(Page 10 of 12)
Mr. Emery, one of her office colleagues, had been trying to use his blazer to seal a ventilation duct that was belching smoke. To evacuate Fiduciary employees who worked on this floor, Mr. Emery and Mrs. Gentul had climbed seven floors from their own offices.
Now the two of them, and the six or so they were trying to save, were all in serious trouble.
As Mrs. Gentul spoke to her husband on the phone - he could overhear what was happening - Mr. Emery got up and spread the coat over the vent. Next, he swung a shoe at a sprinkler head, hoping to start the flow of water.
"The sprinklers aren't going on," Mrs. Gentul said to her husband, Jack Gentul, who listened in his office at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, where he is a dean. No one knew the plane had cut the water pipes.
"We don't know whether to stay or go," Mrs. Gentul told her husband. "I don't want to go down into a fire," she said.
Among the doomed, the phone calls, messages and witnesses make clear, were many people who had put themselves in harm's way by stopping to offer a hand to colleagues or strangers. Others acted with great tenderness when all else was lost.
Mrs. Gentul and Mr. Emery of Fiduciary, whose offices stretched from the 90th to the 97th floors, had made their own fateful decisions to help others.
When the first plane hit across the plaza, the fireball billowed across the western facade of the 90th floor, where Mr. Emery was in his office. "I felt the heat on my face," said Anne Foodim, a member of human resources who worked nearby.
Mr. Emery, known for steadiness, emerged, the lapels on his blue blazer flapping as he waved people out. "Come on, let's go," he said, escorting five employees into a stairwell, including Ms. Foodim, who recounted the events. They walked down 12 floors, reaching the 78th floor and the express elevator, with Mr. Emery giving encouragement.
"If you can finish chemo, then you can get down those steps," Mr. Emery told an exhausted Ms. Foodim, who had just completed a round of chemotherapy. When they finally reached a packed elevator on the 78th floor, Mr. Emery made sure everyone got aboard. He squeezed Ms. Foodim's shoulder and let the door close in front of him. Then he headed back up, joining Alayne Gentul.
Like Mr. Emery, Mrs. Gentul herded a group out before the second plane hit. A receptionist, Mona Dunn, saw her on the 90th floor where workers were debating when or if to leave. Mrs. Gentul instantly settled the question. "Go down and go down orderly," she said, indicating a stairway.
"It was like the teacher saying, 'It's O.K., go,'" Mrs. Dunn recalled.
Together, Mrs. Gentul and Mr. Emery went to evacuate six people on the 97th floor who had been working on a computer backup operation, Mrs. Gentul told her husband.
Mr. Emery was hunting for a stairwell on the 97th floor when he reached his wife, Elizabeth, by cellphone. The last thing Mrs. Emery heard before she lost the connection was Alayne Gentul screaming from somewhere very near Ed Emery, "Where's the stairs? Where's the stairs?"
Another phone call was under way nearby. Edmund McNally, director of technology for Fiduciary, called his wife, Liz, as the floor began buckling. Mr. McNally hastily recited his life insurance policies and employee bonus programs. "He said that I meant the world to him and he loved me," Mrs. McNally said, and they exchanged what they thought were their last goodbyes.
Then Mrs. McNally's phone rang again. Her husband sheepishly reported that he had booked them on a trip to Rome for her 40th birthday. "He said, 'Liz, you have to cancel that,'" Mrs. McNally said.
On the 93rd floor, Gregory Milanowycz, 25, an insurance broker for Aon, urged others to leave - some of them survived - but went back himself, after hearing the announcement. "Why did I listen to them - I shouldn't have," he moaned after his father, Joseph Milanowycz, called him. Now he was trapped. He asked his father to ask the Fire Department what he and 30 other people should do. His father said he passed word from a dispatcher to his son that they should stay low, and that firefighters were working their way up. Then, he says, he heard his son calling out to the others: "They are coming! My Dad's on the phone with them. They are coming. Everyone's got to get to the ground."
