Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Bookshelf Jim Dwyer Kevin Flynn 102 Minutes 20240712

Street y offered here on the west side for adults with flexible schedules and a little bit of time for leisure learning. Today we welcome you to the 29nd street y series in partnership with timestalks called tuesdays with the times featuring noted New York Times journalist and authors. Our tuesdays with the times series, as well as all of our daytime lectures a foumpl for issues that affect us all. Todays discussion focuses on a topic that is greatly in our conscious. We welcome james dwyer and kevin flynn, 102 minutes, the fight to survive the twin towers. Jim dwyer and kevin flynn, native new yorkers, veteran newspapers writers and winner of many awards together and separate. Jim dwyer joined in 2001 as a reporter for metropolitan section. Prior to joining the times, mr. Dwyer was columnist and associate editor for New York Daily News and before that a columnist for new york news day and previously a reporter for the bergen record. Mr. Dwyer is coauthor of two seconds under the world account of 1993 effort to knock down the World Trade Center. And innocence. Also subway lives 24 hours in the new york city subway. At the times since 2003. He was Police Bureau chief on september 11th. Previously mr. Flynn worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, new york news day and the stanford advocate. Hes a recipient of several journalistic awards including 19 the 8 first place award from new York State Associated press for indepth reporting and 1991 distinguished reporting award from the new york Newspaper Publishers association. In 1998 he was part of a team at news day that received indepth reporting award from new York State Associated press. Who better to tell us traumatic and moving account of struggle to survive inside World Trade Center on the morning of september 11th than the authors of 102 minutes, untold story of the fight to survive inside the twin towers of. Please welcome jim dwyer and kevin flynn. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, wendy and thanks to the y for having us this morning and thanks to all of you for coming. Id like to read something from the authors note of our book. For 102 minutes on the morning of september 11th, 2001, 14,000 men and women fought for life at the World Trade Center. This book aims to tell what happened solely from the perspective of people inside the towers. Office workers, visitors and the rescuers who rushed to help them. Accounts drawn from 200 interviews with survivors and witnesses. Thousands of pages of transcribed radio transmissions, phone messages, emails, and oral histories. All sources are named an enumerated. No single voice can describe scenes that unfolded at terrible velocities in so many places. Taken together, though, the words, witnesses and records provide not only a broad and chilling view of the devastation but also a singularly revealing window onto acts of grace at a brutal hour. Immediate challenges not geo political but intensely local. How, for instance, to open a jammed door or navigate a flaming hallway or climb dozens of flights of stairs. Civilians or rescuers, they had to take care of themselves and those around them. Their words inevitably trace a narrative of excruciating loss. They also describe how the simplest gestures and tools were put to transcendent use. Everything from squeegee in a suck elevator to a squeeze on the shoulder. For a voice booming in order to get out to a crowbar smashing sheetrock around a jammed door. As chapters in the history of human valor and frailty and struggle, these are matters of first importance. They brought us to this book. This book is by our last count anyway the 652nd or so that has been written about the offense of 9 11. If youre like a lot of people you might ask why. Why another book about 9 11 . After all, it was perhaps the single most observed event in human history, watched by millions of people around the world. And yet we believe that despite that, there is still so much we did not about what happened inside the towers. Particularly to the people who are trapped on the upper floors. 102 minutes is the best we can reconstruct it their story, their history told, when we could find them, in their own words. Hey, beverly, this is shawn. In case you get this message, theres been an explosion in world trade one. Thats the other building. It looks like a plane struck it. Its on fire at about the 90th floor and its horrible. Bye. Thats shawn rooney of an Insurance Company in the south tower before 9 00 a. M. Leaving one of his last messages to his wife beverly. This book actually began as a newspaper article in the spring of 2002. Jim and i and three other reporters were asked by the times to try to reconstruct what had happened inside the towers by talking to people who had been there that day or called outside to loved ones. The survivors of the day we found could tell us much about what happened on the mid and lower floors but they could not help us with the upper floors where hundreds had been trapped after the impact. 1500 between both buildings. Only 18 of those people would survive. Every one of them in the south tower. No one from above impact survived in the north tower. But hundreds, it turned out, had called out from inside the buildings leaving messages or last words that would resonate with relatives for the rest of their lives. The article was also called 102 minutes and began like the book about what we learned about what was going on in the buildings even before the planes had hit. On the 101st floor and every other floor in the complex, life simmered at 14,154 different temperatures in the logon ritual for email as men and women lined up the days tasks or as they unloaded some fraction of life at home that had been carried into the world of work. One woman called her husband to report that she had stopped at a drugstore to peick up a second home pregnancy test still not able to accept the results of the one she had taken earlier that morning. A window washer, bucket dangling on his arm waited at the 44th floor of the north tower having just grabbed breakfast. In the health club on top marriott hotel, a Roman Catholic priest with clogged arteries had just climbed down from the stationary bicycle and weighing a decision to complete his workout with a few laps in the pool. In the north tower lobby, judith martin, a secretary with march and mcclennon, had just hopped on an express elevator after finishing a final cigarette outside before work. On the 27th floor of the north tower ed rolled his wheelchair to his desk in the office of empire blue cross and blue shield, his aide having set him up with a head pointer he used to operate his computer. At the top of it all, christine called home from windows on the world, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the north tower where she worked as the assistant general manager. She had lived in new york city for 20 years but still checked in most mornings with her mom and dad back in chicago. Christine and her mother were organizing a visit by her parents to the city, no doubt one that would include a stop at windows. Still, she had a busy morning ahead of her. Besides the regulars having breakfast in the dining area called wild blue, a conference was about to begin in the ballroom sponsored by a big financial publishing firm. Mother and daughter agreed to talk again later that day. Elsewhere in the restaurant, one floor below, neil evan patiently read his newspaper, watched carefully by two coworkers. Who, they wondered, was their boss meeting for breakfast. When it came to boss in, the Port Authority had insatablity. Ness nestor had a meeting downstairs. They stopped briefly at the table to say goodbye and went to the lobby and waited for the elevator. A few strides behind them liz thompson and jeffrey warden hurried to get on board. Nestor held the car door open for them. Quickly they stepped in. Then the doors closed. The last people ever to leave windows on the world began their descent. It was 8 44 a. M. The events of september 11th that began two minutes later took place over a vast amount of real estate. The two towers were 110 each. Each of those floors is one acre. Youre talking about essentially 220 aches and 220 football fields and terrain that was involved in this catastrophe. I want to run through a few slides that we have of what the building looked like and what the damage what the damage entailed. Here we go. Okay. This is the north tower and this shows the impact, began at 94th floor. The very top there, the 99th floor, you can see the top of the tail. At the angle that it entered, it cut across all those different floo floors. Below here is schematic computer simulation done by an Engineering Firm in new york that was involved as you know a lot of litigation over how much insurance would be paid out. As part of that, they sketched out the level of damage through the core of the building. As you can see, it was quite extensive. This is the south tower. The distinction here is that the floors where the plane hit were quite a bit lower. The bottom tip of the plane just caught the top of the 77th floor, the bottom tip of the lower wing. Then the tail sliced through a little bit of the 84th sorry, yeah, 84th floor and some of it went into the 85th floor. This plane didnt hit directly through the core of the building as cleanly as the other one had. As you can see when it was entering, it was kind of at an angle. So rather than going right through the center of the building, it went off to the sides. N now, this is the stairway layout in the south tower. There were three in each building, a, b, and c. They ran right down the middle of the towers with one exception. When it got to the sky lobbies, you know, the trade center had two sky lobbies, one at the 44th floor of each tower and one at the 78th. Express elevators would go up there and drop people off and then they would take shuttles to whatever floor they were going to. At the sky lobbies there were huge elevator machines just above them. So what happens is as the stairs come down and approach the sky lobby, they have to swing out to the perimeter of the building. As you can see here stairway a goes out to the 78th. Around the 80th floor it starts to swing out and goes to the outside. That happens with the other stairways, too. Okay. But that becomes very important in the ability of people who survive in the south tower as opposed to the north tower. Because as you remember, it said the plane hit much higher in the north tower. It hit up in this area. The three stair cases were immediately destroyed. In the south tower this is the north tower. So these stair cases were just devastated immediately by the entrance. In the south tower, the staircase a, because the plane cut over that way, missed that stairway. That became a very important escape route for 18 people. One other significant thing you need to know about, when the trade center was built in 1968, new york city had just revived its building code. It was very significant for the Port Authority, which was toeflitoef developing the trade center because it reduced requirements for stair cases and stairways. Stair cases are not rentable space. They are essentially a dead load in the building. The fewer stair cases in a place, the more space you can rent. Here is the empire state building, which was built around 1930, 1931, and it has six stair cases, including one thats a reinforced fire tower in the center of the building. Those six stair cases run from the ground all the way up to the top of the building, in the empire state building. In addition as it gets lower, as you get in the lower floors of the empire state building, instead of six you have nine. So it fans out an theres a dispersion of the folks coming down the stairs. In the trade center you have three stair cases in the core of the building from the mezzanine up to the top of the building. As i mentioned before, the only place where they divert is at that 78th floor and 44th floor. So that was very important to the survival that morning. The sisters of ttories of th trapped upstairs, the newspaper account, words like cell phone or email or blackberry. When we found those accounts, generally there would have been some interview, maybe a paper even as far away as canada, in which someone had spoken from inside the towers to a loved one. When we identified those, we sought to go out and reinterview those people. Then a database author for the times, they created these databases we used in which you were able to catalog all the interviews you had done, organize them either by name or by company or by floor they were on, and then you would search it. This gave the ability now to read four, five, six, seven accounts from people who had all been on the 106th floor of the north tower. In reading them one against another, you began to get a sense of what actually happened on that floor, not just individual snapshots but a little bit more the narrative of what happened on that floor. We became particularly interested in the floors where there had been a lot of communications, obviously. But the other floors we game interested in were what we called the boarding area. Those were the floors where just below where the plane hit. Where although the people may not have been necessarily hurt by the impact, they had been trapped by the jammed doors when the buildings twisted. They were the scenes of some very dramatic rescues. Also we went to court. After a court settlement, we were able to get two dozen radio tapes from the Port Authority that detailed what their police and other workers had done that morning. The police and Fire Departments also gave us their radio tapes, although not their 911 calls. The tapes they gave us were the tapes between the dispatcher and their people at the scene. In particular one tape from the special operations divisions had the transmissions of the helicopter pilots as they were circumstance lipping around the building and watching the events unfold on the upper floors. We also got about 200 oral histories from both the firefighters and from the Port Authority Police Officers who had been inside the tower that day. All of these, like the interviews with survivors or family members, were entered into a database so you could search by Engine Company or floor or by name. The net effect of having so many sources on a particular point was that you were able<  to ge very detailed accounts. For example, there was the case of ed and abe. The rough the outline of their story was already known by the time we had started the book but the details werent as wellknown as we came to know them. They were computer programmers from blue cross and blue shield and they worked on the 27th floor of the north tower. They had been friends for a long time. Ed had been injured in a diving accident as a young man and he was confined to a wheelchair. Nothing below the neck moved. The elevators didnt work and he couldnt get out of the building but he refused to leave him behind. According to interviews, a series of people had interacted with them during the course of the morning which gave us a completely continuous account of their whereabouts during the entire 102 minutes as they moved in and out of stairway c on the 27th floor they were with captain William Burke of Engine Company 21 for quite a while, who stayed with the pair, even after he knew the south tower had collapsed. He like ed and abe did not survive. We found eds nurse irma, who had been with him this morning. She gave us her account before her departure at their insistence from the building. They detailed phone calls with him. In the Port Authority radio tapes we noticed this transmission on channel 28 from one of the workers. Trilli electrical to 77. Im in tower one, 27th floor, c staircase. I have a man in a wheelchair. He needs assistance. The speaker, it turned out, we found out a guy by the name of anthony, an electrician who worked in the building and had survived. We found him, and we found out that he had spent much of the morning with ed and abe. Then he was able to give us the following account, which we were able to put in the book. As they waited for help, they moved about the 27th floor. They had been to the stairwell, to the elevator banks, and to a Conference Room where a firefighter told them to stuff wet ratigs underneath the doors. Several people did what they could to make those left on the floor comfortable. Anthony, an electrician passed out snapple and water from a hallway vending machine. Firefighters poured the drinks over their heads. One firefighter looked at him as they stood together in the landing for stairway c. He could have left much earlier, but the fire upstairs in the north tower seemed far away, the danger distant. Why dont you go, the fireman asked . No, he replied, im staying with my friend. In what we call the border country, border land, just around and below the impact zone, we followed in the north tower a particularly stirring pair of men named frank d. Martini and pablo ortiz. They worked on the 88th floor, which was about five floors below the bottom point of the impa impact. They had quite a job getting the way clear out of their floor. And they managed to do it. They got about 25 to who people off of their floor by clearing a path through a lot of rubble, down some corridors that were not burning and into a stairc e staircase. But the situation was not as hospitable on the floors above and below. One floor up, 189, the doors were jammed or unreachable. The occupants of that floor could not climb over rubble and get out the way their counterparts on the 88th floor had. Rafael, who had been led into the Lawyers Office down the hall and sat on a chair with his hat had been led into a Lawyers Office down the hall and sat on a chair with his hat in his lap. Diane watched in slight amazement as most people from metropolitan life migrated into her space. In the office of cosmos insurance another group formed. The companys president opened the office door to stuff his jacket underneath and the sudden shaft of life fell into the dark, smoky hallway. There lynn simpson had been trying to find somewhere to go away from the office of her Public Relations firm where the conference table burst into flames after the plane hit. She followed the dash of light from his office and led her staff toward it. No one seemed to know one another. Everyone began making calls both there and in the law office where defontes alone a moment earlier now had more than a dozen people with her. Stephanie manning from metlife hung up the phone and reported, they are aware of the situation. Situation . What situation, retorted rob, the president of mets life branch in the trade center. With more phone calls, word of the crash filtered through the room with friends and family members, who were home watching television. Someone switched on the radio and a disk jockey was making jokes about how drunk the pilot must have been to crash into the trade center. Rick brian, a lawyer who worked for metlife, had gone outside with others to investigate escape routes. They found of the three stairways, two were all but impossible to get to. The floor itself felt as if it were melting and buckling. The stairway door nearest them was wedged tightly into the frame. Do you have a fire extinguisher, brian asked defontes and she found one in the office. He took it out to the cavity where the elevator shafts had been. Ridiculous, he thought, he was sprinkling a few drops into an ocean of flame. A group of men began throwing t shoulders and all the strength at the jammed stairway door but had no luck. A few pounded on it, frustrated. People began to make phone calls home. This time to say that the situation was desperate and to bring up matters left unsaid or affirm part of their lives. Defontes called her boyfriend but couldnt reach him then called a girlfriend to say she loved her and her child. The men and women of the floor had taken small protective steps of sensible people in smoke. They had moistened clothing for a filter, called for help, stuck jackets into the crevices at the bottoms of office doors, breathing through damp paper towels, men and women banged on the metal stairway door but the act had an air of futility. Nathan from metlife stood in the hallway wondering if the world was unraveling. Suddenly, a muffled voice called out, get away from the door. A moment later the claw tooth of a crowbar burst through the drywall tearing around the frame. Pablo ortiz pushed the door open. Behind him in the stairs were Frank Demartini. He told the people they are to move quickly to the stairs. Then he opened the doors to cosmos insurance where others were huddled. Lets go, ortiz announced. As walter entered the stairwell, demartini and ortiz were behind him. He thought he saw them continue up the stairs. So on the 90th floor, one floor above, a young woman is trapped in her office. Shes about a month away from getting married. Shes called home to nashville, and they are stuck. Everybody in her office is stuck, then a flashlight comes bobbing into the room. We dont know for sure who that is but were pretty confident it was one of these two men, frankie martini or pablo ortiz, the only two wandering around that part of the building. On the 8 th floor, four floors below there was a Career Planning seminar going on, and that group was also trapped in their office. Again, one of these two men showed up and led them out through a door that had previously been jammed shut. Above the 91st floor, the stairways were plugged solid, the collapsed drywall forming an impermiable membrane, a borderline that could not be crossed even for people on the 92nd and 93rd floors, most of which had not been touched by the plane impact. Below 92, across all or parts of 10 floors, dozens of people had been unable to open doors or walk through burning corridors to the stairs and find their way past the rubble. Then help appeared with crowbar, flashlight, hard hat and big mouths, Frank Demartini and pablo ortiz had pushed back the Boundary Line between life and death. Now, the attempts, the rescues, of course the rescue efforts did not only go on up in the high floors, we know that the city mounted one of the largest efforts in its history. Thousands of police and firefighters and ems workers and others voluntarily rushed to the scene. They faced, you know, not one calamity but two calamities. As they were fighting fires otrying to fight fires and trying to get up to this fire way up in the sky they were getting word there was yet another plane on the way. Of course we now know there wasnt another plane on the way to new york. But once this had happened twice in a single morning, there was nothing that you could not dismiss there was nothing you could dismiss out of hand. You had to take all those threats seriously. So let me just show you how they were organized that morning. Here are the two towers. Again, theres the floors of impact. The north tower a little higher than the south tower. Over here on west street, there was a Fire Command Center being operated by the Fire Department, and then inside the two lobbi lobbies this is one World Trade Center here and thats the lobby of it. Over here is the lobby to number two World Trade Center, the south tower. At both of those buildings, there were fire chiefs operating, sending their firefighters up towards the fire. Now the fact is they had a very, very limited view of what was going on. You know, when youre standing at the bottom of a vertical plane thats 1350 feet high, you cant tell whats happening a quarter mile above you. And over on this side on the other hand, there were helicopters circling both those towers. Those were helicopters operated by the police department. There was no one from the Fire Department in those helicopters that morning. They had a lot of difficulties working together those two agencies. The Police Command center was set up over here on church street. This was about 7 acres here, so its quite a distance from where the fire command operation is. There was effectively no communication between those two agencies that morning. So the perspective of those fighting the fire inside the two buildings, or attempting to fight the fire, was limited to what they could see essentially by craning their next straight up. Jumped the gun. Sorry about that. Im going to play a little tape after the first tower collapsed. This is the south tower here. This building was hit at 9 02. It collapsed 57 minutes later at 9 59. This building had been hit at 8 46, and it did not collapse until 10 28. So this one drops in 57 minutes. It is essentially a bolt from the blue. Nobody expects this to happen. The shock of it was so disorienting to people on the ground that many of them didnt understand what had happened. People who survived, for instance, on this side of the street at this fire command area, when they came out, they ran inside to get away from the smoke and cloud of dust that came roaring down. When they came out of these the garage that they had run into over here, they were looking around for the tower that had just been there. Some of them thought they had come out a different door than they had gone in, because they knew it had to be there but it wasnt there anymore. So the disorientation was pretty extreme. The police department, which was somewhat better organized on this front, sent word to its folks, its aviation people that it wanted a report on what was going on with the other tower. So now we are going to hear a little bit of that report. The tape is its not easy to listen to but were going to run a transcript alongside of it, and that ought to help a little bit. Dont panic when you hear a lot of scratching noise, eventually youre going to start understanding what they are saying, plus the transcript, i hope, will be of some assistance. So that was the warning that was given by the Police Helicopter at 10 07. Now, there are 22 minutes left before the north tower collapses. Im going to read you what the perceptions and what the people inside the towers understood was happening after that message was relayed from the Police Helicopters to the Emergency Services commanders. No matter how many times the Police Dispatcher repeated that message, none of the firefighters in the north tower, by a factor of ten the Largest Group of rescuers in the building had radios that could hear those reports. Indeed many of them could not hear reports from their own commanders. The esu Police Officers did spread the word as they evacuated urging everyone they saw, firefighters and civilians and other rescuers to leave at once. But that message was very sporadically and irregularly spread. Lieutenant warren smith was on the 35th floor did get the word to leave. Ill pick up here. Yet as smith went down, he kept coming across firefighters still carrying their heavy coils of hose, still forcing open doors. It was as if nothing had changed. Another cycle of firefighters would search the floors. They had no idea that the order had been given to get out. When smith told them everyone was leaving, he felt they did not believe him. Listen, smith said, forget about that. Drop your rollups, you can get them later if you want, just get out. These firefighters did not have any sense of urgency about complying with a secondhand order, smith felt. He noticed them stopping to look out windows to see what was happening in the street. Because the fire was so distant, many of them had gone up without a basic order, basically to see what they could do. Smith felt they were very confident about the building. He couldnt blame them. The 1993 bombing had shown them it could stand up. It was, he thought, the titanic mentality. On the 19th floor a lieutenant, greg hanson, stops because a young firefighter has popped out as hanson is walking down the stairs and says, i need some help. Hanson walked onto the 19th floor and in the gloom saw a handful of firefighters and civilians. Whats going on, hanson asked, weve got to get out of here . The firefighter brought him to the window and said i dont think we can get out. Weve got to try to get out of here, hanson said. Weve got to go. He headed back to the stairs calling out that people had to leave. They were moving far too slowly, he thought. They could not have heard the same urgent orders. Around that same time another group had also reached the 19th floor. Three new york state officers, they had run into the building to help. Weve met them earlier in the book. They were coming down from the 51st floor. They had run across Police Officers who had passed the word to them. They had stopped on the 19th floor on the way up and noted a Mass Assembly of firefighters. Now on their way down, they again stepped out of the staircase and into the corridor. They could scarcely believe their eyes, the 19th floor just as full as it had been when they came up. Still packed with firefighters, from end to end of the hallway, down other corridors, so tight it would be tough to find a way to squeeze along the wall with them. Carpeted with firefighters. Most stripped, make down to blue tshirts, maps of sweat blotting through the fabric emblazoned with the Fire Department shield. Al winder saw some were lying down, axes leaned against the wall, legs against oxygen tanks. They could not be hearing, winder thought, what we were hearing. The others also took in the scene. They guessed there were at least 100 firefighters on the floor. Were getting out of here, he yelled. Weve been told weve got to get out of the building. No one moved. Well come down in a few minutes, someone said. All the rescue workers are bailing out, he said. All right. Well be right down. As the officers trampled downstairs, the alarm outside the tower grew more urgent. From Police Helicopter aviation 14, an officer named hayes broke through the jumble of radio traffic. Be advised, he said, just not 100 sure, but it does appear that the top of the tower might possibly be leaning at this t e time. It is now 10 28, 102 minutes since the nose of American Airlines flight 11 shot into the 98th floor of the north tower. The bangs are distant and grow nearer and louder. In stairway b Josephine Harris and the men hear the approaching collapse. A bowling ball rolling down the steps. They curl in corners or grab doors to use the frame as shelter, but the doors are hard to budge. The building is twisting, so are the door frames. Jonas pulls at the door from inside the fourth floor. It will not open. He yanks again and springs open and the wind blast ahead of the collapse. Not a gust but a raging storm of a wind. As each floor drops one upon the other, its as if a giant accordion is squeezed pushing 55 million cubic feet of air. Behind the air trusses, slap of metal columns against other tons of metal. Percussive bangs, end sounds. From the street the building seems to spill out of itself, the dust building up and pouring down the four facades toward the ground. Those who had escaped the collapse of the south tower know the impossible is happening yet again. 29 minutes later. A team of men hurry north carrying a chair that holds the slumped form of michael judge, the Fire Department chaplain, who died during the flight from the lobby of the north tower as the south tower fell. Now as the north tower crumbles another fire chaplain runs towards the hudson river. Next to him is a police officer. Father, can i go to confession, the cop yells . The priest thinks for a moment. This is an act of war, isnt it . He replies. I believe so, the policeman says, then im giving general absolution, he says, never slowing down. In sfarp b among the firefighters who had taken on the cause of Josephine Harris and her fallen arches, there is a prayer or two for a swift end. The impossible collisions of floors, steel, glass are belting toward them. Even stronger than the noise is the wind. Sal d agustino tries to open a door to leave the stairwell but flies out leaving them against the wall. Mike off his feet heaves one floor down carries matt down three floors. As the floors drop, the air has nowhere to go. So much of a skyscraper is nothing but air, empty spaces filled by people in buildings like one and two World Trade Center putting little pieces of their daily lives onto those platforms. Here is a desk drawer from diane defontes keeps her sensible shoes, the rack where rafael kava first hung his happen 30 years earlier. The couch in Frank Demartinis office where his aides children nap on saturday afternoons. The big table where the wealthy young men and women dine out of paper bags on junk food fridays. Flower vases and windows on the world that christine checks. So the well set tables of crystal and linen are as pleasing to the eye as the 40mile vista of city and harbor, river and road. Now the lights have gone out, the giant platters of air plunge past the people in the north tower and hit bottom. The wind seems to be bouncing back up stairway b whipping tons of crushed building particles along the shaft. The people stretched up and down the lower floors of that stairway, the ones with Josephine Harris. A couple of other stragglers can see thonothing. They pry open a door but it goes nowhere. They huddle alive in the last in tact stub of the World Trade Center. Above them is only sky. Thank you. [ applause ] gentlemen, thank you. Its a difficult topic for so many of us. Many of us really do want to know more about those who did survive and how their surviving surviving these days. Have they stayed in touch with you after your process of writing the book . Weve heard from a fair number of people who have you know, who are glad, i guess, that we wrote the book. Some people are not. In general weve gotten a pretty good response. A lot of people felt that what had gone on inside the towers really was not well documented. Because what happened outside we all saw. Everybody in the world watched the towers burning. So the people who were inside seemed particularly in general, not everyone, but in general seemed fairly keen to have the history written. Some of the families, actually, were inspiring to me because they were so deeply interested in finding out what had happened, the loved ones. Even though when they went to wakes and the like and would piece together stories, they still felt there was so much they hadnt learned about what had happened. There was several families i kept up with who still think theres much more to be told than even whats in our book. Thank you for that. Other comments or questions, you can do so for the microphone. Everybody wants to catch their breath for a minute as they process all their thoughts and feelings about this. Comments . A question . Sir, please, will you step up to the microphone so we can all hear you . Thank you. Come around as well. Okay. Thank you. I knew many of the people that were inside the building, so given my profession. Your book was marvelous. It really told a story that was missing from many of the other books that i saw. My question is what, if anything, remains unknown or untold about that day . Theres one mystery that i think would be fascinating and i think helpful to find out. One of the great problems in the north tower was that the radios, as jim read, many of the firefighters didnt get the evacuation order. That was because an improvement that was made after had the 1993 bombing, that was designed to try to create some kind of a workable radio system within the towers. That improvement didnt work for whatever reason. Theres a variety of explanations and a bit of a debate over that. But one of the men had was most schooled, a chief by the name of palmer, most schooled in the Way Radio Communications worked for the Fire Department, he at some point in time in the north tower tested this repeater system with another fire chief and they both determined it didnt work, all right. He then god assigned this happened before the south tower had been hit. When the south tower was hit, he was then reassigned to be sort of the lead fire chief heading towards the fire in the south tower. Sometimes before he left the north tower, where the decision was made that the repeater system, the amplification system wasnt working and therefore they were going to be left to use their tiny hand talkies which dont do much in a big building with all those acres of steel and concrete, somehow he became to learn that the repeater did work, at least it worked in some fashion. So he began to use that same channel they had abandoned in the north tower in the south tower, began to get in some cases Seamless Communications between himself on the 78th floor, where he ultimately did reach the fire floor, and the chief, chief donald burns in the lobby. It was those communications which are ultimately recovered in a tape in the rubble which showed that the repeater at least for a part of the day was working, although they had abandoned it in the north tower. The mystery is how does palmer come to figure that out . Once he figures it out, it doesnt seem like everyone in the south tower goes onto the repeater channel. Theres certainly many, many firefighters in the south tower who dont appear to have ever gone onto this channel. So thats one of the remaining mysteries of the day. As they go forward, i think Radio Communications and highrise fires is something which the Fire Department is still trying to get a grip on. I dont know whether or not many people in the second tower could have been saved but i was in Rockefeller Center and we saw immediately the first the impact of the first plane. Constantly over the television they kept on saying that a small plane had hit the first tower when, in fact, it was a large commercial plane. In essence, it created a completely different image than what was really, in fact, taking place. The first thought was that basically some misguided, inexperienced pilot had hit a plane. Where, in fact, in retrospect we all know it was a commercial plane. How is it, in fact, this gap of knowledge took place for so long, that no one, in effect, corrected the television stations that were, in effect, transmitting the information to all of us. Thats a good question. One thing is you have to count on its almost inevitable the fog of war descends and the fog of war had fallen on new york. Nobody really a few people actually saw it more authoritative and could say right away that a commercial airliner had hit. But you know, most of the broadcast media certainly didnt know what happened. We at the New York Times didnt quite understand what had happened. And there was nobody around to really tell us. We were looking at police tapes, early police tapes, and they thought a missile had been fired from the roof of the woolworth building. The amount of Incorrect Information that was floating around, you know, i happen to go to iraq a year later during the invasion, you know, i saw the level of just wrong stuff that comes out in a situation like that. A lot of the tv helicopters, which normally would have created a birds eye view of the towers i think were actually ordered to land as a result of the nofly zone. I think that that obviously so that the only helicopters that had a birds eye view of what was happening was Police Helicopters. In a moment like that, we do try to get the news, and we had people there at the time, but there is a delay between what the police are finding out and then what gets to the reporters and then what gets onto the tv stations. I think that delay might have even increased that day because everyone was stunned with what was happening. We know how confused they were in civil aviation. The faa didnt understand what was happening. Laguardia air tower had no idea. They were still rolling out planes, you know, as the second plane was flying into the south tower. There were planes on the runway ready to go when they finally got the order to lock down the airport. So but one thing that did come up was people inside the towers were turning to broadcast media because there was no internal p. A. System anymore and they were calling 911. Unfortunately not only did broadcast media have the wrong information but 911 operators had bad information, too. Thats a real crimp in the pipeline of facts. I think in the future they are going to try to create it so that 911 operators will get updated information in realtime so that they dont simply just give reports of like stay put, everything is going to be fine, which is pretty much what they are left with now, because they dont get updated information. Okay. Gentlemen, we have time for one more question, please. I havent read your book, but of course im going to read it now. My question is what has happened as far as buildings are constru. Has there been any reconsideration of the, you know, from this tragedy . There was an excellent study done in the first months afterwards by the City Building department with a task force. Now, theyve enact. Ed some of their recommendations. They have not enacted the building industry is resisting others that will cost them a lot of money. That will sacrifice rental income and so forth for stairways. Theyre trying to work out some compromises on those issues but the fact is some of the most in my, what i would regard as the most important reforms are still, you know, stalemated right now. Yeah. The buildings department, i think, has said that theyre going to wait for the National Institute of standards and technology, which is doing a federally funded and largescale study of the integrity of the building and what happened to cause the collapse, and i think the buildings departments position is they want to see the outcome of that study before they make their final recommendations as to can what theyre going to do locally in new york city. Thank you, james dwyer and kevin flynn. Things your being with us today. Thank you. Well invite you to come out and answer others questions if you dont mind. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, all. Weeknights this month we feature American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight, a look at history through photographs during the Great Depression and world war ii. Photographers working for the u. S. Governments Farm Security administration. And later the office of war information. Created about 1,600 color photographs depicting life in the United States and war production activities. Collection curator beverly brannen of the library of Congress Talks about the photographers and the images. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. Each week, American History tvs american artifacts visits museums and historic places. Next,somerset county, pennsylvania, to visit the flight 93 National Memorial and take a tour of the Visitors Center which details the events of september 11th, 2001. The memorial is the final resting place of 40 passengers and crew whose decisive actions prevented four al qaeda hijackers from crashing a United Airlines 757 into the likely target, the u. S. Capitol building. 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