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.”
Firefighter Dean Beltrami saw “the entire facade starting to buckle … Nobody said anything. We just turned and ran.” EMT Jody Bell saw the tower “looking like it was going to tip, and there was a piece of the building coming down right on top of me … The building was hitting other buildings … This time it was worse … We were just running … I was damn near ready to jump in the river … The debris went well into the Hudson. It almost went to Jersey.”
“I opened up my eyes,” said EMS chief James Basile, “dust and dirt, debris … total darkness, I guess for about two, three minutes. I thought, ‘I guess this is what it’s like to be dead.’ Then I heard a woman screaming.”
“This beautiful sunny day now turned completely black,” said Chief Pfeifer, who survived the fall of the tower. “We were unable to see a hand in front of our faces. And there was an eerie silence.”
The 110-story North Tower had become a pile of flaming, noxious rubble—like its twin before it, in about twenty seconds.
THE SILENCE WAS BROKEN by the high-pitched tones of locator alarms, the devices that are triggered when a firefighter goes down and does not move. Three hundred forty-three men of the New York Fire Department would never move again.
The number of firefighters killed on 9/11 was almost a third of the total killed since the department’s inception in 1865.
Chief Ganci had been killed near the North Tower, and his body was one of the first to be found. Chief Pfeifer’s brother Kevin would be found dead in the rubble, his fireman’s pick at his side. Firefighting runs in families in New York, and fathers and sons, brothers and in-laws, would search for fallen comrades and kin for months to come.
Thirty-seven Port Authority police officers, including their superintendent, Fred Morrone, had died. Five of their bodies were found grouped around that of a woman in a steel chair, a device used to carry the disabled. They had died, it seemed, trying to carry her to safety.
The New York Police Department lost twenty-two men—and one female officer. She had brought an injured person out of the South Tower, only to be killed when she went back in to help another.
“THE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES,” New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, “will be more than any of us can bear.” Government officials would at first suggest, in a serious overestimate, that as many as seven thousand people had been killed in the city. The death toll was nevertheless stunningly high.
The number of fatalities in New York was eventually to stand at 2,763. That figure included the people in or near the Twin Towers, the passengers, crew, and hijackers aboard the two flights that crashed into the complex, and firefighters, police, paramedics, and other emergency workers. The highest number of casualties was in the North Tower—1,466, the majority of them above the point of impact—followed by 624 in the South Tower, all but 6 of them abo
ve the point of impact. One hundred and fifty-seven people died aboard the two planes.
Rarely mentioned, if at all, is the fact that this was not exclusively an American catastrophe. Five hundred and eleven nationals, perhaps more, from more than two dozen other countries, died in New York. They included dozens of Hispanic immigrants, delivery men, cooks, and dishwashers, with no work permits. They are almost all nameless now, remembered on no memorial.
THE TRADE CENTER COMPLEX rapidly became known as Ground Zero, for good reason. Assault by airplane had transformed it in an hour and forty-two minutes from iconic landmark to sixteen-acre wilderness. “All that remained standing,” wrote Atlantic Monthly correspondent William Langewiesche, “were a few skeletal fragments … vaguely gothic structures that reached like supplicating hands toward the sky. After the dust storms settled, people on the streets of Lower Manhattan were calm. They walked instead of running, talked without shouting, and tried to regain their sense of place and time. Hiroshima is said to have been similar in that detail.”
The towers had thrown mighty shards of steel and rubble to the ground and—such was the force involved—beneath it to a depth of thirty feet. Vehicles on the surface were flattened, power and telephone systems crippled, subways and watercourses severely damaged. Even before the collapse, plummeting rubble devastated nearby buildings.
The lesser giants of the complex had been known by numbers. Trade Center 3—the Marriott Hotel—was now wreckage. Great chunks of debris had fallen on Trade Center 7, which collapsed into its own footprint in the late afternoon. Trade Center Buildings 4, 5, and 6 suffered serious damage and were later demolished. Eight more structures, including World Financial Center 2 and 3—American Express—the Winter Garden pavilion, Bankers Trust, a City University of New York building, and Verizon Communications, were damaged but not beyond repair. Tiny St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, in the shadow of the South Tower, had been flattened.
The attackers had succeeded in stopping the engine room of America’s economy, if only briefly. Damage to Verizon Communications, gored by Building 7’s fall, crippled the electronics that connect the financial markets to the New York Stock Exchange. Exchange chairman Dick Grasso delayed opening the market, then closed it as the strikes escalated. It would not open again until the start of the following week.
Unlike the New York Stock Exchange, located at a relatively safe distance from the Trade Center, its cousin the American Stock Exchange was jolted by the second strike. The towers’ collapse left its offices filled with debris and remaining staff—the chairman and the president included—trapped for hours, covered in soot and dust. Seeing the exchange afterward, a leader of commerce would recall loftily, was like “visiting a third world country.”
Its communications cut, NASDAQ’s corporate offices closed. The New York branch of the Federal Reserve Bank was evacuated, not without a moment of comedy. The building had never before been left unmanned, and no one present knew how to lock up.
Many key financial figures were far from the decision making on the morning of 9/11. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was in the air halfway across the Atlantic, returning with colleagues from a meeting in Switzerland, when U.S. airspace closed down. His airplane, like others in mid-flight, had to turn back. Frantic calls to the White House eventually got Greenspan back to Washington courtesy of the military, part of the way aboard a U.S. Air Force tanker.
The minders of the American economy wrestled for days with problems ranging from sustaining liquidity to averting the nightmare scenario—potential public panic if the cash at ATM machines ran out, which in turn might spark a run on the banks. New York City, meanwhile, faced the daunting costs that had been inflicted in less than two hours. Reporting a year later, New York’s comptroller would calculate the economic cost to the city at between $83 and $95 billion.
ON 9/11, after the second collapse, there was at first a long, empty moment, a vacuum in time. Then the start of an epic, heartrending, recovery operation.
NINE
“AMBULANCES GOING THIS WAY, ESU TRUCKS FLYING DOWN THE street … Nobody had any idea what was going on. Where is the command post? Where is staging? We had no radio … You looked where you thought the buildings should be, and if they were there, you couldn’t see them … disorientation … I had already seen my third skyline in forty minutes.”
Fire Department lieutenant Michael Cahill, on the period after the second Trade Center collapse. A time of “absolute panic … absolute panic … Most of us were just too tired … out of it … disorganized … Stuff in our eyes, cuts, bruises, equipment lost. Half the people we came with were lost.”
Off-duty firefighters, former firefighters, men who worked in construction or salvage, all rushed to Ground Zero to help. One of them, crane operator turned fireman Sam Melisi, was one of the first would-be rescuers to pioneer routes through, over, and under the rubble. He had all the expertise and experience one could wish for, but was forced time and again to retreat.
It dawned on Melisi that the “tremendous devastation” of the Oklahoma City bombing, which he had worked six years earlier, had been nothing compared to this. “Visualize fiftyfold or a hundredfold, no matter where you turned … You can never quite prepare for something like this … on this magnitude. We started searching … We were hoping to find many live victims. But as time went on we realized there weren’t going to be that many.”
There were only a few. Twenty people were rescued after the collapses, all but one emerging in the first twenty-four hours. Two civilians, trapped at first in what had been a shopping mall beneath the plaza, managed to squeeze out through an opening. Next out were twelve firefighters, a civilian, and a Port Authority policeman—thanks to “the Miracle of Stairway B.”
When the North Tower collapsed, Captain Jay Jonas and his crew had been four stories up the stairway, trying to help a woman who could walk no further. Swept away on an avalanche of rubble and steel, Jonas had thought, “This is how it ends.” They ricocheted down to certain death, only to find themselves alive—the civilian included—still on or near the stairway.
The difference now was that they were in pitch darkness, at something like ground floor level, in what was rapidly to become known as “the pile.” Jonas began hearing radio transmissions from firemen buried elsewhere: “Just tell my wife and kids that I love them.” “Mayday. Mayday … I’m trapped and I’m hurt bad.” The messages gradually petered out, for the men were dying.
Jonas kept sending his own Maydays. “It was a waiting game,” he remembered. “We were trapped in there for over three hours … I heard one fireman on the radio saying, ‘Where’s the North Tower?’ and I’m thinking to myself, ‘We’re in trouble if they don’t even know where the North Tower is.’ ” Deep in the rubble, Jonas had no way of knowing the reality evident to everyone outside, that the tower had simply vanished.
He realized the truth only as the dust began to clear, when a beam of sunlight penetrated the darkness. It was coming through a hole that was to prove the group’s salvation. “I survived,” Jonas thought as he emerged. “All my men survived. And we have this small victory that is within us, that we brought somebody else out with us … We had a nice void. We had a nice little pocket. There’s got to be hundreds of them. There’s got to be a lot of people getting out of here.”
In fact only three others were to be rescued. Port Authority engineer Pasquale Buzzelli had plunged down, also on a stairway, from the 22nd floor. The fall reminded him for a moment of an amusement park ride. Then he was hit on the head, saw stars, and fell unconscious. Buzzelli came to three hours later, covered in dust and reclining on a cement slab fifteen feet above the ground, there to be rescued by firemen. His only physical damage, a crushed right foot.
Two Port Authority police officers, Jimmy McLoughlin and William Jimeno, were found not by professional rescue workers but by two former U.S. Marines. Determined to be in the front line, they donned military fatigues, talked their wa
y into Ground Zero, and clambered around hollering: “United States Marines! If you can hear us, yell or tap.” After an hour of shouting, a muffled cry came back. The pair summoned help, and rescuers had Jimeno on the surface by midnight. McLoughlin, who was seriously injured, was extracted early the following morning.
There would eventually be an army of rescuers from all over the country, professionals with technical skills, volunteers with a contribution to make—and some who were no help at all. Every city has its cranks, but none outdid the fellow who jumped overboard, early in the aftermath, from a ferry evacuating people to New Jersey. The man then began swimming—back in the direction of the Trade Center. “I thought,” he said as he was hauled out, “I could swim over to New York to help people.” Not everyone on board wanted him rescued. “Shoot him!” someone shouted. “He may be a terrorist!”
HOSPITALS IN MANHATTAN and beyond, expecting an “onslaught of patients,” had rushed to activate their disaster plans. Off-duty personnel, including a busload of surgeons attending a medical conference, dropped what they were doing and offered their services to the Fire Department. The expected flood of injured, however, never materialized. With most of those brought to hospitals released by midnight, the surgeons wound up loading water supplies.
On September 11 and for long afterward they found not survivors, not the injured, only the dead. Cadavers sometimes, but more often mere scraps of humanity. Those who found them saw things they will never forget.
“A person’s torso, just no legs, no head, no arms, nothing, just chest and stomach area … Then like fifteen feet away I found a head to go with the torso … we tagged it.”