... painful and excellent ...
... this puts the event and the losses in a very human and tragic perspective - at times, it is uplifting ... it takes the focus away from what happened to the towers, and shines a bright light on the people who were in those towers ...
Ken Wilson
Memorial Day, 2002
_____________________________
May 26, 2002
Fighting to Live as the Towers Died
By The New York Times
This article was reported and written by Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden.
They began as calls for help, information, guidance. They quickly turned into soundings of desperation, and anger, and love. Now they 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.
Collected by reporters for The New York Times, these last words give human form to an all but invisible strand of this stark, public 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 on Sept. 11. Of the 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 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.
Yet like messages in an electronic bottle from people marooned in some distant sky, their last words narrate a world that was coming undone. A man sends an e-mail message asking, "Any news from the outside?" before perching on a ledge at Windows on the World. A woman reports a colleague is smacking useless sprinkler heads with his shoe. A husband calmly reminds his wife about their insurance policies, then says that the floor is groaning beneath him, and tells her that she and their children meant the world to him.
No single call can describe scenes that were unfolding at terrible velocities in many places. Taken together though, the words from the upper floors offer not only a broad and 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 were able to reach people outside the towers. Spoken or written at the hour of death, these are intimate, lasting words. The steep emotional cost of making them public is worth paying, their families say, 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. Iliana McGinnis, whose husband, Tom, called her from the 92nd floor of the north tower, said, "If they can uncover even one more piece of information about what happened during those last minutes, I want it."
Some details remain unknowable. Working phones were scarce. The physical evidence was destroyed. Conversations were held under grave stress, and are recalled through grief, time and longing. Even so, as one fragile bit of
information elaborates on the next, they illuminate conditions on the top floors.
The evidence strongly suggests that 1,100 or more people in or above the impact zones survived the initial crashes, roughly 300 in the south tower and 800 in the north. Many of those lived until their building collapsed.
Even after the second airplane struck, an open staircase connected the upper reaches of the south tower to the street. The Times has identified 18 men and women who used it to escape from the impact zone or above. At the same time they were evacuating, at least 200 other people were climbing toward the roof in that tower, unaware that a passable stairway down was available, and assuming — incorrectly — that they could open the roof door. "The belief that they had a rooftop option cost them their lives," said Beverly Eckert, whose husband, Sean Rooney, called after his futile trek up.
Hundreds were trapped on floors untouched by the airplanes. Even though the buildings survived the initial impacts, the twisting and bending of the towers caused fatal havoc. Stairwells were plugged by broken wallboard. Doors were jammed in twisted frames. With more time and simple tools like crowbars, rescue workers might have freed people who simply could not get to stairways. In the north tower, at least 28 people were freed on the 86th and 89th floors by a small group of Port Authority office workers who pried
open jammed doors. Those self-assigned rescuers died.
In both towers, scores of people lost chances to escape. Some paused to make one more phone call; others, to pick up a forgotten purse; still others, to perform tasks like freeing people from elevators, tending the injured or comforting the distraught.
The crises had identical beginnings and endings in each tower, but ran different courses. At least 37 people, and probably well over 50, can be seen jumping or falling from the north tower, while no one is visible falling from the south tower, in a collection of 20 videotapes shot by
amateurs and professionals from nearby streets and buildings. Both towers had similar volumes of smoke and heat, but in the north tower, about three times as many people were trapped in roughly half the space. Scores were
driven to the windows of the north tower in search of relief. In the south tower, people had more opportunities to move between floors.
The impact zones formed pitiless boundaries between those who were spared and those who were doomed. Even at the margins, the collisions were devastating: the wingtip of the second plane grazed the 78th floor sky lobby in the south tower, instantly killing dozens of people waiting for
elevators. In all, about 600 civilians died in the south tower at or above the plane's impact. In the north tower, every person believed to be above the 91st floor died: 1,344.
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 AM - 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, Ms. Thompson remembers thinking. Prhaps Ms. Eng had matched her mood to the glorious
weather, the rich blue September sky that filled every window. Or perhaps it was the company.
Familiar faces occupied many of the tables in Wild Blue, the intimate aerie to Windows that Ms. Eng helped manage, according to two people who ate there that morning. As much as any one place, that single room captured the sweep of humanity who worked and played at the trade center.
Ms. Thompson, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, was eating with Geoffrey Wharton, an executive with Silverstein Properties, which had just leased the towers. At the next table sat Michael Nestor, the
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, several of whom came every Tuesday. Ms. Eng had a treat for one of them, Emeric Harvey. The night before, one of the restaurant's managers, Jules Roinnel, gave Ms. Eng two impossibly-hard-to-get tickets to "The Producers." Mr. Roinnel says he
asked Ms. Eng to give them to Mr. Harvey.
Sitting by himself at a window table overlooking the Statue of Liberty was a relative newcomer, Neil D. Levin, the executive director of the Port Authority. He had never joined them for breakfast before. But his secretary
requested a table days earlier and now he sat waiting for a banker friend, said Mr. Levin's wife, Christy Ferer.
Every other minute or so, a waiter, Jan Maciejewski, swept through the room, refilling coffee cups and taking orders, Mr. Nestor recalls. Mr. Maciejewski was one of several restaurant workers on the 107th floor. 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. Some exhibitors were already tending to their booths, set up in the Horizon
Suite just across the hallway.
A picture taken that morning showed two exhibitors, Peter Alderman and William Kelly, salesmen for Bloomberg L.P., chatting with a colleague beside a table filled with a multi-screened computer display. Stuart Lee and Garth Feeney, two vice presidents of Data Synapse, ran displays of
their company's software.
Down in the lobby, 107 floors below, an assistant to Mr. Levin waited for his breakfast guest. But when the guest arrived, he and Mr. Levin's aide luckily boarded the wrong elevator, Ms. Ferer would learn, and so they had to return to the lobby to wait for another one.
Upstairs, Mr. Levin read his newspaper, Mr. Nestor recalled. He and Mr. Tierney were a little curious to see whom Mr. Levin, their boss, was meeting for breakfast. But Mr. Nestor had a meeting downstairs, so they headed for the elevators, stopping at Mr. Levin's table to say goodbye.
Behind them came Ms. Thompson and Mr. Wharton. Mr. Nestor held the elevator, so they hopped in quickly, Ms. Thompson recalled.
Then 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 AM - 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 miles an hour, 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 Companies, 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.
Just three floors below the impact zone, not a thing budged in Steve McIntyre's office. Not the slate paperweight shaped like a sailing ship. Not the family snapshots propped up on a bookcase. Mr. McIntyre 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 got to get the hell out of here," yelled Greg Shark, an American Bureau of Shipping engineer and architect, who was bracing himself in the swaying while he stood outside Mr. McIntyre's office.
Somehow, they were alive. Only later would the two men realize the slender margin of their escape. 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 would never pass.
Mr. McIntyre, Mr. Shark and nine other employees, all uninjured, hustled out of the A.B.S. reception area in the northwest corner and turned left toward the elevators and stairways in the tower's core.
Mr. McIntyre recalls peering into a dim, shattered stairwell, billowing with smoke. He heard nothing but water cascading down the stairs, as if he had encountered a babbling brook on a mountain hike. The water almost
certainly came from severed sprinkler pipes. Seeing and hearing no one else in the stinking gloom, 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, that had enclosed the stairwell to protect it. In huge hunks, the Sheetrock
formed a great plug in the stairwell, sealing the passage from 92, the floor above. Going down the stairs, it made a slightly less formidable obstruction.
"This is no good," Mr. McIntyre would remember saying.
Mr. McIntyre could hardly 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 would survive.
Below, across 90 floors, thousands of others were also alive, stunned, unhurt, calling for help. Nearly all of them lived.
Bad as this staircase was, the two other emergency exits were worse, Mr. McIntyre later said. So he went back to that first staircase, northwest of the building's center. He stepped inside and immediately slipped down two flights of grimy gypsum. Unhurt, he stood and noticed lights below. He remembers calling: "This way!" His A.B.S. colleagues joined the exodus from 91.
One floor above them, on the 92nd floor, employees of Carr Futures were doing exactly what the A.B.S. 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," Mr. 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.
A few minutes later, 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 AM - North Tower, 106th Floor, Windows on the World, 1 hour 28 minutes to collapse
"What do we do? What do we do?"
Doris Eng, the restaurant manager, called the Fire Command Center in the lobby repeatedly with that question, according to officials and co-workers. Just minutes after the plane hit, the restaurant was filling with smoke and
she was struggling to direct the 170 people in her charge.
Many in the crowd made their living providing information or the equipment that carried it, communications experts taking part in the morning's conference in the ballroom. But with thickening smoke, no power and little sense of what was going on, the restaurant was fast becoming an isolation zone, where 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."
Ms. Eng and the Windows 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, like those in Windows on the World, were to leave only when directed by the command center "or when conditions dictate such actions."
Conditions were quickly deteriorating, 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, Mr. Vogt
said, because he was on the street outside the trade center. Ms. Olender told Mrs. 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 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. No one in New York had ever seen a fire of this size — four and five floors blazing within seconds. Commanders in the lobby 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 would still be 50 floors below Windows.
Downstairs, the 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. Mr. 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. Others were waiting for one of the few working phones.
Garth Feeney called his mother, Judy, in Florida. She began with a breezy hello, she later recalled.
"Mom," Mr. Feeney responded, "I'm not calling to chat. I'm in the World Trade Center and it's been hit by a plane."
The calm manner of the staff could not contain the strain. Laurie Kane, whose husband, Howard, was the restaurant's comptroller, said she could hear someone screaming, "We're trapped," as they finished their final conversation. Gabriela Waisman, a conference attendee, phoned her sister 10 times in 11 minutes, frantic to keep the connection. Veronique Bowers, the restaurant's credit collections manager, kept telling her grandmother, Carrie Tillman, that the building had been hit by an ambulance.
"She was so confused," Mrs. Tillman said.
9:01 AM - North Tower, 104th Floor, Cantor Fitzgerald, 1 hour 27 minutes to collapse
Just 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 just 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. And the crash and fires were not as immediately devastating as they had been a few floors below, at Marsh & McLennan.
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.
"Tim Betterly," Mr. Rosenblum said into his cellphone, reeling off a phone number. "James Ladley." Another number.
As the list grew, Mr. 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. She remembers scribbling the names and numbers on a yellow legal pad in her kitchen, as the burning towers played on a 13-inch television in a cubbyhole near the backdoor.
Mrs. Rosenblum handed pieces of paper with the numbers to friends who had shown up. They went either to the leafy, fenced-in backyard, where the dog wandered among them, or to the front lawn, calling the families on cellphones.
Mr. Rosenblum's group, including Jimmy Smith, John Salamone and John Schwartz, sat on the eastern side of the bond trading area, in one of the open areas, according to John Sanacore, one of the group who was not at work that day. The spot offered expansive views of the Empire State
Building.
On the opposite end of the bond area, overlooking the Hudson River, other traders were gathered. John Gaudioso, who normally worked in that section but was on a golf outing that morning, recalled that Ian Schneider sat at
the head of a string of desks where he led a global finance group. Michael Wittenstein, John Casazza and Michael DeRienzo were all in that area, and, like Mr. Schneider, were using land lines at their desks to take calls from
concerned customers and loved ones, according to six people who spoke with them. "The building rocked like it never has before," said Mr. Schneider, who was there for the 1993 bombing, in a phone call with his wife, Cheryl.
In the equities trading area in the southern part of the 104th floor, looking toward the Statue of Liberty, there was a third group. Here, Stephen Cherry and Marc Zeplin pushed a button at their desk to activate the squawk box, a nationwide intercom to other Cantor offices around the
country. "Can anybody hear us?" Mr. 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 Pelletier, and was then in touch with a friend who told him that the airplane crash had been a terrorist attack. Mr. Pelletier
swore and shouted the information to the people around him, Mrs. Pelletier 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 O.K. right now."
9:02 AM - 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 Mr. Rooney's tower, people could feel the 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 the tenants
to stay inside an undamaged building than to walk onto a street where fiery debris was falling.
That instruction would change at the very moment that Mr. Rooney, who worked for the insurance company Aon, was leaving a second message for his wife, at 9:02 a.m.
"Honey, this is Sean again," he said. "Looks like we'll be in this tower for a while." He paused, as a public announcement in the background could be heard.
"It's secure here," Mr. Rooney continued. "But ——" He stopped again to listen: "if the conditions warrant on your floor you may wish to start an orderly evacuation."
"I'll talk to you later," Mr. Rooney said. "Bye."
As Mr. Rooney spoke, United Flight 175 was screaming across New York Harbor.
[CONTINUED] |
