By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
NEW YORK, Sept. 11 -- Valerie Johnson stared, transfixed, at the inferno a thousand yards to her south and west. Tears streamed furrows through a film of ash on her face. Her mind tried to grasp what her eyes beheld: a blazing gash across the tower of wealth that symbolized New York for her all her life. The fire marched downward, floor by floor, windows bursting out ahead of the flames.
Then Johnson screamed a guttural, wordless wail. A sound like nothing she ever heard -- low as thunder, but louder and longer -- pressed in on her chest for ten seconds or more, resounding through Centre Street at Foley Square. The northern tower, the taller of the two, was gone. It was 10:29 a.m., an hour and three quarters after the first of two jetliners ripped through New York's twin emblems of global prestige.
"Oh God, oh God, my niece works in that building," Johnson breathed. "Oh God."
Where we stood there now came a roiling cloud -- smoke and ash, ten stories tall, building speed as they reached the canyons of Manhattan's southern tip. Survivors streamed, choked and gagging, behind the cloud. Among them, stumbling blindly toward the fountain at Foley Square, were Elizabeth Belleau and Melissa Morales, strangers grasping hands with all their might as they ran. Belleau plunged her head into the cooling waters and retched, coughing out ash and phlegm. The fountain enclosed a sculpture: "Triumph of the Human Spirit."
Belleau had been running for nearly two hours. Her morning commute on the BM-3 bus had stalled, then transformed to horror as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel filled with smoke. The panicked driver abandoned the bus, and firefighters directed passengers to a makeshift triage station on Greenwich Street, just south of the burning towers.
"I saw bodies falling out of the World Trade Center -- oh, God, jumping, falling, glass and smoke," Belleau said, heaving at the image. Then Tower One collapsed, and the world turned black. No sign of the triage station remained, nor of most of the emergency workers who guided her there. Belleau linked hands with five strangers, but lost them all. Later she found Morales, a voice in the dark.
It had taken a fistful of cash to a limousine driver, followed by a hitched ride on a Harley Davidson, to bring me this far south from upper Manhattan. A walk further down through the financial district, bypassing police barricades, revealed a hellscape. Within minutes of the first collapse, ashes were ankle deep for block after city block. Nearer the spot where the towers had been, the ashes were knee deep and higher. Hundreds of small fires blazed.
Here and there stood survivors, in all the myriad displays of human shock.
Elaine Greenberg, a retired teacher, could not get over the broken vista, not at all as she felt certain it ought to be. "The Woolworth Building is the high building down there," she said, astonished.
Others could speak only of the jumpers, desperate beyond comprehension, leaping to certain death from the 80th, 90th, 100th floors.
"Look, mommy," 2-year-old William Watt had said, pointing to the tiny figures plunging down. Strangers grappled his 5-year-old sister aloft in her wheelchair and ran toward evacuation boats on the Hudson River. Monica Watt looked back, then held William tighter and turned her face away. She had no words to answer.
Jet A, the standard aviation fuel, is rated to produce 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Not much of a skyscraper's flesh and bones is supposed to burn, but the towers served for chimneys as floors collapsed into shafts. "I don't know what it was like up there, but it must have been hell," said firefighter Paul Curran of New York Fire Patrol 3, covered in a thick coat of gray ash outside a makeshift command post in the Gee Whiz restaurant at Greenwich and Warren streets. "There were a lot of jumpers. I saw bodies hit the upper level concrete of the second floor overhang of Tower One. Others were falling into West Street."
Tower One collapsed atop the broken bodies. Then it buried the staging post where Curran prepared to enter the lobby for a staircase, heading up. "We all just ran," he said. "We couldn't do nothing but save ourselves. I got under a parked car with my respirator on. I was in total darkness for at least five minutes."
Dozens of Curran's comrades, some said hundreds, had already plunged inside the burning tower.
"You know what haunts me?" said Peter Genova, of GC Services Capital, who escaped down the fire stairs. "There had to be 200 firemen that passed us [going up] on our way down. God only knows how many were up there when it collapsed."
From miles away, on the gridlocked Long Island Expressway, the blackened towers resembled smoldering cigarettes. Here where their shadows once fell, millions of pages of paper covered block after city block, untold hundreds of thousands of man-hours of the most highly compensated labor in the world. "NATIONAL UNION INS. CO., $5,000.00 CSL AGGREGATE. . . ." "To whom it may concern, Please journal all securities and cash from. . . ." "In accordance with Section 5c of the Incentive Plan document. . . ."
Among the trove, singed but yet legible: architectural drawings for beautification and improvement of the Port Authority spaces around the towers.
The streets were thick with broken vehicles, husks of air conditioner and heating ducts. A water pitcher tilted, impossibly half full. A flashlight, glowing in the mud. A woman's pump, red under the dun-colored ash.
Huge lengths of five-inch fire hose pumped every drop of pressure from lower Manhattan. The strange sounds of running water, like a brook, filled city canyons.
By the thousands, emergency workers converged from Nassau and Westchester counties, northern New Jersey, the Bronx. Many carried hand tools, oddly poignant amid the apocalypse: a spade, an axe, a halligan -- the firefighter's medieval tool, like a cross between a crowbar and a pike.
They carried these implements to Vesey and West Streets, and stopped. There they found a building squashed as if by a flaming asteroid. Another, next to it, was horizontal, unidentifiable. Just past that, the impossible.
"That's it. That's the World Trade Center," said Dominic Bertucci, goggling at a much-too-small stump shrouded in smoke. Bertucci, from Bronx Engine Co. No. 50, stood at West Street and Murray at half past 12. Like every fire company in greater New York, No. 50 had gone to general quarters and an all-personnel recall. Emergency vehicles lined up four and six abreast on the West Side Highway, stretching for more than a mile, as far north as Houston Street. But thousands of men and women now sat idle, drinking Salvation Army grape juice and attempting to formulate a plan of attack.
"There's no way out here," came a crackling voice on Bertucci's radio. "We're trying to get out the other way. . . . Be advised we're going to have to try from the other side."
Across the street from 1 World Trade Center, the movie theater was mostly intact. It was playing "Ghost World."
Civilians did what they could think of, not all of it sensible. Peter Karmen, 44, assembled a fishing rod as fires burned around him a few blocks from the worst of the destruction. He pressed the tackle through an abandoned cashier's booth at the Washington Street Garage, attempting to hook the car keys he had left a few hours earlier. "I can't believe they left the door locked," he muttered.
A commodities trader, Karmen had been outside on a cigarette break when the first jetliner struck Tower One. Back upstairs, a block away, his picture window gave him a clear view of the second jet striking Tower Two. It banked east and then up from the south, and Karmen knew what to do when he saw the fireball.
He ran to the trading floor and tried to buy gold. "When it all hits the fan that's what everybody buys," he said. He watched the price shoot to $280 an ounce, but he seethed as panic trades impeded his order. Two minutes later, he said, the exchange shut down.
The only way back uptown was on foot. Just a few hundred yards from the epicenter, the Murray and River Terrace children's playground stood somehow untouched. Protected by an easterly wind, daisies grew tall in bright sunlight and the hippopotamus statues had no dust at all. Songbirds chirped in the bushes, living still.