Jim Dwyer - 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

For Mary, Maggie, and Kevin
KF

For Julia Sullivan and Sheila Carmody
and all who travel with them
JD

Table of Contents

Prologue

8:30 A.M.
NORTH TOWER

F irst into the office on the 89th floor of 1 World Trade Center, as always, Dianne DeFontes shut the door behind her, then locked it with a bolt that slid up and down, into floor and ceiling. The lawyers were unlikely to arrive at the office of Drinker Biddle & Reath for another thirty minutes. Until then, DeFontes, the fifty-one-year-old receptionist, would serve as the early voice of a humming, busy law firm engaged in global-trade litigation. Atop the worldor near enough, more than 1,000 feet above New York Harborshe settled into a solitary bubble. She sipped coffee, spooned yogurt, answered the phone. Hes not at his desk right now; may I have him call you? She swapped the easy-on-the-feet running shoes she wore to commute for the easy-on-the-eyes dress shoes stashed in a desk drawer.

The conference room behind her stood empty. The hallway walls were lined with bookshelves, a law library for this satellite office of a firm based in Philadelphia. The 89th floor in the north tower of the World Trade Center gave the lawyers an office where they could see, and be seen, for miles. It had taken DeFontes a long time to get used to life at the trade center, but now, after thirteen years, she at last felt that she had her arms around it. She had a few friends on the floorTirsa Moya, her girlfriend at the insurance company down the hall, and Raffaele Cava, the older gentleman at the freight company who always wore a hat, no matter what the weather. DeFontes may have been the earliest arrival in her office, but Cava, at eighty years old, was always the first person on the 89th floor, at his desk by 6:30. To DeFontes, Tirsa and Raffaele were fixtures.

On the way to work, as her morning train rolled across Brooklyn, the towers grabbed hold of the sky ahead, staying in view until the train sank into the tunnel that crossed the harbor. From a distance, the sight surged through her with well, she found it hard to define the feeling. Familiarity. Maybe a kind of pride, a tiny fraction of ownership, or simply the pleasant jolt of seeing the familiar with fresh eyes, like glancing down from an airplane and spotting a particular house or a park. Of course, the view from the train was pretty much the only way the world at large saw the twin towers: two silver streams running in a blue sky. To DeFontes, they were all that. But they were also the place where she worked and ate and spent half her waking hours. The winter before, the building operators had set up a rink in the plaza, and she had finally learned to ice-skate. During the summer, she lolled over lunch in that same plaza, catching free concerts. In fact, a concert was scheduled for the afternoon; when she arrived that morning, the chairs were in place. As iconic structures, the towers could be seen for miles and miles; their human pulse was palpable only from the inside out. For DeFontes, the geography of the World Trade Center began in a desk drawer in room 8961 of the north tower, where she stashed her dress shoes.

With her door locked, Dianne DeFontes felt safe, if alone, in this colossus.

At 8:30 on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, she was one of the 14,154 people who typically arrived between midnight and 8:47 A.M. in the 110-story towers known as 1 and 2 World Trade Center. Another 940 were registered in the Marriott Hotel nestled between them, at 3 World Trade Center. Yet DeFontes sense of solitude, while an illusion, should hardly count as a delusion. This small city of people was spread across more than 220 vertical acres: each of the 110 floors per tower was its own acre of space, not to mention the hotel, and a basement that gave the trade center more space below the street than the majestic Empire State Building had above it.

Vast as the whole physical place seemed from afar, people inside naturally experienced it on a far more human scale. Each floor provided a little more room than a football field. The count of 14,154 people in the towers worked out to about 64 per flooror 64 spread across a football field, including the end zones. On the 89th floor, where Dianne DeFontes sat, 25 people were also arriving for work; her solitude actually was just a spatial illusion, from the low density of the place. This spaciousness made it easy to feel that each floor was its own island, part of an archipelago in an ocean of sky. A person in the south tower, sitting 131 feet away from DeFontes, might as well have been in the Bronx. For that matter, someone on the floor below, a mere 12 feet under her, was not only invisible but also inaudible.

All around Dianne DeFontes corner of the sky, people she could not see were, like herself, poised on the brink of the workday. On 88, Frank and Nicole De Martini sipped coffee and chatted with Franks staff and colleagues. The couple had driven in from Brooklyn that morning after dropping their children at a new school, and traffic had been light. Nicole worked in the south tower, but with a few extra minutes, she decided to visit Franks office in the north tower to say hello. Frank worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which built and owned the trade center. The agency had just completed a deal to lease the entire complex to Larry Silverstein, a private real estate operator, and down the hall from Franks office, his colleague Jim Connors, a member of the Port Authoritys real estate department, awaited a messenger who was bringing a flatbed trolley stacked with the indentures and documents that described the transaction in excruciating detail. The change in control had, inevitably, led to anxiety among members of the Port Authority staff who served as de facto mayors of the complex, masters of its byways, keepers of its lore. For the most part, they were being transferred to new departments within the Port Authority. Alan Reiss, who had run the world trade department, including the trade center, was downstairs on this Tuesday morning, in a delicatessen at street level, part of his own shift to new work. He was transferring to the post of deputy director of the Port Authoritys aviation department, so he was having a cup of coffee and an English muffin with the deputy directors from some of the agencys other departments.

The 90th floor, directly above Dianne DeFontes, was not quite vacant, but close; Anne Prosser was just arriving for her job at Clearstream, an international bank. She would be getting married in a month. On this floor, some artists had studios because the Port Authority gave them unused space. They kept irregular hours and none had arrived yet for the day. Most of the 91st floor also was empty, but Mike McQuaid, an electrician, was there, installing fire alarms in vacant space that would soon be used by Silverstein Properties, the new operators of the trade center. McQuaid stopped at the office of the American Bureau of Shipping, the only business currently on the floor, to chat with someone he knew.

Above him, on a quiet corner of the 92nd floor, a sculptor named Michael Richards was in his studio space, having worked through the night, as he often did. The rest of the floor was unusually busy, and tense. Carr Futures, a division of a French company, Crdit Agricole Indosuez, had summoned about forty of its brokers for a meeting on commission rates. The brokers, most of them men, led daily lives of wallet-to-wallet combat on the floors of exchanges that traded commodities; many of them had become wealthy through a combination of guile, charm, and pure nerve, without having stopped at the more prestigious universities or, for some, at any college at all. Tom McGinnis, who normally worked at the Mercantile Exchange trading natural gas for Carr, had told his wife that he expected the meeting to run from 8:00 until 8:30, when their boss, Jim Paul, had to join a conference call. The meeting would resume after the market closed at four oclock. Instead, the schedule had slipped, which was not surprising, given the contentious topic of commissions for people who earned their living by thinking and acting quickly.