102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers Read Online Free Page B

test.
    Aviles worked for the Port Authority. He dialed five numbers, leaving identical messages, describing what he saw, and telling everyone up the chain of command to begin the evacuation. He called one colleague, John Paczkowski, but reached his voice mail. “It seems to be an American Airlines jetliner came in from the northern direction, toward—from the Empire State Building, toward us,” Aviles said. He ticked through a list of notifications—he had called the police and the public affairs office, and had beeped the chief operating officer for the agency. “Smoke is beginning to come, so I think I’m gonna start bailing outta here, man … . Don’t come near the building if you’re outside. Pieces are coming down, man. Bye.”
    Then he phoned his wife, Mildred, who was at home with two of their three children. “Millie, a plane hit the building,” he said. “It’s going to be on the news.”
    By then, the havoc was escalating, even if the cause was not apparent. In the police bureau at the base, Alan Reiss heard talk of a missile having been fired from the roof of the Woolworth Building, just a couple of blocks east of the trade center.
    As Reiss was listening to this, a Port Authority detective, Richie Paugh, arrived.
    “We’re going out onto the plaza to let you know what’s going on,” Reiss told the desk. He and Paugh walked down the hallway from the plaza, past an airline ticket counter. A revolving door put them under a soffit, an overhang sheltering the entrance to 5 World Trade Center. They peered out. Debris had rained onto the plaza—steel and concrete and fragments of offices and glass. Above them, they could see the east side of the north tower, and also its northern face. Instead of the waffle gridding of the building’s face, they now saw a wall of fire spread across ten or fifteen floors. Then they saw the people coming out the windows, driven toward air, and into air. The plane had struck not two minutes earlier.
    North Tower: The Impact
    By tipping its wings just before impact, Flight 11 cut a swath through seven floors, severely damaging all three escape staircases. The three staircases were clustered in the central core of the building as the building code permitted.

    Sources: National Institute of Standards and Technology; Weidlinger Associates
    On the ground, they saw an odd shape. Reiss looked closer. It was the nose gear of an airplane, missing the rubber tire, but with its wheel still connected to the hydraulic elbow that retracts into the bottom of the plane. Paugh began to take notes on its shape and location. Reiss protested. “There’s crap falling on us,” he said. “I don’t have a hard hat on or anything, let’s just drag it in.”
    He and Paugh lugged the part into the police office. “It’s evidence, put a sticker on it,” Reiss said.
    “A plane hit the building,” Paugh said.
    “It’s a big plane,” Reiss added. “It’s not a Piper Cub. This is a bi-i-i-g fucking wheel.”
    For hundreds of people on the upper floors of the north tower, death had come in a thunderous instant. The remains of one man who worked for Marsh & McLennan, which occupied space on the 93rd to 100th floors, would later be found five blocks from the tower. American Airlines Flight 11 had flown directly into the company’s offices. The impact killed scores of people who could never have known what hit them.
    Flight 11 had hit 1 World Trade Center, the north tower, at 450 miles an hour, having traveled the full length of Manhattan Island, fourteen miles from north to south, in less than two minutes. When it slammed into the north side of the building, the plane’s forward motion came to a halt. The plane itself was fractionalized. Hunks of it erupted from the south side of the tower, opposite to where it had entered. A part of the landing gear landed five blocks south. The jet fuel ignited and roared across the sky, as if the fuel continued to fly on course, even without its jet.