102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (28 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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No one, it turned out, had fully considered the effects of a plane crash, particularly the loss of fireproofing followed by intense fires, when the buildings were being designed in the 1960s, even though the Port Authority and its engineers had announced the towers would be built to withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707. These assurances were reaffirmed after the 1993 bombing and again only a week before September 11. In a matter of minutes, the unthinkable had become inevitable.
As investigators reviewed how the towers were conceived and built, it also turned out that no one had relied on any technical standards or done any tests to determine how long the spray-on fireproofing could protect the floor system that connected the building’s core to the exterior. The thickness of the fireproofing applied to the floors in two of the world’s tallest buildings seemed to have been based on little more than a hunch.
Those floors were held up by long, unsupported trusses, familiar to anyone who has glanced at the ceilings in warehouse-type supermarkets. In buildings with a high premium on open space, uninterrupted by columns, trusses are often used to hold up floors and ceilings. To turn such a structure into a 110-story building—much less two of them—involved considerable daring and ingenuity, and towers of this type remain a rarity in New York City. Given the inherent difficulty of evacuating the high floors of skyscrapers, the construction of two monumentally tall buildings of novel structure without testing the adequacy of the fireproofing put thousands of people at risk.
Not until the summer of 2004 was the fireproofing tested, in the course of a lengthy postmortem by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The results showed, on the one hand, that the fireproofing was sufficient to protect a seventeen-foot length of steel for two hours, which met the requirement of the code at the time. But the towers had not been built using seventeen-foot lengths of steel; the actual pieces in the floors were at least twice that length. When a thirty-five-foot length of steel, the true size used in constructing the floors, was tested in 2004, the federal investigators found that the fireproofing could not provide two hours of protection.
Long before September 11, the floors in two of the world’s landmark skyscrapers had been more vulnerable to fire than was thought.
This was an alarming finding even if investigators believed that the shortcomings of the original fireproofing—however disturbing—were probably not the direct cause of the collapses. For decades, the generations that rode higher and higher into the upper floors of skyscrapers had taken it on faith that the evolution of such buildings had been solely a story of progress, of innovations and enhancements that made new buildings safer than the old. The World Trade Center towers were presented as marvels, as buildings so robust they could withstand the impact of an airliner. By code, the floors were supposed to be able to withstand fire for two hours. When Chief Orio Palmer and the other firefighters reached people in the crash zone of the south tower, fifty minutes after the plane hit the building, they had every reason to believe there was another hour available for their rescue work. Instead, the tower collapsed seven minutes after they got there.
Not only the Port Authority had a hand in shaping safety for people inside the trade center. To make skyscrapers more profitable to own and less costly to build, New York City had overhauled its building code in the 1960s, part of a national trend that permitted developers more flexibility in their choice of materials. The revisions in New York had another dimension, one that was little remarked on by the new code’s champions in politics and the news media. In 1968, the city reduced the number of stairways required for tall buildings by half, and eliminated fire towers—reinforced stairs that would provide a smoke-free way to escape during an emergency. All these stairways were, in the view of the real estate industry, the wasteful legacies of a bygone era that lacked modern fireproofing techniques. In fact, the stair requirements were the residue of reforms that followed dreadful high-rise fires in the early years of the twentieth century. By the time the codes were changed in 1968, though, more than fifty years had passed since young women, with no other way out, had gone to the windows of a building two miles from the trade center site to escape the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. At the start of the twenty-first century, young men and women
in the prime of their days were, once again, leaping from windows to escape the heat of a tall building. The hijackers—and history—had left them no other way out.
The indifference to the lessons of history, or the inability to integrate them, were hardly limited to the municipal government of New York, of course. Ultimately, all of the people in the trade center that morning were at the head of a pin on which history had come to rest. “On the morning of September 11, 2001, the last, best hope for the community of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center rested not with national policymakers but with private firms and local public servants,” a staff report from the 9/11 Commission stated.
 
 
Virtually no one was able to escape from the collapse of the south tower—not the firefighters Orio Palmer and Tom Kelly, not the building’s fire-safety director, Phil Hayes, not the supervisor of elevators at the tower, Francis Riccardelli. The people upstairs perished as well—those trapped on the 78th-floor sky lobby, those in the offices of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Aon, and Fiduciary Trust. Even Roko Camaj, the window washer with the keys to the roof and an inside knowledge of the building, had not been able to get out. Indeed, above the 78th floor, only four people survived: Richard Fern and Ronald DiFrancesco found a staircase that was, relatively speaking, intact. Stanley Praimnath survived because Brian Clark heard his cries for help; Clark says that had he not heard Praimnath, he might have wound up in the staircases with his colleagues who were persuaded by an ailing stranger to go up, not down. Fourteen other men and women were able to get out of the building from the 78th floor, the lower part of the south tower crash zone. Hours after the collapse, one building worker, Lenny Ardizzone, who had been in the lobby of the south tower, was discovered alive. He was not sure how.
In the north tower, the high floors became a tomb: Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 people. Marsh & McLennan lost 292. Everyone at Windows on the World, 170. Fred Alger Management, 35. Carr Futures, 69. James Gartenberg’s calls for help from the 86th floor had
been heard by many but could be answered by none. The collapse caught him and Patricia Puma trapped in their office. It overtook others as they made their way down. Lt. Kevin Pfeifer, the chief’s brother, was found near the pry tool he had carried upstairs. Tony Savas, the construction inspector who had been freed from an elevator on the 78th floor, was found in a stairwell near the bottom of the building, along with John Griffin, who had helped to get him out.
The stub of stairway B proved to be a refuge for Capt. Jay Jonas of the Fire Department and the men accompanying Josephine Harris out of the building, who were among sixteen people who survived the building’s collapse there. They included Port Authority Police Officer David Lim, a dozen firefighters, and two other civilians—Pasquale Buzzelli and Genelle Guzman—who were themselves the only survivors of a group of sixteen workers from the Port Authority office on the 64th floor. That group had left their offices at 10:12, after the boss, Patrick Hoey, made a phone call and got word that they should go.
Others in that staircase survived the collapse, but could not escape. Mike Warchola, the fire captain on his last day of work, radioed from the rubble that he was around the 12th floor, although the staircase no longer went that high. It is likely that he was among the group that had stopped to help Judith Reese, the woman with asthma from Frank De Martini’s office. None of them made it out. In all, 2,753 people were killed at the trade center.
 
 
An hour or so after the collapse, Will Jimeno, buried beneath the plaza, heard a voice coming through the same hole where the light was entering. The voice wanted to know if a particular person was down in the hole. Jimeno could not quite make out the name, but he was delighted by the sound of another human voice.
“No, but Jimeno and McLoughlin, PAPD, are down here,” he yelled.
The voice did not answer, but moved off, and they heard no more from him.
Balls of fire tumbled into their tiny space, a gust of wind or a
draft steering them away, the fire spending itself before it could find another morsel of fuel. Jimeno, thirty-three years old, felt that death was near. His wife, Allison, and their four-year-old daughter, Bianca, would be sad, but proud, he thought. The Jimenos’ second child was due at the end of November. So he prayed.
Please, God, let me see my little unborn child.
Jimeno tried to make a bargain. He might die, but surely there was a way he could do something for this child.
Somehow in the future, he prayed, let me touch this baby.
Then shots rang out.
The fireballs had apparently heated up the gun of the late Dominick Pezzulo. The rounds pinged off pipes and concrete, erratic and unpredictable, until the last of the ammunition was gone.
With his one free arm, Jimeno reached his gun belt for something to dig with. He had graduated from the Port Authority Police Academy in January and was issued the standard police tools, but he already owned his own handcuffs—a pair made by Smith & Wesson, bought when he was a security guard in a store, arresting shoplifters. He scraped at the rubble with them, but the cuffs slipped out of his hands, and he could not find them again.
 
 
No one had heard from Chuck Sereika, and by midmorning, the messages had piled up on his telephone answering machine and in his e-mail. Can’t believe it. Hope you’re okay. Our hearts are with you.
Sereika woke up. He had slept through everything, not a whisper of trouble in his apartment in midtown Manhattan. The e-mails told him something awful had happened, then news on his computer spelled it out, and as he blinked into the new world, he heard the messages on his answering machine. His sister had called.
“I love you,” she said. “I know you’re down there helping.”
Actually, he had been moping. In his closet, he found a paramedic sweatshirt and a badge he had not used for years. He had lost his paramedic license, let it lapse after he squandered too many days and nights carousing. He had gone into rehab programs,
slipped, then climbed back on the wagon. He had fought his way back to sobriety, but the paramedic work was behind him. He still had the sweatshirt, though, and no one had taken the badge away. Maybe he could do some splints and bandages. He walked outside. Midtown Manhattan was teeming with people, a stream of humanity trooping in the middle of avenues, the subways shut down and scarcely a bus to be seen. The only way to move was on foot, and by the tens of thousands, people were walking north, or over to the river for ferries, or into Penn Station for a commuter train that would take them east to Long Island or west to New Jersey.
Sereika walked a few blocks from his apartment to St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center. Then he hitched rides on ambulances going downtown.
 
 
Seven World Trade Center—a forty-seven-story building—collapsed at 5:20 that afternoon. The firefighters had decided to let the fire there burn itself out. There was no one inside. Against all that had happened, the loss of even such an enormous building seemed like a footnote.
David Karnes had arrived downtown not long after its collapse, and as far as he could see, the searches were confined entirely to the periphery of the complex, picking through the rubble at the edges for signs of life. Other structures were now burning—the low-rise building at 4 World Trade Center was shooting flames—and all hands were staying clear of the ruins of the two towers and the plaza between them.
Karnes had started the morning in a business suit, working as an accountant for Deloitte and Touche in Wilton, Connecticut. After the attacks, he drove from Connecticut to Long Island and went to a storage facility where he kept his Marine kit. His utility trousers and jacket were freshly pressed, though his commitment had ended months earlier. Trim as a whip, he slipped into them, drove to a barber, and ordered a high and tight haircut. He stopped at his church and asked for prayers with the pastor, then with the top down on his new convertible, drove straight for lower Manhattan.
He found the rescue workers in shock, depressed, doing little by way of organized searches. Karnes spotted another Marine, a man named Sergeant Thomas, no first name.
“Come on, Sergeant,” Karnes said. “Let’s take a walk.”
Not another soul was around them. They swept across the broken ground, yelling, “United States Marines. If you can hear us, yell or tap.”
No one answered. They moved forward, deeper into the rubble. The fires roared at 4 World Trade Center. They plowed across the jagged, fierce ground.
 
 
Lost in thought, waiting for release, Will Jimeno listened to the trade center complex ripping itself apart. He had gotten tired of shouting at phantoms. He asked McLoughlin to put out a radio message that Officer Jimeno wanted his newborn baby to be named Olivia. The sergeant was in excruciating pain, his legs crushed. There was nothing to do, Jimeno thought, except wait until they sent out rescue parties in the morning. If they lived that long.

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