Here’s an absolutely riveting piece in the NYT on details of last minute cell phone messages and emails sent by doomed occupants of the WTC’s upper floors. Remarkably, everyone above the 92nd floor in the first tower died. Almost everyone below it lived. But due to some quirks in the building’s design, lots of people in the second building survived despite being above the point of impact when the plane hit. Striking, really. The intuitive escape would come via the roof, especially if you’re just a few floors from it. But doors to the roof were locked, and many of the people who chose to descend 100+ flights of stairs, several of those through the impact floors, lived. The people who went to the roof didn’t. A few excerpts:

I.

Even after the second airplane struck, an open staircase connected the upper reaches of the south tower to the street. The Times has identified 18 men and women who used it to escape from the impact zone or above. At the same time they were evacuating, at least 200 other people were climbing toward the roof in that tower, unaware that a passable stairway down was available, and assuming — incorrectly — that they could open the roof door. “The belief that they had a rooftop option cost them their lives,” said Beverly Eckert, whose husband, Sean Rooney, called after his futile trek up.

II.

The impact came at 8:46:26 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 measuring 156 feet from wingtip to wingtip and carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel, was moving at 470 miles an hour, federal investigators estimated. At that speed, it covered the final two blocks to the north tower in 1.2 seconds.

The plane ripped a path across floors 94 to 98, directly into the office of Marsh & McLennan Companies, shredding steel columns, wallboard, filing cabinets and computer-laden desks. Its fuel ignited and incinerated everything in its way. The plane’s landing gear hurtled through the south side of the building, winding up on Rector Street, five blocks away.

Just three floors below the impact zone, not a thing budged in Steve McIntyre’s office. Not the slate paperweight shaped like a sailing ship. Not the family snapshots propped up on a bookcase. Mr. McIntyre found himself in front of a computer that was still on.

Then came the whiplash.

A powerful shock wave quickly radiated up and down from the impact zone. The wave bounced from the top to the bottom of the tower, three or four seconds one way and then back, rocking the building like a huge boat in a storm.

“We got to get the hell out of here,” yelled Greg Shark, an American Bureau of Shipping engineer and architect, who was bracing himself in the swaying while he stood outside Mr. McIntyre’s office.

Somehow, they were alive. Only later would the two men realize the slender margin of their escape. In their accounts of hunting for a way out, they provide a survey of a border territory, an impregnable zone through which the people imprisoned above would never pass.

III.

9:02
South Tower, 98th Floor, Aon Corp., 57 minutes to collapse:

Those in the south tower were still spectators, if wary ones. “Hey Beverly, this is Sean, in case you get this message,” Sean Rooney said on a voice mail message left for his wife, Beverly Eckert. “There has been an explosion in World Trade One — that’s the other building. It looks like a plane struck it. It’s on fire at about the 90th floor. And it’s, it’s — it’s horrible. Bye.”

Even in Mr. Rooney’s tower, people could feel the heat from the fires raging in the other building, and they could see bodies falling from the high floors. Many soon began to leave. The building’s staff, however, announced that they should stay — judging that it was safer for the tenants to stay inside an undamaged building than to walk onto a street where fiery debris was falling.

That instruction would change at the very moment that Mr. Rooney, who worked for the insurance company Aon, was leaving a second message for his wife, at 9:02 a.m.

“Honey, this is Sean again,” he said. “Looks like we’ll be in this tower for a while.” He paused, as a public announcement in the background could be heard.

“It’s secure here,” Mr. Rooney continued. “But ——” He stopped again to listen: “if the conditions warrant on your floor you may wish to start an orderly evacuation.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” Mr. Rooney said. “Bye.”

As Mr. Rooney spoke, United Flight 175 was screaming across New York Harbor.

IV.

9:02
South Tower, 81st Floor, Fuji Bank, 57 minutes to collapse

Yes, Stanley Praimnath told the caller from Chicago, he was fine. He had actually evacuated to the lobby of the south tower, but a security guard told him to go back. Now, he was again at his desk at Fuji Bank. “I’m fine,” he repeated.

As he would later tell his story, those were his final words before he spotted it.

A gray shape on the horizon. An airplane, flying past the Statue of Liberty. The body of the United Airlines jet grew larger until he could see a red stripe on the fuselage. Then it banked and headed directly toward him.

Another one.

“Lord, you take over!” he remembers yelling, dropping under his metal desk.

At 9:02:54, the nose of the jetliner smashed directly into Mr. Praimnath’s floor, about 130 feet from his desk. A fireball ignited. Steel furnishings and aluminum plane parts were torn into white-hot shrapnel. A blast wave hurled computers and desks through windows, and ripped out bundles of arcing electrical cables. Then the south tower seemed to stoop, swinging gradually toward the Hudson River, ferociously testing the steel skeleton before snapping back.

Through most of both towers, the staircases were tightly clustered, and in the north tower, they were all immediately severed or blocked by the blast. Along the impact zone of the south tower, floors 78 to 84, however, the stairs had to divert around heavy elevator machinery. So instead of running close to the building core, two of the stairways serving those floors were built closer to the perimeter. One of them, on the northwest side, survived. A report in USA Today this month also suggested that the surviving stairway might have been shielded by the machinery.

However the stairway survived, it made all the difference to Stanley Praimnath, who, huddled under his desk, could see a shiny aluminum piece of the plane, lodged in the remains of his door.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 27th, 2002 at 10:59 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.