Tower Stories Read online

  10:53 A.M.:

  New York primary elections are canceled.

  10:54 A.M.:

  Israel evacuates its diplomatic centers.

  11:02 A.M.:

  New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani asks residents to stay home; orders evacuation of Manhattan south of Canal Street.

  11:15 A.M.:

  The Center for Disease Control prepares emergency response teams.

  A Long Afternoon

  12:05 P.M.:

  Los Angeles International and San Francisco International Airports are evacuated under the logic that they were destination airports of the four crashed planes.

  12:17 P.M.:

  The Immigration and Naturalization Service places U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada on the high alert status, but keeps these borders open.

  12:18 P.M.:

  Major League Baseball cancels all games scheduled for that night.

  1:05 P.M.:

  President Bush addresses the nation from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. He says that security measures have been put into place and that the United States military is on high alert across the globe. He vows to “hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

  1:43 P.M.:

  The Defense Department announces that battleships and aircraft carriers are being deployed around New York City; Washington, D.C.; and the East Coast.

  1:48 P.M.:

  President Bush leaves Barksdale Air Force Base and flies to a Nebraska military facility.

  2:30 P.M.:

  The FAA makes an announcement that all commercial U.S. air traffic has been canceled.

  2:51 P.M.:

  In New York City, Mayor Giuliani announces that subway and bus services have been partially restored. As far as the number of people killed in the attacks, Giuliani says, “I don’t think we can speculate … more than any of us can bear.”

  3:55 P.M.:

  Mayor Giuliani notes the number of critically injured in New York City as having risen to 200, with 2,100 total injuries reported.

  4:09 P.M.:

  Adjacent to the Twin Towers, 7 World Trade Center is reported on fire.

  4:25 P.M.:

  The New York Stock Exchange, AMEX, and NASDAQ announce that they will remain closed.

  4:30 P.M.:

  The president leaves Nebraska to return to Washington, D.C. Fires are still reported burning in the Pentagon.

  5:20 P.M.:

  7 World Trade Center collapses. The forty-seven-story building sustained heavy damages after Towers 1 and 2 fell. Nearby buildings are also on fire.

  5:30 P.M.:

  U.S. officials announce that the plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, may have been headed on a collision course for the White House, Camp David, or the United States Capitol Building.

  A Longer Evening …

  6:10 P.M.:

  Mayor Giuliani asks New York City residents to stay home on Wednesday, September 12.

  6:35 P.M.:

  At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld notes that the building is “operational” and hints at getting to work immediately on responding to the attack.

  7:17 P.M.:

  U.S. Attorney General Ashcroft announces that the FBI is looking for tips on the attacks.

  7:45 P.M.:

  Reports confirm that at least 78 police officers are missing; 400 firefighters killed.

  8:30 P.M.:

  President Bush addresses the nation, asking for prayers for the families and friends of the victims. He notes that the U.S. government will make no distinctions between those who commit acts of terrorism and those who harbor terrorists.

  9:22 P.M.:

  Reports from the nation’s capital state that the Pentagon fire is contained, though not under control.

  9:53 P.M.:

  Mayor Giuliani announces that no more rescue volunteers are needed, adding that he still has hope that people are alive in the rubble of the World Trade Towers.

  10:56 P.M.:

  New York City police echo the mayor’s earlier sentiment that people are alive in the rubble.

  TOM HADDAD

  Tom Haddad, thirty-one, was working in his office, Suite 8901 on the 89th floor of Tower 1, when American Airlines Flight 11 impacted two stories above his head.

  FIRST, I HEARD the engine. It was incredibly loud. I’d been in the office late at night during thunderstorms a couple of times. The lightning made the same kind of boom when it hit the river. Then I noticed how the glass in my window had started to vibrate like ripples in water.

  Honestly, the order of all this only occurred to me later on. For weeks after the plane hit, I replayed the first thirty to sixty seconds over and over again in my head, trying to make order of it. I couldn’t.

  Let me start at the beginning.

  I got to work early that day. My company does corporate communications; we do a lot of internal work for banks. JP Morgan had just merged with Chase, so we’d been given a project to educate bank employees on which services were available to them under the new conglomerate.

  The client wanted a quick turnaround so I was in the office until about nine at night on the evening of September 10. I got to the office at about 7:30 in the morning on the eleventh, still working on the campaign designs. There were only five people in the office at that point: myself; Lynn, the head copywriter; Sabrina, our receptionist; my friend Evan, who also worked in the art department; and Frances from client services.

  I had just completed my designs. Lynn and I were discussing them at my computer. My computer monitor sat in the window well of my office, which faced north. I had a great view from that window. If I craned my neck about a millimeter to the right, I used to see the Empire State Building off in the distance.

  I was seated at my desk and Lynn was passing the threshold to my office, heading out. I thought of another question to ask her, so I got up out of my chair to call her back and look at the designs one more time when we were hit. The impact threw me about three feet, and I hit the wall nearly horizontal. Lynn was thrown a good five feet out my door into the main design department. All the power went out like flipping off a light. The office was plunged into total darkness. Then it erupted into flames. And then the sprinkler system popped on.

  When I came to, everything was on fire except for a three-and-a-half-foot path to the door. I was lying in the middle of that path, and so was Lynn. Interestingly enough, Evan, Frances, and Sabrina had all fallen into that same straight line. Later on, after talking about it, we found out how lucky we were. Everything around us had burned.

  On a windy day, the Towers would actually sway. You could really feel it move on the higher floors. I could hear the creaking in my office, and sometimes the motion would make the ceiling tiles fall. They’d drop right down on top of you; it was fairly normal.

  When we were hit, all of the ceiling tiles dropped on us. And we’d just had construction done on the office to put up walls and so forth, including the wall to my office. One of these inter-office walls fell down.

  I stood up, totally stunned. Ahead of me, Lynn got up off the ground and yelled, “Thomas, what are you doing? Run!” She ran toward the front door.

  Our office carpeting was that gross kind of indoor-outdoor industrial stuff. If you scraped your feet on it, it would make this sort of vrooooooof! noise that went right through you. My foot slipped on a piece of ceiling tile and I looked down. Glass was everywhere. That’s when I turned and realized that my window had blown in. The columns in the wall had stayed, but nothing else. I was open to the sky eighty-nine stories in the air.

  I was stunned at how blue the sky was.

  I turned my back to the window, and that’s when I noticed the conference room wall had a very interesting pattern of fire running down it. Later I found out it was jet fuel leaking straight down from the ceiling.

  I remember how everything was strangely silent except for the constant, high-pitched whoop whoop whoop of the fire alarm. Working in the Tow
ers, we’d done fire drills all the time. It was a matter of routine and they’d always played announcements over the intercom system. Nothing now, though.

  It seemed like time was moving very, very slowly. I didn’t run, I didn’t hurry. I just strolled out of the office, absorbing my surroundings.

  I got to the front of our office’s design department and caught up with Evan. He was as stunned as I was. Together, we walked toward the front reception area. The back wall behind the receptionist’s desk was on fire. Sabrina was okay, though. She’d been standing in that same straight line that kept us all safe. But the front doors to the office had blown in. They were on fire, too. And across the hall from our office was a ladies room. The wall was gone and you could see toilets. We were walking on tiles and glass.

  Lynn ran through the front door and out into the hallway. We decided to follow her. We were only about six feet out when I looked to my right and realized I couldn’t see a thing because of all the black smoke. The entire east side of the building was obscured, and there was no air to breathe.

  Evan and Sabrina were with me, and Lynn was in front. But I thought, I don’t know where Frances is. So I decided to turn around and go back into the office. At this point, the fire was about six feet high and spreading everywhere. But there was a little spot on the door that wasn’t burning, so I put my foot on it and crashed through.

  I could hear Frances screaming from the copy room, so that’s where I went. I couldn’t open the door, though. The filing cabinets in the copy room had all fallen down on top of one another. Frances is tiny; she stands maybe four-eleven. Somehow she’d managed to wiggle in between all those cabinets, which were packed with eleven-by-seventeen reams of paper and lots of hanging files. She was pulling on the door handle, screaming to get out, but it was pointless. She wasn’t able to open the door because a filing cabinet had fallen against it. Normally she would have figured this out, but I think she must’ve panicked.

  The cabinets were heavy but I slammed against the door and threw them aside as if they weighed nothing. Pure adrenaline. Evan and Sabrina had followed me, and now they were there, too, raising the rest of the cabinets and debris to clear the door.

  When everyone had wriggled out, we bolted through the office again and turned the corner, heading toward the elevators. We could hear Lynn’s voice calling to us, “Follow me, follow me!”

  We started running.

  It’s funny, I found myself remembering stuff I’d been taught in elementary school fire drills. We’d have more air if we got low and crawled along the floor. So I yelled, “Everybody drop! Crawl to her! Crawl to Lynn!”

  We crawled right past Kosmo Services, the office next door, which shared a wall with mine. I swear to you, that office looked like nothing had happened even though it was directly under where the plane had flown in. Their power was still on, their phones still worked. Some of the ceiling tiles had fallen and the books were jumbled around a little from the shelves, but it looked as if nothing had happened. I didn’t understand it at all.

  We crawled into Kosmo and found five people in there including Walter, who owned the company. We tried to catch our breath while Lynn and Walter went out into the hall to see if they could find anybody. They found an elderly gentleman who was yelling, “Somebody please help me!” I don’t know his name. I saw him in the elevator every day I went to work but, like a lot of people who worked in the Towers, I never talked much to people I didn’t know. Not even a “hello” or “how you doing?” They were just the people in the elevator.

  They brought this man back to Kosmo Services. There was nothing wrong with him, he was just scared and in the dark out in the hall. Lynn and Walter reported that they’d discovered all the doors to the stairwells were locked. I don’t know why. I’ve heard that the doors locked automatically during an emergency—some sort of mechanical function. I’ve also heard that the doors were kept locked intentionally to keep people from smoking in the stairwells.

  Each office was apparently equipped with keys, but we didn’t know this at the time. I found out later that the keys to the stairwell were in Sabrina’s desk at the reception. Which wouldn’t have really helped because Sabrina’s desk was on fire.

  After Lynn and Walter came back, we closed the door to try to keep the air clean. It was maybe fifteen minutes since we’d left our office and I was still in a daze.

  Now this is interesting: in my office, there was a radiator by the window. Every morning, I used to step up on the radiator, into the window well, and put my head against the glass so I could look out and down. From that perspective, you could see everywhere, all of New York City spread out like a carpet. And in the Kosmo office, the first thing I did—by instinct, I guess—was step up onto the radiator, put my head against the glass, and look out.

  I wasn’t thinking or I might have considered that my own windows had just blown out. Occasionally, flaming pieces of the building would fall and hit the same piece of glass that I was pressing my face against.

  Then Walter said, “Hey, you know? I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  I said, “Okay,” and climbed down.

  People started making phone calls. I called my wife, Kim, who works for NBC at Rockefeller Center, but she was still at the gym. She goes there on mornings when I head into work early. I left a message on her voice mail and tried my best to sound even-keeled. I said, “Ah, the building’s exploded. Turn the TV on, we’re probably on the news.”

  Then somebody had a great idea and turned on the radio. Simultaneously, Lynn was on the phone talking to a friend who was watching TV. And that’s how we learned that a plane had struck the building. Lynn’s friend told us.

  WNEW radio station was, in my opinion, making light of the situation. They were watching replays of the impact on TV and giving a play-by-play in their broadcast as if it was a sporting event of some kind. Since everyone was freaking out and Frances and Sabrina were crying, I decided that I’d get up and change the station.

  That’s when the second plane hit. Our building shook, and I was nearly knocked off my feet again.

  We sat on the floor of Kosmo Services. I called my mom, but she wasn’t home. I called my wife’s machine again and left progressively nervous messages. I later learned there were actually four messages—the fourth message was a hang-up, and I believe it was time-stamped at 9:14 A.M. I hung up on that call because, at that very moment, a guy from Operations came by and opened our office door.

  He was dressed in regular office clothes, but he was wearing a hard hat and carried a flashlight. He said that he’d just opened the stairwell and he told us, “Wait a moment, then follow me.” But none of us waited. We saw that open stairwell and went for it.

  Apparently, there were two Operations guys who came up looking for people. That’s what someone told me later on, but I only saw the one. One went down the stairs from our floor and the other guy went up. I assume they were checking to see if they could open more stairwells.

  I found out later that the guy who headed downstairs lived. The guy who went upstairs didn’t. Later on, I saw a television show on The Learning Channel, and I think I recognized the guy who went up as the Head of Operations, a Port Authority guy.1

  We started down the stairs. There was nobody on them, it was eerie. There were only eleven of us—five from my office, five from Kosmo, and the elderly guy.

  Later on, we were told that everyone else on our floor had been killed.

  We reached the 82nd floor, and someone said that the stairwell was blocked. We’d have to cut across the building and find another pathway down. So we opened the door to the 82nd floor and started walking around, looking for another stairwell.

  Eighty-two was completely devastated. The smoke was so thick, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. And the burning smell … I’ll still occasionally catch a whiff of it for no apparent reason. Something tangy and pungent, similar to burning rubber. The floor was covered with piles of debris, collaps
ed plaster walls, and big chunks of metal that looked like beams.

  Somebody in our group got the idea to light our way through by turning their cell phone on and off. This little green light would come on in the black smoke and the phone’s owner would wave it through the air and around fallen objects so that we could see where they were and crawl through them.

  Fire surrounded us everywhere, but you still couldn’t see anything. You could only see the fire when you got right on top of it. It was extremely hot. The sprinklers had popped on here, too, so we were drenched. Fire emergency strobes would flash but we really couldn’t see them through the obscurity of debris.

  When we got to the next stairwell, we started down again, and now we began to see people. Occasionally, we’d pass somebody going down. We didn’t stop for them; we kept to the course and we kept to ourselves. We were tired and scared and very determined.

  When we got to the 78th floor Sky Lobby,2 we encountered a railing of sorts, a long hallway that allowed us to keep going without actually venturing out onto 78. And at the end of this hallway were two doors, standing side by side. Two guys were standing in front of them and they were yelling at each other.

  One door said “EXIT” on it with a sign pointing down, and one man was saying that they should follow that sign, the sign showed the way. But the other man yelled, “No. I’ve done this before. This other door goes to the bottom. If you take the stairs with the EXIT sign, you’ll have to cross the building again.”