Life and Death Decisions, A Tale of Two Towers

As the classic television crime show used to remind us, “There are 8 million stories in the Naked City.” There were more on Sept. 11, 2001. Here are just a few, one from each of the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed.

Ariel Goodman, president of the Rainbow Fund, was running a little late on the morning of Sept. 11. She was walking the 600 feet from home to her office on the 87th floor of One World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. when American Airlines flight 11 slammed into the building. “It was terrifying,” she recalled. “When I saw the first tower get hit on my way to work, I looked up and saw this big hole in the western view. All I kept thinking was ‘Oh my God, everyone I know is dead in my office and I should have been there at 8:15 and I’m not dead!’ I ran back to my apartment.” Goodman reported that she arrived home in plenty of time to see tower two get hit.

For most people home was a safe place to be that day, but Battery Park City was different. The luxury apartments in the shadow of the World Trade Center stood squarely in harm’s way and were about to take a beating.

“I was in my apartment when tower two fell and I saw it fall,” Goodman remembered. “I saw people jumping into the river while the building was falling. After the smoke cleared a little bit I ran down the stairs and there were about 100 people in my lobby trapped because there was no way out by the main entrance.” Debris from the falling skyscraper had blocked the primary exit shared by two apartment towers, and the force of the collapse shifted doors and windows, jamming them shut.

Goodman led her neighbors in breaking out of the trap by smashing windows at the rear of the building and escaping onto the Esplanade that runs along the Hudson River. Just as she fled the building, the north tower collapsed and some of the debris hit Goodman. She ran south, away from the Twin Towers, until police officers directed her to safety in the shelter of the Holocaust Museum.

The Rainbow Fund now operates from Goodman’s new home overlooking the Hudson River in Midtown. Despite the loss of critical backup data when falling debris from the north tower broke disks she was carrying, her company has recovered and is doing as well as can be expected in a prolonged bear market.

Bill Bryan is in the habit of getting to work early, and Sept. 11 was no exception. “I normally get in fairly early and I park in the World Trade Center,” said the senior vice president at Hartford Specialty Company. He remembers patting a yellow Labrador retriever on the head as he left the garage at about 6:20 a.m. The dog, owned by the Port Authority Police Department, died later in the day.

By the time his day started to unravel, Bryan was already chairing a meeting in his office at the northwest corner of the 20th floor of 7 World Trade Center, just north of the Twin Towers. “I heard this roar over my shoulder,” he recalled, “then I heard the crash and I walked across the hall and I saw all the stuff pouring down from the north tower.” His first reaction was to move everybody at Hartford Specialty to the north side of the building, away from the danger. When the second plane hit, it was time to get everybody down the stairwells and outside. Bryan and three other managers swept the floors to make sure nobody remained behind before leaving themselves. Using something he learned during the 1993 terrorist bombing of the complex, Bryan departed from standard safety procedures to help a Hartford employee recovering from surgery leave the building in an elevator.

Because he knows many of the police officers who worked at World Trade Center, Bryan would probably have remained at the scene had he not found a group of “lost sheep,” Hartford employees unsure of what to do. He led them north just in time. “We were about four or five blocks north when the south tower came down. All the debris went about three blocks north, so we were fortunate enough to escape that.”

By another stroke of luck a Hartford Specialty manager had parked his car in Midtown Manhattan for an evening meeting. Because the bridges and tunnels linking New York City to New Jersey had been closed, he and Bryan drove across the Tappan Zee Bridge about 25 miles north of the city. “We ended up getting home about 4:00,” Bryan related, “just in time to turn the television on and watch 7 World Trade go down.”

Bryan spent the rest of the day on the telephone as he and his managers personally spoke to every employee of Hartford Specialty. That was just the first example of the Hartford’s response that Bryan describes as absolutely spectacular. “Our number one priority,” he explained, “is our people, our clients and our business.”

Not all the stories of Sept. 11 have what you can call a happy ending. Among the heroes of that day, one stands head and shoulders above the rest. Rick Rescorda’s job as vice president of corporate security for Morgan Stanley, the World Trade Center’s largest employer, included responsibility for planning, and when necessary executing emergency evacuations. All but seven of Morgan Stanley’s 3,500 employees working at Two World Trade Center and 5 World Trade Center escaped unharmed. Nobody at the securities firm has any doubt that one person deserves all the credit for that remarkable achievement.

Two things make that statistic truly astonishing. United Airlines flight 175 flew directly into the upper floors of Morgan Stanley’s offices in Two World Trade Center. Almost until the moment of the second impact, building management was announcing that the south tower was “secure” and urging occupants of the five undamaged office buildings in the complex to remain at their desks.

In a telephone conversation while the evacuation was in progress, Rescorda told a friend that building management wanted Morgan Stanley to hold its employees at their workstations. He paid no attention to their advice and directed everybody working on the 44th through 74th floors to take the stairs down to the lobby and leave the building. To Gregory Ferris, Morgan Stanley’s executive director, global business continuity planning, that made all the difference in the world. “He made the call to evacuate our people in spite of some other decisions that were made at the building management level,” Ferris said. “In doing so he saved a lot of people. I think that is our major coup.”

Evacuating the Morgan Stanley offices was an orderly process, with employees walking calmly down the stairs two by two. An onlooker might have gotten the impression that they had been there and done that. They had. To make certain that his plans would work when lives were at stake, Rescorda insisted on full- scale rehearsals, evacuation drills reminiscent of grade school.

Some of his coworkers believe that Rescorda intended to be the last person out of the south tower on Sept. 11 as well. He would stay until there was nobody left who needed his help. That is what he was doing the last time any of the survivors saw him. It was in the stairwell at the 10th floor. Rescorda finished helping to evacuate a victim, turned and started climbing the stairs, going up to help someone else.

Both The Hartford and Morgan Stanley have decided that they can do very well without offices in landmark buildings.

Despite reservations about the cleanup downtown, on the other hand, Ariel Goodman can’t wait to get back into her apartment across the street from the open pit where her office used to stand. She also wants back into the World Trade Center. From the Ground Up, an organization she co-founded, is lobbying to win preferential treatment for tenants of the lost buildings when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey rebuilds at the site we now call Ground Zero.

Topics Aviation