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