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kuangning9:00
North Tower, 106th Floor, Windows on the World, 1 hour 28 minutes to collapse
"What do we do? What do we do?"
Doris Eng, the restaurant manager, called the Fire Command Center in the lobby repeatedly with that question, according to officials and co-workers. Just minutes after the plane hit, the restaurant was filling with smoke and she was struggling to direct the 170 people in her charge.
Many in the crowd made their living providing information or the equipment that carried it, communications experts taking part in the morning's conference in the ballroom. But with thickening smoke, no power and little sense of what was going on, the restaurant was fast becoming an isolation zone, where people scrambled for bits of news.
"Watch CNN," Stephen Tompsett, a computer scientist at the conference, e-mailed his wife, Dorry, using his BlackBerry communicator. "Need updates."
Videos from two amateur photographers show that the smoke built with terrifying speed at the top of the building, cascading thicker from seams in windows there than from floors closer to the plane. Early on, Rajesh Mirpuri called his company, Data Synapse, coughing, and said he could not see more than 10 feet, his boss, Peter Lee, would remember. Peter Alderman, the Bloomberg salesman, also told his sister about the smoke, using his BlackBerry to send an e-mail message: "I'm scared."
Ms. Eng and the Windows staff, following their emergency training, herded people from the 107th floor down to a corridor on the 106th near the stairs, where they used a special phone to call the Fire Command Center. The building's policy was to immediately evacuate the floor on fire and the one above it. People farther away, like those in Windows on the World, were to leave only when directed by the command center "or when conditions dictate such actions."
Conditions were quickly deteriorating, though. Glenn Vogt, the restaurant's general manager, said that 20 minutes after the plane hit, his assistant, Christine Olender, called him at home. She got his wife instead, Mr. Vogt said, because he was on the street outside the trade center. Ms. Olender told Mrs. Vogt that they had heard nothing on how to leave. "The ceilings are falling," she said. "The floors are buckling."
Within 20 minutes of the crash, a police helicopter reported to its base that it could not land on the roof. Still, many put their hopes on a rescue by someone, some way.
"I can't go anywhere because they told us not to move," Ivhan Carpio, a Windows worker, said in a message he left on his cousin's answering machine. "I have to wait for the firefighters."
The firefighters, however, were struggling to respond. No one in New York had ever seen a fire of this size — four and five floors blazing within seconds. Commanders in the lobby had no way of knowing if any stairwells were passable. With most elevators ruined, firefighters were toting heavy gear up stairwells against a tide of evacuees. An hour after the plane crash, they would still be 50 floors below Windows.
Downstairs, the authorities fielded calls from the upper floors. "There's not much you could do other than tell them to go wet a towel and keep it over your face," said Alan Reiss, the former director of the world trade department of the Port Authority. But the plane had severed the water line to the upper floors. Mr. Maciejewski, the waiter, told his wife in a cellphone call that he could not find enough to wet a rag, she recalled. He said he would check the flower vases.
The room had almost no water and not much air, but there was no shortage of cellphones or BlackBerries. Using them and a few intact phone lines, at least 41 people in the restaurant reached someone outside the building. Peter Mardikian of Imagine Software told his wife, Corine, that he was headed for the roof and that he could not talk long, she recalled. Others were waiting for one of the few working phones.
Garth Feeney called his mother, Judy, in Florida. She began with a breezy hello, she later recalled.
"Mom," Mr. Feeney responded, "I'm not calling to chat. I'm in the World Trade Center and it's been hit by a plane."
The calm manner of the staff could not contain the strain. Laurie Kane, whose husband, Howard, was the restaurant's comptroller, said she could hear someone screaming, "We're trapped," as they finished their final conversation. Gabriela Waisman, a conference attendee, phoned her sister 10 times in 11 minutes, frantic to keep the connection. Veronique Bowers, the restaurant's credit collections manager, kept telling her grandmother, Carrie Tillman, that the building had been hit by an ambulance.
"She was so confused," Mrs. Tillman said.
9:01
North Tower, 104th Floor, Cantor Fitzgerald, 1 hour 27 minutes to collapse
Just two floors below Windows, the disaster marched at an eerily deliberate pace, the sense of emergency muted. The northwest conference room on the 104th floor held just one of many large knots of people in the five floors occupied by Cantor Fitzgerald. There, the smoke did not become overwhelming as quickly as at Windows. And the crash and fires were not as immediately devastating as they had been a few floors below, at Marsh & McLennan.
In fact, Andrew Rosenblum, a Cantor stock trader, thought it would be a good idea to reassure the families. With his wife, Jill, listening on the phone from their home in Rockville Centre, N.Y., he announced to the room: "Give me your home numbers," his wife recounted.
"Tim Betterly," Mr. Rosenblum said into his cellphone, reeling off a phone number. "James Ladley." Another number.
As the list grew, Mr. Rosenblum realized that 40 or 50 colleagues were in the room, having fled the smoke. "Please call their spouses, tell them we're in this conference room and we're fine," he said to his wife. She remembers scribbling the names and numbers on a yellow legal pad in her kitchen, as the burning towers played on a 13-inch television in a cubbyhole near the backdoor.
Mrs. Rosenblum handed pieces of paper with the numbers to friends who had shown up. They went either to the leafy, fenced-in backyard, where the dog wandered among them, or to the front lawn, calling the families on cellphones.
Mr. Rosenblum's group, including Jimmy Smith, John Salamone and John Schwartz, sat on the eastern side of the bond trading area, in one of the open areas, according to John Sanacore, one of the group who was not at work that day. The spot offered expansive views of the Empire State Building.
On the opposite end of the bond area, overlooking the Hudson River, other traders were gathered. John Gaudioso, who normally worked in that section but was on a golf outing that morning, recalled that Ian Schneider sat at the head of a string of desks where he led a global finance group. Michael Wittenstein, John Casazza and Michael DeRienzo were all in that area, and, like Mr. Schneider, were using land lines at their desks to take calls from concerned customers and loved ones, according to six people who spoke with them. "The building rocked like it never has before," said Mr. Schneider, who was there for the 1993 bombing, in a phone call with his wife, Cheryl.
In the equities trading area in the southern part of the 104th floor, looking toward the Statue of Liberty, there was a third group. Here, Stephen Cherry and Marc Zeplin pushed a button at their desk to activate the squawk box, a nationwide intercom to other Cantor offices around the country. "Can anybody hear us?" Mr. Cherry asked. A trader in Chicago who was listening in later said that she managed to reach a firehouse near the trade center. "They know you're there," the trader told them.
Mike Pelletier, a commodities broker in a Cantor office on the 105th floor, reached his wife, Sophie Pelletier, and was then in touch with a friend who told him that the airplane crash had been a terrorist attack. Mr. Pelletier swore and shouted the information to the people around him, Mrs. Pelletier said.
In Rockville Centre, on the front lawn of the Rosenblums' house, Debbie Cohen dialed the numbers on the yellow pieces of paper she had been handed by Jill Rosenblum.
"Hello? You don't know me, but I was given your number by someone who is in the World Trade Center," she said. "About 50 of them are in a corner conference room, and they say they're O.K. right now."
North Tower, 106th Floor, Windows on the World, 1 hour 28 minutes to collapse
"What do we do? What do we do?"
Doris Eng, the restaurant manager, called the Fire Command Center in the lobby repeatedly with that question, according to officials and co-workers. Just minutes after the plane hit, the restaurant was filling with smoke and she was struggling to direct the 170 people in her charge.
Many in the crowd made their living providing information or the equipment that carried it, communications experts taking part in the morning's conference in the ballroom. But with thickening smoke, no power and little sense of what was going on, the restaurant was fast becoming an isolation zone, where people scrambled for bits of news.
"Watch CNN," Stephen Tompsett, a computer scientist at the conference, e-mailed his wife, Dorry, using his BlackBerry communicator. "Need updates."
Videos from two amateur photographers show that the smoke built with terrifying speed at the top of the building, cascading thicker from seams in windows there than from floors closer to the plane. Early on, Rajesh Mirpuri called his company, Data Synapse, coughing, and said he could not see more than 10 feet, his boss, Peter Lee, would remember. Peter Alderman, the Bloomberg salesman, also told his sister about the smoke, using his BlackBerry to send an e-mail message: "I'm scared."
Ms. Eng and the Windows staff, following their emergency training, herded people from the 107th floor down to a corridor on the 106th near the stairs, where they used a special phone to call the Fire Command Center. The building's policy was to immediately evacuate the floor on fire and the one above it. People farther away, like those in Windows on the World, were to leave only when directed by the command center "or when conditions dictate such actions."
Conditions were quickly deteriorating, though. Glenn Vogt, the restaurant's general manager, said that 20 minutes after the plane hit, his assistant, Christine Olender, called him at home. She got his wife instead, Mr. Vogt said, because he was on the street outside the trade center. Ms. Olender told Mrs. Vogt that they had heard nothing on how to leave. "The ceilings are falling," she said. "The floors are buckling."
Within 20 minutes of the crash, a police helicopter reported to its base that it could not land on the roof. Still, many put their hopes on a rescue by someone, some way.
"I can't go anywhere because they told us not to move," Ivhan Carpio, a Windows worker, said in a message he left on his cousin's answering machine. "I have to wait for the firefighters."
The firefighters, however, were struggling to respond. No one in New York had ever seen a fire of this size — four and five floors blazing within seconds. Commanders in the lobby had no way of knowing if any stairwells were passable. With most elevators ruined, firefighters were toting heavy gear up stairwells against a tide of evacuees. An hour after the plane crash, they would still be 50 floors below Windows.
Downstairs, the authorities fielded calls from the upper floors. "There's not much you could do other than tell them to go wet a towel and keep it over your face," said Alan Reiss, the former director of the world trade department of the Port Authority. But the plane had severed the water line to the upper floors. Mr. Maciejewski, the waiter, told his wife in a cellphone call that he could not find enough to wet a rag, she recalled. He said he would check the flower vases.
The room had almost no water and not much air, but there was no shortage of cellphones or BlackBerries. Using them and a few intact phone lines, at least 41 people in the restaurant reached someone outside the building. Peter Mardikian of Imagine Software told his wife, Corine, that he was headed for the roof and that he could not talk long, she recalled. Others were waiting for one of the few working phones.
Garth Feeney called his mother, Judy, in Florida. She began with a breezy hello, she later recalled.
"Mom," Mr. Feeney responded, "I'm not calling to chat. I'm in the World Trade Center and it's been hit by a plane."
The calm manner of the staff could not contain the strain. Laurie Kane, whose husband, Howard, was the restaurant's comptroller, said she could hear someone screaming, "We're trapped," as they finished their final conversation. Gabriela Waisman, a conference attendee, phoned her sister 10 times in 11 minutes, frantic to keep the connection. Veronique Bowers, the restaurant's credit collections manager, kept telling her grandmother, Carrie Tillman, that the building had been hit by an ambulance.
"She was so confused," Mrs. Tillman said.
9:01
North Tower, 104th Floor, Cantor Fitzgerald, 1 hour 27 minutes to collapse
Just two floors below Windows, the disaster marched at an eerily deliberate pace, the sense of emergency muted. The northwest conference room on the 104th floor held just one of many large knots of people in the five floors occupied by Cantor Fitzgerald. There, the smoke did not become overwhelming as quickly as at Windows. And the crash and fires were not as immediately devastating as they had been a few floors below, at Marsh & McLennan.
In fact, Andrew Rosenblum, a Cantor stock trader, thought it would be a good idea to reassure the families. With his wife, Jill, listening on the phone from their home in Rockville Centre, N.Y., he announced to the room: "Give me your home numbers," his wife recounted.
"Tim Betterly," Mr. Rosenblum said into his cellphone, reeling off a phone number. "James Ladley." Another number.
As the list grew, Mr. Rosenblum realized that 40 or 50 colleagues were in the room, having fled the smoke. "Please call their spouses, tell them we're in this conference room and we're fine," he said to his wife. She remembers scribbling the names and numbers on a yellow legal pad in her kitchen, as the burning towers played on a 13-inch television in a cubbyhole near the backdoor.
Mrs. Rosenblum handed pieces of paper with the numbers to friends who had shown up. They went either to the leafy, fenced-in backyard, where the dog wandered among them, or to the front lawn, calling the families on cellphones.
Mr. Rosenblum's group, including Jimmy Smith, John Salamone and John Schwartz, sat on the eastern side of the bond trading area, in one of the open areas, according to John Sanacore, one of the group who was not at work that day. The spot offered expansive views of the Empire State Building.
On the opposite end of the bond area, overlooking the Hudson River, other traders were gathered. John Gaudioso, who normally worked in that section but was on a golf outing that morning, recalled that Ian Schneider sat at the head of a string of desks where he led a global finance group. Michael Wittenstein, John Casazza and Michael DeRienzo were all in that area, and, like Mr. Schneider, were using land lines at their desks to take calls from concerned customers and loved ones, according to six people who spoke with them. "The building rocked like it never has before," said Mr. Schneider, who was there for the 1993 bombing, in a phone call with his wife, Cheryl.
In the equities trading area in the southern part of the 104th floor, looking toward the Statue of Liberty, there was a third group. Here, Stephen Cherry and Marc Zeplin pushed a button at their desk to activate the squawk box, a nationwide intercom to other Cantor offices around the country. "Can anybody hear us?" Mr. Cherry asked. A trader in Chicago who was listening in later said that she managed to reach a firehouse near the trade center. "They know you're there," the trader told them.
Mike Pelletier, a commodities broker in a Cantor office on the 105th floor, reached his wife, Sophie Pelletier, and was then in touch with a friend who told him that the airplane crash had been a terrorist attack. Mr. Pelletier swore and shouted the information to the people around him, Mrs. Pelletier said.
In Rockville Centre, on the front lawn of the Rosenblums' house, Debbie Cohen dialed the numbers on the yellow pieces of paper she had been handed by Jill Rosenblum.
"Hello? You don't know me, but I was given your number by someone who is in the World Trade Center," she said. "About 50 of them are in a corner conference room, and they say they're O.K. right now."
