102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (31 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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On the question of building code compliance, the federal report had a significant, and possibly stinging recommendation: government agencies such as the Port Authority that were exempt, by law, from building code enforcement should not escape all outside scrutiny. The federal report said those agencies should not be permitted to “self-certify” that they had met the codes. That was the approach that had been used by the Port Authority in building the trade center—its own engineers and experts decided if the buildings met standards, and when they were entitled to take an exception. Now, the federal authorities suggested, even in cases where a government agency was exempt, an independent third party should review the procedures to determine if they were consistent with the code.
Asked if the Port Authority—an agency whose executives were appointed by the governors of New York and New Jersey—would now subject its building safety standards to the scrutiny of an outside expert, a spokesman replied: “It is an interesting proposal and we will consider it.”
 
 
Two months later, in August 2005, the City of New York released hours of audio tape from emergency dispatchers who had directed the Fire Department’s response, as well as 12,000 pages of transcribed interviews with 503 firefighters, fire officials, and emergency medical workers who had been at the towers that morning. The interviews had been ordered in the fall of 2001 by Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, who sought to preserve accurate recollections before they were refashioned by collective memory.
The department later made no effort to analyze the information, however, and when
The New York Times
asked to see the material in February 2002, the city refused to release it, saying it would interfere with the prosecution of a man accused of plotting with the September 11 hijackers. A federal judge ruled that most of the records had no bearing whatsoever on the trial. Later, city lawyers claimed that the firefighters had been promised confidentiality, but ultimately withdrew that assertion. The city finally argued that much of the oral histories were opinions and not public records. The newspaper
sued, under New York’s freedom of information law, and in April 2005 the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ordered that the materials be released.
The interviews provided searing, vivid testimony, uncensored by protocol. Firefighters recalled the confusion of the day and their frustrations and struggles against the surging fire in highly personal accounts that resonated with their own residual disbelief at what had occurred. All were recorded at a time when the whereabouts of hundreds of people had yet to be determined. In many cases, the interviewers asked for any sightings of colleagues, many of whose remains had yet to be found.
Particularly informative were the accounts of 200 emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and their supervisors, whose response had been vital but whose perspective had been largely overlooked in the retellings of the day. The Emergency Medical Services, which became a division within the Fire Department in 1996, had deployed en masse to the incident and, almost from the start, had difficulty coordinating an orderly response. Crews had trouble finding supervisors. Radio communications were spotty. Each unit was forced to fend for itself. Efforts at triage were scattershot. Isolated and without clear lines of command, each crew made its own judgments and set its own priorities.
Paramedics shepherded crowds away from the towers, bandaged people inside a bank lobby, and packed their ambulances with the dazed, the bleeding, and the burned. At one point, a group of the medical chiefs met, in part by chance, at the Embassy Suites Hotel in the World Financial Center and sat down to configure a new plan. Gathered in the lobby, they began to work out the details over a tabletop and then, distracted by the arrival of more people needing care, moved into a back corridor where they fashioned a strategy to regain some semblance of order over the disaster. When they emerged, however, they found they could not communicate the plan to the entire force because their own radios could not contact the dispatchers.
Joseph Cahill, a paramedic, said the experience felt like being in an infantry unit that had been overrun. “We are scattered everywhere,”
he said. “Nobody knew where anybody was. Nobody knew who was in charge. It really felt for a moment that I was in
Apocalypse Now,
where Martin Sheen goes, ‘Where is your C.O.? Ain’t that you? No. Uh-oh.’”
Several medical technicians had family in the burning buildings—a father, a wife, a fiancé, a close friend. Manuel Delgado, a paramedic, was standing on Church Street with another paramedic, Carlos Lillo, treating several critically injured people when Delgado noticed that Lillo was crying. It was an overwhelming moment, Delgado understood, but Lillo was a seasoned veteran.
“I go to him, ‘Carlos, what’s the matter? What’s going on?’”
“My wife’s in there,” Lillo responded, indicating the north tower.
Cecilia Lillo worked as an administrator for the Port Authority on the 64th floor. She ultimately survived after escaping with the other people from her floor. Her husband, who went looking for her, did not.
Two emergency medical technicians, Richard Erdey and Soraya O’Donnell, recounted how they were on the scene only a few moments when they were directed to help a firefighter, Danny Suhr. He had been hit by the body of a woman who had fallen from one of the towers and, after loading him into the ambulance, his condition was immediately clear: He had no vital signs and his injuries were catastrophic.
Erdey was certain the firefighter was dead, but two of the firefighter’s colleagues from Engine 216 had climbed into the ambulance with them for the ride to Bellevue Hospital Center. “They kept yelling, ‘Danny, Danny, Danny!’” Erdey said. He was struck by how intently they were staring at him. “I’m saying, should I tell them? Should I not tell them? How can I tell them tactfully?”
As they continued the hopeless resuscitation efforts, Erdey finally warned the firefighters there was only a small glimmer of hope for their friend. Indeed, Suhr was pronounced dead when they arrived at the hospital. Minutes later, as the crew began preparing to return to the towers, they were approached by two people from the hospital, an emergency room doctor and an Anglican nun, Sister Cynthia Mahoney. They wanted to go along to help.
Erdey looked at the nun, unsure if she knew the magnitude of what she was volunteering for. “You understand, ma’am, we might not come back from this,” he said. She understood, Sister Cynthia said, and the pair from the hospital climbed in for a trip back to the towers. When they arrived, the chaos had intensified. The towers had fallen and as they approached in their ambulance they encountered a fellow medical technician wandering, disoriented, through the smoke, holding his helmet.
“Where is your partner?” O’Donnell asked.
“I’m looking for my father,” the technician responded. “He was in the World Trade Center.”
“Why don’t you get in the back with us,” O’Donnell called out to him. “We had the nun in the back,” she said. “We figured she could talk to him.”
 
 
The oral histories from the firefighters presented fresh evidence of how deeply unaware firefighters in the north tower had been of their own peril after the south tower collapsed. The bleak picture provided in the accounts is in stark contrast to the depiction by public officials—most particularly, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, in submissions to the 9/11 Commission—that firefighters were broadly aware of the dangers they faced but stayed in the building to carry out their rescue duties.
In actual fact, of the fifty-eight firefighters who escaped the north tower and gave oral histories, only four said they knew that the south tower had fallen.
Lt. William Walsh of Ladder 1 said he had heard the order to evacuate when he was around the 19th floor. Yet he did not know that a plane had struck the other building or that it had already collapsed, and as he descended he encountered firefighters who had significantly less sense of what was going on than he did.
“They were hanging out in the stairwell and in the occupancy and they were resting,” Walsh said. “I told them, ‘Didn’t you hear the Mayday? Get out.’ They were saying, ‘Yeah, we’ll be right with
you, Lou.’ They just didn’t give it a second thought. They just continued with their rest.”
 
 
Long after September 11, long after studies had identified breaches in New York City’s preparedness for a mammoth disaster, city officials struggled to mend the gaps. The inherent difficulty of using a small, hand-held radio in a high-rise setting was addressed by issuing new Command Post radios to chiefs, twenty-two-pound devices that a fire captain had designed using an old marine radio and a battery taken from his daughter’s Jet Ski. They were carried to the upper floors of a large building and were effective at establishing clear communications with commanders below.
The protocol of police and firefighters sharing one set of helicopters as response and reconnaissance aircraft was also resolved, and the two departments resumed training flights together. The need to establish a single, joint command post and to share information was embraced, at least in concept.
Some problems, however, could not be solved with battery power and bandwidth. The enmity between New York’s fire and police agencies did not seem to dissipate, even if it resembled the animosities of divorce within some families—dreadfully apparent but still not spoken about. Years after the disaster, New York was still working to install radios that would allow firefighters and police to talk to each other on the same frequency in special situations. And when the city unveiled a new emergency response protocol for disasters in the spring of 2005, the police were assigned primary responsibility for biological and chemical attacks, an adjustment that provoked open bitterness in the Fire Department ranks. Chief Peter Hayden, who had been the commander in the north tower, responded to the city’s decision by telling a reporter for
The New York Times:
“If the question was posed today—would the response at a terrorist incident be different than it was on 9/11?—the answer would have to be no. Now if that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.”
 
 
The next major disaster that New York responded to was not man-made and it was far away, in New Orleans, where 650 firefighters and police officers arrived in September 2005 to help bail out a city that had disappeared beneath flood waters. Some of the firefighters drove down in a pumper truck that the people of New Orleans and Louisiana had given to a Brooklyn firehouse in December 2001 to replace one destroyed on 9/11. The truck was called “The Spirit of Louisiana.”
In the days after the towers collapsed, a group of New Orleans firefighters had traveled north to help out, cooking and cleaning at firehouses while the New Yorkers searched for lost colleagues in the rubble. Now the New York crews were in the south riding to calls with a fire force that had been depleted by the hurricane. Bill Butler of Ladder 6. Sean Halper of Engine 279. Liam Flaherty of Rescue 4. Many of the firefighters were veterans of the towers and the pile, repaying a debt, offering lessons learned, losing themselves and finding themselves in someone else’s catastrophe.
On the morning of September 11, 2005, the Spirit of Louisiana was parked on the lawn of Our Lady of Holy Cross College, near the buildings where the firefighters were staying, in the Algiers section of New Orleans, which had not been flooded. At 8:30 A.M. eastern time, a quarter hour before the time the first plane had hit, Father Peter Weiss, a Brooklyn native, began an outdoor Catholic Mass in observance of the anniversary. Hundreds of firefighters stood on the field in front of the administration building, a red brick Georgian colonial that had lost one of its white columns to the storm. The lawn was edged with twisted oaks and magnolias, some with branches that hung limp or lay on the grass. “We are here today with another community devastated by another tragic event,” said New York’s Assistant Fire Chief Michael Weinlein. “We feel your pain and understand your frustration. It may take some time, but I promise you from personal experience, things will get better.”
At 9:35 A.M., as the Mass wound down, word of a house fire nearby came in over the radios. Firefighters from Maryland, Illinois,
and New York ran for their trucks parked along the road in groups of five and six. A company from Chicago pulled its truck out of a formation of rigs that had been arranged around the altar. Firefighters, who a few minutes before had waited in line for communion, now stood along Woodland Drive, hurrying to pull on their gear.
 
 
With the passing of years, the emotions of the day no longer surged with the same force. Still, they retained unique power.
Esmerlin Salcedo, thirty-six years old, worked the afternoon shift as a security guard at the trade center, often stationed in a basement command center where he monitored the elevator intercoms and other emergency gear. Since his workday did not begin until 3 P.M., he was not present when the planes struck; he was not down in the basement, on the B-1 level, when the first, urgent calls came from the elevators or by phone from the people upstairs, seeking guidance. In fact, he was just a block or so away, taking a computer class at the Chubb Institute, a business school. Those in the command center had no time to think of who was not there: The cries for help were raining on them, unceasingly.

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