102 Minutes

In addition to detailing the grim evacuation situation in the south and north tower stairwells—as well as some of the severe injuries and heroic actions to help the injured escape—Chapter 8 explores the changes in the 1968 city building code that lightened safety restrictions in place from a 1938 code.

Changes that allowed for two percent more rentable space on each floor amounted to $1.8M more money per year. These changes included reducing the number of hours columns in high-rises must be able to withstand fire from four to three hours, and reducing the number of hours the floors themselves must be able to withstand fire from three to two hours. The change to the building codealso reduced the number of stairwells and the distance between them, the latter of which had been a purposefully-large distance in case an emergency shutdown one stairwell.

Further, requirements that certain bricks and masonry provide fire resistance for a building’s structural steel were nixed, with the decision left up to building owners. The real estate industry had long claimed the outdated code did not account for technological advances, with new materials equating to a sturdier building. The authors quote architect Frederick G. Frost, who guided a 1962 study by the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to overhaul the old code, which The New York Building Congress had long lobbied for: “Overdesigning is the equivalent of cracking a walnut with a ten-pound weight rather than a nutcracker” (94).

Also important to Chapter 8 is the brief history behind the conception of a world trade center by the Rockefeller brothers, one a vice chairman at Chase Manhattan, the other New York’s governor. The vice chairman envisioned a world trade center that could revitalize New York’s flagging downtown. Original conceptions produced 5 million square feet of office space near the Brooklyn Bridge, while later plans saw the center closer to the Hudson River. The final plan doubled in size, “an entire city’s worth of office space” (92). 

The chapter opens with the account of Richard Fern, who worked in Euro Brokers’ computer room, pushing a button inside the elevator on the 84th floor at the moment of impact in the south tower: “Afraid that the doors would shut, he plunged out of the car, then scrambled to the door into the nearest stairway, a dark smoky void […] If there were lucky breaks to be had, Rich Fern caught every one” (89). The authors contrast Fern’s luck with the misfortune experienced by others in the stairwells as walls crumble, blocking passageways. One unnamed person who stands at the 82nd floor, telling others, you can’t go that way. Fern’s luck leads him to stairway A, the only navigable stairwell, which still requires Fern to lift a broken wall. Down stairway A also goes Donna Spera, who is badly burned, and Keating Crown, who has a broken leg and a metal spring embedded in his skull. In stairway A, the two lines fold into single-file, allowing injured people from upper floors to pass. When they can, people carry others on their backs, assist the blind, and encourage one another to keep going.

Another essential element of Chapter 8 is the authors’ statement that the trade center’s three exit stairways were not sufficient to accommodate a rapid, full-building of each tower. The authors compare the situation to the lack of lifeboats available on the Titanic, and provide the example of a 1980 fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, with deaths caused by a lack of exits. If the 1938 building code had still been in place for the World Trade Center towers, each tower would have been required to have six stairwells. 

Chapter 9 explores the decision of those stuck in the north tower, on the floors above where the plane hit, to head to the tower roof, in the hopeof an aerial rescue. This takes place at 9:05 a.m., less than twenty minutes after impact.When a group reaches the doors that lead to the roof, they find the doors locked. Port Authority officials control the doors but when officials try to open the doors from their office, the computer system in charge of opening the doors fails.

Dwyer and Flynn weave this escape narrative with the account of police helicopter pilots hoping to save those trapped on the upper floors of the tower. However, smoke streaming from the buildings blocks their view, making such rescues impossible. Police leadership radios the pilots, telling them to not attempt a landingand to not attempt to rappel onto the roof with the hopes of airlifting employees,two at a time, into an airlift basket. Many people were rescued from the upper floors of the tower during the 1993 bombing in this fashion, an attempt that sparked outrage from the fire department, which later issued a statement saying police aerial rescue created a dangerous situation, and that the best mode of rescue was for those on the upper floors to wait for emergency rescuers to arrive. In 1993, almost half those airlifted to safety came off the south tower roof. 

Dwyer and Flynn write that the attempt to make it to the roof made sense. The upper floors were like an inferno—smoky, with oxygen depleting fast. The police helicopter pilots see people jumping from windows, as individuals line the windowsills, bumping into one another in attempts to get air. In the north tower, people like Charles Heeran start up the stairs in the minutes following impact. Heeran has called his father, a retired firefighter:“‘Get everybody to the roof,’ Bernie Heeran told his son. ‘Go up. Don’t try to go down’” (115). But the Port Authority’s rescue plan lacked any information for a roof rescue. For roof rescues, fire officials were supposed to contact police pilots, and the fire officials would ride along with the police pilots. This did not happen: “Despite the aversion to aerial rescues, the Port Authority did not explicitly tell the occupants of its towers that the roof was not an option” (117). Meanwhile, “the need for intervention was horribly apparent to Semendinger, Hayes, and the other pilots watching the fires advance through the upper floors and seeing people on those floors hanging out of the windows” (124). Pilots could see people with faces against the window trying to breathe. 

On the upper floors of both towers, people are unsure if breaking windows would let in oxygen or fuel the fire. The latter was the result. The authors state that “[w]hy people would jump in greater numbers from one building than the other reflects the different paths that the crisis followed in each place” (125).

People in the south tower begin evacuating before it was hit by Flight 175, the second plane. In the north tower, people crowd windows at Windows on the World. They telephone loved ones and send emails. Loved ones hardly hear anything but panic and background noise. On the 104th floor, in Cantor Fitzgerald’s northwest conference room, Andrew Rosenblum and fifty others plug vents with jackets. They smash windows for air. Rosenblum calls his wife and in the midst of conversation suddenly says, “Oh, my God” (126).

The chapter also includes a brief chronicling of the work of window washer Roko Camaj, who spent nearly half his sixty years working at the south tower. He hung from the top of the center in a harness, washing the upper windows. On this day, his knowledge of the tower rooftop is no help.