Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Bookshelf Jim Dwyer Kevin Fl

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 hi