attack. Some identified the plane as a commercial airliner.
next few minutes would turn on their circumstances and their preparedness,
assisted by building personnel on-site.
was reported on the 92nd floor, technically below the impact but unable to
descend. Civilians were also trapped in elevators. Other civilians below the
impact zone--mostly on floors in the 70s and 80s, but also on at least the 47th
and 22nd floors--were either trapped or waiting for assistance.
immediately aware that a major incident had occurred, did not know for
approximately ten minutes that a commercial jet had directly hit the building.
Following protocol, he initially gave announcements to those floors that had
generated computerized alarms, advising those tenants to descend to points of
safety--at least two floors below the smoke or fire--and to wait there for fur-
ther instructions. The deputy fire safety director has told us that he began
instructing a full evacuation within about ten minutes of the explosion. But
the first FDNY chiefs to arrive in the lobby were advised by the Port Author-
ity fire safety director--who had reported to the lobby although he was no
longer the designated fire safety director--that the full building evacuation
announcement had been made within one minute of the building being hit.
reason, many civilians may have been unable to use the emergency intercom
phones, as they had been advised to do in fire drills. Many called 911.
an "all circuits busy" message. Standard operating procedure was for calls relat-
ing to fire emergencies to be transferred from 911 operators to FDNY dispatch
operators in the appropriate borough (in this case, Manhattan).Transfers were
often plagued by delays and were in some cases unsuccessful. Many calls were
also prematurely disconnected.
to provide information as fundamental as whether callers were above or below
the fire. Because the operators were not informed of NYPD Aviation's deter-
mination of the impossibility of rooftop rescues from the Twin Towers on that
day, they could not knowledgeably answer when callers asked whether to go
up or down. In most instances, therefore, the operators and the FDNY dis-
patchers relied on standard operating procedures for high-rise fires--that civil-