Long, but good article on WTC

Txs

Unfolding of Sequence of in NYCNYC - 9/23/2001 NewsdayFrom the moment the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the police and fire departments swung through escalating stages of alarm, rescue and evacuation. Thousands of emergency workers converged in the smoke and dust of the collapsing towers, many never to emerge alive. The story of those first desperate hours has been compiled from Newsday reporters on the scene, interviews with dozens of emergency workers and civilians and scanner reports obtained from Breaking News Network. This is that account. "10-60": ANSWERING THE FIRST CALL At 8:48 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into One World Trade Center, the north tower. Police and fire radios erupted with "10-60," the code for a major emergency. Ismael Quinones, a traffic enforcement agent in a scooter at a stoplight at Cortlandt and Church streets, reached for his radio. "Traffic 191, we just had an explosion at One World Trade Center by a jet," he told his dispatcher and left his car to order civilians to leave the area. "They hadn't heard about it yet," said Quinones, 39. "People were hanging out the window, sending morse code [by flicking the blinds]. I saw bodies hit the ground. It was an unimaginable sight." He thinks he saw 20 people fall in all: "Body after body after body." Moments after the first plane hit, Car 3, NYPD lingo for Chief of Department Joe Esposito's vehicle, arrived near the towers, according to a police source. Esposito, the source said, ordered a mobilization at Church and Vesey streets. The Fire Department set up its command post near the Marriott Hotel on West Street. Manhattan companies responded there. Among the first to arrive were Ladder 5 and Engine 24, out of Sixth Avenue.At 8:52 a.m., a third Fire Department alarm and an explosion. Floors in the tower burned. Port Authority staffers shut down service at the PATH train beneath the station. Without that decision, as many as 5,000 more people may have been trapped when the towers collapsed. At 8:59 a.m., the Police Department called a Level 4 mobilization, ordered only in the most dire situations. Calls had gone out to every police commander with the rank of captain and above. Rank and file officers raced downtown, from streets and over the bridges. Detectives from the Brooklyn Child Abuse Squad dropped everything, and sped west over the Brooklyn Bridge, as thousands fled east. "It was like Godzilla was chasing them," one cop said.By 9:01 a.m., the Fire Department had called a fifth alarm and ordered four elite rescue units to the scene. Kevin Dinkins, 44, a firefighter from Staten Island, was among the first to arrive. "We'd had a box run at Canal and Church, and someone looked up and said, `Look how low that plane is flying,' " he recalled. Dinkins and his unit, located on Duane Street, reached the lobby of the north tower and found devastation. "There were people on fire," he said. "The fire shot down the elevator shafts and blew out the lobby." The company, along with dozens of other firefighters, began to make the perilous climb up the tower's stairs. As Dinkins worked his way up the stairs, lawyer Richard Zimmerman worked his way down from the 52nd floor of the north tower, reaching ground at 10 a.m. "There was FBI, there was regular police, there was Port Authority police, there were firemen, they kept people going away from the building," he said. "Every fireman I saw going up is probably , and they were many of these people who helped us get away from the building.""WE'RE UNDER ATTACK": THE SECOND PLANE HITS At 9:06 a.m., United Flight 175 crashed into Two World Trade Center, the south tower. "Central, a second plane has hit the World Trade Center!" someone screamed into a radio. "We're under attack! Notify 1PP, Aviation and the Department of Defense!" Capt. Sean Crowley, 36, who heads Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik's security staff, and Eddie Aswad, 45, a Corrections Department captain on loan to Kerik, looked for a spot to set up a command post at West and Liberty streets, and for a working phone line. More bodies fell. Two people were holding hands, it was an unbelievable sight," Aswad said. People were hanging out of windows for as long as two minutes, others only 10 or 20 seconds before they let go. They looked like black dots hanging from the edge. But everyone could tell they were people. Even so, Aswad said the firefighters, from Brooklyn companies, and police seemed relatively calm. Both Crowley and Aswad said the fact the buildings were able to sustain a hit by a plane made them think that nothing could topple them. "I see firemen pulling up. They're putting on their gear, they're filing into the building like it's nothing," Aswad said. "They're going into the building like `it's no big deal, we're going to put this fire out.' " Fidel Sanchez, a painter who was working on 15th Street, reached the scene just ahead of the second plane. "When we first got there, it was so quiet," he said. "There were just two or three paramedics on the scene." When firefighters arrived, they told Sanchez and his friends to leave. "I said we were there to help," Sanchez said. "They said, `OK, grab a hose.' " Sanchez eventually hooked up with a paramedic crew out of St. Vincents Hospital in Manhattan and helped bring people out of the burning towers. In 25 minutes, they got about 15 people out and loaded them in ambulances. When one tower collapsed, he said, he was cut off from the paramedics, and did not see them again.At 9:07 a.m., as the buildings swayed, the Federal Aviation Administration shut down air traffic and the airports. Police headquarters and other sensitive buildings were secured. The electric clocks in the underground mall stopped at 9:10 a.m., evidence of a power shutdown.At 9:11 a.m., police radio reported a call for military assistance, and 10 minutes later, all bridges and tunnels into the city had been ordered closed.At 9:18 a.m., Officer Eugene Fasano left the Port Authority police academy in Jersey City with Capt. Kathy Mazza and Lt. Robert Cirri. They drove through the Holland Tunnel and parked next to 7 World Trade Center, which housed the city's emergency management headquarters. They headed toward the loading dock of Tower 1. About 200 feet away, Mazza gave Fasano her keys and told him to get her defibrillator, oxygen tank and first-aid kit. Mazza and Cirri headed into Tower 1. Fasano never saw them again. "Something told me, something's not right, get out of the building," Fasano said to himself before spotting Sgt. Thomas Marten. "I said, `Sarge I don't know where they went. Let's regroup and find other people.'"By 9:27 a.m., all off-duty Port Authority police officers had been called in. By 9:32, all off-duty firefighters had been called in."DON'T LOOK! KEEP GOING!": MOVING OUTAfter the planes hit, police officers appeared at key intersections all the way up to 59th Street, stopping traffic, directing pedestrians to the west and east. A river of people flowed north along the new West Side bike path, shepherded by police officers. A quiet, orderly procession. A teacher whispered to her class of third-graders, "Everything is fine. Everything is fine."By 9:40, reports filtered out that hundreds of people were trapped on floors above the fires, and dozens of burn victim were being treated in makeshift triage areas on stairwells. By 9:55 a.m., ferries carrying burn victims were en route from Manhattan to New Jersey. Overhead, military aircraft had been ordered to "stop" any plane that did not answer on aircraft frequency. At Church and Vesey streets, Capt. Timothy Pearson, commander of PSA 2, a housing unit that covers East New York and Brownsville, encountered an old friend, John Perry. Perry, a 40th Precinct officer, also worked in the Department Advocate's office, carried a Screen Actors Guild card, and made a cameo in "The Devil's Advocate." He had returned to headquarters that day to put in his retirement papers. He had talked of working in an overseas relief effort, friends said. Pearson said he and Perry sprinted into 5 World Trade Center through the Borders bookstore onto the concourse and encountered crowds of stunned civilians. "Some of the people were wandering along, not realizing how serious it was," said Pearson. "And some were responding to seeing the bodies falling. We kept telling them `Don't look! Keep going!' " Pearson estimated that police were able to evacuate hundreds of people during that time, saving countless lives. Lt. Timothy McGinn, who was at the command post at West and Liberty, said he thought some lives there had been saved by the falling bodies. Officers there, he said, heard a rumor that a firefighter had been killed by a body. So they ducked under a bridge just before the south tower fell, and were sheltered from the full force of the collapse."RIGHT ON TOP OF US": THE SOUTH TOWER FALLSAt 9:55 a.m., the south tower fell. "We started to hear a rumble and saw a cloud," Pearson recalled. "The lights started to flicker out, then there was a tremendous wind and then all hell broke loose." Pearson, Port Authority Police Insp. Larry Fields, a secret service agent, and officers from the Brooklyn South Task Force struggled out from the darkness onto West Street, but Perry had disappeared. Port Authority employee Donald Jodice, 42, had just worked his way down 88 flights to the ground with 40 co-workers over 30 to 40 harrowing minutes. "The building started falling right on top of us," he said. "The firemen were going up, passed us on the stairs. They are all now. They must be." Two men in EMS jackets led him by the arms to the front of a line of people waiting for pay phones on West Broadway and one of them dialed his wife's number for him. They couldn't get through. "You're all right now. Go home," the EMS worker said to Jodice. "How do I get to Jersey? I have to see my children," he said. The EMS worker shrugged. By then, firefighter Kevin Dinkins and his crew had reached the 30th floor in the north tower. "When [the collapse] came over our radios, we knew it was time to get out," he said. "I keep hoping to wake up and find out it's not true. I'm still trying to wake up. It's all very surreal, like a dream state." In the lobby of the north tower, firefighter Billy Green of Engine 6 and others found their way out blocked by heavy debris and falling bodies. Firefighter Marcel Claes, of Engine 24, reached the 37th floor, when he got the message to get out. Claes later told supervisors that the members of Ladder 5 might have continued up. He and the others from Engine 24, however, headed down. Claes was separated around the sixth floor. When he reached the ground, his rig ran out of water and, as the building collapsed, he ran for his life. Traffic agent Quinones, 39, found himself under the debris of the south tower. "It must have been seven stories coming down," he said. "I drove into a revolving door, dropped my radio. Everything turned black." He staggered onto the sidewalk, retrieved his radio and escorted civilians out of another building. "When the towers came down at that intersection, no one was around yet," he said. "It was basically just me moving people out." Det. 1st Grade Nick Casale, an aide to Chief of Department Joe Esposito, was looking through a window at his boss standing in front of Tower 2 when it collapsed, almost in slow motion. "Like it was just a few floors at a time," Casale said. Where Esposito had stood, there was only rubble. "He was gone, I knew it, Espo ." Casale was wrong about that, but it would be eight hours before he was reunited with his boss, who is still on the job. As he left, Casale ran into Lt. Timothy McGinn. They headed for the ferry pier to Jersey City. A man there told them that the Coast Guard had ordered a halt to traffic in the area. "I don't want to say what language I used, but I ordered him to radio the captain and ask him if he had the guts to bring the boat in," Casale said. He and McGinn loaded as many people as the boat could hold, sent it on and switched to a police launch. The launch struck a sea wall, but the skipper steadied it and they loaded up the boat, this time with women and children only. "Harbor police were hanging over the wall, handing the babies down," Casale said. In New Jersey, Casale and McGinn met Jersey City Mayor Glenn Cunningham at the pier. The mayor had been waiting for an order from the governor to release his police and firefighters, Casale said. "McGinn and I had a little conversation with him. Let's just say he was persuaded not to wait," Casale said. "You couldn't see the city. There was no city. We thought we were still under attack." Cunningham said his talk with the New Yorkers was only one of several factors in his decision to send police and fire units. Jersey City contributed 100 emergency workers to the effort. "From the very beginning, we were already involved," Cunningham said. "We had already had a civilian dispatcher killed. But I'll give them credit." Police formed a command post at Park Row and Broadway. Throughout the tri-state area, emergency personnel were mobilized. City after city switched to full alert. Building evacuations spread. The Holland Tunnel became a conduit for dozens of emergency units.At 10:07 a.m. an F-15 fighter jet roared overhead, and circled the remaining tower twice. After they struggled out of the debris from the collapse, Capt. Sean Crowley and Corrections Capt. Eddie Aswad made their way into the North Cove Marina. A police boat pulled in, and they started to help people on board, taking the injured and mothers with young children first. At Worth and Center streets, as people covered in dust wandered by, a stubborn vendor sold coffee, bagels and pastries to businessmen in spotless suits. In the Barclay Rex smoking lounge at Williams and Broad streets, five well-dressed men sat in plush chairs, smoking cigars and watching replays of the building collapses on TV. Firefighter Richard Rattazzi of Ladder Co. 16 on the Upper East Side snapped a photo of his friends, firefighter Robert Curatolo and Lt. Ray Murphy, as they walked toward the north tower. "They were probably about 25 feet in front of me and they'd come across an engine chauffeur that had a broken shoulder and when I caught up with them they told me to bring him back," he said. "That was the last time I saw them." Rattazzi reached the Merrill Lynch building on West Street and moved toward the Hudson River. He borrowed a mask and walked back down Vesey Street to look for his comrades."IT'S COMING DOWN! GO! GO! GO!": THE NORTH TOWER FALLSAt 10:29 a.m., the north tower collapsed. Tons of debris fell on the Fire Department command post on West Street. Thousands of people sprinted north along West Street. A police officer fired two gunshots at Harrison Street to move a civilian motorist. "It's coming down. It's coming down," another running officer yelled. "Go! Go! Go!" Rattazzi ran west again. "The wind from the building coming down came up and knocked the helmet off me," he said. "It just looked like a twister going by." He linked up with other firefighters who had lost their radios and returned to West Street to find a command post. Finding none, he looked for people in the rubble, and aided a photographer with a broken leg. Crowley and Aswad were getting ready to pull away in the police boat. Even though there were people in the harbor pleading to get on, they made the decision to pull off to get the injured help. "I saw all the people we left on the wall, they were overtaken by the cloud of dust," Aswad said. "I don't know what happened to them." They took the injured to Jersey, unloaded them, then made two more trips. Wayne Ludewig, a firefighter in special operations command, was driving toward the north tower when it collapsed. "Millions of people running away and we're going into this, not sure where's the street, where's the building, fire's burning all around," he recalled. "You couldn't really tell where was the front of the building because it was all in the street. We heard maydays from companies and we knew we couldn't get to them." The on-scene commanders had been caught in the collapse. With their rescue equipment buried, and a water main broken and no commanding officers, the firefighters worked by instinct. "I had guys that just went to incredible feats to try to get to people," Ludewig said. "You can't imagine this crater of a hole, guys climbing into a hole to find people, and you have got to realize nobody had too much in the way of tools because everything was buried, all the rescue rigs were buried, the squad rigs were buried. "And the only thing you put in your mind right now was we have to get these guys out. We gotta get the fires out, we have to go get to them," he said. "We couldn't, and that was frustrating."By 10:34 a.m., a mobilization point has been set up at Stuyvesant High School. Hundreds of people were evacuated by ferry and train to New Jersey. Doctors throughout the tri-state area were called in. Hundreds of people were reported trapped under rubble. An eerie quiet settled over the area below Chambers, save for the security alarms. Almost a lull. A ghostly dust settled on everyone and everything. An hour passed before the damage to the towers was visible, even from across the street. Rescue workers moved gingerly through the dusty haze. Firefighters wept as they carried colleagues from the rubble. A rescue worker searched for blankets to cover bodies. About 30 fire trucks were totaled, one cut in half and flipped upside down. A police squad officer said, "The north tower collapsed on top of Building Seven, where we were. We were able to dig our way out. We went in with nine and came out with six." In the hazy, uncertain aftermath, people voiced their worst fears. "I thought I was , I thought I was ," a police officer told a comrade. "I'm alive, I'm alive," a firefighter said, "but there's a lot more that aren't." Trevor Watts, a Con Edison worker, stopped for a few deep breaths. Chest heaving, he said he narrowly avoided the first collapse by diving under a fire truck. He sprinted north to avoid the second. He sat on the sidewalk for a while, dazed and covered with soot. He had just stood up and started walking when the second building collapsed.At 11 a.m., Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered an evacuation of lower Manhattan.At 11:07 a.m. -- 38 minutes after the second collapse -- the Fire Department command post set up at Broadway and Vesey, according to an FDNY chronology.By 11:17 a.m., police boats were ordered to stop any vessels in New York harbor. A major gas leak was reported in a building near the Trade Center. In the first of many such reports, rescue workers were asked to back off. People volunteered to bring water to the emergency workers. Stores in the area allowed workers to come in and take drinks and food. Here and there, burning cars exploded. Panes of glass fell from buildings. Building 7 was fully engulfed in flame. At noon, police officers started moving the civilian stragglers out. On Vesey Street, a firefighter swung a shovel at media photographers. "You take one more -- -- -- picture and I'll hit you with this," he said. One photographer hurled back an obscenity."WHERE ARE ALL THE PEOPLE?": SLOW RECOVERYFor the next six hours, recovery was slowed by fires, reports of building collapses, and lack of construction vehicles. Firefighters searched the buildings left standing, and gingerly made a series of initial probes into the debris. Water mains had ruptured, so water to fight fires was lacking.At 12:15 p.m., on Vesey Street, a line of firefighters stretched a hose to the Hudson, and pumped water directed from the river. "We're in business now," a firefighter said.By 12:43 p.m., Westchester County fire units stepped in to cover the Bronx.At 12:45, police scanners reported a series of threats. Circle Line boats had been commandeered for emergency workers.At 1:04 p.m., President George W. Bush announced that the military was on high alert worldwide.At 2 p.m., firefighters began a new series of probes into the debris. One firefighter wondered aloud, "Where are all the people? We can't even find guys who were with us." They spent a lot of time waiting. At Liberty and West streets, holding their pikes, they sat on the sidewalks or leaned against the fa?ade of the World Financial Center, their faces grim, words left unsaid. It was the moment that they wanted most to take action, and they were forced to wait. A bank of four pay phones became their one link to the world. Many of them called loved ones to tell them they were all right. A firefighter told his son: "Some people were mad at us and they blew up the Twin Towers. I want you to pray for everyone." The smoke stung and burned their eyes. Some were transported out for heat exhaustion. A hot dry wind fanned the fires. Rumors spread through the ranks: Camp David had been hit. The Sears Tower, too. Eleven planes were involved. None of the rumors were true. Major blazes at the 60-story 7 World Trade Center and an old hotel on Liberty and West streets forced rescue workers to back off. "It's pretty well chaos," said Michael Milner, of Jericho, a Rescue 4 firefighter who assisted in the Oklahoma City recovery effort in 1995. "We're waiting for it to collapse," Milner said of the fire at No. 7. "It's free-burning. It's unfathomable. There are so many buildings unstable we really can't work on the debris pile." Retired Sgt. Pat Russo was one of many retired cops who had been asked to go to Staten Island Yankee Stadium to help ferry wounded who never arrived. Shortly before 2 p.m., he left the ferry and headed to Ground Zero. "We removed three firefighters from a truck," Russo said. "It looked like they just pulled up and they were crushed. They were buried. The fire department had to cut them out.""GET YOUR LINES FORMED": ORDER EMERGESAt 3:30 p.m., Deputy Fire Chief Peter Hayden climbed on top of a fire truck at Liberty and West Street with a megaphone and peered at 100 firefighters, the remnants of many units. He removed his helmet, the others followed suit. "OK, let's take a moment of prayer," he said, as the group fell silent. Raising his head, he said: "We're trying to account for everyone, and organize a list of the missing, get your lines formed." It was the first clear signal that the normal command structure was working. At 3:35 p.m., as what remained of the south tower emerged through the smoke, two bulldozers finally began to clear cars and debris on Liberty. It took an hour just to clear the street enough so larger vehicles could reach the debris. A backhoe rumbled in. It was so large that it cleared the pedestrian walkway by several inches. Construction workers from Ironworkers union locals used torches to dismantle giant steel pieces, some 30 feet long. A system began to develop: Firefighters would wade into the debris, search and back out. Construction workers would take over, cutting and removing debris with their cranes and welding tools. Then the firefighters would search again.At 4:05 p.m., the first body pulled from the rubble was carried on an orange stretcher by a firefighter, a paramedic in green scrubs and a volunteer in ash-covered jeans and a handkerchief. No morgue had been established, so the trio put the stretcher in an out-of-the-way spot at the base of Two World Financial Center. A white sheet covered the body, but blood soaked through in large splotches. It seemed smaller than normal, as if it had been miniaturized. The second body came out about 30 minutes later, carried by four firefighters west on Liberty Street toward a police staging area on a pier at the Hudson River.Close to 5 p.m., Michael Milner, the Rescue 4 firefighter, received clearance to enter the tunnels of the 1, 2, and E lines at Church Street to look for ways into the wreckage. Milner and firefighters Paul Mendoza of Rescue 4 and Al Lampaso of Squad 1 crawled in under collapsed beams, shimmied through a two-foot hole in a collapsed ceiling, and made their way down a set of escalators, eventually working their way down three levels to the PATH station. They found it was flooded up to the level of the platform. The place was empty, and their approaches were blocked by a compacted mass of metals and pipes and rubble. "We tried underground parking garages. We opened up every manhole cover. We tried every door," Milner said. "In Oklahoma City, there was always ways to get in and find people. But this was basically a brick. It was a little depressing, cause you know you're not going to find anybody." At 5:25 p.m., Building No. 7 finally collapsed. Once more, the ground shook, and rescue workers ran for their lives.For Esposito's aide, Det. Nick Casale, events took a toll. At 6 p.m., he was found wandering in a daze by Suffolk County Det. Donovan Martin. A firefighter was leading him along. "We have to get him to a hospital, and you need to take his gun," the firefighter told Martin. "He's been here all day rescuing people. He's in shock." "You can have my gun, but what do you need two guns for," quipped Casale. Martin removed the pistol's clip, then led Casale to a triage center at the evacuated Embassy Suites Hotel on Vesey Street. He slept four hours and returned to Esposito's side.At 6:20 p.m., the searches began again in earnest, with renewed energy, followed shortly by the arrival of lights. As night fell, and the spotlights cast a glow across the debris, Lt. Patrick Kelly took up a post near the Millennium Hotel. Now a member of the Mounted Unit, Kelly served in Bosnia with a UN mission. "I had seen this type of destruction before," Kelly said, "but I never expected to see it here."