102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (6 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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The operators for the 911 system were giving callers similar instructions: Stay put. The firemen are coming to get you.
Ivhan Carpio, a worker at the restaurant, left a message on his cousin’s answering machine. “I can’t go anywhere because they told us not to move,” he said. It was Carpio’s twenty-fourth birthday and his day off, but his extended family in Peru depended on Carpio’s paycheck, and he had agreed to cover someone else’s shift to earn extra money. “I have to wait for the firefighters,” he told his cousin’s machine.
Christine Olender now called the police desk again, as instructed.
“Right now,” she told Officer Ray Murray, “we need to find a safe haven on 106, where the smoke condition isn’t bad. Can you direct us to a certain quadrant?”
“All right,” Murray responded. “We’re sending … we’re sending people up there as soon as possible.”
“What’s your ETA?” she asked.
“As soon as possible. As soon as it’s humanly possible.”
 
 
To do any good for the people upstairs, Chief Pfeifer needed a quick way to reach them, and reliable information from the high floors. Neither was available. Even as the firefighters ascended single file, the shape of the situation upstairs remained a mystery, if one with increasingly desperate overtones. The messages from Christine Olender had been relayed from the Port Authority police desk in 5 World Trade Center to Sergeant Al DeVona, a Port Authority police officer who had gone to the lobby of the north tower to coordinate his department’s work with the firefighters. DeVona passed word to Pfeifer that people at Windows were trapped. The chiefs at the command post were sent word of other calls for help that had gone
to the 911 system or to the building staff, who were answering the intercom phones.
The console at the fire command desk held few of the answers that Chief Pfeifer needed. Where was the fire? How fast was it spreading and where? Which stairwells were clear? The chief, it turned out, knew less than the people he was trying to rescue. They were being briefed on the phone by family and friends who were watching TV. He had no TV and the fire chiefs were getting only snatches of information from colleagues who walked outside and craned their heads, trying to fathom what was happening 1,200 feet in the sky. Few departments equal the rigor of New York City’s basic firefighter training, but its commanders went through little formal planning for complex events. The concept of “situational awareness”—using modern tools to provide information needed by people making life-and-death decisions in fast-moving environments—had become a foundation for military maneuvers, air-traffic control, power-plant operation, and advanced manufacturing. That concept had not taken hold at many fire departments, including New York’s. Though the FDNY rarely lacked for resources—indeed, it had prospered over the previous ten years, as its budget increased by $253 million above the inflation rate, even as the number of fires was dropping by 46 percent—it operated without video feeds, computer laptops with building plans, or strong communication links. Battalion Chief Pfeifer was junior to other arriving commanders, including his boss, Deputy Chief Hayden, and Assistant Chief Callan. (In the Fire Department’s nomenclature, a hybrid glossary of civil service and tradition, a battalion chief is outranked by a deputy chief, who is in turn subordinate to an assistant chief.) The chiefs hoped to get better information when firefighters reached the upper floors and sent back reports, or when tenants from those floors started reaching the lower floors and could pass along their firsthand observations. Whether the intelligence came from descending civilians or ascending firefighters, the radios had to work. In high-rises, fire radios had a poor record because the mass of the building often prevented radio signals from penetrating, and chiefs lost touch
with firefighters on upper floors. One of the more infamous episodes had occurred after the trade center bombing in 1993. Hundreds of firefighters had responded, overloading the radio frequencies. Messages were lost. Commanders had to rely on human messengers to transmit critical information. Afterward, in a report on the attack and the response, Anthony L. Fusco, the chief of department, said: “A major detriment to our ability to strengthen control of the incident was Fire Department on-scene communications.”
In the days before portable radio technology, New York City firefighters used hand signals to communicate or sent runners to carry messages. Often they just shouted. By the mid-1940s, the department was using shortwave pack sets, similar to the ones employed by soldiers on the battlefields of Europe. In the 1960s, individual firefighters were given their own radios. Four decades after that innovation, however, and thirty years after men on the moon beamed live television pictures across the cosmos, firefighters were still having a hard time using their radios in high-rise buildings.
To communicate consistently in a tall building, an emergency agency needed two things: a reliable handheld radio and an amplifier to boost the radio’s signal so that it could reach the upper floors. No matter how hardy a handheld radio was—Motorola salesmen used to drop the Saber radios on the floor in a cocky demonstration of their ruggedness—its signal was generally too weak to reliably penetrate multiple floors without a booster.
The New York Police Department had figured this out many years earlier. Its officers could communicate effectively in high-rise buildings even though a police officer’s radio, the one that dangled from the belt, was much like a firefighter’s radio. The difference was that, unlike the Fire Department, the police had installed boosters in 350 locations across the city to amplify their signals. The Fire Department had only a handful of boosters in place.
Part of the disparity in the use of boosters was found in how the two agencies used their radios on a daily basis. Police officers needed to be in touch with a distant central base or dispatcher, requiring a system designed to communicate over great distances. The situation was reversed for firefighters, who were more concerned with
keeping track of a colleague lost in the smoke of an adjoining room. Amplification was generally not needed to talk at the scene of the average house fire. And though tourist postcards portrayed New York City as a forest of skyscrapers, most of its tall buildings really were in two pockets, lower Manhattan and midtown. The chiefs in those two neighborhoods complained long and hard when their radios malfunctioned inside office towers. For the rest of the department, working in neighborhoods where buildings seldom topped six stories, the problem of high-rise radio reception did not outrank other issues facing the FDNY.
Moreover, to install a booster system would have represented an entirely new way of doing things—never an easy sell in a department that resisted technological change. At the Fire Department, the loyalty of one firefighter to another, a soldierly bond, was at times extended to an attachment to gear and the old way of doing things. Technological ruts became enshrined as customs. Still, over the years, the Fire Department had boosters installed in a few critical buildings like train terminals and the trade center. In a city with a signature skyline, where more than 2,000 buildings in Manhattan alone rise higher than twenty stories, this was not a major achievement. But it was better than nothing, which was what many urban fire departments had when it came to such boosters.
At the trade center, the booster, also known as the repeater, had been part of $80 million in safety improvements made by the Port Authority after the 1993 bombing. The repeater—and its antenna—were installed at 5 World Trade Center, but it was turned on and operated from consoles at the fire command desks in both of the twin towers, across the plaza. When it was on, the device could capture messages from the firefighters’ handheld radios and rebroadcast them at greater strength. That would allow fire commanders in a lobby to stay in touch with their troops working on the upper floors.
Earlier in 2001, the Fire Department had also issued new handheld radios, the Motorola XTS3500R. It employed the latest in digital technology, fire officials said, an improvement over the existing, aging, analog Motorola Saber radios, and would be better able to penetrate multiple layers of concrete and steel at high-rises.
Just days after the new radios were introduced, however, a firefighter lost in a house fire called for help and could not be heard by his colleagues outside. Other complaints soon surfaced, and the new radios were pulled from service amid a debate over whether the problem was a hardware glitch or a lack of training on how to use the new equipment.
As a result, the department was forced to reissue the Motorola Saber radios it had just withdrawn, some of them fifteen years old. On September 11, many of the firefighters marched into the towers with these old radios, the identical ones they had carried eight years earlier when the bomb went off. This time, though, they had the powerful repeater. It had been tested only a few months earlier and had worked well. Even with the old radios, the prospects for communicating within the tower looked brighter than they had in 1993.
 
 
Truck 1, an elite team of rescue specialists from the Emergency Service Unit of the New York Police Department, arrived at 8:52 A.M. and set up a command post at the corner of Church and Vesey Streets, about two blocks from the lobby where Pfeifer and the fire chiefs were directing their operation. The ESU cops, forty or so officers organized in six teams, were trained to help people who had been taken hostage, or were dangling from bridges or, as was the case here, trapped by fire. They were followed to the scene by hundreds of fellow New York police officers summoned at 8:56 A.M. by the chief of the department, Joseph Esposito.
“Car three,” Esposito said on the radio. “We’ve got a level three and you might want to go to a level four here, Central, all right?”
A Level 4 mobilization was the department’s highest, rarest state of alert, the police equivalent of a war footing. It meant that about 1,000 officers would be responding. As they arrived, most of the officers were given assignments outside the buildings. Some directed people leaving the trade center away from the perimeter of the complex and the streets around it. Others controlled the crowd or tried to direct the congealing traffic. The ESU cops were sent
inside the building. On paper, they would work under Fire Department direction. The city had a protocol that established who did what at emergencies, which was supposed to avoid duplication of effort and to keep the chain of command clear. The Fire Department was in charge at fires, so technically the ESU teams were supposed to check in with fire officials at the lobby before they rushed to help in the building.
Some teams did check in, others didn’t, and one that did felt rebuffed by the fire chiefs to whom they spoke. That was not a surprise. The Finest, as the police were called, and the Bravest, the nickname for the firefighters, did not like each other. The saying went that the only thing the two departments could ever agree on was the date of their annual boxing match. Sometimes, they didn’t wait for that date, and fistfights broke out at rescue scenes. The corrosive nature of the relationship had far more serious consequences than a fat lip. To be completely effective, firefighters and police officers needed to share information, to act in concert, to anticipate what the other force might do as a disaster evolved. The decisions that commanders made were influenced by how quickly and accurately they sized up a situation based on what they learned both from their troops and their putative allies. But these two agencies didn’t train together often or well. They couldn’t talk to each other by radio because their frequencies did not match. And they didn’t share equipment.
The police, for example, flew helicopters, and the city had drafted a plan to let firefighters ride in them at high-rise fires. This plan was revised after the 1993 bombing, but it was rarely used and infrequently rehearsed. And on this day the cooperation was no different. The Police and Fire Departments ran brave but completely independent rescue operations. They did not bicker; they simply did not communicate. No one from the Fire Department called up to request the use of a helicopter, as envisioned by the protocol. No one from the Police Department called to find out if they were coming. And so the police helicopters lifted off without any firefighters, leaving Chief Pfeifer to wonder about the spread of fire on the upper floors 1,200 feet above him, even though, from 8:52 on,
a police helicopter had a clear view of the damage. Indeed, a few minutes later, the pilot of Aviation 14 sent in a grim bird’s-eye report.
“Be advised at this time,” Detective Timothy Hayes said. “Be advised we do have people confirmed falling out of the building at this time. It looks like four sides are cut open. A lot of flames.”
That word did not get down to the fire commanders in the lobby of the north tower, not in an act of specific hostility, but because of a long-standing malaise that ran from the top of each department to the bottom. Mayors had tried for years to forge a peaceful, working relationship so that in the event of a big disaster, all the resources of the city would be coordinated. After a series of plane crashes, Mayor David N. Dinkins formed an Aviation Emergency Preparedness Working Group in 1990, with representatives from the Fire and Police Departments and Emergency Medical Services, as well as others. In a report, the group concluded that the agencies needed to practice working together and to arrange for a single radio frequency that commanders could share during emergencies. After a couple of years of drills, the group was disbanded in 1994, when a new mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, took office. Giuliani made public safety the signature cause of his administration. In 1996, he created the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), which ran a series of mock disaster drills, though none that involved an airliner crashing into a skyscraper, whether by accident or design. Indeed, despite the trade center’s status as the city’s leading terrorist target, coordinated disaster drills were extremely rare events in the life of the complex.

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