We have enough information to compare the two disasters with greater precision now that New York Times writers Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have put out their long-awaited documentary monograph, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers - compare and see whether this world changed for the better or worse between 1912 and 2001.
No one considered the possibility of disaster
Built in mid-1960s, the Twin Towers were advertised in America and round the world as a triumph of engineering. The ambitions of billionaire brothers David and Nelson Rockefeller stood behind the world's highest buildings. No masonry was used in their construction, with its cutting-edge technologies. Each tower would survive even if a plane rammed it, enthusiastic accounts said. According to calculations, the fire-insulated steel structure would hold the hit and survive a four-hour-long conflagration.
The dark forecast came true - but the towers did not last.
The insulation came off when the Boeing crashed into the tower and left the frame naked. Fire-extinguishing devices - several hundreds of thousand sprinklers - all failed. "Hit it with your shoe!" rescuers shouted to the stranded people over the phones. They drummed the sprinklers with their boots, laptops, coat hangers - everything they had at hand, but all in vain. Burning fuel burst from the plane to flood along the corridors and send liquid flame down elevator shafts. All 99 speed elevators switched off at once to trap several hundred people. More were trapped in a hundred offices whose doors got jammed.
The warped naked frames stood only 102 minutes after the fire started. The towers collapsed. The north, which had been hit first, stood longer.
The buildings had not undergone heat resistance tests, neither did designers consider the option of complete evacuation, investigators later stated.
The "Titanic" was victim to similar shortsightedness. Made of isolated compartments, the giant ship was unsinkable even if it collided with an iceberg, reassured designer Thomas Andrews. Yet the iceberg cut its steel board as easily as a knife would open a fruit can, and water gushed into the six huge compartments to sink the vessel. As investigators later learned, shipbuilders had never considered the possibility of all six being pierced at once. That was something improbable.
As we see, the past hundred years had not made designers any cleverer.
The planes broke through the two towers in the crash to make tunnels, each six stories high. The buildings shook for seven minutes after the hit. Though the tops held, the people above the rammed spots were doomed, with all elevators and stairs destroyed and clogged with debris.
The first Boeing crashed into the tower at a speed of 450 miles per hour. Everyone in the crash area died instantly. It took survivors some time to see their plight. Hundreds dialed 911 to ask whether they should get down or stay where they were. Telephone operators, whom it took an hour to realize what was going on, gave a standard answer - to stay and wait for rescuers. The flame and smoke were so bad that hundreds of people broke the windows to leap down within minutes. The first suicide jumpers appeared two minutes after the crash.
A wall of fire was devouring the 15 stories above the crash but rescue service operators still could not grasp the situation. One of their records reports a woman saying people were dying trapped in an elevator somewhere between the 84th and 87th stories. The operator called the fire service asking for gas masks.
The towers were totally unsuited for evacuation. Each had only three narrow fire escapes instead of the required six. Even those stairs did not run all across the building. When you reached a dead-end, you were to go along the corridor to find another escape among several hundred doors.
The devil casts lots
The "Titanic" wreck killed 1,522 out of the 2,227 on board. A total of 2,749 died in the Twin Towers disaster out of the six thousand inside.
The towers collapsed 102 minutes after they were rammed. The Devil cast the lots - who was to die and who to escape. The Fuji Bank office, of the south tower, was victim to the most horrible of all hellish tricks played that day. The Japanese-based bank had safety rules the staff had learned by heart in regular drills. The personnel divided into groups of ten for emergencies. The leader of each group had torches and smoke masks. An alarm call came the instant the north tower was rammed. All 75 working on the 81st and 82nd stories the bank occupied calmly came to the elevators to safely get to the first story lobby ten minutes later. The security man did not let them get out of the building but said they should not panic and were to get back to the office as their building was in no danger. The bank employees docilely returned and resumed work. The other Boeing rammed their 81st story, and all but one died. We shall later return to the miraculous survivor, whose name was Stanley Praimnath.
The "Titanic" odyssey also abounds in blood-curdling accounts of death, and inspiring miraculous rescues and heroism at death's door. The band continued playing on the upper deck to encourage the passengers and crew up to the instant when the ship broke in two and went down - a scene Stephen Spielberg's film re-creates with documentary precision.
Harold Godfrey Lowe, 5th officer, displayed valor and resourcefulness as he ordered a lifeboat under his command to deliver the 57 on board to other boats, and row back with a volunteer crew to look for survivors among the bodies floating in their lifebelts. They saved four people.
The Twin Tower odyssey also includes an account of an amazing feat of valor. Building manager Frank De Martini and his men Pablo Ortiz and Mac Hanna, who knew the layout by heart, came upstairs against hundreds streaming down to crush jammed room and elevator doors with crowbars, story after story in the flaming inferno. Their Herculean labors rescued seventy lives or more. The three died in one of the upper stories as the tower collapsed.
Heaven interferes
There was a truly amazing rescue from the "Titanic". One Jack Thayer escaped to the empty ship restaurant the instant the panicky flight started to quaff gin bottle after bottle. Dead drunk, he was thrown off the deck, and roared snatches of songs in cold water. He kept afloat for eight hours, unaware of the hell round him, and did not even catch a cold. The young man sobered up only the following day, when hoisted to the deck of the "Carpathia", the first ship to dash to the "Titanic" rescue. He had no recollection of swimming up to the ship or of being rescued.
His story looks a heavenly whim. Another miraculous rescue, from the Twin Towers, is a tale of conscious courage and kindness. The rescue of Josephine Harris, 60, has deservedly gone down in American history.
Jay Jones and his fire crew received an order to immediately leave the building, which was about to collapse. As the firemen were running down, they saw an elderly woman who could not walk because her feet hurt, and stood helpless and sobbing. Jay ordered her taken down. The firemen first carried Josephine in their arms, then found a chair and put her in it. They spent twenty precious minutes helping her out. The building collapsed when the exhausted crew reached the fourth story. All of them survived, including the old lady. The crew would have perished if they had run down without stopping to help and got to the ground lobby earlier - by miracle fourth story was the only safe spot.
Let us now get back to Stanley Praimnath, Fuji Bank assistant vice-president and epitome of swarthy Indian handsomeness. His was the most amazing odyssey of all that came on September 11.
As he came back to his 81st story office with the rest of the bank's staff, Stanley was talking over the phone, facing the window, when one of the plane wings got into the room. It was his custom to look out the window, admiring the view - the New York Harbor, the Atlantic and the Statue of Liberty. He spotted the fatal plane when it was still on the horizon, and his flesh crept as he realized the Boeing was headed straight for the building. He discerned the red and blue stripes on the fuselage, the pilot's face. The plane rocked. "O Lord!" Stanley cried as he dived under his desk. The plane rammed the building just above his room, the wing piercing the ceiling to stick in the doorway twenty feet away from Stanley. Omitting the details, rescuer Brian Clark got him from under the debris.
In short, the two hair-raising stories - of the "Titanic" and the Twin Towers - prove the world is no different from what it was a hundred years ago.
