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102 Minutes (The fight to survive inside the twin towers) Hardcover – January 1, 2005
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTimes Books
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2005
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Product details
- ASIN : B01JQ8O95S
- Publisher : Times Books (January 1, 2005)
- Language : English
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Customer Reviews:
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This book is a sensitively and respectfully written account of what it would have been like inside the towers once they were hit. Every time a person was mentioned, I flipped the pages to the back section and scanned the "Lost" list of people in the North and South Towers, and list of firemens names. People you wanted to live did not, and other people you wanted to live, did.
The thing that stood out so amazingly, was the selflessness of the ordinary person. Others helping those who were struggling. For example, Stanley Primnath who witnessed the plane entering his floor and jamming the wing into the wall of his office. Then Brian Clark hearing his calls for help, helped Stanley all the way down to the ground floor and outside. Both were saved. Both are now lifelong friends. There is Josephine Harris who could not go on any longer and wanted to be left behind, but the firemen who were with her helped her down the stairs. Once the building started to collapse, they were trapped on the stairs, but survived and were pulled out of the rubble. Josephine Harris and her firemen became firm friends. There is Frank di Martini who selflessly scanned floor after floor looking for people, so he could tell them to leave the building. Sadly he did not make it out himself. The man in the red bandana who saved others but did not make it out. Someone in the book mentioned "choices". You must decide. You choose one way and there is a way out, you choose another way and there is no way out. You must make a choice.
The one thing I did find sad, but this problem is now rectified I believe, is the co-ordination between Police, Fire Department and other services.
Such a well written book. At once a eulogy for loved ones lost, and a testament to loved ones saved. An abundance of friendships found and kept. A stunning and completely heart breaking read.
They do it by pulling together many vignettes, culled from thousands of victims, survivors and emergency personnel, to tell larger stories.
The key story they’ve got to tell is this: Hundreds of firefighters died unnecessarily when the North Tower collapsed, because radio malfunction meant they didn’t know they’d been told to evacuate it. An An estimated 1500 people who survived the planes’ impacts on upper floors died because they couldn’t escape. Firefighters in the south tower die because it collapses in only one hour instead of the two hours the steel was supposed to last. They thought they had another hour.
In other words, maybe three quarters of the 2753 dead, were killed by the buildings’ design and construction, or by radio system failures, not by the hijackers.
The buildings are lead characters in the book. Marvels of modern engineering when built in the 1960s and 1970s, they were deeply flawed in their levels of safety.
Made of lightweight materials allowing them to soar higher than buildings ever had, they contained less fire-resistant masonry. They contained fewer staircases and less fire-resistant ones. Their steel members had experimental and uproven fire-resistance coating. Warnings from firefighters experienced in high-rise firefighting went unheeded.
It was a transitional era of changing building codes, and the WTC got built before new safety strategies fully kicked in. Estimated times that structural components must resist fire were shaved down, and on September 11, they didn’t last even that long.
The WTC terror bombing of 1993, a truck bombing in the basement parking garage, highlighted shortcomings. But while some changes were made, others were never fully implemented and the buildings could not be rebuilt.
The World Trade Center was like the Titanic: Huge, glorious and seen as unlikely to fail. So why worry? Fires would be contained to a floor or two, just as the Titanic’s compartmentalized hull was supposed to have made it unsinkable. Fewer stairwells were like the Titanic’s too-few lifeboats.
Most people would be safest staying in place, anyway, so why waste rentable space on stairways few people would ever use? To save even more space, the existing staircases were grouped more closely together – a safety no-no, making it less likely at least one would remain open in case disaster struck.
The police and fire departments struggled for years over who was in charge where, and what radios to use. A radio repeater system amplifying firefighters’ radios inside the building was buggy. Many systems – electronic and human – break down in the chaos. When a building engineer on 9/11 warns of imminent collapse, a runner must be sent with the news to the scene, because there are no radios reaching the fire chiefs on scene.
The authors find moments of dramatic light against the day’s overwhelming darkness, as people struggle to survive – and many do. People help friends or complete strangers who are asthmatic, disabled, paralyzed overweight or elderly to escape. In some cases they stay with them until the end rather than abandon them. Maintenance and security employees lead rescue attempts on upper floors in the absence of direction or outside help.
One is the story of Richard Fern, a systems operator from Euro Brokers who bolts for the stairs on the 84th floor at the first moment of the south tower’s plane impact. At a dead sprint, even running over people, he charges downstairs, letting nothing stop him. He clears wreckage that others turn back from. He tells a guy who wants to join him, “Fine, but you’ll have to keep up with me.”
When he gets to the bottom, he has blazed a trail, discovering the highest working staircase in either tower, one still passable as high as the 84th floor.
He is one of only 18 people who use it. Tragically, the word doesn’t get back to those who might make use of it – firefighters, trapped building occupants on the upper floors still in touch with the world by cell phone or laptop – and so hundreds die who otherwise might have escaped.
Sprinting in the opposition direction is fire commander Orio Palmer, a marathon runner, physical fitness fanatic and, carrying 56 pounds of gear, the first firefighter to reach the south tower’s plane crash zone starting at the 78th floor. He is the first outsider to see the devastation, radioing back just minutes before the building collapses.
There are many tales of heroism, most notably from building personnel who go up instead of down to rescue people trapped in elevators or under wreckage.
The authors tell the story in an evenhanded way. They describe the background and context of bureaucratic decisions that look horrible in retrospect but may have seemed reasonable at the time. They leave some names off to avoid embarrassing those whose behavior may not seem perfect in retrospect.
But, really, who among us can pass judgment?
Top reviews from other countries
102 minutes is exactly that. A 102 minutes insider view of what happened in the towers on September 11th, from the moment the first plane hit to the moment the North tower collapsed. Using witness accounts, 911 calls that were made and e-mails sent they were able to recount the stories of some of those who were in the Trade Centers on that faithful September morning.
For those of us who watched the towers fall on TV in various locations across the world. The shock was brutal, however the quickness in which the events happened left us with little time to think about what was really going on inside those tower walls.
This book paints a different story than what we saw on TV that morning, one we've never heard before, yet one that needs to be heard... because those who died that morning definitely need to be remembered, not as a simple picture stuck on a wall amongst thousands but as individuals who like you & I had families and friends.








