The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [32]
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,