102 Minutes
Good Fit
- Readers who want to understand 9/11 through human stories
- Anyone interested in building safety, evacuation and emergency management
- Lovers of serious, well-sourced documentary journalism
Not a Fit
- Readers seeking the political and geopolitical causes of the attack: the book barely touches them
- Readers who remember the day vividly or lost someone: the effect can be very heavy
The authors' note states the book's thesis plainly. The struggle of the 14,000 people in the towers that morning was not geopolitical but local: opening a jammed door, finding a way along a burning corridor, climbing dozens of stairs. The numbers are here too. The North Tower was struck at 8:46:31, the South Tower at 9:02:59; the South Tower fell at 9:58:59, the North Tower at 10:28:25. At least 1,500 people survived the impacts but died because they could not escape from their floors, while about 12,000 people below the impact zones got out. The authors draw a Titanic comparison: those people were killed not by the planes but by the building, the shortage of exits and the collapse of communication. They also say clearly that nothing diminishes the hijackers' guilt.
The prologue starts at 8:30 and contains the book's quietest, and therefore heaviest, pages. On the 89th floor of the North Tower the receptionist Dianne DeFontes changes out of her sneakers and drinks her coffee as on every other morning. On the 88th floor Frank and Nicole De Martini have just dropped their children at school. At Cantor Fitzgerald 659 people have started work; one of them, David Kravette, is arguing with his wife about a newspaper thrown in the wrong place while clients wait for him in the lobby. A conference is getting under way at Windows on the World. The last elevator leaves the restaurant at 8:44. The authors also convey the scale: 14,154 people came to the towers that morning, each floor was a little larger than a football field, and there were on average 64 people per floor. DeFontes's sense of solitude is an illusion created by that space; 25 other people worked on her floor.
The second half of the prologue goes back to 1993. Radicals gathered at a Brooklyn mosque first murder Rabbi Meir Kahane. Photographs of the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center are found in the killer's home, but he is dismissed as «a lone madman». On 26 February 1993 a bomb in a yellow van in the garage beneath the towers kills six people, and the evacuation takes ten hours. Afterwards the stairs are painted with glow-in-the-dark paint and a new public-address system is installed. But by 11 September the fireproofing on the steel structure has been upgraded on only 30 of 220 floors, and the new radios bought for police and fire chiefs sit unused on shelves.
Chapter one gives the first seconds after 8:46 through dozens of eyes. DeFontes is thrown from her chair and thinks «bomb». Gerry Gaeta, who worked on the centre's construction projects, shouts, «It's a bomb, let's get out of here!», convinced it was smuggled in with the boxes of documents delivered minutes earlier. An electrician thinks a transformer has blown. Engineer Pasquale Buzzelli, whose elevator swings like a pendulum, rides back up to the 64th floor without realising what has happened. Six men, among them window washer Jan Demczur, are trapped in an elevator filling with smoke. At the Marriott, Father Paul Engel sees the swimming pool on fire.
One of the most moving scenes belongs to Ezra Aviles. From the 61st floor he saw the plane with his own eyes and immediately calls everywhere, urging an evacuation. The message he leaves on a friend's answering machine still hurts to read: «Smoke is already coming in, I think I need to get out of here. If you're outside, don't come near the building. Bye». Then he calls his wife: «Millie, a plane hit. It'll be on the news». The book never exaggerates emotion; sentences like these are enough on their own.
- A minute-by-minute chronicle built around time stamps
- Notes that source every claim, and witnesses given by name
- Chapter titles taken from the words of people inside the buildings
- Calm, precise reporting that never turns tragedy into sensation
The official investigation, where the book's questions are answered at length
The Pulitzer-winning account of the road to the attack and the organisations behind it
The classic minute-by-minute account of the Titanic's sinking from survivors' testimony
Alan Reiss, the Port Authority's former World Trade Department director, feels nothing of the impact in a coffee shop below. On his way to the police desk he sees paper falling outside like burning confetti and assumes a truck bomb has gone off nearby; after 1993 experts had agreed that the towers could be damaged by a bomb but would not fall. When he steps out onto the plaza he sees a wall of fire spanning ten or fifteen floors, and people falling from windows. On the ground lies a strange object: the nose landing gear of a plane. «This isn't a Piper Cub,» he says. «That's a damn big wheel.»
The chapter closes with the physics of the impact, told calmly. American Airlines Flight 11 was flying at about 750 kilometres an hour, crossed Manhattan in under two minutes and struck the north face of the tower. Part of the plane burst out of the south face, and part of the landing gear landed five blocks to the south. The energy of the impact ran down the building's skeleton into the bedrock, and the Lamont-Doherty observatory, forty kilometres to the north, recorded a twelve-second signal.
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