[FONT=arial,sans-serif]Graphic descriptions of injuries and fatalities follow.
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Firefighter John Morabito of ladder 10, which is just 200 yards from the north tower.
“Just inside the front entrance, Morabito found two victims of the fireball. A man, already dead, was pushed against a wall, his clothes gone, his eyeglasses blackened, his tongue lying on the floor next to him. The other was a woman, with no clothes, her hair burned off, her eyes sealed.
“The woman, she sat up. I’m yelling to her, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to help you,’” Morabito said. “She sat up and was trying to talk, but her throat had closed up. She died right there.”
http://www.fdnytenhouse.com/911/story01.htm
Mercedes Rivera: I saw a burned woman in a sitting position in the lobby, as if she was still typing behind a desk.... She was already dead.” [/FONT][FONT=arial,sans-serif]
Susan Hagen and Mary Carouba. Women at Ground Zero: Stories of Courage and Compassion. Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2002. P. 22[/FONT][FONT=arial,sans-serif]
Dave Bobbitt, Port Authority Operations
"It was quite hectic, and we did what we could to stay in contact with the elevator passengers while helping to direct other people out of the building and direct firemen to the stairs and the elevators," Bobbitt remarked. "When entering the North Tower, we saw the marble on the walls was severely cracked, and Riccardelli told everyone to stay back from the walls. Don (Parente) noticed that the doors of elevators number 6 and 7 had been blown out." –Courage Above and Beyond the Call of Duty: A Report of the September 11, 2001 Experiences of Port Authority Engineers at the World Trade Center
Lobby & 3rd floor: Firefighter Peter Blaich
As we got to the third floor of the B stairway, we forced open an elevator door which was burnt on all three sides. The only thing that was remaining was the hoistway door. And inside the elevator were about I didn’t recognize them initially, but a guy from 1 Truck said oh my God, those are people. They were pretty incinerated. And I remember the overpowering smell of kerosene. That’s when Lieutenant Foti said oh, that’s the jet fuel. I remember it smelled like if you’re camping and you drop a kerosene lamp.
The same thing happened to the elevators in the main lobby. They were basically blown out. I do’nt recall if I actually saw people in there. What got me initially in the lobby was that as soon as we went in, all the windows were blown out, and there were one or two burning cars outside. And there were burn victims on the street there, walking around. We walked through this giant blown-out window into the lobby.
There was a lady there screaming that she didn’t know how she got burnt. She was just in the lobby and then next thing she knew she was on fire. She was burnt bad. And somebody came over with a fire extinguisher and was putting water on her.
That’s the first thing that got me. That and in front of one of the big elevator banks in the lobby was a desk and I definitely made out one of the corpses to be a security guard because he had a security label on his jacket. I’m assuming that maybe he was at a table still in a chair and almost completely incinerated, charred all over his body, definitely dead. And you could make out like a security tag on his jacket. And I remember seeing the table was melted, but he was still fused in the chair and that elevator bank was melted, so I imagine the jet fuel must have blown right down the elevator shaft and I guess caught the security guard at a table, I guess at some type of checkpoint.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/9...gz/blaich.html
Brian Reeves, a 34-year-old security guard, was nearly killed while making the rounds in the lobby of 1 World Trade Center on September 11. He started to run after hearing an explosion that he said sounded like a missile, but he was knocked down by a fireball that roared down the elevator shaft.
Reeves suffered third-degree burns to 40 percent of his body before he was able to pat out the flames. He was one of 20 critically-injured patients rushed to New York Presbyterian’s burn unit that day.
http://www.ny1.com/pages/RRR/911special_survivors.html
Ronnie Clifford and Jennianne Maffeo
At around 8.45am, Ronnie walked into the lobby of the Marriott, which was connected to the lobby of the north tower by a revolving door. As he was checking his yellow tie in a mirror, he felt a massive explosion, followed several seconds later by a reverberation, a warping effect that he describes as the "harmonic tolerance of a building that's shaking like a tuning fork". He peered through the revolving door into the lobby of the north tower. It was filling with haze. People were scurrying to escape what had become a "hurricane of flying debris".
Then the revolving door turned with a suctioning sound followed by a hot burst of wind, and in came a mannequin of the future. A woman, naked, dazed, her arms outstretched. She was so badly burned that Ronnie had no idea what race she was or how old she might be. She clawed the air with fingernails turned porcelain-white. The zipper of what had once been a sweater had melted into her chest, as if it were the zipper to her own body. Her hair had been singed to a crisp steel wool. With her, in the gust of the door, came a pungent odour, the smell of kerosene or paraffin, Ronnie thought.
Then the mannequin became a person, crying for help. Ronnie had little idea what had happened to her, or where exactly she had come from, but he knew that whoever she was, she was his responsibility now.
With no medical training, Ronnie Clifford scarcely knew what to do with the helpless woman who stood before him. He sat her down on the cool marble floor, then dashed into the bathroom and ran water into a clean black garbage bag that he found. He hurried back out and dribbled the contents over her body. Then he sat down on the puddled floor and tried to comfort her. Despite her condition, she was lucid.
He took out a pen and notepad and jotted down her information. Her name was Jennieann Maffeo. She was Italian-American, from Brooklyn, single, 40 years old. She worked for USB PaineWebber. She was an asthmatic, she said, and had an extreme intolerance to latex. She could not adequately describe what had happened to her.
She had been standing outside the north tower next to a man she knew, waiting for a bus, when she heard a loud crash above. In an effort to protect them from falling debris, a security guard herded everyone inside the tower's lobby. Suddenly, she told Ronnie, something bright and hot enveloped her, a vapour maybe. She thought it could have dropped down the elevator shaft. She was worried about the man who'd been next to her. Surely he was dead, she feared.
“He thought he was the lucky one, but then tragedy struck” Irish Independent, Sept. 11, 2002. (The above is an excerpt. Ronnie Clifford was able to get Jennieann Maffeo to an ambulance. She died in the hospital on October 12, 2001.)
http://www.unison.ie/features/911oneyearon/stories.php?ca=261&si=823151
I have a badly burned lady at the lobby of …they need an ambulance ASAP…One World Trade Center. [/FONT][FONT=arial,sans-serif]
(Port Authority Transcript WTC Ch. 15 EMS direct line, p. 5)[/FONT][FONT=arial,sans-serif]
(Vasana) Mutuanot was in the lobby of Tower One when she heard the first explosion. Thinking it was a bomb like the terrorist attack in 1993, she turned to run, looking over her shoulder as flames leaped from a freight elevator shaft cooking her back and legs and right cheek. "It was a fireball with sand and heat, like a hurricane of fire," she said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/terror/aftermath/1051698.html
Mututanont ran out of the building then fell after flying glass sliced through a tendon in her leg. A wall of fire followed her outside.
“Swept to my back from my feet up and then I see fire all over, in my hair, also. A lot of people just blew away, you know, like that.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terrorism/july-dec01/recovery_10-11.html
David Kravette, a managing director of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trading firm that occupied the upper floors of the North Tower and lost about 700 people, or more than two thirds of its 1,000 U.S.-based employees addressed what he saw in the lobby as the first plane hit. I have provided this quote from the Mercury News New York Bureau since it is the only reference I have seen to the free falling elevators and the fire ball at the lower levels of the tower.
“I saw a couple of elevators in free fall; you could hear them whizzing down and as they crashed, there was this huge explosion, like a fireball exploding out of the bank of elevators,” Kravette said. “People were engulfed in flames.”
http://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/WTC/CantorFitzgerald.html
Firefighter William Green: We entered in through the front doors of the lobby. The lobby was screwed. All the windows were already broken. Marble walls that surrounded the elevator shaft, they were cracked and broken. I’m still thinking a bomb went off.
We headed for the B staircase. It was pretty much in the center of the core. We had to go through these turnstiles. I remember there was a lot of rubble on the floor there. There was elevator doors ajar. There were elevator doors missing. I could see an elevator car twisted in the shaft.
I remember I looked up at the ceiling because I thought maybe the ceiling got charred because there was a bunch of rubble on the floor. It was about three feet high in the middle. The ceiling wasn’t charred. So I had thought the floor blew up.
I was telling guys afterwards the floor must have blown up. Maybe there was a bomb downstairs or something. But I came to learn that that was bodies. We had to climb over and around this pile.
Q. A pile of bodies, in the lobby?
A. I didn’t recognize it as bodies. I don’t know if my mind didn’t see it.
Q. Burned?
A. Burned.
Q. Near the elevators?
A. It looked like rubble to me.
Q. Right.
A. Right outside the elevators, in the core. We had to climb up and around it—it was like three feet high in the middle—to enter the B staircase.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110392.PDF[/FONT]
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(Green was the only member of Engine 6, which headed up the B staircase behind William Rodriguez, to survive.) [/FONT][FONT=arial,sans-serif]
Firefighter Geroge Kozlowski: We did see bodies that got pulled out of the elevators because all the elevators fell.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110308.PDF
Firefighter Craig Dunne: We proceeded to go into the lobby of tower one. We got in there. The glass was down in the front. There was a gentleman -- you saw people that were jumping from the building. You had to look up and make sure you didn't get hit by any jumpers or anything. We saw a couple of people that were burnt on the outside of the building. There was a gentleman that was burnt inside when we went in.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110490.PDF
Firefighter Peter Fallucca: Before we got in, all the elevators were crashed down in the lobby, and we were going to the stairwell. See all the elevators were crashed down, big slabs of marble on the floor, all the ceiling tiles of the dropped ceiling was falling down, wires hanging. You see wires and stuff hanging inside the elevator shafts, because the doors were blown right off the elevators.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html
FDNY Lieutenant William Walsh: In the center of these two elevator shafts would be the elevators that go to the lower floors. They were blown off the hinges. That’s where the service [freight] elevator was also. …They were blown off the hinges, and you could see the shafts.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110442.PDF
As he waited for orders, Meldrum, the chauffeur (Fire engine driver), noticed that all windows in the high lobby were blown out. Glass and marble from busted walls littered the floors, crunched underfoot. He caught an occasional whiff of jet fuel, a smell like kerosene, wafting from elevator shafts. On the floor by the elevators he saw burned people.
http://www.projo.com/words/st20021016.htm
Lobby
Firefighter David Sandvik: We got down to the lobby, and when we got out of the stairwell, the lobby was deserted. Nobody was down there except the people coming out of our stairwell. We were walking through and the elevator doors were blowing [blown?] off. The lobby was just like a complete mess. I remember grabbing the proby that day and we were looking down the elevator bank and I said, man, this would make a hell of a picture.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110375.PDF
Firefighter John Moribito: I noticed that some of the elevators had been blown out of their shafts. They came down and crashed out of the shaft. They were buckled, and I had noticed that there were people still in the elevators. I believe that they were at that point deceased. Then I saw the lights in both buildings went out, and I heard the rumble. At that point, I didn’t know what was happening, but 2 World Trade Center was collapsing.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110354.PDF
Firefighter Keith Murphy: To my immediate left is a bank. If I had to guess I would say it was maybe 75, 80 feet long. It was a pretty long elevator bank and it was big sky lobby elevators. They were like floor to ceiling, the ones that hold, I don’t know, 60, 70 people. There was tremendous damage in the lobby. There was already things that were like fallen or cracked. A lot of structural wall damage and ceiling damage that I could see. There was also about four or five inches of water on the floor.
At the end of this elevator lobby, there was – it just looked to me like something had exploded. I don’t remember how I heard it or who said it, but someone said I think it was an elevator – when the plane hit, it severed the elevator cable and it came all the way down and crashed. I don’t know a hundred percent if that’s what happened, but it looked to me like that could have been true. It looked like something had fallen down, hit, and exploded out. I mean the whole area around it was maybe 25, 30 feet of really severe damage.
I remember thinking, I looked at the elevators and I still wasn’t feeling good about them, because the damage that I spoke about was more severe or at least up close I got to see it. There were pieces of marble, like ornamental marble I guess, on the walls that were maybe 2 foot by 3 foot pieces, maybe even a little bigger, that had split and cracked and some had actually fallen.
Some of the doors – they were silver colored elevator doors and they were almost like hanging out of plumb. They just didn’t look right.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110238.PDF
Firefighter John Ottrando: After I hooked up, I went into the lobby of the north tower and I saw the command post being set up there. I noticed some people on the floor that were badly burned. One man was deceased, and there was a woman there that was very badly burned.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110355.PDF
Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick: The lobby didn't look too good. The integrity of the elevators - I started to think about the elevators. They had either blown out, cut off or could possibly have the cars coming down. The lobby was becoming an untenable place, especially if we wanted to continue operations.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110001.PDF
Firefighter Terence Rivera: As I got off the back -- the back step, there were a few individuals that were civilians that were outside that were burnt. There was a -- he wasn't a regular security guard. He had a weapon on him. I don't know if he was FBI or Secret Service and he was trying to put the pants out on one individual that was conscious. His pants were still smoldering. I took the can, fire extinguisher off the truck and then sprayed down the pants on the person that was still conscious.
At that time, I had asked him where did this individual come from. He told me when the plane had hit, a fire ball had shot down the elevator shaft and had blown people out of the lobby.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110343.PDF
Pfiefer arrived at the west-side entrance to 1 World Trade Center. Entering the tower he walked to the fire command station located in the northwest corner of the lobby. Many of the large windows in the lobby were broken, and pieces of marble in the elevator lobbies were cracked or had fallen from the impact of the jet between the 96th and the 103rd floors. Pfiefer was advised that numerous people were trapped in nearly 25 elevators, the highest was at the 71st floor. The elevators were not working. Apparently, jet fuel had poured down the elevator shafts. Some of the elevators were on fire. Signs of smoke and fire damage were visible at some elevators. Many of the elevator doors were missing.
Other firefighters reported finding additional burn victims on the first floor of the north tower.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/harvey.html
Firefighter Kevin Murray: The elevators looked like they were on fire in the lobby. There wasn't smoke coming out of them, but it looked like they all bubbled up and everything and there was a fire in there.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110020.PDF
Firefighter Gregg Hansson: We went past the elevator banks. You could see that they were all blown out.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110017.PDF
Firefighter Joseph Casaliggi: We went into the lobby. The lobby actually looked like the plane hit the lobby. From what I understand, I was told afterwards, that a fireball shot down the elevator shaft and blew out all the windows in the lobby and blew out the elevator doors.
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/sept11_fdny_transcripts/9110430.PDF
Firefighter Thomas Piambino: When I got down to the lobby -- the lobby was in bad shape when I went up. It was worse when I came back down. All the elevator shaftway doors were blown out, and there was stuff coming down the -- just falling down the shafts, and the civilians had bogged down at the bottom of the stairs, because they were afraid to pass the elevator shafts, and there were piles of rubble all over the place.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110493.PDF
Capt. Jay Jonas, FDNY Ladder 6: Jonas walked over to his guys and said, "OK, here's the deal. We're gonna go upstairs and we're gonna perform search and rescue. The deal is, we're gonna have to do it on foot." He wasn't comfortable using the elevators after seeing them disgorge burned people. "We're gonna take 10 floors at a time, take a quick breather, and push on for 10 floors."
http://www.projo.com/words/st20021016.htm
Greg Manning: For those of you who may not know the story, she was entering the lobby of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when a fireball exploded from the elevator shaft. She and two others managed to run out of the building, all three of them on fire. A passerby across the street ran to them, reaching Lauren [Manning] first, and put the flames out. He then put Lauren in an ambulance, so she was the first person evacuated. He certainly saved her life.
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553381894
Lauren Manning: Building one. And as I walked into the building, the plane had hit -- I imagine as I was getting out of the cab -- and the fuel just poured down.
LARRY KING: You never got into the building?
L. MANNING: No, I got into the building. I walked into the lobby. As I was turning toward the elevator banks, the fireball exploded out and caught me from behind, and literally pushed me toward the doors as I was running, and...
KING: You kept running?
L. MANNING: Oh, I kept running through the initial panel of doors, through the revolving doors, outside, and my only desire was to -- you know, you think of anything having to do with fire is try to find a way to put it out. So I was running across the street to this grassy median area, and...
KING: You remember all this?
L. MANNING: I remember everything vividly. The, you know, people around me, the debris that began falling, and it was...
KING: Did you pass out eventually?
L. MANNING: No.
KING: Never passed out?
L. MANNING: No, I didn't. Because as I was running I was, you know, praying, probably screaming to God, Please, you know, help me. Help me. You know, I can't -- I can't leave now. It's not my time to leave.
KING: You kept thinking that?
L. MANNING: I did. I had to make a decision. I could feel myself going under. And losing consciousness, and I would not. And I didn't, so this wonderful man came and helped me.
KING: Put the fire out?
L. MANNING: Yes, he did, and I was able to give him Greg's phone number.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0210/01/lkl.00.html
According to the accounts I have heard, Debbie was in the lobby waiting for an elevator when AA Flight 11 hit on 93. The jet fuel from the plane poured down the elevator shafts. Owing to the way the elevators are laid out, I don't understand how the fuel got into the elevator that she was waiting for. There are / (were) "Sky Lobbies" on 44 and on 78. So to go above those floors, you took an express elevator to the appropriate sky lobby and then transferred to a local elevator. The elevator machinery was located on the floors above the sky lobbies; only a very few shafts continued all the way up. Anyway, apparently she was in the lobby, the elevator shaftway doors opened and a fireball hit her with full force. She survived and was taken to a hospital with 90% burns. After lingering for about 50 days she died.
http://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/WTC/AlMasetti.html
Bill Pekrol: Bill is one of those survivors and was on the 72nd floor of the North Tower when that first plane hit at 8:47 a.m. attending a meeting with thirty people. The public address system issued its "all is safe" announcement. Bill and two attendees left the meeting after the building swayed and shook and numerous explosions set off by the jet fuel. Bill climbed down all 72 floors but when he arrived in the lobby of the Tower, 20 elevators exploded from the plane’s jet fuel... the noise was horrendous and the tower was beginning to collapse.
Bill spent the next three months in St. Vincent's Hospital where he clinically died twice but was resuscitated. He saw "the light," the tunnel, angels, and his sister who died seventeen years ago. He was unconscious the first twenty days he spent in the hospital and was told he would probably not walk again. Bill sustained fuel burns on the dorsal sides of both hands and suffered three skull fractures, a crushed knee, a broken jaw, burned corneas, and a lacerated abdomen that required 200 stitches to close. His injuries were sustained from steel beams that were blowing apart. Later, Bill was told that he was brought out of the North Tower unconscious and less than five minutes before it collapsed.
http://news.boisestate.edu/UPDATE/updatearchive/2003/09112003/0911meetbillpekrol.html
Mike Pecoraro: "When I walked out into the lobby, it was incredible," he recalled. "The whole lobby was soot and black, elevator doors were missing. The marble was missing off some of the walls. 20-foot section of marble, 20 by 10 foot sections of marble, gone from the walls".
The west windows were all gone. They were missing. These are tremendous windows. They were just gone. Broken glass everywhere, the revolving doors were all broken and their glass was gone. Every sprinkler head was going off. I am thinking to myself, how are these sprinkler heads going off? It takes a lot of heat to set off a sprinkler head. It never dawned on me that there was a giant fireball that came through the air of the lobby. I never knew that until later on. The jet fuel actually came down the elevator shaft, blew off all the (elevator) doors and flames rolled through the lobby. That explained all the burnt people and why everything was sooted in the lobby."
http://www.chiefengineer.org/article.cfm?seqnum1=1029[/FONT]
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