102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (26 page)

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Authors: Jim Dwyer,Kevin Flynn

BOOK: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
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Like Tina Hansen before him, John Abruzzo caught the attention of the firefighters on the 21st floor, who offered his coworkers the opportunity to leave him with them. Like Michael Benfante and
John Cerquiera, Abruzzo’s colleagues declined. They thought they could handle the rest of the trip. They did.
 
 
In the dim, soundless landing, the approaching footfall grabbed the attention of Jeff Gertler and Judith Reese, whose breathing problems had not eased. Moving quickly down the stairs, but not galloping, was a group of people in uniforms—Gertler thought he saw a Port Authority police officer, a firefighter or two, maybe a city officer.
“What’s going on?” the Port Authority policeman asked.
Gertler explained Reese’s condition—her asthma, the descent from the 88th floor, the exhaustion that had marooned them on the landing. The officer turned to one of the others.
“Get a chair,” he said, and a moment or two later, one of the men came back with a desk chair from the 10th floor.
“Go ahead,” the cop said to Gertler. “We’re going to carry her down.”
“I’ll walk down with you,” Gertler said.
“This is police business,” the cop replied. “We will carry her down. You need to leave now.”
“You carry her, I’ll just walk with you,” Gertler said.
The policeman stepped closer to Gertler, and whispered into his face.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “The building is going to collapse.”
That sounded like madness to Gertler, but having been told twice to get out, he turned and headed down the stairs.
 
 
Susan Fredericks had gotten as far as the 2nd floor, a long way from the offices of Beast Financial on 80, then found traffic on the stairway at a standstill. Behind her, twenty or thirty people were packed in two lines, backing up the stairs a few floors. As word spread that the stairway was impassable, the lines began a slow retreat, turning back. In the throng was a firefighter, Bill Spade, who eventually
found two police officers from the Emergency Service Unit, Sgt. Michael Curtin and Officer John D’Allara. Shoving mightily, the three of them forced open the door at the bottom of the stairs. Minutes later, word was passed up the line: “Come back down. We found a way out.”
A faint hint of daylight drifted into the staircase, revealing the mezzanine and the plaza beyond it.
“Come this way—move quickly!” Spade yelled. “Hold hands. Don’t let go. We’re almost out.”
He lit the path with his flashlight. Back up the stairs, ESU officers and firefighters were standing in pitch-black corridors with flashlights, their beams pointing the way from blocked stairs toward ones that were open. As Fredericks and the others moved out of the building and onto the plaza, near the Custom House at 6 World Trade Center, she glanced at her watch. It was 10:24, ninety-eight minutes since the first plane struck. Spade did not exit with her. He turned to the two police officers, and they began to steer the line of people behind her to the concourse. Those who navigated the shattered mezzanine and lobby included Michael Hingson, the blind man who had left the 78th floor with Roselle, his Labrador guide dog, and his visitor from California, David Frank. Moe Lipson, the eighty-nine-year-old man from the 88th floor, had gotten out, escorted down by Mak Hanna. Dianne DeFontes, who had started the day in the law office on the 89th floor, had been separated from her friends on the last leg of the trip, but she made it to the street. So had Raffaele Cava, the elderly man with the hat who came and sat in DeFontes’s office when the plane first struck, helped to the street by Tirsa Moya, the young woman who worked on his floor at the insurance company. Cava had been one of the very first tenants to move into the building, before it was even completed. Now he was one of the last to leave. Some of the oldest people in the building, from the highest open floors, were getting out.
As the two cops, Curtin and D’Allara, stood with Spade, they joked mildly about the circumstances. Is this what it takes, Spade joshed, to get cops and firemen to work together?
A moment or so later, Jeff Gertler got to the lobby, bypassing the mezzanine because he had taken stairway B, the only one of the three that went all the way to the bottom. He had thought about waiting for Judith Reese and the people carrying her in the chair, but the sight of the shattered lobby left him bewildered. He looked around, trying to figure out what had happened. A voice yelled to him.
“Run this way.” It was a fireman. He pointed to a cavity that once held a floor-to-ceiling window. “We’re going that way,” the firefighter said. They climbed onto West Street, and someone turned them to the right, going north. Gertler looked to the south, toward the Marriott Hotel, which seemed to have been split open. He could see inside the rooms. How could that be? The south tower he could not see. But it had to be there.
 
 
Iliana McGinnis finally heard from her husband, Tom. She had been dialing his number all morning, but each time the call had gone into his voice mail. She knew there had been a catastrophe at the towers, but he worked across the trade center plaza, in the Mercantile Exchange. This morning, though, he had been summoned to the special early meeting at the Carr Futures office on the 92nd floor in the north tower. The firm was cutting commissions for McGinnis and his group of traders, and they were getting the news at the meeting. It was to have broken up at 8:30 so that the boss could get on a conference call, and the traders could get to the exchange in time for the opening of the markets.
Iliana had not been able to get through to him at his desk, but she expected that he had long since left the trade center. Still, she waited by her desk for him to call as her colleagues huddled around a television set. Finally, the phone rang, at 10:20.
“This looks really, really bad,” he said.
“I know,” said Iliana. “This is bad for the country; it looks like World War Three.” Then something in the tone of Tom’s answer alarmed her.
“Are you okay, 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.
Three old friends—Joey Holland, Brendan Dolan, and Elkin Yuen, people he had known for years.
“I love you,” Tom said. Then he mentioned their daughter. “Take care of Caitlin.”
Iliana 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.”
She was right: these were men who had grown up in the city, gone right from high school to Wall Street, and made their livings not on credentials from fancy colleges, but on nerve and guile.
“You don’t understand,” Tom said. “There are people jumping from the floors above us.”
It was now 10:25. The 92nd floor seemed to be safely below the plane crash. In the ninety-nine minutes since Flight 11 had struck, the 92nd floor had not been afflicted with unbearable smoke or flame—the worst of that had been six or seven floors above them for much of the time. The sprinkler system had gone off or the pipes had burst; water had risen to the ankles. The big problem was getting out: seventy people were on 92, sixty-nine of them with Carr, and none of them could open the doors. McGinnis and his group were stuck in a conference room where the door had jammed. Over time, the flames had spread along the 93rd and 94th floors, even down to the 92nd floor, and were now bearing down on the pockets of refuge. The people who had survived for the terrible hour and a half, unable to find an escape route, found themselves forced to the windows for air. More and more people began to fall. As the fire raged along the west side of the 92nd floor, forty-one-year-old Tom McGinnis, who had met Iliana when they were kids in Washington Heights, again told her he loved her and Caitlin.
“Don’t hang up,” she pleaded.
“I gotta get down on the floor,” he said.
With that, the phone connection faded out.
It was 10:26, 100 minutes from the time the plane hit.
 
 
For most of the evacuation, the tenants of the north tower had largely taken themselves as far as the lobby or the concourse, and then been steered to safety. Most of those left in the building now were the people who could not move without help. It was around the 7th floor of stairway B that the cause of John Rappa, a heavy man, exhausted, unable to walk, first intersected with the rescue workers scrambling to leave the building. “Help me,” he said, and two Port Authority police officers, Patrick Lucas and Barry Pikaard, gave him oxygen, then carried him down a few flights. They could not bring him any farther. Lucas would remember that firefighters ran past, screaming at him to just drop the man and go, but the next documented hand on Rappa belonged to Pat Kelly, a firefighter from Squad 18. At the fifth floor, Lt. Greg Hansson of Engine 24 came on the scene, on his way down from the 35th floor. Already he had stopped twice, at the 27th floor to round up Rich Billy and then at the 19th floor, where he had tried to prod the congregation of resting firefighters into leaving. And now, on the 5th floor, he was waylaid for a third time by Pat Kelly, who was unable to move John Rappa.
“You can’t get out that way,” Kelly said. “I need help with this guy.”
Upon meeting this latest crisis, Hansson sent his men down ahead: they had been lugging gear up the stairs, while he had been traveling with the lighter load of an officer. Now that they all were going down, he felt he had more strength in reserve to grapple with the job of moving the disabled man sprawled on the floor. Someone found a chair, and they tied him into it with a belt and managed to wheel him back into the corridor and toward stairway A. The chair barely squeezed through a hallway. Just keeping Rappa perched on it was exhausting. Then the belting arrangement broke down. Around that moment, a group of Port Authority police officers arrived. The chair no longer made any sense. Rappa was again on the floor. They would drag him down the stairs. Hansson and James Hall, one of the police officers, grabbed him by the legs and pulled
him. Those steps ended at a door that was propped open, onto the mezzanine.
There, they met the trio that had opened the door a few minutes earlier—Bill Spade, the firefighter, and Mike Curtin and John D’Allara, the two ESU officers. Together, they would make a run for the plaza, propelling John Rappa and themselves.
The building was unstable, the ESU officers told Hall.
“We better get out of here,” Curtin said. “Hurry.”
But how? All morning, a committee of the willing—self-selected civilians and self-assigned uniformed rescuers—had stationed themselves on the mezzanine, to make sure that people coming down stairways A and C did not try to use the doors that led directly from the mezzanine to the plaza. Not only that, they urged the people not to even look at the plaza, for death was raining there. They sent them down the escalators to the lobby, and through the concourse to the east.
Now most of that group of steerers was gone. And going down the escalator, to the broken lobby, did not seem much of an alternative. For the group carrying John Rappa, the best way seemed to be a dash onto the plaza, directly from the mezzanine—to take their chances on the plummeting bodies and the peels of aluminum skin of the building that seemed to float and wobble toward the ground, giving the illusion of delicacy. And they would be carrying a large man unable to move.
Spade, the firefighter, took a count. They were seven. No, they were eight. Nine, counting Rappa.
“We go together, we stay together,” Spade said.
At the north end of the mezzanine was a door. Across a few open feet of the plaza was an overhang jutting from 6 World Trade Center, the Custom House.
D’Allara dashed first, reaching the overhang. He gazed up at the top of the tower, smoke and flame ripping from its crown, nothing and no one coming down just that second. A body could emerge from the billowing cloud of blackness at any instant.
“It’s clear,” D’Allara yelled.
It was now 10:27, 101 minutes since the first plane struck. Hall and Hansson and the others grabbed Rappa. In as close to a sprint as they could manage, they broke for the overhang of the Custom House.
 
 
Fourth floor. Almost there. If only she could move.
Jay Jonas, the captain of Ladder 6, knew the south tower had fallen—he was with Capt. William Burke on the 27th floor of the north tower when Burke saw it from the window. This one would fall, too, Jonas suspected, so he was driving his people out. Around the 12th floor, they had spotted Josephine Harris, age sixty, in agony from fallen arches and from a sixty-story walk. She was now hanging onto Billy Butler and Tommy Falco, firefighters from Ladder 6. Even with their help, she moved slowly: In the time she would take two steps, someone else could travel an entire flight. Her bad feet were now setting the pace of escape for eight people who were helping in some way, the Ladder 6 crew of six firefighters—Jonas, Butler, Falco, Michael Meldrum, Matt Komorowski, and Sal D’Agostino, along with a lieutenant from another company, Mickey Kross of Engine 16, and a Port Authority police officer, David Lim.

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