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

operations. They did not bicker; they simply did not communicate. No one from the Fire Department called up to request the use of a helicopter, as envisioned by the protocol. No one from the Police Department called to find out if they were coming. And so the police helicopters lifted off without any firefighters, leaving Chief Pfeifer to wonder about the spread of fire on the upper floors 1,200 feet above him, even though, from 8:52 on,a police helicopter had a clear view of the damage. Indeed, a few minutes later, the pilot of Aviation 14 sent in a grim bird’s-eye report.
    “Be advised at this time,” Detective Timothy Hayes said. “Be advised we do have people confirmed falling out of the building at this time. It looks like four sides are cut open. A lot of flames.”
    That word did not get down to the fire commanders in the lobby of the north tower, not in an act of specific hostility, but because of a long-standing malaise that ran from the top of each department to the bottom. Mayors had tried for years to forge a peaceful, working relationship so that in the event of a big disaster, all the resources of the city would be coordinated. After a series of plane crashes, Mayor David N. Dinkins formed an Aviation Emergency Preparedness Working Group in 1990, with representatives from the Fire and Police Departments and Emergency Medical Services, as well as others. In a report, the group concluded that the agencies needed to practice working together and to arrange for a single radio frequency that commanders could share during emergencies. After a couple of years of drills, the group was disbanded in 1994, when a new mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, took office. Giuliani made public safety the signature cause of his administration. In 1996, he created the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), which ran a series of mock disaster drills, though none that involved an airliner crashing into a skyscraper, whether by accident or design. Indeed, despite the trade center’s status as the city’s leading terrorist target, coordinated disaster drills were extremely rare events in the life of the complex.
    The consequences of a plane’s striking one of the towers had been envisioned many years earlier, even before the towers were built, by opponents of their construction who ran an ad in The New York Times with a lurid—and, as it turned out, prescient—illustration of an airliner striking the north face of the north tower. The Port Authority quickly responded: calculations by its engineers and computer simulations showed that an airplane crash would wreak destruction across seven floors, but the building itself would stand. On Sunday, November 7, 1982, officials replicated a plane crashhigh in one of the towers, a “disaster” to which city Police and Fire Departments, Emergency Medical Services, and the Port Authority all responded. The drill followed a real near-disaster that had made news the year before: an Argentine airliner came within ninety seconds of hitting the north tower when it had problems communicating with air traffic controllers. No terrorism was involved.
    After the 1993 bombing, a retired director of the World Trade Center, Guy Tozzoli, told a legislative hearing that the city should probably prepare for such a catastrophe, citing the drill from 1982. His suggestion was ignored. None of the city newspapers gave the idea even a sentence of coverage, and it did not appear in the legislative committee’s report. A new administration took over the city government, and Mayor Giuliani, in the classic fashion of New York mayors, attacked the Port Authority for shortchanging the city on various financial arrangements. Giuliani raised the temperature on the customary mayoral critiques, decrying everything from the salaries the Port Authority paid to its police officers—higher than what the city paid to NYPD officers—and what he claimed was poor airport snow removal. For all the spears launched, however, the city