102 Minutes : The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers - Vendido!

by Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn
Hardcover: 352 pages 16 pp insert; 8 illus throughout
Henry Holt and Co. / Times Books (January 12, 2005)

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Book Description:
The dramatic and moving account of the struggle for life inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, when every minute counted.

At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers-reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it-until now.

Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most were told from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the opposite-and far more revealing-approach. Reported from the perspectives of those inside the towers, 102 Minutes captures the little-known stories of ordinary people who took extraordinary steps to save themselves and others. Beyond this stirring panorama stands investigative reporting of the first rank. An astounding number of people actually survived the plane impacts but were unable to escape, and the authors raise hard questions about building safety and tragic flaws in New York’s emergency preparedness.

Dwyer and Flynn rely on hundreds of interviews with rescuers, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts. They cross a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos, seeing cataclysm and heroism, one person at a time, to tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women-the nearly 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished-as they made 102 minutes count as never before.

Quotes and reviews:
102 minutes to live
By Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden
June 1 2002
They started as cries for help and became the last human sounds and messages to leave the World Trade Centre. Now, eight months later, scores of telephone messages and e-mails from the trapped and dying have been gathered to form a haunting account of the last 102 minutes in the life of the doomed twin towers. To place these fragmentary messages in context, family members, friends and colleagues of those who died were interviewed. Times of calls from mobile phone bills and 911 records were obtained, and 15 hours of police and fire radio tapes were analysed. The evidence suggests that 1100 or more people in or above the impact zones survived the initial crashes. Many of those lived until their building collapsed. Here are their final words and actions: (...)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/01/1022569847731.html?oneclick=true


From Publishers Weekly
Drawn from thousands of radio transcripts, phone messages, e-mails and interviews with eyewitnesses, this 9/11 account comes from the perspective of those inside the World Trade Center from the moment the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. to the collapse of the north tower at 10:28 a.m. The stories are intensely intimate, and they often stir gut-wrenching emotions. A law firm receptionist quietly eats yogurt at her desk seconds before impact. Injured survivors, sidestepping debris and bodies, struggle down a stairwell. A man trapped on the 88th floor leaves a phone message for his fiancée: "Kris, there’s been an explosion.... I want you to know my life has been so much better and richer because you were in it." Dwyer and Flynn, New York Times writers, take rescue agencies to task for rampant communications glitches and argue that the towers’ faulty design helped doom those above the affected floors ("Their fate had been sealed nearly four decades earlier, when... fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space"). In doing so, the authors frequently draw parallels to similar safety oversights aboard the ill-fated Titanic nearly 90 years before. Their reporting skills are exceptional; readers experience the chaos and confusion that unfolded inside, in grim, painstaking detail. B&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From 102 Minutes:
When he returned to 78, Greg Trapp saw a group of three Port Authority employees at work on the doors to the elevator where Tony Savas, a seventy-two-year-old structural inspector, was trapped. Trapp peered into the small gap and saw him, a man with thinning white hair, seemingly serene. One of the workers grabbed a metal easel, wedging the legs into the opening, trying to spread the doors from the bottom, where they seemed to have the greatest leverage. But their efforts had the opposite effect at the top of the doors, which seemed to pinch tighter.

At that moment, John Griffin, who had recently started as the trade center’s director of operations, came over to the elevator bank. At six feet, eight inches tall, Griffin had no problem reaching the top of the door to apply pressure as the others pushed from the bottom. The doors popped apart. Out came Savas, who seemed surprised to find Griffin, his new boss, involved in the rescue. Savas seemed exhilarated, possessed of a sudden burst of energy, rubbing his hands together, or so it seemed to Trapp.

"Okay," Savas said. "What do you need me to do?”

One of the Port Authority workers shook his head. "We just got you out-you need to leave the building."

No, Savas insisted. He wanted to help. "I’ve got a second wind."

102 Minutes: Fighting to Live as the Towers Died
by Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden
The New York Times
September 11, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/nyregion/26WTC.html
They began as calls for help, information, guidance. They quickly turned into soundings of desperation, and anger, and love. Now they are the remembered voices of the men and women who were trapped on the high floors of the twin towers.
From their last words, a haunting chronicle of the final 102 minutes at the World Trade Center has emerged, built on scores of phone conversations and e-mail and voice messages. These accounts, along with the testimony of the handful of people who escaped, provide the first sweeping views from the floors directly hit by the airplanes and above.
Collected by reporters for The New York Times, these last words give human form to an all but invisible strand of this stark, public catastrophe: the advancing destruction across the top 19 floors of the north tower and the top 33 of the south, where loss of life was most severe on Sept. 11. Of the 2,823 believed dead in the attack on New York, at least 1,946, or 69 percent, were killed on those upper floors, an analysis by The Times has found.
Rescue workers did not get near them. Photographers could not record their faces. If they were seen at all, it was in glimpses at windows, nearly a quarter-mile up.
Yet like messages in an electronic bottle from people marooned in some distant sky, their last words narrate a world that was coming undone. A man sends an e-mail message asking, "Any news from the outside?" before perching on a ledge at Windows on the World. A woman reports a colleague is smacking useless sprinkler heads with his shoe. A husband calmly reminds his wife about their insurance policies, then says that the floor is groaning beneath him, and tells her that she and their children meant the world to him.
No single call can describe scenes that were unfolding at terrible velocities in many places. Taken together though, the words from the upper floors offer not only a broad and chilling view of the devastated zones, but the only window onto acts of bravery, decency and grace at a brutal time. (...)
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company


Dwyer reflects on life as a journalist in Iraq conflict
Danielle Ponzio
Princetonian Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Jim Dwyer, a New York Times reporter (...), spoke Monday about his career as a journalist and his experiences as an embedded reporter in Iraq in the first Rockefeller College Master’s dinner.

Dwyer, a biology major and premed student at Fordham University, became interested in journalism through a twist of fate. He was driving along a road during his sophomore year in college, he recalled. "A guy in distress was lying on the side of the road. I decided, as a premed student, I should help him," Dwyer said. The man was having a seizure, which he later told Dwyer was the result of a Vietnam War injury.

This might have been an isolated story in Dwyer’s life. But Dwyer had a developing love interest who would make the event his impetus to enter journalism.

"It may be a twisted thought, but I thought I’d write an article on it, an essay, an impressionistic report," he said. "I thought the girl would read it and be impressed."

Though the girl never read the article, it did make his school’s newspaper. Dwyer started working for the paper.

After graduating, he got a job with New York’s Newsday where he wrote a regular column — named "In the Subways" — to bring "where New York happens" to the newspaper’s primarily Long-Island-based readership.

He also wrote the book "Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway."

In 1995, Dwyer was hired by The New York Daily News, where he continued to write columns for seven years. In 2001, tired of his own voice, he went to work for The New York Times. It was a few months before Sept. 11.

He was sent to Iraq as an embedded reporter, living, eating and sleeping with the 101st Airborne army unit. He experienced the miserable state of life in the deserts of Iraq, including a 48-hour period of sandstorms.

"I called the office, and they told me to write a story about what it’s like to live in those conditions. I interviewed soldiers, and one said to me, ’Jim, you just got to embrace the suck,’ so that’s what I did," Dwyer said. "It was a terrible, terrible place, and as soon as I could leave, I left."

He returned home in April.

Six months after his experience in Iraq, Dwyer is teaching a journalism class, HUM 440: The Literature of Fact. He is also writing a book about Sept. 11, 2001 entitled "102 Minutes," told completely from the point of view of those who experienced the collapse of the towers firsthand.

"And, that girl who didn’t read the article married me anyway," he said.

Copyright 2003 Daily Princetonian Publishing Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2003/11/12/news/9080.shtml

About the Authors:
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, native New Yorkers, veteran newspaper reporters, and winners of many awards together and separately, now write for The New York Times. Dwyer is co-author of Two Seconds Under the World, an account of the 1993 effort to knock down the World Trade Center, and of Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted. He is also the author of Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway. Flynn, a special projects editor at the Times, was the newspaper’s police bureau chief on September 11. He previously worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, New York Newsday, and the Stamford Advocate.