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

did not organize a single joint drill involving all the emergency responders at the trade center in the eight years after the 1993 attack. The last joint drill appears to have been the one held in 1982, preparations for a plane crash that did not come for nineteen years.
    If the city’s Office of Emergency Management did not have the history or clout to forge an effective partnership between the Fire and Police Departments before September 11, as some critics believed, it certainly had no opportunity that morning. Just minutes after Flight 11 hit the north tower, the agency was forced to evacuate its own offices, a $13 million emergency “bunker” at 7 World Trade Center, a forty-seven-story building at the northern edge of the complex. The bunker had been conceived a few years earlier as a place where emergency officials and Mayor Giuliani could preside during a crisis, coordinating the response. Some emergency-response experts and politicians suggested that the location of the bunker was unwise, given the trade center’s status asa terrorist target, but the mayor brushed off the critics as people mired in the “old ways” of thinking. His aides described the bunker as state of the art and imagined it as impregnable. A defiant response to the 1993 terrorist attack, the bunker was, intentionally or not, a barely veiled monument to the iron will of the mayor, and during his brief campaign for the United States Senate in 2000, it served as an occasional backdrop for Giuliani’s meetings with the press.
    Now, the first time the bunker was truly needed, the agency and its officials were homeless. They arranged to relocate to a specially outfitted command bus that had been prepared as a backup headquarters. The redundancy in the planning, however—to use a phrase popular in emergency-management circles—only served to reinforce the misjudgment of the original arrangement.
    Indeed, the arrangements were being made by OEM over radios broadcasting at 800 megahertz. In 1996 and 1997, dozens of these radios had been distributed to select police and fire commanders so the agencies could communicate, an important recommendation from the 1990 Aviation Emergency Preparedness Working Group. There was a hitch, though. Who would be in control of the interagency frequency? Who would decide when it should be used and how? Representatives of the Police and Fire Departments had met for months to settle these questions, but the talks had broken down over unresolved issues of protocol. The radios were new and ready to use. It was just that no one outside OEM was willing to talk on them yet. The fire chiefs kept them in the trunks of their cars. As for the police chiefs, the radios never left the shelves.
     
     
    A few minutes before 9:00, after getting his bearings in the lobby of the north tower, Chief Pfeifer turned to Lloyd Thompson, the civilian safety director at the fire command desk for the building. “Turn the repeater on,” he said. Thompson began fiddling with something on the desk in front of him. Then he looked over to his left, he would recall later, and saw that the repeater was already on. The repeater was controlled by a console that looked like a phone setwith several buttons. One button, when depressed, turned it on. A second button activated a handset that looked like a telephone. It was supposed to carry the voice of the chief to all the radios that had been tuned to the repeater channel, channel 7. Pfeifer was depending on the repeater to keep him connected to the companies he was sending upstairs, to make sure it amplified the radio signal so that the firefighters could hear his words, so they wouldn’t get trapped like the people they were trying to save. But before being used, the chief thought, the repeater should be double-checked.
    Pfeifer and another chief, Orio J. Palmer, stood several yards apart in the lobby and began trying to talk to each other over the repeater channel. Palmer could not hear Pfeifer.