Fighting to Live as the Towers Died his
article was reported and written by Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn,
James Glanz and Ford Fessenden.
(PAGE THREE) continued from pg. 2 or return to front The calm manner of the staff could not contain the strain. Laurie Kane, whose husband, Howard, was the restaurant's comptroller, said she could hear someone screaming, "We're trapped," as they finished their final conversation. Gabriela Waisman, a conference attendee, phoned her sister 10 times in 11 minutes, frantic to keep the connection. Veronique Bowers, the restaurant's credit collections manager, kept telling her grandmother, Carrie Tillman, that the building had been hit by an ambulance.
"She was so confused," Mrs. Tillman said. 9:01 Just two floors below Windows, the disaster marched at an eerily deliberate pace, the sense of emergency muted. The northwest conference room on the 104th floor held just one of many large knots of people in the five floors occupied by Cantor Fitzgerald. There, the smoke did not become overwhelming as quickly as at Windows. And the crash and fires were not as immediately devastating as they had been a few floors below, at Marsh & McLennan. In fact, Andrew Rosenblum, a Cantor stock trader, thought it would be a good idea to reassure the families. With his wife, Jill, listening on the phone from their home in Rockville Centre, N.Y., he announced to the room: "Give me your home numbers," his wife recounted. "Tim Betterly," Mr. Rosenblum said into his cellphone, reeling off a phone number. "James Ladley." Another number. As the list grew, Mr. Rosenblum realized that 40 or 50 colleagues were in the room, having fled the smoke. "Please call their spouses, tell them we're in this conference room and we're fine," he said to his wife. She remembers scribbling the names and numbers on a yellow legal pad in her kitchen, as the burning towers played on a 13-inch television in a cubbyhole near the backdoor. Mrs. Rosenblum handed pieces of paper with the numbers to friends who had shown up. They went either to the leafy, fenced-in backyard, where the dog wandered among them, or to the front lawn, calling the families on cellphones. Mr. Rosenblum's group, including Jimmy Smith, John Salamone and John Schwartz, sat on the eastern side of the bond trading area, in one of the open areas, according to John Sanacore, one of the group who was not at work that day. The spot offered expansive views of the Empire State Building. On the opposite end of the bond area, overlooking the Hudson River, other traders were gathered. John Gaudioso, who normally worked in that section but was on a golf outing that morning, recalled that Ian Schneider sat at the head of a string of desks where he led a global finance group. Michael Wittenstein, John Casazza and Michael DeRienzo were all in that area, and, like Mr. Schneider, were using land lines at their desks to take calls from concerned customers and loved ones, according to six people who spoke with them. "The building rocked like it never has before," said Mr. Schneider, who was there for the 1993 bombing, in a phone call with his wife, Cheryl. In the equities trading area in the southern part of the 104th floor, looking toward the Statue of Liberty, there was a third group. Here, Stephen Cherry and Marc Zeplin pushed a button at their desk to activate the squawk box, a nationwide intercom to other Cantor offices around the country. "Can anybody hear us?" Mr. Cherry asked. A trader in Chicago who was listening in later said that she managed to reach a firehouse near the trade center. "They know you're there," the trader told them. Mike Pelletier, a commodities broker in a Cantor office on the 105th floor, reached his wife, Sophie Pelletier, and was then in touch with a friend who told him that the airplane crash had been a terrorist attack. Mr. Pelletier swore and shouted the information to the people around him, Mrs. Pelletier said. In Rockville Centre, on the front lawn of the Rosenblums' house, Debbie Cohen dialed the numbers on the yellow pieces of paper she had been handed by Jill Rosenblum. "Hello? You don't know me, but I was given your number by someone who is in the World Trade Center," she said. "About 50 of them are in a corner conference room, and they say they're O.K. right now." 9:02 Those in the south tower were still spectators, if wary ones. "Hey Beverly, this is Sean, in case you get this message," Sean Rooney said on a voice mail message left for his wife, Beverly Eckert. "There has been an explosion in World Trade One — that's the other building. It looks like a plane struck it. It's on fire at about the 90th floor. And it's, it's — it's horrible. Bye." Even in Mr. Rooney's tower, people could feel the heat from the fires raging in the other building, and they could see bodies falling from the high floors. Many soon began to leave. The building's staff, however, announced that they should stay — judging that it was safer for the tenants to stay inside an undamaged building than to walk onto a street where fiery debris was falling. That instruction would change at the very moment that Mr. Rooney, who worked for the insurance company Aon, was leaving a second message for his wife, at 9:02 a.m. "Honey, this is Sean again," he said. "Looks like we'll be in this tower for a while." He paused, as a public announcement in the background could be heard. "It's secure here," Mr. Rooney continued. "But ——" He stopped again to listen: "if the conditions warrant on your floor you may wish to start an orderly evacuation." "I'll talk to you later," Mr. Rooney said. "Bye." As Mr. Rooney spoke, United Flight 175 was screaming across New York Harbor. 9:02 Yes, Stanley Praimnath told the caller from Chicago, he was fine. He had actually evacuated to the lobby of the south tower, but a security guard told him to go back. Now, he was again at his desk at Fuji Bank. "I'm fine," he repeated. As he would later tell his story, those were his final words before he spotted it. A gray shape on the horizon. An airplane, flying past the Statue of Liberty. The body of the United Airlines jet grew larger until he could see a red stripe on the fuselage. Then it banked and headed directly toward him. Another one. "Lord, you take over!" he remembers yelling, dropping under his metal desk. At 9:02:54, the nose of the jetliner smashed directly into Mr. Praimnath's floor, about 130 feet from his desk. A fireball ignited. Steel furnishings and aluminum plane parts were torn into white-hot shrapnel. A blast wave hurled computers and desks through windows, and ripped out bundles of arcing electrical cables. Then the south tower seemed to stoop, swinging gradually toward the Hudson River, ferociously testing the steel skeleton before snapping back.
Through most of both towers, the staircases were tightly clustered, and in the north tower, they were all immediately severed or blocked by the blast. Along the impact zone of the south tower, floors 78 to 84, however, the stairs had to divert around heavy elevator machinery. So instead of running close to the building core, two of the stairways serving those floors were built closer to the perimeter. One of them, on the northwest side, survived. A report in USA Today this month also suggested that the surviving stairway might have been shielded by the machinery. However the stairway survived, it made all the difference to Stanley Praimnath, who, huddled under his desk, could see a shiny aluminum piece of the plane, lodged in the remains of his door. The plane, entering at a tilt, raked across six floors. Three flights up was the office of Euro Brokers, on the 84th floor. Most of the company's trading floor there was annihilated. Yet even there — at the bull's-eye of the airplane's impact — other people were alive: Robert Coll, Dave Vera, Ronald DiFrancesco and Kevin York, among others. Within minutes, they headed to the closest stairwell, led by Brian Clark, a fire warden on the 84th floor, who had his flashlight and whistle. A fine powder mixed with light smoke floated through the stairwell. As they approached the 81st floor, Mr. Clark would recall, they met a slim man and a heavyset woman. "You can't go down," the woman screamed. "You got to go up. There is too much smoke and flame below." This assessment changed everything. Hundreds of people came to a similar conclusion, but the smoke and the debris in the stairwell proved less of an obstacle than the fear of it. This very stairwell was the sole route out of the building, running from the top to the bottom of the south tower. Anyone who found this stairwell early enough could have walked to freedom. This plain opportunity hardly read that way to the band of survivors who stood on the 81st floor landing, moments after the plane crash. They argued the alternatives, with Mr. Clark shining his flashlight into his colleagues' faces, asking each, "Up or down?" The debate was interrupted by shouts on the 81st floor. "Help me! Help me!" Mr. Praimnath yelled. "I'm trapped. Don't leave me here!" With no further discussion, the group in the stairs turned in different directions. As Mr. Clark recalls it, Mr. Coll, Mr. York and Mr. Vera headed up the stairs, along with the heavyset woman, the slim man and two others he knew from Euro Brokers but could not identify. Mr. York and Mr. Coll hooked arms to support the woman, Mr. Clark recalled. One of them said: "Come on, you can do it. We're in this together." Mr. Clark and Mr. DiFrancesco headed toward the man yelling for help. Mr. Praimnath saw the flashlight beam and crawled toward it, over toppled desks and across fallen ceiling tiles. Minutes earlier, this had been Fuji Bank's loan department, employee lounge and computer room. Finally, he reached a damaged wall that separated him from the man with the flashlight. From both sides, they ripped at the wall. A nail penetrated Mr. Praimnath's hand. He knocked it out against a hard surface in the darkness. Finally, the two men could see each other, but were still separated. "You must jump," Mr. Clark told Mr. Praimnath, whose hand and left leg were now bleeding. "There is no other choice." As Mr. Praimnath hopped up, Mr. Clark helped boost him over the obstacle. They ran to the stairwell and headed down. The steps were strewn with shattered wallboard. Flames licked in through cracks in the stairwell walls. Water from severed pipes poured down, forming a treacherous slurry. They moved past the spot with the heavy smoke that the woman had warned Mr. Clark against. Perhaps the draft had shifted; maybe the smoke had not been all that bad to begin with. In any case, the stairs were clear and would be clear as late as 30 minutes after the south tower was hit. Meanwhile, Mr. DiFrancesco took a detour in search of air, climbing about 10 floors, where he found the first group to go upstairs. They could not leave the stairwell; the doors would not open. Exhausted, in heavy smoke, people were lying down, Mr. DiFrancesco included. "Everyone else was starting to go to sleep," he said. Then, he recalled, he sat up, thinking, "I've got to see my wife and kids again." He ran down. 9:05 Mary Jos cannot say for sure how long she was lying there, unconscious, on the floor of the sky lobby, outside the express elevator. Her first recollection of stirring is when she felt searing heat on her back and face. Maybe, she remembers thinking, she was on fire. Instinctively, she rolled over to smother the flames. She saw a blaze in the center of the room, and in the elevator shafts. That was terrifying enough. Then, below the thick black smoke and through clouds of pulverized plaster, she gradually noticed something worse. The 78th floor sky lobby, which minutes before had been bustling with office workers unsure whether to leave the building or go back to work, was now filled with motionless bodies. The ceilings, the walls, the windows, the sky lobby information kiosk, even the marble that graced the elevator banks - everything was smashed as the second hijacked plane dipped its left wingtip into the 78th floor. In an instant, the witnesses say, they encountered a brilliant light, a blast of hot air and a shock wave that knocked over everything. Lying amid the deathly silence, burned and bleeding, Mary Jos had a single thought: her husband. "I am not going to die," she said, remembering her words. In the 16 minutes between attacks, those in the south tower scarcely had time to absorb the horrors they could see across the plaza and decide what to do. To map their choices about movements is to see the geography of life and death. Before the second plane hit, survivors said, the mood in the sky lobby was awkward: relief at the announcements that their building was safer than walking on the street, and fear that it really wasn't. In these critical moments, people milled about, trying to decide. Be at trading desks for the opening of the market, or grab a cup of coffee downstairs? At Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, nearly the entire investment banking department left and survived. Nearly all the equities traders stayed and died.
One of them, Stephen Mulderry, spoke to his brother Peter, and described the blaze in the north tower he could see from a window. Still, the word had come from the building management that his tower was "secure" - and his soundless phone was blinking for his attention. "He said, 'I got to go - the lights are ringing and the market is going to open,"' Peter Mulderry recalled. In the moments before the second impact, everyone in the 78th floor sky lobby was poised between going up or down. Kelly Reyher, who worked on the 100th floor at Aon Corporation, stepped into a local elevator headed up. He wanted to get his Palm Pilot, figuring it might be a while before he could return to his office. Judy Wein and Gigi Singer, also both of Aon, debated whether to go back and get their pocketbooks from their 103rd floor office. But Howard L. Kestenbaum, their colleague, told them to forget about it. He would give them carfare home. As some office workers spoke nervously of the loved ones they were rushing to rejoin, there was even a bit of humor. "I have a horse and two cats," Karen E. Hagerty, 34, joked, as she was squeezed out of an elevator spot. At the instant of impact, a busy lobby of people - witness estimates range from 50 to 200 - was struck silent, dark, all but lifeless. For a few, survival came from having leaned into an alcove. Death could come from having stepped back from a crowded elevator door. As Ms. Wein came to, she had her own battered body to deal with: her right arm was broken, three ribs were cracked and her right lung had been punctured. In other words, she was lucky. All around her were people with horrific injuries, dead or close to it. Ms. Wein yelled out for her boss, Mr. Kestenbaum. When she found him, she said, he was expressionless, motionless, silent. Ms. Hagerty, who had joked about the cats at home, showed no signs of life when a colleague, Ed Nicholls, saw her. And Richard Gabrielle, another Aon colleague, was pinned to the ground, his legs apparently broken by marble that had fallen on them. Ms. Wein tried to move the stone. Mr. Gabrielle cried out from pain, she said, and told her to stop. Gradually, those who could move, did. Ms. Wein found Vijayashanker Paramsothy and Ms. Singer, neither of whom had life-threatening injuries. Kelly Reyher, who had been on his way to get his Palm Pilot, managed to pry open the elevator doors with his arms and his briefcase. He crawled out of the burning car and found Donna Spira 50 feet away. Her arm fractured, her hair burned, Mrs. Spira could still walk. A mysterious man appeared at one point, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher. As Judy Wein recalls, he pointed to the stairs and made an announcement that saved lives: Anyone who can walk, get up and walk now. Anyone who can perhaps help others, find someone who needs help and then head down. In groups of two and three, the survivors struggled to the stairs. A few flights down, they propped up debris blocking their way, leaving a small passageway to slip through. A few minutes behind this group was Ling Young, who also survived the impact in the sky lobby. She, too, said she had been steered by the man in the red bandanna, hearing him call out: "This way to the stairs." He trailed her down the stairs. Ms. Young said she soon noticed that he was carrying a woman on his back. Once they reached clearer air, he put her down and went back up. Others never left. The people who escaped said Mr. Paramsothy, who had only been scraped, remained behind. Ms. Young said that Sankara Velamuri and Diane Urban, colleagues of Mrs. Jos from the State Department of Taxation and Finance, tried to help two more seriously injured friends, Dianne Gladstone and Yeshavant Tembe, both also state employees. All five of these people would die. Of the dozens of people waiting in the sky lobby when the second plane struck, 12 are known to have made it out alive. 9:35 So urgent was the need for air that people piled four and five high in window after window, their upper bodies hanging out, 1,300 feet above the ground. They were in an unforgiving place. Elsewhere, two men, one of them shirtless, stood on the windowsills, leaning their bodies so far outside that they could peer around a big intervening column and see each other, an analysis of photographs and videos reveals. On the 103rd floor, a man stared straight out a broken window toward the northwest, bracing himself against a window frame with one hand. He wrapped his other arm around a woman, seemingly to keep her from tumbling to the ground. Behind the unbroken windows, the desperate had assembled. "About five floors from the top you have about 50 people with their faces pressed against the window trying to breathe," a police officer in a helicopter reported. |
