102
MINUTES
The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive inside the Twin Towers
By
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
322 pages. Henry Holt and Times Books. $26.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the destruction of the World
Trade Center towers, for many of us who lived through the attack
and its aftermath in New York, is how unreal it all seems now.
Already, the events of September 11, 2001, often feel as if they
took place in the distant past. And yet, all it takes is the smallest
reminder, a low-bearing plane, a National Guardsman patrolling
Grand Central, a whiff of jet fuel like the smell that pervaded
downtown Manhattan for months afterwards, and one is plunged immediately
into the same emotions that gripped us at the time—horror,
grief, shock, rage.
In
102 Minutes, The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive inside
the Twin Towers, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn evoke all these
responses, and more. Dwyer, a longtime columnist and reporter,
and the author or coauthor of several books on New York (including
one on the 1993 attempt to blow up the Trade Center), and Flynn,
a special projects editor and former police bureau chief at this
paper, have put their experience to good use, drawing on hundreds
of interviews, and thousands of pages of electronic, phone, and
radio transmissions. What they have produced is a masterpiece
of reporting.
Not
all of 102 Minutes was truly “untold,” but
it is a remarkably comprehensive account of what went on inside
the trade center that day, distilled to an amazingly coherent,
261 pages of text. Dwyer and Flynn have added charts and drawings
to help us keep track of the dozens of individuals whose plights
they follow, but so vivid are their characterizations that one
hardly needs to refer to such aids. Their style is invariably
succinct and understated; like all the best reporters, they let
the story they have dug out speak for itself.
102
Minutes is a book riveting enough to be read in a sitting,
but I suspect that many readers will find it too emotionally debilitating
to do so. It is comprised of one story after another of harrowing
escapes, immense heroism, and heart-rending loss. There are Liz
Thompson and Geoffrey Wharton, who became the last people out
of the Windows on the World restaurant because a man happened
to hold an elevator door for them. Jan Demczur, a window washer
stuck in an elevator on the fiftieth floor of the north tower
when the first plane hit and who, with five other men, cut his
way out of the elevator shaft with the blade and handle of his
squeegee. Frank De Martini, the ebullient Port Authority construction
manager who with his crew of Pete Negron, Carlos DaCosta, and
Pablo Ortiz, performed herculean labors, saving at least seventy
people in the north tower and even radioing out the first, ominous
reports of the damage the fire was causing to the building’s
steel (reports that went largely unheeded). There is Abe Zelmanowitz,
who stayed with his paralyzed, wheelchair-bound friend, Ed Beyea,
right to the end; 24-year-old security guard Robert Gabriel Martinez,
assigned to the 78th floor of the south tower only because he
was a few minutes late to work that day, refusing to abandon his
post. The 72-year-old Port Authority construction inspector, Tony
Savas who, after being trapped in a smoky elevator for half-an-hour,
bounded out asking “What do you need me to do?” when
he was finally rescued, insisting, “I’ve got a second
wind.”
Again
and again, one finds oneself moved to the point of tears by the
smallest things. A conversation between a person trapped in a
tower and a loved one; the mere fact that several of the firms
in the center preferred to hire friends and relatives; the account
of a firefight, Danny Suhr, who is mentioned only once in the
narrative, killed by a falling body before he could even get into
the south tower. The pictures of those who didn’t make it,
even the simple diagrams showing the outlines of the planes where
they hit and dissolved into the buildings, are nearly as heart-wrenching.
Dwyer
and Flynn’s story is an intensely human, personal one. And
yet it also draws them inevitably into the question of whether
or not some part of this calamity might have been ameliorated.
This is where the rage comes in.
Of
the 2,749 individuals killed in the attack on New York on September
11, Dwyer and Flynn estimate that at least 1,500, “and possibly
many more,” survived the initial plane crashes but died
because they could not get out of the towers before they collapsed.
They attribute this to the design of the buildings themselves,
and “to a sclerotic emergency response culture in New York
that resisted reform” even after the earlier, 1993 terrorist
attempt to destroy the trade center.
The
towers had been built under a New York City building code that
was quietly modified in the 1960s in order to make just such steel-and-glass
boxes economically feasible. This was a betrayal of the city’s
longtime social covenant, stretching back to another of its most
tragic moments, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in
which dozens of teenage girls ended up jumping to their deaths
because they were caught beyond hope of rescue by a fire in a
tall building. Ninety years later, because the Port Authority
was allowed to erect skyscrapers with insufficient stairways or
fireproofing, we were once again forced to watch helplessly as
our fellow citizens leaped to their deaths.
Even
worse was how the police officers and especially the firefighters
who rushed to the stricken towers were left mostly to their own
devices by their superiors and, ultimately, by the administration
of the most acclaimed public hero of 9/11, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Dwyer and Flynn spell it out:
“The
people fighting the two worst building fires in the nation’s
history had no video monitors. No radio communications with other
agencies. No way to get reports from police helicopters and only
a limited ability to communicate among themselves.”
Giuliani,
testifying before the congressional 9/11 Commission, tried to
make out that the estimated 200 firemen still in the remaining,
north tower at the time of its collapse had somehow received the
order to evacuate, but had chosen to keep helping civilians. Dwyer
and Flynn find no evidence for this assertion. Nearly all the
civilians who could have left the north tower were already gone;
the hard fact is that most of the firefighters who died there
probably had no idea the building was about to fall. The courage
of these men remains unsurpassed in the annals of our city. It
needed no gilding from Rudy Giuliani—especially none that
conveniently obscured the failure of his own administration to
properly prepare for and react to the terrorists’ attack.
Dwyer
and Flynn duly point out that “Nothing can diminish the
culpability of the hijackers and their masters” for all
the deaths of 9/11. Yet if their brilliant and troubling book
gives us any indication, we will probably be just as unprepared
to meet them the next time.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novels Paradise Alley and
Dreamland.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
