The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [30]
High in the tower itself, Aon’s Kevin Cosgrove finally lost patience with the 911 operator. “Name’s Cosgrove,” he said. “I must have told you a dozen times already. C.O.S.G.R.O.V.E. My wife thinks I’m all right. I called and said I was leaving the building and that I was fine … There are three of us in here … Three of us … Two broken windows. Oh, God … OH …!” Against a background of huge noise, Cosgrove screamed. Then the line went dead.
Beverly Rooney, still on the phone to her husband, heard sounds she, too, recalled as sounding like an explosion, followed by a crack, followed by a roaring sound. “The floor fell out from under him,” she thought. “It sounded like Niagara Falls. I knew without seeing that he was gone.”
Rooney and Cosgrove and so many others were gone. Then, and in little more than the time it takes to read these words, the South Tower itself was gone.
“The entire structure just sank down on to itself with a colossal whoosh,” reported the British journalist David Usborne, who had watched from the park in front of City Hall. “For a second, the smoke and dust cleared enough to reveal a stump of the core of the building … But the clouds closed in again and nothing more could be seen. All of us simply stood and gaped, hands to our faces.”
• • •
IN THE STUDIO AT ABC, Peter Jennings had been juggling the cascade of brutal news, his eye on one live monitor, then another. “It may be,” he said, puzzled by the vast new plume of smoke that had appeared where the South Tower had been, “that something fell off the building.” Jennings asked a colleague closer to the scene what had happened.
“The second building that was hit by the plane,” Don Dahler told him, “has just completely collapsed. The entire building has just collapsed … It folded down on itself, and it’s not there anymore.” The famously unflappable Jennings allowed himself an on-air “My God! My God!” Then, as if in the hope that he had misheard, “The whole side has collapsed?”
Dahler said it again. “The whole building has collapsed … There is panic on the streets. Thousands of people running … trying to get away.”
It was 9:59 A.M. One of the tallest buildings in the world had collapsed in no more than twenty seconds. “From a structure,” in the words of a witness, “to a wafer.”
IN THE WAKE of the roar there was darkness—an all-enveloping, suffocating, blinding dust cloud—and cloaked in the cloud a mass of humanity, rushing pell-mell for refuge.
Fire chief Ganci and his senior aides, and Zarrillo, the EMT who had brought word of a possible collapse, rushed into the garages of adjacent buildings. “I took ten or fifteen rolling steps into the garage,” Zarrillo recalled, “and hugged into a corner, an indentation, and I felt two or three guys get in behind me … The dust, the cloud, came rolling in.”
Chief Peruggia, still outside Building 7, became aware of the cloud as he answered a woman reporter’s question. “I grabbed the female, threw her through the revolving doors of Number 7 … Everything came crashing through the front … Next thing I remember I was covered in glass and some debris … I had shards of glass impaled in my head … I was able to get all this debris and rubble off me and cover my face with my coat so that I could breathe. It was very thick dust. You couldn’t see.”
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.