The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [23]
Rumor took hold. “CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall near the Capitol,” read a note passed to Clarke. There was no fire on the Mall. Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary representing the Department of State on the videoconference, had a blunt response when asked about the “car bomb.” “Does it fucking look,” he asked, looming large on the monitor, “as if I’ve been bombed?”
TO THE NORTH, in New York City, humor survived in the midst of suffering. A firefighter in the North Tower—on the way up—noticed a fellow coming down toting an odd piece of salvage, a golf club. “Hey!” exclaimed the fireman, “I saw your ball a few flights down.” There were bizarre sights, too. Officers moving from floor to floor found a few people still hard at work at their computers—blind to the peril.
As in Washington, rumors flew. “There’s another plane in the air,” a senior fireman hollered into his radio. “Everybody stay put … We don’t know what’s going on.” A police sergeant told a firefighter, “They hit the White House. And we have another inbound coming at us now.” “Yeah,” a radio dispatcher confirmed, “another one inbound. Watch your back.”
There was no third hijacked airplane heading to New York. Some in the North Tower, meanwhile, were still unaware that even one airplane had hit the building. “What happened?” enquired Keith Meerholz, who had escaped with minor burns. “A plane hit each tower,” a fireman confided, “but don’t tell anyone.” He did not want evacuation to become panic.
For those still alive on the higher floors of the tower, the grim ordeal continued. They were stranded, unable to go down—because of blocked stairways and jammed elevators—or up, with the faint prospect of rescue by helicopter, because of the locked doors.
Down on the 27th floor, from which most workers would escape, a man in a wheelchair named Ed Beyea waited patiently with Abe Zemanowitz, a colleague who had stayed protectively at his side. So far below the point of impact, with emergency services on the scene, real danger perhaps seemed remote. Yet neither man would survive.
Outside, paramedic Carlos Lillo was crying as he worked. His wife, Cecilia, worked on the tower’s 64th floor, and he was frantically worried about her. Cecilia would get safely down and out of the building. Carlos, who lost touch with his comrades, died.
The dying had begun in a horrific way for the firefighters. “The Chief said, ‘You’re going into the lobby command post,’ ” Paul Conlon remembered. “He pointed to the entrance of Two World Trade Center [the South Tower] … It was probably two hundred yards … There were people jumping … Dan Suhr said something like, ‘Let’s make this quick …’ We got about halfway there, and Dan gets hit by a jumper.”
Daniel Suhr, aged thirty-seven, had been with an engine company from Brooklyn. “It was as if he exploded. It wasn’t like you heard something falling and you could jump out of the way … We go to pick him up. He’s a big guy … Someone picked up his helmet … One of the guys says, ‘He still has a pulse.’ … I called the Mayday … The guys were doing CPR. The ambulance came up pretty quickly.”
Suhr, dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Hospital, was the first firefighter to die, first on a list that, it would soon become clear, was to be numbingly long.
Communications, crucial to any firefighting operation, failed dismally that day. “We didn’t have a lot of information coming in,” Chief Joe Pfeifer recalled of the Command Center in the North Tower lobby. According to the Fire Department’s own investigation, the portable radios in use on 9/11 did not “work reliably in high-rise buildings without having their signals amplified or rebroadcast by a repeater system.”
“We didn’t receive any reports of what was seen from the helicopters,” Pfeifer said. “It was impossible to know what was done