Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

When the building began to fall, EMT Jody Bell had been strapping a hysterical patient into a stair chair. “Everybody’s like, ‘Run for your lives!’ ” he remembered. “She’s hyperventilating … It’s like, a tidal wave of soot and ash coming in my direction. My life flashed before my eyes … I started to run—took about ten steps, and the lady started screaming, ‘Don’t leave me!’ … I got ahold of myself. ‘Wait, what the hell am I doing?’ I turned back, got her out of the chair. I said, ‘Ma’am, can you run?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ She took off. I’ve never moved so fast … The dust was like snowfall. The cars are covered … I’m breathing in mouthfuls … The scene was totally blacked out.”

Firefighter Timothy Brown had just left the South Tower, where he had seen people—only their legs and feet visible through the door of a stranded elevator—being “smoked and cooked.” On his way to fetch medics when the tower fell, he had ducked into the lobby of the Marriott, the eight-hundred-room hotel adjoining the Trade Center.

“Everything started blowing towards us that wasn’t nailed down … I’m guessing that the wind at its height was around 70, 75 miles an hour … You couldn’t see anybody … You couldn’t hear anything. It was becoming our grave … I thought it lasted four minutes … You could hear an eerie silence at first, and then you could start to hear people starting to move around a little bit, people that were still alive.”

Sixteen of some twenty firefighters who had been on a stairwell in the hotel were not alive. The collapsing tower had sliced the Marriott in two.

Spared thanks to their final dash, Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath had sheltered outside a church. They “stared in awe, not realizing what was happening completely … You at least thought people had a chance—until that moment. Then this great tsunami of dust came over … I suppose it was a quarter of an inch of dust and ash, everywhere.”

To Usborne, the British reporter, the dust was a “huge tidal wave, barrelling down the canyons of the financial district … The police went berserk, we went berserk, just running, running for our lives … we were in a scene from a Schwarzenegger film … thousands of Hollywood extras, mostly in suits for the office, with handbags and briefcases, just tearing through the streets of the city. Every few seconds we would snatch a look behind us.”

Columnist Hamill remembered dust blossoming perhaps twenty-five stories high, leaving the street a pale gray wilderness peopled by “all the walking human beings, the police and the civilians, white people and black, men and women … an assembly of ghosts.… Sheets of paper scattered everywhere, orders for stocks, waybills, purchase orders, the pulverized confetti of capitalism.”

INSIDE THE NORTH TOWER, few were even aware of the collapse. “We felt it,” one said. “Our tower went six feet to the right, six feet to the left … it felt like an earthquake.” “You just heard this noise that sounded like the subway train going by,” said another, “multiplied by a thousand.”

“It didn’t register,” recalled James Canham, a firefighter who was on the 11th floor. “There was the sound of the wind blowing through the elevator shafts … air pressure coming in … the entire floor enveloped in dust, smoke … Then I had gone right into the stairwell. There had to be twenty people piled up—I mean actually in a pile … I told them to grab the railing … to grab the belt loop of the person in front of them … If it was a woman … the bra strap. I told them, ‘Hold the bra, with the other hand hold the railing, and make your way down.’ Panicking and crying as they were, they were listening … on their way … coughing … disoriented.”

On hearing by radio of the South Tower’s collapse, police officer David Norman—on the 31st floor—could not comprehend what the operator told him. “To think that a building of one hundred and some stories had fallen was like, you know, not believable … He then explained that there was no South Tower, that it was absolutely gone.”

A great burst of energy, generated by the fall of the South Tower, had translated into a blast of air and dust shooting into the North lobby and on up into the building. For a while it was pitch black. Debris rained down, fatally for some—including the Fire Department chaplain, Mychal Judge. He died in the lobby, hit on the head by flying debris, as he returned from giving last rites to the dead and dying outside.

Fire chief Pfeifer, still running operations in the lobby, knew nothing at first of the collapse on the other side of the plaza. Thinking that something catastrophic was going on above him, though, he decided to pull his men out. Police commanders made the same decision, and an evacuation began.

The order did not reach battalion chief Richard Picciotto, on the 35th floor, but he took the decision on his own initiative. “All FDNY, get the fuck out!” he hollered on his bullhorn. And, over the radio, “We’re evacuating, we’re getting out, drop your tools, drop your masks, drop everything, get out, get out!”

Outside, meanwhile, Fire Department chief Ganci had sent his command group off in one direction while—with just one colleague—he headed back toward the North Tower. He went back, an aide explained simply, because he “knew that he had men in that building.” Some of those men, on the 54th floor, defied the order to evacuate. Intent on continuing to help civilians, they radioed, “We’re not fucking coming out.”

On the higher floors, civilians and firemen alike now had no chance of survival. For those really high up, it had long been so. Tom McGinnis, a trader with Carr Futures on the 92nd floor, had been trapped behind jammed doors since Flight 11 hit. He and colleagues had long been ankle-deep in water from either burst pipes or the sprinkler system. Now they were forced to the windows to get air. The phones were still working, and McGinnis told his wife he was going to crouch down on the floor. Then the connection was broken.

“WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW,” Chief Pfeifer said later, “was that we were running out of time.” In the dark and confusion of the lobby, he and other chiefs were for all intents and purposes operating blind. Firefighter Derek Brogan recalled the chaos that greeted him when he got there from above. “There was gas leaking all over the place. The marble was falling on top of us … You couldn’t see anything.”

Brogan stepped outside, to realize it was suddenly “raining” bodies. Fireman Robert Byrne found himself dodging jumpers and falling debris, weaving between corpses “littering the courtyard.” “Everything was on fire … I took a peek up … aluminum was coming down … going through thick plate glass like a hot knife through butter.”

Pilots in the helicopters, circling above, could see what was coming. As early as five minutes after the South Tower’s collapse, a Police Department pilot reported thinking that the North Tower’s top floors might collapse. Nine minutes on, another pilot said he thought the tower might not last long. Twenty minutes on, the pilot who had made the first report radioed that the tower was now “buckling and leaning.”

In the absence of an effective liaison arrangement between the Police and Fire Departments, this crucial information was not passed on to the firefighters.

AT 10:28, not quite half an hour after the South Tower’s slide to ruin, time did run out.

Fireman Carletti, now watching from the safety of a fire truck, saw the antenna atop the North Tower “do a little rock back and forth, and I could just hear the floors pancaking. I heard it for about thirty pancakes … boom, boom, boom, boom.” As when the first tower had fallen, others spoke of “explosions,” “pop, pop, pop” noises, a “thunderous, rumble sound.”