Director of the daytime program. Daytime at the side heart building is 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 92nd street learning count talks. Its called tuesdays with the times. Its featuring noted New York Times journalists and authors. Our tuesdays with the time series as well as all of our daytime lecturers are provided for a formal discussion, debate on issues that affect us all. Todays discussion focuses on a topic that still remains greatly in our consciousness. We welcome journalist james dwyer, and kevin flynn, for discussion based upon their published book 102 minutes, the untold story of the fight to survive inside the twin towers. Jim dwyer and kevin flynn are native new yorkers, veteran newspaper reporters, and winter so many awards together and separately. James joined the New York Times in may 2001 as a reporter for the metropolitan section. Prior to joining the times, mr. Wire was economists and associate editor for the New York Daily News and previously a reporter for the third bergen record. U actual innocence five days to execution and other dispatchers from the wrongly convicted. Hes also the author of subway lives, 24 hours in the life of a new york city subway. Kevin flynn is a special projects editor for the New York Times since february 2003. He was the newspapers but 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 ever separate of several journalistic awards including a 1998 first place award for the new York State Associated award for and at reporting and the 1991 distinguish reporting award from the new york Newspaper Publishers association. In 1998, he was a part of the team a new say that received indepth reporting award from the new York State Associated press. So who better to tell us the dramatic and moving account of the struggle to survive the inside of the World Trade Center on the morning of september 11 than the authors of 102, the untold story of the fight to survive inside the twin towers. Please welcome jim dwyer and kevin flynn. thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, wendy and thanks to the y for having us this morning and thanks to all of you for coming. I would like to read something from the authors note of our book. For 102 minutes on the morning of september 11, 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. Their accounts are drawn from 200 interviews with survivors and witnesses. Thousands of pages are transcribed radio transmissions, phone messages, emails, and oral histories. All sources are named and 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 on to acts of grace at a brutal hour. The immediate challenges these people faced were not geopolitical 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 traced a narrative of excruciating loss. They also describe how the simplest gestures and tools were put to transcendent use. Everything from a squeegee in a stuck elevator to a squeeze on the shoulder. From 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 and if you are 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 know about what happened inside the towers. Particularly to the people who were trapped on the upper floors. 102 minutes is, to the best that we can reconstruct it, their story, their history, told when we could find them in their own words. Hey, beverly, this is sean. 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 its horrible. Bye. Thats sean 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 were called outside to loved ones. The survivors of the day, we found, could tell as much about what happened on the mid and upper floors but they could not help us with the upper floors where hundreds had been trapped after 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 it began like the book with 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 of the complex, life simmered at different temperatures in the logon ritual for email, as men and women lined up the days task 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 pick up a second home pregnancy test, still not quite able to accept the results of the one she had taken earlier that morning. A window washer, bucket dangling on his arm, waded at the 34th floor of the north tower having just grabbed a bite of breakfast on 43. In the health club, atop the marriott hotel, a Roman Catholic priest with clogged arteries had just climbed down from the stationary bicycle and was weighing a decision to complete his workout with a few laps in the pool. In the north tower lobby, judith martin, a secretary with a firm had just hopped on an express elevator after finishing a final cigarette outside before work. On the 2th floor of the north tower, ed rolled his wheelchair to his desk in the office of empire bluecross and blue shield. His aide having set him up with the head pointer that 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 was 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 risk waters, a big financial publishing firm. Mother and daughter agreed to talk again later that day. Elsewhere in the restaurant, one floor below, neil leven patiently read his newspaper, watched carefully by two workers, who, they wondered, was their boss meeting for breakfast . When it came to gossip, the Port Authority had the insatiability of most bureaucracies, but nester and tianny couldnt stick around to satisfy their curiousity because nester had a meeting downstairs. Instead, they stopped briefly at levens table to say goodbye and then walked to the restaurants lobby and caught a waiting elevator. A few strides behind them, liz thompson and jeffrey warden hurried to get on board. Nester held the car door open for them. Quickly they stepped in. Then the doors closed and the last people ever to leave windows on the world began their descent. It was 8 44 am. The events of september 11th that began two minutes later took place over a vast amount of real estate. The two towers, as you know, were 110 stories each, each of those floors was one acre, so youre talking about essentially 220 acres, 220 football fields of terrain that was that was involved in this catastrophe, and im going 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. Ok. This is the north tower and this shows the impact, as you can see it. It began around the 94th floor and at the very top there, the 99th floor, you can see the top of the tail and at the angle it entered, it cut across all those different floors. Below here is a scheme attic computer simulation that was done by an Engineering Firm in new york. It was involved as you know, a lot of litigation over how much insurance would be paid out but 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, and the bottom tip of the plane just caught the top of the 77th floor, the bottom tip of the lower wing, and then the tail sliced through a little bit of the 84st sorry. Yeah 84th floor, and then 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. Now, this is the stairway layout in the south tower. There were three in each building a, b, and c, and 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 and express elevators would go up there and drop people off and then they would take schultzes to the whatever floor they were going to shuttles to whatever floor they were going to and at the sky lobbies there were huge elevator machines just above them, so what happens is, as the stairs come down and they approach the sky lobby, they have to swing out to the perimeter of the building. And as you can see here, stairway a goes out to the 78th, on the 80th floor starts to swing out, goes to the outside and that happens with the other stairways, too, but that becomes very important in the ability of people to survive in the south tower as opposed to the north tower, because as you remember, remember, we said the plane hit much higher in the north tower, it hit up in this area, so the three staircases were immediately destroyed. In the south tower this is the north tower. So these staircases were just devastated immediately by the entrance. But in the south tower, the staircase a, because the plane caught over that way, missed that stairway and that became a very important escape route for 18 people. Now one other significant thing you want to know about is that when the trade center was built in 19 starting in 1968, new york city had just revised its Building Code and it was very significant for the Port Authority which was developing the trade center because it reduced certain requirements for staircases and stairways. And staircases are not rentable space. They are essentially a dead load in the building and the fewer staircases that are in place, the more space you can rent. Heres the Empire State Building built around 1931, this has six staircases, including one thats a reenforced fire tower in the center of the building. Those six staircases 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 and theres a dispersion of the folks coming down the stairs. The other center, you have three staircases in the core of the building, from the mezzanine up to the top of the building from the mezzanine they divert. Its at the 78th floor and 44th floor, so that was very important to the survival that morning. To get the stories of the people who were trapped upstairs, we began the research by trying to look through newspaper accounts in order to see if we could find key words. Unidentified speaker words like cell phone or email or blackberry, and when we found those accounts, generally there would have been some interview, maybe from 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, and then tom torik, a data base enterer and another person created these databases we used in which you were able to basically 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 you the ability now to read four or five, six, seven accounts of people who had all been on, say, the 106th floor of the north tower, and in reading the reading them one against mother, you began to get a sense of what had actually happened on that floor, not just individual snapshots but a little bit more the narrative of what had happened on that there are. We became particularly interested on the floor where there had been a lot of communications. But the other floors that we became interested in were what we called the boarding area and those are the floors where just below were the plane had 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. And they were the scenes of some very dramatic rescues. Also, we went to court and after a Court Settlement were able to get about two dozen radio tapes from the Port Authority that detailed what their police and other workers had done that morning. The police and the Fire Departments also give us their radio tapes, although not their 9 11 calls. Tapes that 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 circling 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 AuthorityPolice Officers who had been inside the tower that day. All of these, like the interviews with survivors of family members, were entered into a database so that you could search by Engine Company or by floor or by name, and the net effect of having so many sources on a particular point was that you were able to get very detailed accounts. For example, it was the case of ed and abe. The rough outline of their story was already wellknown by the time that we had started the book but the details werent as wellknown as we had come to know them. They were computer programmers from bluecross 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 his neck moved. With the elevators out, he could not easily get out of the building but abe refused to leave him behind. In reporting it out, we learned from some survivor interviews and from the firefighter oral histories that a series of people had interacted with them during the course of the morning. That gave us a completely continuous account of their whereabouts throughout the entire 102 minutes as they moved in and out of stairway c on the floor. The 27th floor. They were with a captain of Engine Company 21 for a while who stayed with the pair, even after he knew the south tower had collapsed and he, like ed and abe, did not survive. We found eds nurse irma who had been with him that morning and she gave us her account before her departure at their insistence from the building, and abes relatives detailed their phone conversations with him from the north tower. And finally, in those Port Authority radio tapes, we noticed this transmission on channel 28 from one of the workers. 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 was a guy by the name of anthony giodina, an electrician who worked in the building and survived 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 rags underneath the doors. Several people did what they could to make those left on the floor more comfortable. The electrician who worked in the building passed out snaffle and water from a vending machine in the hallway. Firefighters poured the drinks over their heads. One firefighter looked at them 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 applied. Im staying with my friend. In the what we call the border country of the border land, just around, below the impact zone, we followed in the north tower a particularly stirring pair of men named Frank Demartini and pablo ortiz, and they worked on the 88th floor, which was about five floors below the bottom point of impact and had quite a job getting the way clear out of their floor. And they manageed to do it. They got about 25 to 40 people off of their floor by clearing a path through a lot of rubble, down some guarders that were not burning, and into a staircase. But the situation was not as hospitable on the floors above and below. One floor up, on 89, 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 cabba who had been led into the Lawyers Office gun on the whole and sat on a chair with his hat in his lap. Diane watched in slight amazement as most of the 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 had burst into flames after the plane hit. She followed the dash of light from the office, then led her staff toward it. No one seemed to know one another. Everyone began making calls, both there and in the law office where defontis alone a moment earlier now had more than a dozen people with her. Stephanie manning from met life hung up the phone and reported, theyre aware of the situation. Situation . What situation retorted the president of met lifes branch in the trade center. With more phone calls, word of the crash filtered through the room from friends and family members who were home watching television. Someone switched on the radio and a disc 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 met life and others had gone outside to investigate escape routes. They found of the three stairway, the two on the north side 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, he asked, 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 putting a few drops into a nation of flame. A group of men began throwing all their 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 that had been left unsaid or to affirm what was already part of their lives. Rick brian called his father. Defontis called her boyfriend but couldnt reach him. Then she called a girlfriend to say she loved her and her child. The men and women of the 89th floor had taken the small protective steps of sensible people in smoke. They had moistened clothing to use as 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 up utility. Nathan stood in the hallway wondering if the world was unraveling. Suddenly, a muffled voice called out, get away from the door. And moment later, the claw toot of a crowbar burst through the dry wall, tearing around the frame. Pac bell ortiz pushed the the door open. And behind him were Frank Demartini and another. Ortiz walked into the offices and told the people there to move quickly to the stairs. Then he opened the doors to the offices of cosmos insurance. Many 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. And 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 theyre stuck. Everybody in her office is stuck. And then a flashlight comes bobbing into the room and we dont know for sure who that is, but were pretty confident of that it was one of these two men, frank or pablo, the only two warning around that part of the building and then on the 86th floor, four floors below, there was a Career Planning seminar going on, and that group was also trapped in their office, and again, one of these two men showed up and led them out to a door through a door that had previously been jammed shut. North side were all but above the 91st floor, the stairways were plugged solid. The collapsed dry wall forming an impermanentable membrane, a border line that could not be crossed, even for people on the 92nd and 93rd floors, most of which have not been touched by the plane impact. And 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 more, frank and pablo 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 on the high floors. We know that the city mounted one of the largest efforts in its history. Thousands of police and firefighters and e. M. S. Workers and others voluntarily rushed to the scene and they faced a, you know, not one calamity but two calamities, and as they were fighting fires and trying to or trying to fight fires and trying to get up to this fire that was way up in the sky, they were getting worried that there was yet another plane on the way. And, of course, we now know there wasnt another plane on the way in new york but once this had happened twice in a single morning, it was there was nothing that you could not dismiss theres 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, and again, theres the floors of impact, the north tower a little higher than the south tower. And over here, on west street, there was a Fire Command Center being operated by the Fire Department and then inside the two lobbies, this is one World Trade Center here and thats the lobby of it, and then over here is the lobby to number two World Trade Center, the south tower. And both of those buildings, they 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 there were helicopters circling both of those towers, and those were helicopters operated by the police department, and they were there was no one from the Fire Department in those helicopters that morning. They had a lot of difficulties working together, those two agencies, and the Police Command center was set up over here on church and v. C. Streets, which is quite a distance from where the fire command operation is, and there is 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 necks 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, and 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, all right . So this one drops in 57 minutes, and it is essentially a bolt from the blue. Nobody expects this to happen. And the 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 were when they came out, they ran inside to get away from the smoke and the cloud of dust that came roaring down, and 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 and some of 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 that its aviation people that it. Here is a report with what was going on with the other tower and so now we are going to hear a little bit of that report. The tape is its not easy to listen to, but there were going to run a transcript alongside of it and that ought to help a little bit. And dont panic when you hear a lot of scratchy noise and stuff. Eventually youre going to start understanding what theyre saying, plus the transcript i hope will be of some assistance. So that was unidentified speaker the that was the warning that was given by the Police Helicopter at 10 07. Now there are 22 minutes left before the before the north tower collapses, and im going to read you what the perceptions and what the people inside the towers understood was happening. That was the warning that was given by the Police Helicopter at 10 07. Now there are 22 minutes left before the before the north tower collapses, and im going to read you what the perceptions and what the people inside the towers understood was happening. After the message was relayed from the Police Helicopters after the message was relayed from the Police Helicopters to the Emergency Services commanders. No matter how many times the Police Dispatcher13 no matter how many times the Police Dispatcher repeated that message, none of the firefighters in the north tower, by a factor of 10, 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 e. S. U. 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 that 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 economying with the 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 distance, many of them had gone up without a specific order. Basically to see what they could do and 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 hansen, stops because a young firefighter has popped out as hanson is walking down the stairs and says i need some help. Hanson walked on the 1 th floor and in the gloom saw some firefighters and some civilians. Whats going on, hansen asked, we got to get out of here. A firefighter brought him to the window and said, i dont think we can get out. We got to try to get out of here, hansen said, we got to go. He headed back for 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 already reach the 19th floor. Three new york state officers. They had run into the building to help, we met them earlier in the book and they were coming down from the 51st floor. They had run across some Police Officers who had passed the word to them. They had stopped on the 19th floor on the way up and met with an 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 19 th floor was just as full as it had been when they came up, still packed with firefighters. From endtoend in the hallway, it would be tough to find a place to squeeze in alongside the wall with them, the place was carpeted with firefighters. Most were sitting and had stripped off their coats, helmets off, some down to their tshirts, mats of sweat blotting through the fabric emblazened with the Fire Department shield. Some were lying down. Axes leaned against the wall. Legs stretched out. Arms against oxygen tanks. They could not be hearing, he 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. A lot of the rescue workers are bailing out, he said. Yeah, well be right down. As they tramped 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 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, then grow nearer and louder. Unidentified speaker and 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. They pull at the door, it will not open, he yanks again and it springs open and the wind blasts ahead of the collapse. Not a gust but a raging storm of a wind. As each floor drops, one upon the other, it is as if a giant accord confront is being squeezed, pushing 55 million cubic feet of air behind the rush of air comes the screech of the falling tresses, the slap of tons of metal columns against other tons of metal, er and cussive bangs and sounds. From the street the building seems to spill out of itself, the dust boiling up and then pouring down. Those who had escaped the collapse of the south tower know the impossible is happening yet again. 29 minutes later, a team holding a chair that carries 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, he runs toward the hudson river, next to him is a plaintiff. Father, can i go to confession . The cop yells. The priest thinks for a moment. This is an act of war, isnt it . Yeah i believe so, the policeman says, im giving general abc pollution, he declares general absolution he declares, never slowing down. In stairway b, among the firefighters who have 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 floor, steel, glass, are belting toward them. Even stronger than the noise is the wind. One person tries to open a door to leave the stairwell but it flies out and throws him against the wall. The wind lifts another off his feet and heaves him one floor down. It 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 on to those platforms. Here is a desk drawer where diane keeps her sensible shoes. The rack where rafael first hung his hat 30 years earlier. The couch in franks office where his aides children nap on their afternoon at daddys job. The big table up in another area where the wealthy men and women dine out of paper bags on junk food fridays. The flower vases on windows of the world that Christine Olender checks so that the tables 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 nothing. They pry open the door but it goes nowhere. They huddle, alive, in the last 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, and many of us really do want to know more about those who did survive and how theyre 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 has gone on inside the towers really was not welldocumented 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 they were 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. They would piece together stories, they still felt there was so much that they had hadnt really learned about what had happened so there were some families ive kept up with who still think theres much more to be told than whats even in our book. Thank you for that. Other comments or questions . You can do so from the microphone, please. Everybody wants to catch their breath for a minute as they process all their thoughts and feelings about this. Comments . Questions . Sir, please, will you step up to the microphone so that we can all hear you. Thank you. Come around as well. Ok. Thank you. I knew many of the people that were inside the building, so ive through my profession and your book was marvelous and 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 the north tower was that the radios, as jim read, many of the firefighters really didnt get the evacuation order, and that was because an improvement that was made after 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, and theres a variety of explanations for and a bit of a debate over that, but one of the men who was most schooled, a chief by the name of Oriole Palmer, who is most schooled in the way of 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 that it didnt work. All right. But he then got this happened before the south tower had been hit. When the south tower was hit, he was then reassigned to be like sort of the lead fire chief heading toward the fire in the south tower. Sometime between the time 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 just to use their tiny handy talkies, which dont do much in a big Tall Building with all those acres of steel and concrete, somehow he became to learn that the repeater did work, or at least it worked in some fashion and so he began to use that same channel that 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. And 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 Oriole Palmer come to figure that out and once he figured it out, it doesnt seem like everyone in the south tower is it goes on to the repeater channel. Some theres certainly many, many firefighters that are in the south tower who dont appear to have ever gone on to this channel. So thats one of the remaining mysteries of the day and as they go forward, i think Radio Communications and high rises 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, and constantlyly 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, and in essence it created a completely different image than what was really, in fact, taking place. First thought was that basically some, you know, misguided, inexperienced pilot had hit a plane, when, in fact, in retrospect we all know it was a commercial plane. How is it, that, in fact, this gap of acknowledge of knowledge took place for so long that no one in effect corrected the television stations who, in fact, were transmitting the information to all of us . Thats a good question. One thing is that you have to count on its almost inevitable, you know, the thought of war i mean, a few people actually saw it more authoritative and could say right away that a commercial airliner had hit but most of the broadcast media certainly didnt know what had 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 some of the police tapes, the early police tapes and they thought a missile had been fired from the roof of the woolworth building, and the amount of Incorrect Information that was floating around, you know, i happened to go to iraq later that year during the invasion and i saw the level of just, you know, wrong stuff that comes out in a situation like that. A lot of the tv helicopters, which normally would have created a birdseye view of the towers, i think actually were ordered to land. Right. As a result of the noflyzone. And so i think that, obviously, so that the only helicopters then that had a birdseye view of what was happening were the Police Helicopters and, you know, in a moment like that, i mean, 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 on to the tv stations, that and i think that delay might have been even increased that day because everyone was stunned with what was happening. Look, we know how, you know, confused they were in aviation. The f. A. A. Didnt understand what was happening. Laguardia air tower had no idea. They were still running out planes, you know, as the second plane was flying into the south tower. There were planes on the runway ready to go and they finally got the order to lock down the airport. So but one thing that did come up is that people inside the towers were turning to broadcast media because there was no internal p. A. System anymore, and they were calling 911 and unfortunately not only did broadcast media have the wrong information, but the 911 operators had bad information, too, and thats a real crimp in the pipeline of facts. I think in the future theyre going to try to create it so that 911 operators will get updated information in realtime so that they dont simply just give reports. Everything is going to be fine, which is pretty much what theyre left with now, because they dont get updated information. Gentlemen, we have time for one more question, please. I havent read your book but, of course, im going to read it now, but my question is, what has happened as far as buildings are concerned, new construction . Has there been any reconsideration of the you know, from this tragedy . There was an excellent study done in the first month afterwards. By the City Building department with a task force. Theyve enacted some of the recommendations, theyve 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 going to try to work out some compromises on those issues but the fact is that some of the most, in my what i would regard as the most important reforms are still, you know, stale mated right now. 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 large scale study of the integrity of the building and what happened to cause the collapse, and i think the Buildings Department position is they want to see the outcome of that study before they make their final recommendations as to what theyre going to do locally in new york city. Thank you, james dwyer and kevin flynn. Thank you so much for being with us today. We will invite you to come out and answer other question some other time. Thank you. Thank you all