102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (29 page)

BOOK: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
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Then came the voice.
“United States Marines. If you can hear us, yell or tap.”
What? That was a person.
Jimeno shouted with every bit of strength he had.
“Right here! Jimeno and McLoughlin, PAPD! Here!”
“Keep yelling,” Karnes said.
It took a few minutes, but Karnes found the hole.
“Don’t leave,” Jimeno pleaded.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Karnes said.
Karnes pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911, but the call did not go through. He tried again, without success. How could he get help, without leaving Jimeno and McLoughlin? Maybe the problem was with phone lines downtown, and he could find an electronic bridge via someone outside the city. He dialed his sister in a suburb of Pittsburgh and got through. She called the local police. They were able to reach the New York police. The message had traveled 300 miles from the pile to Pennsylvania, then 300 miles back to
police headquarters, but the NYPD finally learned that a few blocks away, two cops were buried in the middle of the pile, and a United States Marine was standing by to direct the rescuers.
 
 
Chuck Sereika had been wandering the edge of that pile as evening approached, when he heard people yelling that someone had been found in the center of the place. Sereika set out, walking part of the way with a firefighter. They could see the flames roaring from the remains of 4 World Trade Center, an eight-story building. The firefighter peeled away. By himself, Sereika stumbled and climbed, until he found Dave Karnes standing alone. From the surface, he could see nothing of Will Jimeno, but he could hear him. Sereika squeezed his way into a crevice, inching his way down the rubble, finally spotting Jimeno’s hand.
“Hey,” Sereika said.
“Don’t leave me,” Jimeno said.
Sereika felt for a pulse. A good, strong distal pulse, a basic in emergency care.
“Don’t leave me,” Jimeno said.
“We’re not going to leave you,” Sereika said. He pawed at the rubble and found Jimeno’s gun, which he passed up to Karnes. Then he sent word for oxygen and an intravenous setup. Two emergency service police officers, Scott Strauss and Paddy McGee, soon arrived, and Sereika handed rocks and rubble back to them. A fireman, Tom Ascher, arrived with a hose to fight off the flames. They could hear McLoughlin calling out for help.
We will get there, they promised.
The basics of trauma care are simple: provide fluids and oxygen. Simple—except that in the hole at the trade center, they could not take the next step in the classic formula: “load and go.” First they had to extricate Jimeno, a highly delicate proposition.
Sereika could hear 4 World Trade Center groaning to its bones. To shift large pieces off Jimeno risked starting a new slide. There was room in the hole only for one person at a time, and Sereika was
basically on top of him. It was not unlike working under the dashboard of a car, except the engine was on fire and the car was speeding and about to crash. The space was filled with smoke. Strauss and McGee were carefully moving the rubble, engineering on the fly, so that they could shift loads without bringing more debris down on themselves or on Jimeno and McLoughlin. Tools were passed from the street along a line of helpers. A handheld air chisel. Shears. When the Hurst jaws of life tool arrived, the officers wanted to use it to lift one particularly heavy section, but they could not quite get solid footing on the rubble. Sereika, the lapsed paramedic, immediately sized up the problem and shimmed rubble into place for the machine to rest on.
The work inched forward, treacherous and hot and slow.
After four hours, at 11 P.M., Will Jimeno was freed. They loaded him into a basket, slid him up the path to the surface. That left only John McLoughlin, deeper still, but none of the group in and around the hole could go on. They called down a fresh team that would work until the morning before they finally pulled him out, not long before the last survivor from stairway B, Genelle Guzman, would also be reached.
Aboveground, the men who had gone into the hole with Will Jimeno found they could barely walk. Smoke reeked from the hair on their heads, soot packed every pore on their skin. Sereika stumbled up from the crevice in time to see Jimeno in his basket being passed along police officers and firefighters who had set up a line, scores of people deep, across the jagged, broken ground.
He could not keep up with his patient. He could just about get himself to the sidewalk. He had worked for hours alongside the other men, first names only, and Sereika was employed by no official agency, no government body. Once they left the hole, the men lost track of each other. Just as people had come to work by themselves hours earlier, at the start of the day—an entire age ago—now Chuck Sereika was starting for home on his own. His old paramedic shirt torn, he plodded north in the late-summer night, alone, scuffling down streets blanketed by the dust that had been the World Trade Center.
High above
Manhattan:
The Twin Towers
F
or 102 minutes on the morning of September 11, 2001, 14,000 men and women fought for life at the World Trade Center. This book aims to tell what happened solely from the perspective of the people inside the twin towers—office workers, visitors, and the rescuers who rushed to help them. Their accounts are drawn from 200 interviews with survivors and witnesses, thousands of pages of transcribed radio transmissions, phone messages, e-mails, and oral histories. All sources are named and enumerated.
No single voice can describe scenes that unfolded at terrible velocities in so many places. Taken together, though, the words, witnesses, and records provide not only a broad and chilling view of the devastation, but also a singularly revealing window onto acts of grace at a brutal hour.
The immediate challenges these people faced were not geopolitical but intensely local: how, for instance, to open a jammed door, or navigate a flaming hallway, or climb dozens of flights of stairs. Civilians or rescuers, they had to take care of themselves and those around them. Their words inevitably trace a narrative of excruciating loss; they also describe how the simplest gestures and tools
were put to transcendent use—everything from a squeegee in a stuck elevator to a squeeze on the shoulder, from a voice booming an order to get out to a crowbar smashing Sheetrock around a jammed door. As chapters in the history of human valor and frailty and struggle, these are matters of first importance. They brought us to this book.
That the crises in the two buildings had identical beginnings and endings—suicidal attacks by terrorists in airliners, followed by raging fire and total collapses—evokes the parallel shape and size of the buildings, suggesting one more way in which the towers were twins. Yet the events in each tower ran on different clocks and took different courses, each separately instructive. The north tower was hit first, at 8:46:31, sixteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds before the strike against the south tower at 9:02:59; this gap between crashes afforded some opportunity to begin an evacuation in the south building before the second plane flew into it. Conversely, the south tower, though hit second, was the first to fall, collapsing at 9:58:59, twenty-nine minutes and twenty-six seconds before the north tower, which fell at 10:28:25—in effect, giving notice that total calamity was not only possible but also imminent, and thus providing a chance for rescuers to pull out of the north building.
In heartbreaking measure, many people could not take hold of those fleeting opportunities. During those two intervals, and ultimately, across the entire 102 minutes, decades of struggle over safety in skyscrapers and over the sensible operation of New York’s emergency services would come to shattering ends.
Nothing can diminish the culpability of the hijackers and their masters in the murders of September 11, 2001, which stand beyond mitigation as the defining historical truth of the day. The ferocity of the attacks meant that innocent people lived or died because they stepped back from a doorway, or hopped onto a closing elevator, or simply shifted their weight from one foot to another. That said, simply to declare that the hijackers alone killed all those people gives them far more credit as tacticians than they are due. The buildings themselves became weapons, apparently well beyond the
designs of the hijackers, if not their hopes; so, too, did a sclerotic emergency response culture in New York that resisted reform, even when confronted again and again with the dangers of business as usual.
At least 1,500 people in the trade center—and possibly many more—survived the initial crashes but died because they were unable to escape from their floors or elevators while the buildings stood. Those people were not killed by the planes alone any more than passengers on the
Titanic
were killed by the iceberg. With 102 minutes in the north tower, and 57 minutes in the south, thousands of people had time to evacuate, and did. Those who did not escape were trapped by circumstances that had been the subject of debates that began before the first shovelful of earth was turned for the trade center, and that continued, at a low volume, through the entire existence of the towers. Could the buildings withstand the direct impact of an airplane? Was the fireproofing adequate? Were there enough exits?
The willingness of firefighters, police officers, and medical workers to serve others, never in question, was indelibly established on September 11. Stark and towering as their sacrifices are, they do not stand alone in history. We have now obtained many records documenting the emergency response that both the City of New York and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have tried to keep secret. These records show that for all the aggressiveness of the response, emergency workers suffered the same failures of communication, coordination, and command that they had experienced on February 26, 1993, when terrorists first tried to knock down the trade center. This time, those failures came at terrible cost. Indeed, for 102 minutes, success and failure, life and death, ran parallel courses—as did effort and selflessness, infighting and shortsightedness.
Finally, the fate of all the men and women inside the towers during those 102 minutes was specifically, and intimately, linked to decisions about the planning and construction of, and faith in, colossally tall buildings. Approximately 12,000 people—nearly
everyone below the crash zones—got out, creating an encyclopedia of survival: the towers stood long enough, the office workers formed a mass of civility, the responders helped steer and steady them.
And then there is the brutal calculus of death. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City reports that 2,753 people died in the attacks on New York. Of these, 147 were passengers or crew members on the two flights; in the buildings, no more than 600 people were on floors where the planes hit, close enough to be killed immediately. Another 412 of the dead were rescue workers who came to help. The rest, more than 1,500 men and women, survived the plane crashes, but were trapped as far as twenty floors from the impact. Like the passengers on the unsinkable
Titanic
, many of the individuals inside the World Trade Center simply did not have the means to escape towers that were promised not to sink, even if struck by airplanes. In the struggle to live, those who survived and those who did not sent out hundreds of messages. They gave us the history of those 102 minutes.
 
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
 
September 2004
New York City
1 WORLD TRADE CENTER (NORTH TOWER)
The 89th floor
Rick Bryan
Raffaele Cava
Dianne DeFontes
Nathan Goldwasser
Akane Ito
Stephanie Manning
Harold Martin
Tirsa Moya
Walter Pilipiak
Rob Sibarium
Lynn Simpson
 
Beast Financial Systems
Susan Fredericks
Sharon Premoli
 
Cantor Fitzgerald
Stephen Cherry
Charles Heeran
David Kravette
Andrew Rosenblum
Martin Wortley
 
Carr Futures
Brendan Dolan
Joe Holland
Tom McGinnis
Damian Meehan
Jeffrey Nussbaum
Jim Paul
Elkin Yuen
 
Clearstream Banking
Anne Prosser
 
Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield
Ed Beyea
Irma Fuller
Abe Zelmanowitz
 
Julian Studley
James Gartenberg
Patricia Puma
 
Marsh & McLennan
Dana Coulthurst
Judith Martin
Patricia Massari
Keith Meerholz
Ian Robb
Gerry Wertz
Chris Young
 
 
May Davis Group
Steve Charest
Mike Jacobs
 
Network Plus
Michael Benfante
John Cerquiera
 
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 88th floor
Jim Connors
Patricia Cullen
Carlos DaCosta
Frank De Martini
Nicole De Martini,
guest
Elaine Duch
Gerry Gaeta
Jeff Gertler
Mak Hanna
Moe Lipson
Pete Negron
Pablo Ortiz
Judith Reese
Anita Serpe
Dorene Smith
Frank Varriano
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, elsewhere in building
Ana Abelians
John Abruzzo
Michael Ambrosio
Lenny Ardizzone
Ezra Aviles
Peter Bitwinski
Frank Bucaretti
Pasquale Buzzelli
Phillip Caffrey
Richard Capriotti
Nelson Chanfrau
Michael Curci
Frank DiMola
Gerry Drohan
Bob Eisenstadt
Michael Fabiano
Ken Greene
Genelle Guzman
Tina Hansen
Josephine Harris
Mark Jakubek
Patrick Hoey
Michael Hurley
Shivam Iyer
Vickie Cross Kelly
John Labriola
Louis Lesce
Cecilia Lillo
Wilson Pacheco
John Paczkowski
Tony Pecora
George Phoenix
John Rappa
Alan Reiss
Colin Richardson
Tony Savas
Gerald Simpkins
George Tabeek
Greg Trevor
Peggy Zoch
 
Silverstein Properties
John Griffin
 
Windows on the World guests
Peter Alderman
Caleb Arron Dack
Garth Feeney
Christopher Hanley
Emeric Harvey
William Kelly
Stuart Lee
Neil Levin
Peter Mardikian
Michael Nestor
Liz Thompson
Richard Tierney
Stephen Tompsett
Geoffrey Wharton
 
Windows on the World staff
Ivhan Carpio
Doris Eng
Howard Kane
Jan Maciejewski
Christine Olender
WPIX-TV
Steve Jacobson
 
 
Others
Keith Ensler
David Frank
Norma Hessic
Michael Hingson
Bill Hult
Vanessa Lawrence
Theresa Leone
Jules Naudet
Al Smith
Richard Wright
 
Building staff
Jan Demczur
Anthony Giardina
Mike McQuaid
Marie Refuse
Tony Segarra
Lloyd Thompson
Greg Trapp
2 WORLD TRADE CENTER (SOUTH TOWER)
Aon Insurance
Mary Jo Arrowsmith
Kevin Cosgrove
Keating Crown
Sarah Dechalus
Eric Eisenberg
Tamitha Freeman
Richard Gabrielle
Karen Hagerty
Gary Herold
Howard Kestenbaum
Alan Mann
Greg Milanowycz
Ed Nicholls
Marissa Panigrosso
Vijay Paramsothy
Robert Eisenhardt
Kelly Reyher
Sean Rooney
Gigi Singer
Donna Spera
Judy Wein
 
Euro Brokers
Brett Bailey
Brian Clark
Bobby Coll
Dennis Coughlin
Ron DiFrancesco
Richard Fern
Edward Keslo
Ed Mardovich
Jose Marrero
Ann McHugh
Steven Salovich
Andy Soloway
Thomas Sparacio
Michael Stabile
Patty Troxell
Dave Vera
Karen Yagos
Kevin York
 
Fiduciary Trust
Shimmy Biegeleisen
Elsie Castellanos
Donovan Cowan
Ed Emery
Anne Foodim
Alayne Gentul
Elnora Hutton
Stephanie Koskuba
Bob Mattson
Ed McNally
Paul Rizza
Doris Torres
 
Garban ICAP
George Nemeth
Michael Sheehan
 
Keefe, Bruyette & Woods
J. J. Aguiar
Joseph Berry
Will DeRiso
Frank Doyle
Bradley Fetchet
Scott Johnson
Stephen Mulderry
Bob Planer
Linda Rothemund
Lauren Smith
Rick Thorpe
Brad Vadas
 
Kemper Insurance
Terence McCormick
 
Mizuho Capital Markets/Fuji Bank
Jack Andreacchio
Manny Gomez
Yuji Goya
Richard Jacobs
Bobby McMurray
Stephen Miller
Michael Otten
Stanley Praimnath
Silvion Ramsundar
Christine Sasser
Keiji Takahashi
Brian Thompson
 
Morgan Stanley
Nat Alcamo
Ed Ciffone
Kristen Farrell
Sean Pierce
Rick Rescorla
Al Roxo
Louis A. Torres
 
New York State Department of Taxation and Finance
Dianne Gladstone
Mary Jos
Yeshavant Tembe
Diane Urban
Sankara Velamuri
Ling Young
 
Oppenheimer Management Corp.
Edgardo Villegas
 
Sandler O’Neill & Partners
Jace Day
Jennifer Gorsuch
Herman Sandler
 
Others
Katherine Hachinski
Eric Johnson
John Mongello
 
Building staff/Port Authority
Roselyn Braud
Ed Calderon
Roko Camaj
James Flores
Phil Hayes
Ron Hoerner
Robert Gabriel Martinez
Francis Riccardelli
Esmerlin Salcedo
3 WORLD TRADE CENTER (MARRIOTT HOTEL)
Reverend Paul Engel
Rich Fetter
Joe Keller
Abdu A. Malahi
Fire Department of New York
Commissioner Thomas Von Essen
Deputy Commissioner Tom Fitzpatrick
Chief of Department Peter Ganci
Rich Billy
Assistant Chief Joseph Callan
Michael Boyle
Deputy Assistant Chief Al Turi
Billy Butler
Deputy Chief Donald Burns
Robert Byrne
Deputy Chief Tom Galvin
Sal D’Agostino
Deputy Chief Peter Hayden
Dennis Dowdican
Battalion Chief Ed Geraghty
Robert Evans
Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer
Tommy Falco
Battalion Chief John Paolillo
Tom Feaser
Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer
Mike Fitzpatrick
Battalion Chief Richard Picciotto
Liam Flaherty
Fire Marshal Ron Bucca
Sean Halper
Fire Marshal Jim Devery
Pat Kelly
Fire Marshal Steve Mosiello
Tom Kelly
Captain William Burke Jr.
Robert King Jr.
Captain Fred Ill
Matt Komorowski
Captain Jay Jonas
Scott Kopytko
Lieutenant Raymond Brown
Scott Larsen
Lieutenant Joseph Chiafari
Joseph Maffeo
Lieutenant John Fischer
Keithroy Maynard
Lieutenant Gregg Hansson
Michael Meldrum
Lieutenant Mickey Kross
Bill Morris
Lieutenant Joseph Leavey
Rich Nogan
Lieutenant Steve Modica
Douglas Oelschlager
Lieutenant Bob Nagel
Michael Otten
Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer
Bob Pino
Lieutenant Richard Smiouskas
Christian Regenhard
Lieutenant Warren Smith
Willie Roberts
Lieutenant William Walsh
Bill Spade
Lieutenant Mike Warchola
Danny Suhr
Reverend John Delendick
David Weiss
Reverend Mychal Judge
John Wilson
David Arce
 
New York Police Department
Chief of Department Joseph
Lieutenant Steve Reardon
Esposito
Sergeant Michael Curtin
Captain Tim Pearson
Detective Timothy Hayes
Detective Greg Semendinger
Paddy McGee
Detective Patrick Walsh
Dave Norman
Detective Ken Winkler
John Perry
James Ciccone
Moira Smith
John D’Allara
Scott Strauss
Yvonne Kelhetter
Port Authority Police Department
 
Inspector James Romito
Sue Keane
Captain Anthony Whitaker
David Leclaire
Sergeant Al DeVona
David Lim
Sergeant John Mariano
Patrick Lucas
(via phone)
Steve Maggett
(via phone)
Sergeant John McLoughlin
Ray Murray
(via phone)
Sergeant Robert Vargas
Richie Paugh
Christopher Amoroso
Dominick Pezzulo
Greg Brady
(via phone)
Barry Pikaard
Thomas Grogan
(via phone)
Stephen Prospero
James Hall
Antonio Rodriguez
Will Jimeno
 
New York State Court Officers
Captain Joseph Baccellieri
Sergeant Andrew Wender
Sergeant Al Moscola
 
New York City Emergency Medical Services
Division Chief John Peruggia
Paramedic Carlos Lillo
Paramedic Joseph Cahill
EMT Richard Erdey
Paramedic Manuel Delgado
EMT Soraya O’Donnell
 
New York City Office of Emergency Management
Director Richard Sheirer
Rich Zarillo
 
United States Marine Corps
Staff Sergeant David Karnes
 
Others
Sister Cynthia Mahoney
Chuck Sereika
Deborah Mardenfeld

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