Another phone call was under way nearby. Edmund McNally, director of technology for Fiduciary, called his wife, Liz, as the floor began buckling. McNally hastily recited his life-insurance policies and employee-bonus programs. "He said that I meant the world to him and he loved me," McNally said, and they exchanged what they thought were their last goodbyes.
McNally's phone then rang again. Her husband sheepishly reported that he had booked them on a trip to Rome for her 40th birthday. "He said, 'Liz, you have to cancel that,' " McNally said.
9:45, south tower, 105th floor, 14 minutes to collapse
Sean Rooney called Beverly Eckert. They had met at a high-school dance in Buffalo, when they were both 16. They had just turned 50 together.
He had tried to go down but was stymied, then had climbed 30 floors or so to the locked roof. Now he wanted to plot a way out, so he had his wife describe the fire's location from the TV pictures. He could not fathom why the roof was locked, she said. She urged him to try again while she dialed 911 on another line. He put the phone down, then returned minutes later, saying the roof door would not budge. He had pounded on it.
"He was worried about the flames," Eckert recalled. "I kept telling him they weren't anywhere near him. He said, but the windows were hot. His breathing was becoming more labored."
Ceilings were caving in. Floors were buckling. Phone calls were being cut off. He was alone in a room filling with smoke. They said goodbye.
"He was telling me he loved me. Then you could hear the loud explosion."
10:00, north tower, 92nd floor, Carr Futures, 28 minutes to collapse
"Mom," Jeffrey Nussbaum asked, "what was that explosion?"
Twenty miles away in Oceanside, N.Y., Arline Nussbaum could see on television what her son could not from 50 yards away. She recalls their last words:
"The other tower just went down," she said.
"Oh, my God," her son said. "I love you."
Then the phone went dead.
The north tower, hit 16 minutes before the south, still was standing. It was dying, more slowly, but just as surely. Calls were dwindling. The number of people falling from windows accelerated.
That morning, the office of Carr Futures on the 92nd floor was unusually busy. Sixty-eight people were on the floor that morning, 67 of them associated with Carr.
About two dozen brokers for Carr's parent company had been called to a special 8 a.m. meeting. When the building sprang back and forth like a car antenna, door frames twisted and jammed shut, trapping a number of them.
The remaining Carr employees, about 40, migrated to a large, unfinished space along the west side. Jeffrey Nussbaum called his mother, and shared his cellphone with Andy Friedman. In all, the Carr families have counted 31 calls from the people they lost, according to Joan Dincuff, whose son, Christopher, died that morning.
Carr was two floors below the impact, and everyone there had survived it; yet they could not get out. Between 10:05 and 10:25, videos show, fire spread westward across the 92nd floor's north face, bearing down on their refuge.
At 10:18, Tom McGinnis, one of the traders summoned to the special meeting, reached his wife, Iliana McGinnis. The words are stitched into her memory.
"This looks really, really bad," he said.
"I know," said Mrs. McGinnis, who had been hoping that his meeting had broken up before the airplane hit. "This is bad for the country; it looks like World War III."
Something in the tone of her husband's answer alarmed McGinnis.
"Are you OK, yes or no?" she demanded.
"We're on the 92nd floor in a room we can't get out of," he said.
"Who's with you?" she asked. McGinnis mentioned three old friends ? Joey Holland, Brendan Dolan and Elkin Yuen.
"I love you," McGinnis said. "Take care of Caitlin." Mrs. McGinnis was not ready for that.
"Don't lose your cool," she urged. "You guys are so tough, you're resourceful. You guys are going to get out of there."
"You don't understand," McGinnis said. "There are people jumping from the floors above us."
It was 10:25. The fire raged along the west side of the 92nd floor. People fell from windows. McGinnis again told her he loved her and their daughter, Caitlin.
"Don't hang up," Mrs. McGinnis pleaded.
"I got to get down on the floor," McGinnis said.
The phone connection faded out.
It was 10:26, two minutes before the tower crumbled. The World Trade Center had fallen silent.
This article was reported and written by Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden, with contributions from Alain Delaqueriere and Tom Torok.
Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company |
