102 Minutes

Between 8:55 and 9:00 a.m., confusion reigns. Callers to Port Authority police in charge of tower security receive different answers depending on which officer answers the phone. The officers in the lower south tower could not see the gaping hole in the north tower, nor people jumping from the upper floors, as workers on the upper floors of south tower could. Officer Greg Brady tells employees the situation is in Building 1 and to stay put. Meanwhile, Steve Maggett tells workers to evacuate. An official evacuation order was not made until 9:00 a.m. by Captain Anthony Whitaker. Before this, the entire emergency operation was being run from the ground of the north tower. This was a major decision, considering when the same decision was made in 1993, one firm in the center complained about a $5 billion bond trade that never made the books, the implication being that a forced evacuation had the potential to affect global commerce.

Such a decision evacuates all five Trade Center buildings, which include offices of the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA—a potential national disruption. In Chapter 5, Dwyer and Flynn continue to progress the narrative of uncertainty and different decisions made by different companies, such as Morgan Stanley, which tells its employees to evacuate.

Most essential in Chapter 5 is the thesis of high-rise firefighting: that the building is designed in such a manner to be able to put out and contain the fire on its own. This idea is put forth by trade center developers, architects, and engineersand was:

a founding principle of the modern skyscraper […] The lives of the people inside rely on that principle. The continued existence of the structure depends on it. Flames must not move from floor to floor, but be stopped by the fireproofing; the steel structure of the building must be protected from the distorting effects of fire for at least two hours; the floors, for three hours(54).

The authors state, however, that:

no one had experience in fireproofing those webbed tresses known as ‘bar joists.’ Yet these were issues of prime concern during design and construction. In 1966, Emery Roth & Sons, the New York architecture firm that was the local representative for Minoru Yamasaki, the lead architect, stated the fire rating of the floor system could not be determined without testing (55).

Afederal investigation, conducted in the years after the collapse, found these tests were never done. Instead, fireproofing was added during renovations. Yamasaki never stated the building was fireproof, though precautions that included no natural gas lines were put into place. By 1999, the Port Authority chief engineer ordered fireproofing density be made three times thicker, at a cost to the Port Authority of $1M per floor.

Identifying actions taken by employees at different companies, Chapter 5 continues to expose the lack of precise information present in the moments immediately following Flight 11’s impact. Thanks to many drills, the entire workforce from the Fuji/Mizuho firm on the 80/81st floors evacuates the office immediately, taking express elevators to the lobby. However, once in the lobby, a Port Authority guard tells them the problem is in Tower One and so Fuji/Mizuho employees return to work. Official fire department manuals tell employees total evacuation can cause panic in the lobby. The Fuji employees return to work so quickly they miss the stream of hundreds evacuating from above. On the 55th floor, a logjam forms; while using the restroom, Stephen Miller hears an announcement on the PA system saying not to evacuate. Express elevators at the 78th and 44th floors become overburdened. Meanwhile, on the 90th floor, Alayne Gentul, whose father built the express elevators, was among the forces driving people out of their offices at Fiduciary Trust. Ed Emery, also with Fiduciary, tells Anne Foodim, who has just finished chemotherapy, “if you can finish chemo, then you can get down those steps” (64). Colleagues pass cell phones around for one another to make calls. At the Aon offices on the 98th floor, Tamitha Freeman decides to go back upstairs to retrieve her pursebecause pictures of her baby are inside. 

Chapter 6 chronicles the atmosphere and actions of those on the 88th floor, an entire floor of Port Authority employees. Frank De Martini, Mark Hanna, Pablo Ortiz, and Frank Varriano grab a crowbar, hardhats, and flashlights and guide fellow employees to an accessible stairway then continue helping others escape from higher floors at the borderline of the impact, where more than 1,000 people remain trapped. On the 89th floor,where Dianne DeFontes is lifting herself back onto her feet following being knocked over by the force of the plane’s impact, the Port Authority group breaks through the jammed doors. There, they help folks like Raffaele Cava, an elderly man who always wears a hat and “passed lengths of his life in Egypt as the son of Jewish Italian civil servant, in Milan as a printer, and now in a tiny office on the 89th floor […] working for his nephew’s shipping company” (68).

The authors state that:

[i]t was hardly the job of Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz and the others from 88 to go around prying doors […] Only when people like De Martini and his crew took it upon themselves to attack those barriers—broken rubble, stuck doors, disorientation—could people go free. Above the 91st floor, the stairways were plugged solid, the collapsed drywall forming an impermeable membrane, a border line that could not be crossed, even for people on the 92nd and 93rd (76).

In the MetLife offices on Floor 89, the floors seem to melt and buckle, and employees break a window in an adjoining room, hoping to increase oxygen flow while also hoping the wind gusts are not too strong that they increase the fire.

The chapter also explores tensions that week inside the Port Authority office, as employees’ futures remain uncertain due to the lease of the entire trade center to private developer Larry Silverstein. Those tensions transform into moments of heroism as fellow employees work to save the most vulnerable, such as Elaine Duch, who was “dazed, charred, her clothes nearly burnt off her. She had been getting off the elevator when the fireball of fuel blew through the shaft” (71). Gaping holes replace elevator shafts. From the 90th floor, Clearstream Banking employee Anne Prosser calls her mother in Nashville to say, “We can’t get out. We’re all right. We’re going to get out. I’ll call you” (75).