41 pages • 1 hour read
Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn102 Minutes
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 13-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Chapter 13 documents the lack of coordination between rescue agencies, and the utter lack of information available to firefighters inside the north tower, after the south tower collapses. The chapter opens at 9:59 a.m. in the north tower, as Jeffrey Nussbaum, of Carr Futures, who is on the 92nd floor, learns via telephone from his mom of the south tower collapse. This leads into a discussion of the incredible amount of energy the south tower sent rippling into the north tower. The collapse registers on a seismograph in Lisbon, New Hampshire, 265 miles away. Months and years later, scientists struggled to explain to everyday people just how much force was involved in the collapse:
All the power used by the construction workers to lift steel, pour concrete, hammer nails had been banked in the buildings as potential energy for three decades, just as a sled at the top of a hill stores the verve of the child who tugged it up there […] Stockpiled in the south tower was a tremendous reserve of energy, 278 megawatt hours [...] enough power to supply all the homes in Atlanta or Oakland or Miami for one hour” (200).
This power ripples from the south to the north tower, 131 feet away. Both buildings are bolted seven stories beneath the surface of the New York City sidewalks.
The majority of Chapter 13 is spent chronicling the fire department’s struggles: the failure of walkie-talkies, the men who continue searching floors, others who stop for rest, covered in sweat, and take off their heavy gear. As the south tower collapses, operation commanders, including Chief Pfeifer, flee the north tower, leaving radios behind. Dwyer and Flynn suggest that were it not for serendipitous meetings with police and Port Authority officers—who, at 10:01 a.m., seventy-five minutes after impact, receive directions to evacuate immediately—many firefighters would never have received evacuation orders.
When trade center employees urge firefighters to get out, firefighters say they’ll be down in a few minutes. Many people who evacuate at this time spot Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz on the 27th floor stairway landing: “All morning, institutional prerogatives and customs and obstinacy had blanked [Fire Department Chief Joe Pfeifer] and his colleagues in a thick fog of ignorance” (202). This continues after the south tower collapses. Firefighters never got together with police helicopter pilots, who radio at 10:19 a.m. that north tower is glowing red and buckling, and collapse seems imminent. Police stayed put, despite that as early as 9:00, Port Authority command had abandoned that approach and ordered evacuation.Firefighters believe in the building, as Lieutenant Warren Smith observes when firefighters refuse to leave their posts: “The 1993 bombing had shown them it could stand up. It was, he thought, the Titanic mentality” (213).
As in previous chapters, Chapter 13 is filled with both brief notes of personal accountsand comparisons to the 1993 bombing. The chapter shows how lack of communication between emergency departments proves fatal, while at the same time characterizes the firefighters inside the south tower as brave men dedicated to their work as emergency rescuers. Many commanders would not leave their men and ascended into the inferno.
Chapter 14 Summary
Chapter 14 explores the harrowing minutes of 10:20 to 10:28—102 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 smashes into the north tower. The last survivors escape the building; hundreds of others remain trapped inside as the north tower collapses. Dwyer and Flynn continue to humanize victims by naming as many people as they can. One example is Jeff Gertler, who helps Judith Reese, an older colleague with severe asthma and broken arches, descend from the 88th floor. Reese was among the first to evacuate minutes after impact, but her physical condition allows only a turtle’s pace. Gertler encourages Reese, who worked for Frank De Martini, all the way to the 10th floor.
Meanwhile, the Marriott Hotel, which abuts the north tower, crumbles. It has served as a ramp out of the tower during evacuation, as well as being a way in for many emergency workerswith almost zero information about the tower’s layout. Many, including Marriott employees who stayed behind to help direct traffic, are trapped among the debris. As rescuers communicate with them, trying to save who they can, the north tower buries the Marriott and the rescuers: “By 9:59, the evacuation had slowed to a trickle […] then it came: a rumble, the crashes, the blotting out of light” (218). A majority of those still inside the north tower just before collapse are chronically injured, and some of those injured escape the tower only because rescuers leave behind wheelchairs and drag people out by their legs. Still inside at the time of collapse are hundreds of firefighters.
The chapter is a final homage to those lost on 9/11. People who safely escape include secretary Dianne DeFontes and Raffaele Cava, the old man with the hat. Meanwhile,41-year-old Tom McGinnis calls his wife to tell her he, and many others on the 92nd floor, where smoke and fire barely reached, won’t make it out. The collapse is like “a giant accordion is being squeezed, pushing 55 million cubic feet of air. Behind the rush of air comes the screech of the falling trusses, the slap of tons of metal columns against other tons of metal, percussive bangs, end sounds” (230). The authors pay special attention to naming firefighters, who fight to rescue strangers until the last moment.
Epilogue Summary
The Epilogue begins with Dwyer and Flynn describing the situation at ground zero at 11:00 a.m., once both towers have collapsed. Will Jimeno, a Port Authority police officer who was running through the concourse when the north tower fell, finds himself buried beneath the rubble. Of the four other officers fleeing with Jimeno, only one, Sgt. John McLoughlin remains alive. Here, the authors draw conclusions: so many firefighters did not have to die. Safety restrictions eased by the 1968 building code created more profit at a cost to people’s safety. Lessons were not learned from past tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, decades earlier, where young women workers, like those occupying the floors above the plane’s impact, leapt to their deaths from burning rooms.
Despite Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s statements in following weeks that many firefighters died helping civilians escape, the evidence proves otherwise; the authors contend that “[a] cascade of lapsed communications […] cost lives” (238). The many firefighters resting on the 19th floor when the north tower collapsed assumed they had at least another hour of rescue time, based on how long fireproofing is supposed to last. But the Epilogue points out that true tests to the fireproofing were never done until 2004, and then, tests showed the fireproofing was simply not enough. Nearly all 6,000 civilians below the impact zone escape the north tower before its collapse. Police helicopters radioed about the possibility of collapse almost an hour before it happened: “For no good reason, firefighters were cut off from critical information”(238).
The authors show how the poor communications in the towers that morning foreshadow governmental issues. National defense systems could not pool resources to track even one of the hijacked planes that morning: “What happened in New York City that morning was replicated through all the arms of government, differing only in details, duration, and cost” (235). Only a week before, President George W. Bush received information that Bin Laden was determined to attack on U.S. soil. Firefighters in the tower were largely on their own, the authors say.
Dwyer and Flynn go on to chronicle rescue efforts in the rubble, documenting actions of everyday people who made decisions to come to ground zero. One example is David Karnes, who began the day working in Wilton, Connecticut, and drove to Long Island, where he kept his Marine kit, then headed to ground zero. There, Karnes spots another Marine, Sergeant Thomas. It’s these two who first reach Jimeno, who had prayed to God to somehow let Jimeno see his unborn baby. Their efforts, along with paramedic Chuck Sereika, who missed work that day, and had been in and out of rehab, but showed up late in the morning, save Jimeno’s and McLoughlin’s lives.
Chapter 13-Epilogue Analysis
In the final three chapters of 102 Minutes, Dwyer and Flynn reiterate the facts they have shared throughout the book, while documenting the final moments before each tower collapses, and the moments after. The authors sugarcoat nothing, and call people like Mayor Rudolph Guiliani into question. The authors stick to their task of delivering as much factual information as possible. In these final sections, the authors circle back and share the fates of individuals they’ve refenced throughout, individuals like De Martini, who never makes it out, and Diane Defontes, who does.
The Epilogue celebrates and humanizes names that might have remained, for many, simply names on a list, and closes on a note of melancholy: “now Chuck Sereika was starting for home on his own. His old paramedic shirt torn, he plodded north in the late-summer night, alone, scuffling down streets [covered in] the dust that had been the World Trade Center” (249).
