Around 1:00 P.M.
Police Department Begins Helicopter Rescues
Some in the towers, unable to make a lengthy descent down dark stairwells,
move to the top floors under the direction of first responders and Port Authority staff. From the rooftops, and over the course of several hours, the
NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit helicopter crews airlift 28 people to safety. Television news outlets capture the rooftop rescues on-screen, airing the footage again and again.
Helicopter landing
NYPD Emergency Service Unit (ESU) helicopter crews land on the roof of the North Tower to rescue evacuees. Timothy Farrell, an ESU sergeant who rappels onto the roof, later describes searching the uppermost floors:
“Floor by floor, I would only run into a couple of people. A lot of people had gone down, but some people really stayed put. It was only a couple of dozen in all of those 10 floors. I sent those people to the roof, told them there was a police officer up on the roof, and
that’s where I wanted them to at least gather. We’d all be in the same spot.”
Helicopter rescue notes
Port Authority Police Department Officer Thomas McHale takes notes while assisting in the South Tower rooftop evacuation. The notes specify whether helicopter evacuees are male (marked with the letter M) or female (marked with F). McHale also notes the health conditions of some people, including pregnancies and cardiac issues.
1:30 P.M.
Towers Go Dark
Detonation of the bomb causes
rolling power failures at the World Trade Center. Around 1:30 p.m., all electricity in the complex is shut off. Emergency generators, ventilation systems, and public address systems become inoperable, along with the elevators.
With no windows or emergency lights in the stairwells, people still in the towers evacuate in the dark. Their slow progress means a full evacuation will take hours.
Most New York City broadcast stations transmit their over-the-air signals from the antenna on the North Tower.
When the electricity goes out, the stations lose their feeds. By the middle of the afternoon, only WCBS is still on the air, using backup equipment at the Empire State Building.
Evacuation flashlight
Michael Hurley, Port Authority Observation Deck supervisor, on the 107th floor of the South Tower,
uses a flashlight to lead trapped tourists, including approximately 30 elementary school students on a field trip, out of dark, smoke-filled stairwells.
After four hours on the roof, the tourists are escorted down the stairs to street level while Hurley stays to search for others. Hurley is airlifted from the roof by helicopter later that night.
"You couldn’t walk down a step until the person in front of you walked down a step."
Jeannine Ali, a Dean Witter employee, remembers the slow evacuation in a South Tower stairwell.
“There was smoke coming through the vents. You felt the earth shake. We felt the bomb. We didn’t know what it was. The person who was my best friend, I remember holding her hand.
The stairs were packed. You couldn’t walk down a step until the person in front of you walked down a step. I mean, we were literally back to back to back. And I remember us counting because there wasn’t the same number of steps on each landing, and you couldn’t see. So we were counting out loud, and people were yelling at us for doing that. We held each other. I held the rail, she was at the wall, and we would count: ‘Okay, this one’s eight, this one’s seven, this one’s eight, this one’s seven.’ And there were people up above, and we’d be yelling, ‘We need some light!’ But, you know,
there were very few flashlights, and it was pitch-black, pitch-black.
When we got down to, like, the 14th or the 17th floor, somebody had pried one of the entryways open. And I remember there was a light coming through—there was a little bit of light coming through the stairway, and as we passed it, my girlfriend said to me, ‘Ew, your nose is all black.’ And I’m like, ‘Ew, what’s that?’ And when we got down, we realized all our faces were black.”
Around 5:00 P.M.
Most Civilians Have Evacuated the Towers
More than four hours after the explosion, most of the 40,000 people inside the towers have slowly made their way down dark, smoke-filled staircases and, finally, out of the World Trade Center complex. Some evacuees believe a transformer exploded or electrical fire occurred.
We had to take turns holding the flashlight, just for a little bit of a glow.
Robert Small, who worked for Dean Witter in the South Tower, talks about the evacuation process.
“We decided to leave, but there were no lights. And going down the stairs in total darkness, someone had a pen flashlight that you had to hold with your thumb. We had to take turns holding the flashlight, just for a little bit of a glow. You had to count the stairs as you went down.
You had to keep your hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you and just rely on them to tell you that they hit a platform because there would be, like, two flights to every floor. It was a zigzag stairwell. So you had to let the person behind you know ‘landing,’ and then turn.
We did Batman trivia on the way down. We had to identify all the bad guys and who played the villains, so that kind of got us through the trip down. And then of course when we got outside, everyone had the raccoon face from breathing in all the smoke that we couldn’t see because we were in total darkness.”
We went down in groups of ten, and it was dark. It was dark.
Linda Horan, an employee of Fiduciary Trust, describes evacuating from the 94th floor of the South Tower.
It takes her approximately two and a half hours to exit safely.
“Finally, somebody from Security, I think, came and said that you have an option.
You can either start going down the stairs, or you can wait until the Fire Department gets up here and then go. So that’s what we did, we waited. And I guess they got up to us about three o’clock, and that’s when they gave groups of us flashlights. We went down in groups of ten, and it was dark. It was dark. So you really took your time.”