A Paradise Built in Hell (29 page)

Put all that away and look at it as a local disaster, as the fiery collapse of two colossi and the shattering of sixteen densely inhabited acres, with that strange toxic cloud of pulverized architecture, computers, asbestos, heavy metals, and human lives spreading around the city, the storms of office papers drifting over water to come to ground in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and refugees streaming in all directions, and the local effects of disrupted transit and work, health concerns, and rescue efforts. Only then can you see what the media in their rush to go to the centers of power and the labyrinths of Middle East politics and the stock of clichés about rescuers and victims largely missed: the extraordinary response of the people of that city.

When the towers crumpled and people nearby were plunged into the pitch-black darkness inside the fast-moving cloud of pulverized buildings, many of them thought they had died. And yet even after the most unimaginable event possible, even after being showered with debris and immersed in midmorning darkness, after that vision of 220 floors, each an acre in size, coming down, after witnessing commercial airliners become firebombs, after inhaling that terrible choking dust that would damage so many permanently, people for the most part got back up and tried to take care of each other en route to safety.

About twenty-five thousand people in the towers aided each other in an orderly evacuation without which the casualties would have been far higher than the 2,603 that resulted. (That many had not yet arrived at work, because of the time of the collisions and because of the citywide election, also kept down the numbers who died; an evacuation of twice as many would have been far more difficult.) The great majority of the casualties were people trapped above the fires, including more than 1,300 above the ninety-first floor of the north tower. Had the firemen who val iantly marched up the stairs while thousands were pouring down had better radio communications equipment, far fewer than 341 of them might have perished. Had the people in charge of the buildings ordered evacuations immediately rather than urging people to return to their offices or stay put in the south tower, more rescuers and workers might have survived. Of course what happened was unprecedented, and that the structures would collapse was initially unthinkable.

Evacuating the whole southern tip of Manhattan became urgent as the area became toxic and chaotic, and the towers’ workers were joined in flight by residents, workers in surrounding businesses, passersby, schoolchildren, and others. A spontaneously assembled armada of boats conducted in a few hours an evacuation far larger than the fabled ten-day Dunkirk evacuation of the Second World War (that evacuation was done under fire, but the civilian boats approaching the dust cloud enveloping southern Manhattan had no way to know whether the attacks had ended after the two planes hit). Citizens on the streets aided wounded, overwhelmed, exhausted, and stranded evacuees, and concentric circles of support ringed the disaster site. Later, spontaneously assembled collection sites, commissaries, and supply chains supported the workers on what they called the Pile and the media would call Ground Zero. Many of those workers, particularly in the beginning, were also volunteers, some of them specialists—engineers, construction workers, medics, welders. Priests, ministers, rabbis, masseuses, medics, and other caregiv ers swarmed the site, and one of the largest disaster convergences in history transpired. Some of those who came without plans found or created useful roles and worked as part of the response for months. Many nonprofit agencies, notably those working with Muslims, immigrants, and the poor, sprang into action. Some new organizations were born. The city’s less urgent functions were largely halted at first, and people paused to contemplate, mourn, argue, comfort, read, gather, pray, stare, and to act, sometimes powerfully, sometimes ineffectually, on their overwhelming desire to give and be of service. There were racists who wanted to attack any Muslim or Arab and people clamoring for war, but they were a minority in that city that suddenly came to a dreadful, thoughtful halt.

 

 

 

The evacuation of the towers and nearby areas had been calm at first, then anxious, and then urgent. When asked who the heroes were, emergency services policeman Mark DeMarco, who’d been at Ground Zero, replied, “I said, ‘The people who were in the towers, who actually initiated the rescue before the police or fire department got there.’ I said, ‘They initiated it, they started it, they were helping each other.’ I said, ‘Everybody who was helping each other,’ I said, ‘to me they were all heroes.’ And in hindsight, when we came walking out of the building, there wasn’t any panic, there wasn’t anybody running.”

Michael Noble, a big, calm-looking midwesterner who’d risen to become a senior executive at Morgan Stanley, was on the sixty-sixth floor of the south tower when the first airplane hit the north tower. One of his coworkers who’d seen the plane fly right at him and remembered the 1993 attack on the towers ran out of a private dining room shouting, “They’re back.” Noble and several of his coworkers decided on their own initiative to evacuate and took the elevator down to the forty-fourth floor, only to find that the elevators had been closed and someone with a bullhorn from Port Authority—the agency that ran the buildings—was telling people to go back to their offices. “I just started down the stairs for no particular reason. It just seemed at the time that it was a good idea to get out of the building. So I went into the stairwell, and the stairs were crowded. People were two abreast, someone on every stair going down calmly, and I remember thinking as I was going down—there was a woman who was overweight in front of me and having a hard time—and remember at this time there’s no emergency in our building—and I remember thinking: what do you do here? Do you move around her? She was now backing up quite a few people and I guess to her credit she just kind of moved aside, she was tired, she was out of breath, and she moved aside and people just kept going down and past her, as did I.” On the nineteenth floor, there was another call for people to return to their offices, but he calculated how long it would take to return versus leave and decided to continue. The people who heeded the call to return and got into elevators mostly died, because the burning jet fuel from the plane that would shortly thereafter crash into the south tower turned the elevator shafts into infernos.

Noble continued, “So I go to my normal exit from the lobby and the signs are up saying use the revolving door, and there was so much debris that I couldn’t budge the revolving doors. So I go to the other doors, where there’s signs saying don’t use these, and there was a young woman there and debris, and I’m getting ready to shove open this door when a huge chunk of debris falls from the sky right in front of us. I assume it was part of the building’s facade, and both of us were kind of taken aback by that but we knew we had to get out, so I remember grabbing her hand and saying, ‘Let’s go.’ We pushed out and we ran across away from the building, south toward Liberty Street, and she ran off in a different direction. . . . There was a parking lot for a Greek Orthodox church, and that’s where I went. As I looked around, every car was on fire. It looked like a war zone. I remember looking down, and this was before I looked back up at the building, and there was an arm, severed at the elbow, with a wedding ring on, the same type of wedding ring as my own, and that shocked me a little bit to see a body part, and as I looked around there were body parts pretty well all around and lots of clumps of flesh, just blood and goo, not recognizable as a body part. I saw things that day that no civilian should see. . . . So I started walking up what I think was called the West Side Highway, and of course it was hard not to be looking up . . . and I looked up and saw this speck in the sky and it caught my attention and it was a man who had jumped. I remember his arms and his legs just trying to grab at air and I watched him fall and I remember thinking,
How can I help this man? Is there some way I can communicate with him as he is about to die?
I don’t know . . . it’s what I thought. And for the last fifteen floors he fell I watched and tried to hold his hand, to be somehow in communication with him.” He wished afterward that he had retrieved that wedding ring for the widow. For the next few days, he joined other senior management people in his firm, making phone calls to employees’ homes to try to track down who had survived and where people were. Morgan Stanley had recently merged with Dean Witter, but before the crisis the two communities had remained distrustful. Afterward, Noble says, “It was open arms, how can we help, anything you need is yours.”

John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant who worked on the sixty-ninth floor of the north tower, was carried down all those flights of stairs to safety by ten of his coworkers in relays, using an evacuation chair designed to skid down the stairs that had been provided after the earlier attack. Zaheer Jaffery, a polio survivor from Pakistan, worked on the sixty-fifth floor of one of the towers and remembers the long journey down the stairs: “We had to stop several times during our descent because of injured people being brought down. For example, you would hear, ‘move to the right, move to the right’ and everybody would move to the right, so that the injured could be taken down. And this happened, three, four times. People in a groove and then they had to reposition themselves. And people would actually: ‘No, no, you first.’ I couldn’t believe it, that at this point people would actually say, ‘No, no, please take my place.’ It was uncanny.” Eventually he got to the bottom of the stairs. “I was walking, very, very slow by now because I could barely walk. In the concourse level I was going so slow that two or three times people offered to carry me and I said, ‘No, no, maybe someone else needs help.’ You know the water was this much, up to my ankles, and it was slimy and slippery. My shoes were new and they were slipping. And by that time I knew that it was very serious because people were actually now beginning to run and you could hear the volunteers saying, ‘Get out of the building before it falls. Get out of the building before it falls.’ ” One of the firefighters in Jules and Gedeon Naudet’s documentary about 9/11 recalls people saying to the ascending firefighters, “What are you doing? Get out!”

John Guilfoy, a young man who’d been a college athlete, recalled, “I remember looking back as I started running, and the thickest smoke was right where it was, you know, a few blocks away, and thinking that, like, whoever’s going to be in that is just going to die. There’s no way you could—you’re going to suffocate, and it was coming at us. I remember just running, people screaming. I was somewhat calm, and I was a little bit faster than my colleagues, so I had to stop and slow up a little bit and wait for them to make sure we didn’t lose each other.” He spoke of slowing down as though it was an ordinary, sensible thing to do—but to keep pace, in flight from imminent danger, not even with family or beloved friends but with coworkers is not what we imagine we ourselves or those around us would do. It exemplifies the extremes of altruism and solidarity in disaster. A young immigrant from Pakistan, Usman Farman, was also running from the cloud when he fell down. A Hasidic Jewish man came up to him, took into his hand the pendant with an Arabic prayer on it that Farman wore, and then “with a deep Brooklyn accent he said ‘Brother if you don’t mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let’s get the hell out of here.’ He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren’t for him, I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris.”

Errol Anderson, a recruiter with the New York City fire department, was caught outside in that dust storm. “For a couple of minutes I heard nothing. I thought I was either dead and was in another world, or I was the only one alive. I became nervous and panicky, not knowing what to do, because I couldn’t see. . . . About four or five minutes later, while I was still trying to find my way around, I heard the voice of a young lady. She was crying and saying, ‘Please, Lord, don’t let me die. Don’t let me die.’ I was so happy to hear this lady’s voice. I said, ‘Keep talking, keep talking, I’m a firefighter, I’ll find you by the response of where you are.’ Eventually we met up with each other and basically we ran into each other’s arms without even knowing it.” She held on to his belt, and eventually several other people joined as a human chain, which he delivered to the Brooklyn Bridge before returning to the site of the collapses. The Brooklyn Bridge became a pedestrian route, and a river of people poured for hours to the other side. New Yorkers were well served by their everyday practices of walking the city, mingling with strangers, and feeling at home in public. It is hard to imagine many of the more suburbanized and privatized American cities responding with such resilience, resourcefulness, and public-spiritedness, and so the everyday qualities of true urbanism may too be survival skills in crisis. The denizens of many other cities may have even had difficulty imagining that a mass evacuation could be conducted on foot, that the human body that seemed so frail under attack could nevertheless cover several miles or more to safety and to home.

A thirty-five-year-old financier named Adam Mayblum escaped with several coworkers from the eighty-seventh floor of the north tower, just a few floors below the airplane. In an account widely circulated on the Internet, he wrote about their descent down the staircases as things around them fell apart: “We could not see at all. I recommended that everyone place a hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them and call out if they hit an obstacle so others would know to avoid it. They did. It worked perfectly.” Later in his e-mail account, he added, “They failed in terrorizing us. We were calm. If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves. If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite. This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States. The very moment the first plane was hijacked, democracy won.” Maria Georgiana Lopez Zambrano, who was born in Colombia and went blind after emigrating to the United States, had a newsstand at 90 Church Street. Nearly sixty when the catastrophe began, she felt shaking and heard rumblings and distressed people, and while she was still confused about what had transpired, two women, strangers to each other and to her, each took one of her arms and walked her north to safety in Greenwich Village and then paused. One lived in New Jersey, the other in Connecticut, and they were torn beween desire to get home and reluctance to abandon Zambrano. “They say, ‘No, I don’t let you go by yourself. We still here together. We help you.’ ” Eventually a woman from Queens who recognized Zambrano joined them and took her to her door there by foot and by taxi, and the other women proceeded on to their families.