102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (30 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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Henry Holt and Company New York
“An astounding reconstruction of what happened inside the World Trade Center … . These are stories, after all, you have to share.”
—
Newsweek
 
“There have been many 9/11 books, but the sheer volume of detail about individuals and their acts of heroism and humanity puts this one in a class by itself.”
—
Reader’s Digest
(editor’s choice)
 
“It’s just one of those great books of reporting, and you read it almost at one sitting with your hair on end … . There have been 50 different preachy books and 10,000 op-ed pieces, but this is one that really takes you back to that beautiful morning in New York.”
—Garrison Keillor,
Hartford Courant
 
“A masterpiece of reporting … . [
102 Minutes
] is a remarkably comprehensive account of what went on inside the trade center that day, distilled to an amazingly coherent 261 pages of text. The authors have added charts and drawings to help readers keep track of the dozens of individuals whose plights they follow, but so vivid are their characterizations that one hardly needs to refer to such aids. Their style is invariably succinct and understated; like all the best reporters, they let the story they have dug out speak for itself … . Mr. Dwyer and Mr. Flynn’s story is an intensely human, personal one. And yet it also draws them inevitably into the question of whether or not some part of this calamity might have been ameliorated … . Brilliant and troubling.”
—Kevin Baker,
The New York Times
 
“The chief virtue of
102 Minutes,
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s unsparing, eloquent history of the struggle to survive inside the World Trade Center, is the authors’ insistence that truth supplant myth. However comforting myths may be after a defeat, they’re useless in assessing what went wrong and may actually be impediments to preventing future disasters … . With its consistently clear prose,
102 Minutes
does an admirable job of conveying this chaos without replicating it.”
—John Farmer (senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey attorney general),
The Washington Post Book World
“The point-counterpoint that runs achingly throughout
102 Minutes
is the interplay of the ordinary and the extraordinary … . [A] deeply reported, practically minute-by-minute and floor-by-floor portrayal … . Insightful, compassionate … unmistakably affirming.”
The Sun
(Baltimore)
 
“I strongly, strongly recommend
102 Minutes,
the excruciatingly human and painful account of the demise of the twin towers. Incredibly detailed reporting, and I found it a Grisham-esque pageturner. Be ready to mist up at times, but you will really learn things you didn’t know.”
—Peter King,
Sports Illustrated
 
“For those of us haunted by the tragedy, an indispensable book.”
—
O Magazine
 
“It is Dwyer and Flynn’s brilliance as storytellers that makes [September 11] come alive once again. It would not be overstatement to say that
102 Minutes
is an important book. Certainly it is an invaluable reminder for those of us whose memories of good and evil on that day may have since dimmed.”
—
Forbes FYI
 
“If someone asks—‘So what was 9/11 all about, anyway?’—point to this.”
—
Richmond Times-Dispatch
 
“It took the authors three years to describe what happened in 102 minutes … . The book is worth the wait.”
—
Providence Journal
 
“I was struck from the beginning of
102 Minutes
by how much it resembles Walter Lord’s
A Night to Remember,
about the
Titanic
tragedy … .
102 Minutes
is beautifully written with real people as its heroes. Dwyer and Flynn did their research meticulously, and the book is just as meticulously footnoted. They have not mythologized. They didn’t need to; their story can stand on its own.”
—
Maysville Ledger Independent
(Kentucky)
 
“Superb reporting.”
—
The New York Sun
 
“This is a poignant, emotion-stirring and important book … . It is a story that gets to the center of the most violent and heinous attack on American soil. Mostly, though, it is a story of how ordinary people exhibit extraordinary traits in times of peril.”
—
The Denver Post
“The writing—sometimes searing, sometimes factual but always appropriate—brings the human experience of disaster into focus … . Thanks to this volume, those voices have not been silenced.”
—
Boston Herald
 
“Riveting human drama.”
—
The Columbus Dispatch
 
“A powerful account of the disaster that hesitates neither to confer laurels nor point fingers … . [Dwyer and Flynn] celebrate the extraordinary capacities of ordinary folk. Swift, photographic prose defines the dimensions of hell—and of humanity.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
 
“Superb reporting … . The book vividly captures the stories of those struggling to survive. Heartbreaking and heroic.”
—
The Dallas Morning News
 
“A masterful account.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
 
“This is a heart-stopping, heartbreaking book. It is also an infuriating one. Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn give us vivid examples of uncommon valor in the face of approaching doom. Nobody can read those pages without feeling a chilly surge of fear. But they also give us—in lucid, understated prose—explanations for the immensity of the calamity. In short, this is an essential document about New York’s worst human tragedy. And it’s a terrific book.”
—Pete Hamill, author of
Forever
and
Downtown: My Manhattan
 
“A triumph of ground level reporting. Dwyer and Flynn deliver us inside a day the world has seen only from the outside looking in, and in the process show what happens in the first moments when human beings collide with the impossible.”
—Robert Kurson, author of
Shadow Divers
 
“
102 Minutes
does for the September 11 catastrophe at New York’s World Trade Center what Walter Lord did for the
Titanic
in his masterpiece,
A Night to Remember.
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have written a book that is searing, poignant, and utterly compelling.”
—Rick Atkinson, author of
An Army at Dawn
and
In the Company of Soldiers
Afterword
T
he stock market reopened within a week. After a year, the subway lines that ran beneath the towers resumed full service. In December 2002, Deborah Mardenfeld, who had been among the first people injured, left New York University’s Rusk Institute, where she had relearned how to use her shattered legs. She had been at the corner of Church and Vesey streets on her way to work at American Express when she was hit by cascading debris as the second plane hit the south tower. That morning, she arrived, unidentified and barely alive, at NYU Downtown Hospital as Jane Doe No. 1. Fifteen months later, she was the last of the 4,400 injured to go home.
 
 
For months after the attacks, the people who had escaped from the 89th floor of the north tower wondered about the men who had come to save them. That group, including Diane DeFontes from the law firm, her friend Tirsa Moya from the insurance company, and Raffaele Cava, the older man with the hat, had crept from their offices to discover that they were trapped. Their elevator bank had
become a gaping, burning hole. Their staircase doors were jammed and impassable. The floor itself was heating and melting beneath their feet. Suddenly, someone in the staircase pried open an exit door, unsealing their fate.
The survivors sent word to the Port Authority that they recalled one of their saviors as a man with an earring and salt-and-pepper hair. Alan Reiss, who had been in charge of the building and worked on the 88th floor, recognized the description at once. To be sure, he assembled a lineup of mug shots, using ID card photos, and passed that along to the tenants of the 89th floor. They immediately picked out the man Reiss had in mind, Pablo Ortiz. And Mak Hanna, who had accompanied Ortiz and Frank De Martini to the 89th floor but left ahead of them to escort out an older colleague, confirmed the names of the men who had gone up the stairs. For the first time, the people on the 89th floor learned that two of the three men who had saved their lives—Ortiz and De Martini—never made it home. More of the De Martini–Ortiz pilgrimage through the north tower was pieced together by Roberta Gordon, an attorney who represented Nicole De Martini in her application to the compensation board set up by Congress for the families of people killed or hurt in the attacks.
The 89th floor tenants posted their condolences and thanks to an online memorial site. The remains of Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz were not recovered, but when the Ortiz children held a memorial service for their father in upstate New York, Tirsa Moya and other survivors attended.
The accounts of Frank De Martini’s valor reached Italy through his cousin, Enrico Tittarelli, who had visited the trade center in 1994 and snapped a picture of him riding an inspection bucket along the side of the building, smiling, perhaps at the audacity of an open-to-the-air journey a quarter mile in the sky. Cousin Enrico brought word of Frank’s deeds to their aunt in Italy.
“In the house where I spent unforgettable days with Frank, when he was in Italy as a student, I sat in front of the fireplace with my old aunt who really loved him,” Tittarelli recalled. “Some young cousins were with us. There was silence, unusual in that room,
while I was reading … what his fearless personality made him do and say in a ‘calm and collected’ way. My voice was not so much calm and collected as his.
“For some moments Frank was again among us. Alive, courageous, generous, and fatally imprudent. As we had known him.”
 
 
Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, who had escaped from the south tower, made it to the southeast corner of the trade center, stopped in a delicatessen for water, and were given a breakfast tray that had not been picked up. They walked a block to the west side of Trinity Church. They met a clergyman who invited them to come into the church, but as they walked in, Praimnath said, “You know, I think those buildings could go down.” Clark scoffed at the notion. The interior furnishings might burn, he said, but the structure was steel. “There is no way.”
At that instant, the south tower boiled into dust. They retreated into an office building, with Clark still carrying the tray of fruit and rolls and offering them to the people in the lobby. The refugees devoured them. After a half hour or so, the two headed down New Street. Praimnath slipped Clark a business card, and told him to stay in touch. In the throngs moving to the East River, they were separated and quickly lost track of each other.
Clark wandered over to Pier 11, and heard someone calling out on a bullhorn that a ferry was going to Jersey City, so he jumped on. As the boat came around the foot of Manhattan island, he saw that the south tower had not just lost the burning floors at the top, but had completely vanished. He had worked there for twenty-seven years.
On board the ferry, the unlikely steps of his flight came back to him: the people in the staircase, arguing about whether to go up or down; the calls for help that he heard from the 81st floor, diverting him from that debate. As he pulled Praimnath out of his ruined office, the people he had been with on the stairs were going up. It was Praimnath’s voice that had saved him from that fatal diversion.
But what had happened to this Stanley, this stranger whom he
had pulled over the rubble and fell to the ground with in an embrace? Where had he gone? Perhaps, Clark mused, he had dreamed the whole thing. Or maybe that stranger had been an angel, some sort of spectre, a metaphysical presence. Then, in his breast pocket, he felt a small business card. On it was the name of Stanley Praimnath.
Clark reached Jersey City, found a phone to call his house and report that he was alive. Then he caught a train to his station, and from there, drove home. In front of his house, he leaned on the horn, long and loud, a blaring fanfare to declare life as loud as he could. He was smothered in the embrace of his wife, then all the family and friends who had come to console her.
Having survived a plane that flew almost directly into his window, Stanley Praimnath, a devout man before September 11, became a speaker much in demand at churches and with religious groups who wanted to see the man who saw the plane coming. As his story became known, his autumn weekends were soon booked, and he told audiences about the divine love that he believes carried him to safety.
 
 
The planning, and the bickering, over what should be done with the trade center site began before the sixteen acres had been cleared of the twisted steel and powdered concrete. Filling the void became a pressing and difficult matter. Years passed and the slow pace in settling on a blueprint, in honoring the dead, in laying some kind of foundation for a new, brighter, safer future, seemed conspicuous, in part because so much else in Manhattan seemed to revive.
When the PATH station, the remnant of the Hudson Terminal train line on which the trade center had been built, was reopened in November 2003, many found themselves for the first time in the very pit where the towers and satellite buildings once stood. Among the remnants of the old complex was a bank of escalators that had carried streams of New Jersey commuters from the PATH station into the trade center. Now the train platform, once invisible to the world and from which it was hard to see anything, was, startlingly,
wide open, at the center of the remains. Everything that once sat above and around the train station had disappeared. Trains rolled in and out, but the platform, swept every moment by wind and memory, could never be merely a place to catch a train. On her way to an appointment in New Jersey, Tirsa Moya, one of the people who had escaped from the 89th floor, finally returned to the site in the spring of 2004. As she rode the escalator down to the PATH platform, she wept. She felt as though she were going to her grave. Her boss distracted her, and she completed the trip. On her return from New Jersey, however, she found herself again buried in history, in loss, in the moment of escape. She cried all the way home.
 
 
Across the street from the towers, at the Millenium Hilton, where the breakfast dishes had been fossilized in soot, the building was cleaned and ready for guests by May 2003. A year later, after making do in temporary offices, Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trading firm that lost 658 people at the top of the north tower, found a new, permanent home, four miles uptown, in the lower floors of an East 59th Street skyscraper.
Yet even as New Yorkers resumed old rhythms or struggled to shape new ones, much of what had happened that morning remained inconceivable, the depth of the disaster so stunning it took on the dreamlike quality of myth. Efforts to reconstruct a solid version of what had happened inside the towers had to navigate through the fog of pain, politics, and fear. In fact, the answers to some questions had disappeared with those who had been lost in the collapses.
Why had only eighteen people in the south tower been able to escape using stairway A, the only effective route out of the imperiled upper floors in either of the buildings?
Had others found the stairwell but were still descending when the south tower fell?
How did Battalion Chief Orio Palmer come to understand that Channel 7, the radio frequency that had been specially designed to work inside the towers, was not completely out of service, as he and
other fire commanders originally thought? For much of the morning Palmer had been able to use that channel to talk to his commander in the south tower lobby, even as he climbed, floor by floor, into the higher reaches of the building to rescue the injured. Such a line of communication would have been invaluable in the north tower where the escape of so many firefighters had been impeded by poor communications.
How many people had actually jumped from either of the towers? And in many of the cases was “jumping” an accurate depiction of what bodies at 98.6 degrees do reflexively when confronted by 1,000-degree heat?
Even after the report of the 9/11 Commission, the studies by management specialists, and the sifting of evidence by investigators, journalists, and family members, the precise shape of the disaster and the texture of the final moments of many men and women remained unknown.
 
 
In 2005, though, rich new sources of information became available that sharpened some perceptions, offered fresh insights, and filled out incomplete chapters in the sprawling chronicle of the morning. In June, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies released its final draft report, a three-year engineering study primarily designed to make the next generation of skyscrapers safer.
The document amounted to a 10,000-page autopsy of the trade center’s collapse: the efficacy of the fireproofing, the adequacy of the original design, the efficiency of the emergency response and the evacuation that followed. In one section, the analysts found that the towers should have had four exit staircases under the 1968 New York City building code, not just the three that were in each building. The planes’ impact had destroyed those three escape stairwells in the north tower, and two of the three in the south tower. Although the Port Authority, as an interstate agency, was not bound by local codes in constructing the trade center, it had publicly pledged to “meet or exceed” the city codes. The investigators found that to have met even the newly liberalized 1968 code, the builders should have installed
the fourth staircase, one specifically designed to accommodate the 1,000 people who would use the large public meeting rooms at the top of each building: the restaurant in the north tower and the observation deck atop the south tower.
“Once you go over 1,000 people on a floor, you need to have a fourth stairway,” said Richard W. Bukowski, a senior engineer with the institute. Of course, the location of that additional staircase in each tower would have determined whether they survived the crashes, and ultimately, whether they might have been useful as escape routes for the people trapped on the high floors.
The Port Authority said it believed the institute was mistaken and noted that New York City building officials, who reviewed the trade center plans in the 1960s and after the 1993 terrorist bombing, had not raised any questions about the missing staircase.
Nevertheless, the city Buildings Department in 2005 had no doubts: A fourth staircase was unambiguously required by the code, its officials said.
At the same time, the institute offered additional evidence that the Port Authority had indeed been eager to reduce the amount of space devoted to stairs in the buildings. One of the documents included in its report was a September 29, 1965, letter from Malcolm P. Levy, the authority’s chief planning engineer, to Minoru Yamasaki, the architect, in which the agency noted that it would be using the new, less restrictive building code then being drafted.
“It is my understanding that the present drawings have been prepared to permit rapid conversion to the new code,” Levy wrote. “The tower core should be redesigned to eliminate the fire towers and to take advantage of the more lenient provisions regarding exit stairs.” A few years later when city building officials took exception to those plans, arguing that they did not meet the 1938 code that was still the law, Levy and others at the Port Authority said they had decided that the buildings would comply with the less-stringent code, then in draft form, but on the verge of being enacted. The NIST investigators also located notes showing that the Port Authority saw advantages in the new code because it required fewer exits and less fireproofing.

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