[CONTINUED]
9:02 AM - South Tower, 81st Floor, Fuji Bank, 57 minutes to collapse
Yes, Stanley Praimnath told the caller from Chicago, he was fine. He had actually evacuated to the lobby of the south tower, but a security guard told him to go back. Now, he was again at his desk at Fuji Bank. "I'm fine," he repeated.
As he would later tell his story, 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.
Another one.
"Lord, you take over!" he remembers yelling, dropping under his metal desk.
At 9:02:54, the nose of the jetliner smashed directly into Mr. 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 hrled computers and desks through windows, and ripped out bundles of arcing electrical cables. Then the south tower seemed to stoop, swinging gradually toward the Hudson River, ferociously testing the steel skeleton before snapping back.
Through most of both towers, the staircases were tightly clustered, and in the north tower, they were all imediately severed or blocked by the blast. 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. A report in USA Today this month also suggested that the surviving stairway might have been shielded by the machinery.
However the stairway survived, it made all the difference to Stanley Praimnath, who, huddled under his desk, 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's impact — 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, who had his flashlight and whistle.
A fine powder mixed with light smoke floated through the stairwell. As they approached the 81st floor, Mr. 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, running from the top to the bottom of the south tower. Anyone who found this stairwell early enough could have walked to freedom.
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 Mr. Clark shining his flashlight into his colleagues' faces, asking each, "Up or down?" The debate was interrupted by shouts on the 81st floor.
"Help me! Help me!" Mr. Praimnath yelled. "I'm trapped. Don't leave me here!"
With no further discussion, the group in the stairs turned in different directions. As Mr. Clark recalls it, Mr. Coll, Mr. York and Mr. Vera headed up the stairs, along with the heavyset woman, the slim man and two others he knew from Euro Brokers but could not identify. Mr. York and Mr. Coll
hooked arms to support the woman, Mr. Clark recalled. One of them said: "Come on, you can do it. We're in this together."
Mr. Clark and Mr. DiFrancesco headed toward the man yelling for help. Mr. Praimnath saw the flashlight beam and crawled toward it, over toppled desks and across fallen ceiling tiles. Minutes earlier, this had been Fuji Bank's loan department, employee lounge and computer room. Finally, he reached a damaged wall that separated him from the man with the flashlight.
From both sides, they ripped at the wall. A nail penetrated Mr. Praimnath's hand. He knocked it out against a hard surface in the darkness. Finally, the two men could see each other, but were still separated.
"You must jump," Mr. Clark told Mr. Praimnath, whose hand and left leg were now bleeding. "There is no other choice."
As Mr. Praimnath hopped up, Mr. Clark helped boost him over the obstacle. They ran to the stairwell and headed down. The steps were strewn with shattered wallboard. Flames licked in through cracks in the stairwell walls. Water from severed pipes poured down, forming a treacherous slurry.
They moved past the spot with the heavy smoke that the woman had warned Mr. Clark against. Perhaps the draft had shifted; maybe the smoke had not been all that bad to begin with. In any case, the stairs were clear and would be clear as late as 30 minutes after the south tower was hit.
Meanwhile, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 AM - 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, below the thick black smoke and through clouds of pulverized plaster, 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 or go back to work, was now filled with motionless bodies.
The ceilings, the walls, the windows, the sky lobby information kiosk, even the marble that graced the elevator banks - everything was smashed as the second hijacked plane dipped its left wingtip into the 78th floor.
In an instant, the witnesses say, they encountered a brilliant light, a blast of hot air and a shock wave that knocked over everything. 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.
In the 16 minutes between attacks, those in the south tower scarcely had time to absorb the horrors they could see aross the plaza and decide what to do. To map their choices about movements is to see the geography of life and death.
Before the second plane hit, survivors said, the mood in the sky lobby was awkward: relief at the announcements that their building was safer than walking on the street, and fear that it really wasn't. In these critical moments, people milled about, trying to decide. Be at trading desks for the opening of the market, or grab a cup of coffee downstairs? At Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, nearly the entire investment banking department left and survived. Nearly all the equities traders stayed and died.
One of them, Stephen Mulderry, spoke to his brother Peter, and described the blaze in the north tower he could see from a window. Still, the word had come from the building management that his tower was "secure" - and his soundless phone was blinking for his attention. "He said, 'I got to go - the lights are ringing and the market is going to open,'" Peter Mulderry recalled.
In the moments before the second impact, everyone in the 78th floor sky lobby was poised between going up or down. Kelly Reyher, who worked on the 100th floor at Aon Corporation, stepped into a local elevator headed up. He
wanted to get his Palm Pilot, figuring it might be a while before he could return to his office. Judy Wein and Gigi Singer, also both of Aon, debated whether to go back and get their pocketbooks from their 103rd floor office. But Howard L. Kestenbaum, their colleague, told them to forget about it. He would give them carfare home.
As some office workers spoke nervously of the loved ones they were rushing to rejoin, there was even a bit of humor.
"I have a horse and two cats," Karen E. Hagerty, 34, joked, as she was squeezed out of an elevator spot.
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. Death could come from having stepped back from a crowded elevator door.
As Ms. Wein came to, she had her own 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. All around her were people with horrific injuries, dead or close to it. Ms. Wein yelled out for her boss, Mr. Kestenbaum. When she found him, she said, he was epressionless, motionless, silent. Ms. Hagerty, who had joked about the cats at home, 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.
Ms. Wein tried to move the stone. Mr. Gabrielle cried out from pain, she said, and told her to stop.
Gradually, those who could move, did. Ms. Wein found Vijayashanker Paramsothy and Ms. Singer, neither of whom had life-threatening injuries. Kelly Reyher, who had been on his way to get his Palm Pilot, managed to pry open the elevator doors with his arms and his briefcase. He crawled out of the burning car and found Donna Spira 50 feet away. Her arm fractured, her hair burned, Mrs. Spira could still walk.
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, the 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. Ms. 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.
Others never left.
The people who escaped said Mr. Paramsothy, who had only been scraped, remained behind. Ms. Young said that Sankara Velamuri and Diane Urban, colleagues of Mrs. Jos from the State Department of Taxation and Finance, tried to help two more seriously injured friends, Dianne Gladstone and
Yeshavant Tembe, both also state employees.
All five of these people would die.
Of the dozens of people waiting in the sky lobby when the second plane struck, 12 are known to have made it out alive.
9:35 AM - 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, seemingly to keep her from tumbling to the ground.
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 just 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. "Currently an argument going on as whether we should break a window," Mr. Lee continued a few moments later. "Consensus is no for the time being."
Soon, though, a dozen people appeared through broken windows along the west face of the restaurant. Mr. Vogt, the general manager of Windows, said he could see them from the ground, silhouetted against the gray smoke that
billowed out from his own office and others.
By now, the videotapes show, fires were rampaging through the impact floors, darting across the north face of the tower. Coils of smoke lashed the people braced around the broken windows.
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," Mr. Rosenblum reported by cellphone to his golf partner,
Barry Kornblum.
But there was no hiding.
As people began falling from above the conference room, Mr. 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 AM - South Tower, 97th Floor, Fiduciary Trust; 93rd Floor, Aon Corp.; 21 minutes to collapse
"Ed, be careful!" shouted Alayne Gentul, the director of human resources at Fiduciary Trust, as Edgar Emery slipped off the desk he had been standing on within the increasingly hot and smoky 97th floor of the south tower.
Mr. Emery, one of her office colleagues, had been trying to use his blazer to seal a ventilation duct that was belching smoke. To evacuate Fiduciary employees who worked on this floor, Mr. Emery and Mrs. Gentul had climbed seven floors from their own offices.
Now the two of them, and the six or so they were trying to save, were all in serious trouble.
As Mrs. Gentul spoke to her husband on the phone - he could overhear what was happening - Mr. Emery got up and spread the coat over the vent. Next, he swung a shoe at a sprinkler head, hoping to start the flow of water.
"The sprinklers aren't going on," Mrs. 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," Mrs. Gentul told her husband. "I don't want to go down into a fire," she said.
Among the doomed, the phone calls, messages and witnesses make clear, were many people who had put themselves in harm's way by stopping to offer a hand to colleagues or strangers. Others acted with great tenderness when all else was lost.
Mrs. Gentul and Mr. Emery of Fiduciary, whose offices stretched from the 90th to the 97th floors, had made their own fateful decisions to help others.
When the first plane hit across the plaza, the fireball billowed across the western facade of the 90th floor, where Mr. Emery was in his office. "I felt the heat on my face," said Anne Foodim, a member of human resources who worked nearby.
Mr. Emery, known for steadiness, emerged, the lapels on his blue blazer flapping as he waved people out. "Come on, let's go," he said, escorting five employees into a stairwell, including Ms. Foodim, who recounted the events. They walked down 12 floors, reaching the 78th floor and the express elevator, with Mr. Emery giving encouragement.
"If you can finish chemo, then you can get down those steps," Mr. Emery told an exhausted Ms. Foodim, who had just completed a round of chemotherapy. When they finally reached a packed elevator on the 78th floor, Mr. Emery made sure everyone got aboard. He squeezed Ms. Foodim's shoulder and let the door close in front of him. Then he headed back up, joining Alayne Gentul.
Like Mr. Emery, Mrs. Gentul 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. Mrs. Gentul instantly settled the question. "Go down and go down orderly," she said, indicating a stairway.
"It was like the teacher saying, 'It's O.K., go,'" Mrs. Dunn recalled.
Together, Mrs. Gentul and Mr. Emery went to evacuate six people on the 97th floor who had been working on a computer backup operation, Mrs. Gentul told her husband.
Mr. 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 very 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. Mr. McNally hastily recited his life insurance policies and employee bonus programs. "He said that I meant the world to him and he
loved me," Mrs. McNally said, and they exchanged what they thought were their last goodbyes.
Then Mrs. McNally's phone 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,'" Mrs. McNally said.
On the 93rd floor, Gregory Milanowycz, 25, an insurance broker for Aon, urged others to leave - some of them survived - but went back himself, after hearing the announcement. "Why did I listen to them - I shouldn't
have," he moaned after his father, Joseph Milanowycz, called him. Now he was trapped. He asked his father to ask the Fire Department what he and 30 other people should do. His father said he passed word from a dispatcher to
his son that they should stay low, and that firefighters were working their way up. Then, he says, he heard his son calling out to the others: "They are coming! My Dad's on the phone with them. They are coming. Everyone's got to get to the ground."
Even when the situation was most hopeless, the trapped people were still watching out for one another. On the 87th floor, a group of about 20 people from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods took refuge in a conference room belonging to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. During the final minutes, Eric Thorpe managed to get a call to his wife, Linda Perry Thorpe, who was waiting to hear from him at a neighbor's apartment. No one spoke from the tower. Instead, Ms. Thorpe and the neighbor listened to the
ambient noise.
"I hear everything in the background," Mrs. Thorpe recalled, including, she said, gasping. "Someone asks, 'Where is the fire extinguisher?' Someone else says, 'It already got thrown out the window.' I heard a voice asking, 'Is anybody unconscious?' Some of them sounded calm.
"One man went berserk, screaming. I couldn't understand that he was saying anything. He just lost it.
"I heard another person soothing him, saying, 'It's O.K., it'll be O.K.'"
9:45 AM - South Tower, 105th Floor, 14 minutes to collapse
Minutes after the second plane struck the south tower, Roko Camaj called home to report that a throng had gathered near the roof, according to his son, Vinny Camaj. "I'm on the 105th floor," Roko Camaj told his wife. "There's at least 200 people here."
The promise of sanctuary on the roof had seemed so logical, so irresistible, that scores of people chased their fates up the stairs. They were blind alleys.
Mr. Camaj, a window washer who had been featured in a children's book, carried the key to the roof, his son said. That key alone would not open its door: a buzzer also had to be pressed by the security staff in a command post on the 22nd floor. And the post had been damaged and
evacuated.
The roof seemed like an obvious choice - and the only one - to people on the upper floors. A police helicopter had evacuated people from the roof of the north tower in February 1993, after a terrorist bomb exploded in the
basement. For a variety of reasons, though, the Port Authority, with the agreement of the Fire Department, discouraged helicopters as part of its evacuation plan. Police commanders ruled out a rooftop rescue that morning.
Whatever the wisdom of the policy, it came as a shock to many people trapped in the towers, according to their families and summaries of 911 calls. Only a few realized that Stairway A could take them down to safety, and that information never circled back upstairs from those escaping or from the authorities. Frank Doyle, a trader at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, called his wife, Kimmy Chedell, to remind her of his love for her and the children. She recalls he also said: "I've gone up to the roof and the rooftop doors are locked. You need to call 911 and tell them we're
trapped."
The 105th floor was the last stop for many of those who had climbed toward the roof, a crowd dominated by Aon eployees. At 9:27, a man called 911 and said a group was in the north conference room on the 105th floor. At 9:32, a man on the 105th floor called 911 and asked that the roof be opened. At
9:38, Kevin Cosgrove, a fire warden for Aon, called 911, then rang his brother.
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," Ms. 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 AM - North Tower, 92nd Floor, Carr Futures, 28 minutes to collapse
"Mom," asked Jeffrey Nussbaum. "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," Mrs. Nussbaum said.
"Oh my God," her son said. "I love you."
Then the phone went dead.
The north tower, which had been hit 16 minutes before the south, was still standing. It was dying, more slowly, but just as surely. The 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. A total of 68 men and women 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 srang back and forth like a car antenna, door frames twisted and jammed shut, trapping a number of them in a conference room.
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 western 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 Mrs. McGinnis.
"Are you O.K., yes or no?" she demanded.
"We're on the 92nd floor in a room we can't get out of," Mr. McGinnis said.
"Who's with you?" she asked. Mr. McGinnis mentioned three old friends - Joey Holland, Brendan Dolan and Elkin Yuen.
"I love you," Mr. McGinnis said. "Take care of Caitlin." Mrs. McGinnis was not ready to hear a farewell.
"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," Mr. 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. Mr. 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," Mr. McGinnis said.
With that, the phone connection faded out.
It was 10:26, two minutes before the tower crumbled. The World Trade Center had fallen silent.
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