Distant voices, still lives, 09:38-10:00

'Ed, be careful!' shouted Alayne Gentul, director of human resources at Fiduciary Trust, as Edgar Emery slipped off the desk he had been standing on within the increasingly hot and smoky 97th floor of the South Tower.

Emery had been using his blazer to seal a ventilation duct that was belching smoke. To evacuate Fiduciary employees who worked on this floor, Emery and Gentul had climbed seven floors from their own offices. Now the two of them, and the six or so they were trying to save, were in serious trouble. As Gentul spoke to her husband Jack on the phone - he could overhear what was happening - Emery spread the coat over the vent. Next, he swung a shoe at a sprinkler head, hoping to start the flow of water. 'The sprinklers aren't going on,' Gentul told Jack. No one knew the plane had cut the water pipes.

'We don't know whether to stay or go,' Gentul added. 'I don't want to go down into a fire.'

Among the doomed, the phone calls, messages and witnesses make clear, were many people who had put themselves in harm's way by stopping to offer a hand to colleagues or strangers. Others acted with great tenderness when all else was lost.

Gentul and Emery, of Fiduciary, whose offices stretched from the 90th to the 97th floors, had made their own fateful decisions to help others. When the first plane hit, the fireball billowed across the western facade of the 90th floor, where Emery was in his office. 'I felt the heat on my face,' said Anne Foodim, a member of human resources who worked nearby. Emery, known for steadiness, emerged, the lapels on his blue blazer flapping as he waved people out. 'Come on, let's go,' he said, escorting five employees, including Foodim, into a stairwell. They walked down 12 floors, reaching the 78th floor and the express elevator, with Emery giving encouragement.

'If you can finish chemo, you can get down those steps,' Emery told an exhausted Foodim, who had just completed a round of chemotherapy. When they finally reached a packed elevator on the 78th floor, Emery made sure everyone got aboard. He squeezed Foodim's shoulder and let the door close in front of him. Then he headed back up, joining Gentul. Like Emery, Gentul herded a group out before the second plane hit. A receptionist, Mona Dunn, saw her on the 90th floor where workers were debating when or if to leave. Gentul instantly settled the question. 'Go down and go down orderly,' she said, indicating a stairway.

'It was like the teacher saying, "It's OK, go",' Dunn recalled. Together, Gentul and Emery went to evacuate six people on the 97th floor who had been working on a computer backup operation, Gentul told her husband.

Emery was hunting for a stairwell on the 97th floor when he reached his wife, Elizabeth, on a mobile. The last thing she heard before she lost the connection was Gentul screaming from somewhere very near Emery: 'Where's the stairs? Where's the stairs?'

Nearby, Edmund McNally, director of technology for Fiduciary, called his wife, Liz, as the floor began buckling. He hastily recited his life insurance policies and employee bonus programmes. 'He said that I meant the world to him and he loved me,' McNally said, and they exchanged what they thought were their last goodbyes. Then McNally's phone rang again. Her husband sheepishly reported that he had booked them on a trip to Rome for her fortieth birthday. 'He said, "Liz, you have to cancel that".'

On the 93rd floor, Gregory Milanowycz, 25, an insurance broker for Aon, urged others to leave - some survived - but went back himself, after hearing the announcement. 'Why did I listen to them - I shouldn't have,' he moaned after his father, Joseph, called him. Now he was trapped. He asked his father to ask the fire department what he and 30 other people should do. His father said he passed word from a dispatcher to his son that they should stay low and that firefighters were working their way up. Then he heard his son calling: 'They're coming! My dad's on the phone with them. They're coming. Everyone's got to get to the ground.'

Even when the situation was most hopeless, the trapped people were still watching out for one another. On the 87th floor, a group of about 20 from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods took refuge in a conference room. During the final minutes, Eric Thorpe managed to get a call to his wife, Linda Perry, at a neighbour's apartment. No one spoke from the tower. Instead, Mrs Thorpe and the neighbour listened to the ambient noise.

'I heard everything in the background,' she said. 'Someone asks, "Where is the fire extinguisher?" Someone else says, "It got thrown out the window." I heard a voice ask, "Is anybody unconscious?" Some of them sounded calm. One man went berserk. I couldn't understand what he was saying. He just lost it.'

09:45 - South Tower, 105th floor, 14 minutes to collapse.

Minutes after the second plane struck the South Tower, Roko Camaj called home to report that a throng had gathered near the roof, according to his son Vinny. 'I'm on the 105th floor,' Roko told his wife. 'There's at least 200 people here.'

The promise of sanctuary on the roof had seemed so logical, so irresistible, that scores of people chased their fates up the stairs. They were blind alleys.

Camaj, a window washer, carried the key to the roof. That key alone would not open its door: A buzzer also had to be pressed by security staff in a command post on the 22nd floor. And the post had been damaged and evacuated.

The roof seemed the only option to people on the upper floors. A police helicopter had evacuated people from the roof of the North Tower in 1993 after a terrorist bomb exploded in the basement. For a variety of reasons, though, the Port Authority, with the agreement of the Fire Department, discouraged helicopters as part of its evacuation plan. Police commanders ruled out a rooftop rescue that morning.

Whatever the wisdom of the policy, it came as a shock to many people trapped in the towers, according to their families and summaries of 911 calls. Only a few realised that a stairway could take them to safety, information that never circled back upstairs from those escaping or from the authorities. Frank Doyle, a trader at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, called his wife, Kimmie Chedell, to remind her of his love for her and the children. She recalls he also said: 'I've gone up to the roof and the rooftop doors are locked. You need to call 911 and tell them we're trapped.' The 105th floor was the last stop for many of those who had climbed towards the roof, a crowd dominated by Aon employees. At 9.27 a man called 911 and said a group was in the north conference room on the 105th floor. At 9.32 a man on the 105th floor called 911 and asked that the roof be opened. At 9.38 Kevin Cosgrove, a fire warden for Aon, called 911, then rang his brother.

Sean Rooney called Beverly Eckert. They had met at a high school dance in Buffalo when they were 16. They had just turned 50 together. He had tried to go down but was stymied, then had climbed 30 floors or so to the locked roof. Now he wanted to plot a way out, so he had his wife describe the fire's location from the TV pictures. He could not fathom why the roof was locked, she said. She urged him to try again while she dialled 911 on another line. He put the phone down, then returned minutes later, saying the roof door would not budge.

'He was worried about the flames,' Eckert recalled. 'I kept telling him they weren't anywhere near him. He said, but the windows were hot. His breathing was becoming more laboured.' Ceilings were caving in. Floors were buckling. Phone calls were being cut off. He was alone in a room filling with smoke. They said goodbye. 'He was telling me he loved me. Then you could hear the loud explosion.'

10:00 - North Tower, 92nd floor, Carr Futures, 28 minutes to collapse.

'MOM,' asked Jeffrey Nussbaum. 'What was that explosion?'

Twenty miles away in Oceanside, Arline Nussbaum could see on TV what her son could not from 50 yards away. She recalls their last words. 'The other tower just went down.' 'Oh my God,' her son said. 'I love you.'

Then the phone went dead.

That morning, the office of Carr Futures on the 92nd floor was unusually busy. A total of 68 men and women were on the floor. About two dozen brokers for Carr's parent company had been called to a special 8am meeting. When the building sprang back and forth like a car antenna, door frames twisted and jammed shut, trapping a number of them in a conference room. The remaining Carr employees, about 40, migrated to a large, unfinished space along the west side. Nussbaum called his mother and shared his mobile phone with Andy Friedman. In all, the Carr families have counted 31 calls from the people they lost.

Carr was two floors below the impact and everyone there had survived it; yet they could not get out. Between 10.05 and 10.25, videos show, fire spread westward across the 92nd floor's north face, bearing down on their western refuge.

At 10.18, Tom McGinnis, one of the traders summoned to the special meeting, reached his wife, Iliana. The words are stitched into her memory. 'This looks really, really bad,' he said. 'I know,' said Mrs McGinnis, who had been hoping that his meeting had broken up before the airplane hit.

'This is bad for the country; it looks like World War Three.' Something in his tone alarmed McGinnis. 'Are you OK, yes or no?' she demanded. 'We're on the 92nd floor in a room we can't get out of,' McGinnis said. 'Who's with you?" she asked. McGinnis mentioned three old friends - Joey Holland, Brendan Dolan and Elkin Yuen. 'I love you,' he said. 'Take care of Caitlin.'

McGinnis was not ready to hear a farewell. 'Don't lose your cool,' she urged. 'You guys are so tough, you're resourceful. You guys are going to get out of there.' 'You don't understand,' McGinnis said. 'There are people jumping from the floors above us.'

It was 10.25. The fire raged along the west side of the 92nd floor. People fell from windows. McGinnis again told her he loved her and their daughter, Caitlin. 'Don't hang up,' she pleaded. 'I got to get down on the floor,' McGinnis said. The phone connection faded out.

It was 10.26, two minutes before the tower crumbled. The World Trade Centre had fallen silent.

(c) New York Times

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