Good afternoon, im the director of the program, operating here on the west side for adults with flexible schedules and the time for leisure learning, today we welcome you to the 92nd Street Series in partnership with time stocks. Featuring noted New York Times journalist and authors. Our tuesday with the time series as well as with all of our daytime lectures provide a forum for discussion and 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 discussing their recently 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 and winners of many awards together and separately. James dwyer joined the New York Times in 2001 as a reporter for the metropolitan section, prior to joining the times he was a columnist for the New York Daily News and before that he was a columnist for new york newsday and previously a reporter for the burkin record. He is the author of many books, he is also the author of subway lives 24 hours in the life of the new york city subway. Kevin flynn was the new york Police Bureau chief correspondant on 2011, previously he worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, new york newsday, and of the stanford advocate. He is the recipient of several journalistic awards including the 1988 first place award for the new York State Associated press or indepth reporting and for or indepth reporting and the 1991 Distinction Award for the new york publishers association. In 1998 he was part of a team that received an award from the new York State Associated press. Who better to tell us the moving account of the struggle to survive inside the World Trade Center on the morning of september 11 than the authors of 102 minutes the untold story of the fight to survive inside the twin towers . Please welcome james dreyer and kevin flynn. Thanks 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, 2001, 14,000 men and women fought for life at the World Trade Center, this book aims to tell what happened solely from this 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 of transcribed radio transmission, phone messages, email, and oral histories. All sources are named and enumerated. No single voice can describe the scenes that unfolded at terrible velocities in so many places, taken together, though, the words, witnesses, and records provide not only a broad view of the devastation, but also a singularly revealing window onto 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 described 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 moving in order to get out, to a crowbar smashing the sheet rock around a jammed door. As chapters in the history of human valor and struggle, these are matters of first importance, they brought us to this book. This book is by our account the 652nd or so that has been written about the events of 9 11 and if you are like a lot of people, you might ask why, why another book about 9 11. It was 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 we can reconstruct their story, their history told when we can find them in their own words. Hey beverly, this is sean, in case you get the message there has been an explosion, it looks like a plane struck, it is on fire at about the 90th floor and it is horrible. Bye. That is sean rooney of an Insurance Company in the south tower 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 New York Times to reconstruct what happened inside the towers by talking to people who had been there that day who had called outside to loved ones. The survivors of the day could tell us much about what had happened on the mid and lower 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, everyone 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 plane had hit. On the 101st floor and every other floor in the complex, lights simmered at different temperatures as men and women lined up todays 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 pick up a second home pregnancy test, still not quite able to accept the results of the first 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 the breakfast. At a health club, a Roman Catholic priest with clogged arteries had just climbed down from a stationary bicycle and was weighing a decision to complete his work out with a few laps in the pool. In the north tower lobby, mr. Martin, a secretary had just hopped on and express elevator after finishing a final cigarette outside before work. On the 27th floor of the north tower, ed v. A. Rolled his wheelchair to his desk, his aide having set him up with a head pointer that he used to operate his computer. At the top of it all, Christine Olander called home from windows on the world, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors on the north tower where she worked as the assistant general manager. She had lived in new york city for 20 years, but still checked and 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 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 11 patiently read his newspaper watched carefully by two coworkers who, they wondered, was their boss meeting for breakfast . When it came to gossip, the Port Authority had the authority of most bureaucracies, but they could not stick around to satisfy their curiosity because one had a meeting downstairs. Instead, they stopped weekly at levinsohn table to say goodbye, then they walked to the lobby and caught a waiting elevator. A few strides behind them, liz thompson and Jeffrey Worden hurried to get on board. Quickly, they stepped in, then the doors closed and the last people ever to leave windows on the world began their dissent. It was 8 44 a. M. James the events of september 11 that happened began in 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, youre talking about essentially 220 acres, 220 football fields of terrain that was involved in this catastrophe. I am going to run through a few slides that we have of what the building looked like and what the damage entailed. Ok, this is the north tower and this shows the impact as you can see it began around the 94th floor. At the very top there, the 99th floor you can see the top of the tail. At the angle that it entered, it cut a cross all those different floors. Below here is a schematic computer simulation that was done by an Engineering Firm in new york that was involved there is 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. The tail sliced through a little bit of the 84th sorry, yeah, 84th floor and then some of it went into the 85th floor. This plane did not 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 at an angle. 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. They ran right down the middle of the towers with one exception. When it got to the sky lobbies, 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 them off and they would take shuttles to whatever floor they were going to. At the sky lobbies there were huge elevator machines just above them. What happens is, as the stairs come down they have to swing out to the perimeter of the building and as you can see here, stairway a goes down to the 78th, around the 80th floor it starts to swing out and it goes to the outside. That happens with the other stairways too. That becomes important and the ability for people to survive in the south tower, remember, 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, these staircases were just devastated immediately to the entrance, but in the south tower, staircase a because the plane cut over that way missed that stairway and that became a very important escape route for 18 people. One other significant thing you want to know about is that when the trade center was built, 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 requirements for staircases and stairways. Staircases are not rentable space, they are essentially a dead load in the building. The fewer staircases that are 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 staircases including one that is a reinforced 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 addition, as it gets lower, as you get into the lower floors, instead of six you have nine so it fans out and there is a dispersion for the folks coming down the stairs. The trade center, you had a three staircases in the core of the building from the mezzanine up to the top of the building. As i mentioned, the only place they opened up where the 78 and 44th floor. To get the stories of the people who were trapped upstairs, we begin the research by trying to look through newspaper accounts in order to find keywords. Words like cell phone, or email, or blackberry. We found in those accounts there had been an interview made from 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. Tom toric who is a database editor at the time created these databases we used in which you are able to basically catalog all the interviews you had done, organize them by name or by company or by floor they were on and then you would search it. This gave you the ability to read 4, 5, 6, 7 accounts where people had all been on save 106th floor of the north tower. Reading them a one against the other, you begin to get a sense of what had happened on that floor, not individual snapshots, but more of a narrative of what had happened on that floor. We became particularly interested in the floors were where there had been a lot of coming occasions. Communications. We were also interested in the boarding area and those were areas where just below where the plate and hit where a lot of 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 and after a Court Settlement we 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 Fire Department also gave us their radio tapes although not there 911 calls. The tapes they gave us where the taste between the dispatcher and their people at the scene. In particular, one tape from the special Operations Division 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 or family members were entered into a database where you can search by company or floor or 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, there is the case of ed and abe, the rough outline of their story was already known by the time we had started this book, but the details were not as wellknown. They were computer programmers from the blue cross and blue shield and they worked on the 27th floor of the north tower, they had been friends for a long time. It had been injured in a diving had been injured in a diving accident and 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. We learn from some of the survivor interviews and from the firefighter oral histories the series of people had interacted with him during the course of the morning that gave us a continuous account of their whereabouts throughout the entire 102 minutes as they moved in and out of stairway c on the 27th floor. They were with captain burke of Engine Company 21 for a well who stayed with the pair even after he knew the south tower had collapsed. He, like ed and april, did not survive. , did not survive. We found eds nurse irma who had been with him and she gave us her account before her departure from the building. Abes relatives detailed their phone conversations with him from the north tower, finally, in those Port Authority radio tapes, we noticed this is mission on channel 28 from one of the workers. Electrical 277, i am in and the c staircase, i have a man in a wheelchair, he needs assistance. The speaker it turns out was a man by the name of anthony who had survived. We found him and found he had spent much of the morning with ed and abe and that he was able to give up the following account which we were able to put in the book. As they waited for help, they moved about the 20 seventh floor, they had been to the stairwell, to the elevator banks, and to a Conference Room or a firefighter told them to stuff wet rags underneath the doors. Several people did what they could to make those left on the floor operable, anthony comfortable, anthony giardina, an electrician who worked in the building passed out snapple and water from a vending machine, firefighters ordered the drinks over their heads. One firefighter looked at the man, he couldve left much earlier, but the fire upstairs seemed far away. The danger, distant, why dont you go the firemen asked. No, he replied, i staying with my friend. James in what we called the border country, just around below the impacted zone, we followed in the north tower a particularly stirring pair of men named Frank Martini and pablo ortiz. They worked on the 88th floor which was about five floors low the bottom point of the impact and they had quite a job of getting the way clear out of their floor. They managed to do it, they got about 2540 people out of their floor by clearing a path through a lot of rubble, down and some garters 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 ottomans could not get out the way their counterparts on the 88 floor had. The occupants could not get out the way their counterparts on the 88 floor had. A man sat on the chair with his had been led into a lors office down the hall and sat in a chair with his hat in his lap. Diane watched in amazement as most people from metropolitan life gathered in her office space. A companys president opened the office door to stuff his jacket underneath and the sudden shaft of light fell into the dark, smoky hallway. There, a woman 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 m