102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn

days after the new radios were introduced, however, a firefighter lost in a house fire called for help and could not be heard by his colleagues outside. Other complaints soon surfaced, and the new radios were pulled from service amid a debate over whether the problem was a hardware glitch or a lack of training on how to use the new equipment.
    As a result, the department was forced to reissue the Motorola Saber radios it had just withdrawn, some of them fifteen years old. On September 11, many of the firefighters marched into the towers with these old radios, the identical ones they had carried eight years earlier when the bomb went off. This time, though, they had the powerful repeater. It had been tested only a few months earlier and had worked well. Even with the old radios, the prospects for communicating within the tower looked brighter than they had in 1993.
     
     
    Truck 1, an elite team of rescue specialists from the Emergency Service Unit of the New York Police Department, arrived at 8:52 A.M. and set up a command post at the corner of Church and Vesey Streets, about two blocks from the lobby where Pfeifer and the fire chiefs were directing their operation. The ESU cops, forty or so officers organized in six teams, were trained to help people who had been taken hostage, or were dangling from bridges or, as was the case here, trapped by fire. They were followed to the scene by hundreds of fellow New York police officers summoned at 8:56 A.M. by the chief of the department, Joseph Esposito.
    “Car three,” Esposito said on the radio. “We’ve got a level three and you might want to go to a level four here, Central, all right?”
    A Level 4 mobilization was the department’s highest, rarest state of alert, the police equivalent of a war footing. It meant that about 1,000 officers would be responding. As they arrived, most of the officers were given assignments outside the buildings. Some directed people leaving the trade center away from the perimeter of the complex and the streets around it. Others controlled the crowd or tried to direct the congealing traffic. The ESU cops were sentinside the building. On paper, they would work under Fire Department direction. The city had a protocol that established who did what at emergencies, which was supposed to avoid duplication of effort and to keep the chain of command clear. The Fire Department was in charge at fires, so technically the ESU teams were supposed to check in with fire officials at the lobby before they rushed to help in the building.
    Some teams did check in, others didn’t, and one that did felt rebuffed by the fire chiefs to whom they spoke. That was not a surprise. The Finest, as the police were called, and the Bravest, the nickname for the firefighters, did not like each other. The saying went that the only thing the two departments could ever agree on was the date of their annual boxing match. Sometimes, they didn’t wait for that date, and fistfights broke out at rescue scenes. The corrosive nature of the relationship had far more serious consequences than a fat lip. To be completely effective, firefighters and police officers needed to share information, to act in concert, to anticipate what the other force might do as a disaster evolved. The decisions that commanders made were influenced by how quickly and accurately they sized up a situation based on what they learned both from their troops and their putative allies. But these two agencies didn’t train together often or well. They couldn’t talk to each other by radio because their frequencies did not match. And they didn’t share equipment.
    The police, for example, flew helicopters, and the city had drafted a plan to let firefighters ride in them at high-rise fires. This plan was revised after the 1993 bombing, but it was rarely used and infrequently rehearsed. And on this day the cooperation was no different. The Police and Fire Departments ran brave but completely independent rescue