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Hundreds were trapped on floors untouched by the airplanes. Even though the buildings survived the initial impacts, the twisting and bending of the towers caused fatal havoc. Stairwells were plugged by broken wallboard. Doors were jammed in twisted frames. With more time and simple tools like crowbars, rescue workers might have freed people who simply could not get to stairways. In the north tower, at least 28 people were freed on the 86th and 89th floors by a small group of Port Authority office workers who pried open jammed doors. Those self-assigned rescuers died.
In both towers, scores of people lost chances to escape. Some paused to make one more phone call; others, to pick up a forgotten purse; still others, to perform tasks like freeing people from elevators, tending the injured or comforting the distraught.
The crises had identical beginnings and endings in each tower, but ran different courses. At least 37 people, and probably well over 50, can be seen jumping or falling from the north tower, while no one is visible falling from the south tower, in a collection of 20 videotapes shot by amateurs and professionals from nearby streets and buildings. Both towers had similar volumes of smoke and heat, but in the north tower, about three times as many people were trapped in roughly half the space. Scores were driven to the windows of the north tower in search of relief. In the south tower, people had more opportunities to move between floors.
The impact zones formed pitiless boundaries between those who were spared and those who were doomed. Even at the margins, the collisions were devastating: the wingtip of the second plane grazed the 78th floor sky lobby in the south tower, instantly killing dozens of people waiting for elevators. In all, about 600 civilians died in the south tower at or above the plane's impact. In the north tower, every person believed to be above the 91st floor died: 1,344.
The farther from the impact, the more calls people made. In the north tower, pockets of near-silence extended four floors above and one floor below the impact zone. Yet remarkably, in both towers, even on floors squarely hit by the jets, a few people lived long enough to make calls.
To place these fragmentary messages in context, The Times interviewed family members, friends and colleagues of those who died, obtained times of calls from cellphone bills and 911 records, analyzed 20 videotapes and listened to 15 hours of police and fire radio tapes.
The Times also interviewed 25 people who saw firsthand the destruction wreaked by the planes, because they escaped from the impact zone or above it in the south tower, or from just below it in the north.
8:00
North Tower, 107th Floor, Windows on the World, 2 hours 28 minutes to collapse
"Good morning, Ms. Thompson."
Doris Eng's greeting was particularly sunny, like the day, as Liz Thompson arrived for breakfast atop the tallest building in the city, Ms. Thompson remembers thinking. Perhaps Ms. Eng had matched her mood to the glorious weather, the rich blue September sky that filled every window. Or perhaps it was the company.
Familiar faces occupied many of the tables in Wild Blue, the intimate aerie to Windows that Ms. Eng helped manage, according to two people who ate there that morning. As much as any one place, that single room captured the sweep of humanity who worked and played at the trade center.
Ms. Thompson, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, was eating with Geoffrey Wharton, an executive with Silverstein Properties, which had just leased the towers. At the next table sat Michael Nestor, the deputy inspector general of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and one of his investigators, Richard Tierney.
At a third table were six stockbrokers, several of whom came every Tuesday. Ms. Eng had a treat for one of them, Emeric Harvey. The night before, one of the restaurant's managers, Jules Roinnel, gave Ms. Eng two impossibly-hard-to-get tickets to "The Producers." Mr. Roinnel says he asked Ms. Eng to give them to Mr. Harvey.
