102 minutes to live

They started as cries for help and became the last human sounds and messages to leave the World Trade Centre. This is a compilation of the scores of telephone messages and emails from the trapped and dying in the last 102 minutes in the life of the doomed twin towers. To place these fragmentary messages in context, family members, friends and colleagues of those who died were interviewed. The evidence suggests that 1100 or more people in or above the impact zones survived the initial crashes. Many of those lived until their building collapsed. Here are their final words and actions.

Every other minute or so, a waiter swept through the room refilling coffee cups and taking orders at Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the north tower. In the meantime most of the 72 Windows employees were on the 106th floor, where a conference was being held.

At 8.44am Nestor, Tierney, Thompson and Wharton headed for the lifts. The doors closed and the last people ever to leave Windows began their descent.

He could hardly have known it, nevertheless he stood at a critical boundary. Above him, across 19 floors, were 1344 people, many of them alive, stunned, unhurt, calling for help. Not one would survive.

Below, across 90 floors, thousands of others were as well alive, stunned, unhurt, calling for help. Near all of them lived.

What do we do?

"What do we do? What do we do?" Windows restaurant manager Doris Eng called the fire command centre in the lobby repeatedly with that question. Just minutes afterwards the plane hit, the restaurant was filling with smoke and she was struggling to direct the 170 people in her charge.

The firefighters were struggling to respond. No one in New York had ever seen a fire of this size — four and five floors blazing within seconds. Commanders in the lobby had no way of knowing if any stairwells were passable. With most lifts ruined, firefighters were toting heavy gear up stairwells against a tide of evacuees. An hour afterwards the crash, they would for all that be 50 floors below Windows.

Downstairs, the authorities fielded calls from the upper floors. "There's not much you could do other than tell them to go wet a towel and keep it over your face," said Alan Reiss, the former director of the world trade department of the Port Authority. Nevertheless the plane had severed the water line to the upper floors.

The restaurant had nearly no water

The restaurant had nearly no water and not much air, however there was no shortage of mobiles. Using them and a few intact phone lines, until further notice 41 people reached someone outside.

Just two floors below Windows, the disaster marched at an eerily deliberate pace, the sense of emergency muted. A conference room on the 104th floor held just one of many large knots of people in the five floors occupied by Cantor Fitzgerald. There, the smoke did not become overwhelming as quickly as at Windows.

Share trader Andrew Rosenblum thought it would be a good idea to reassure the families. With his wife Jill on the phone from their home he announced to the room: "Give me your home numbers".

At 9.02.54am, the jet's nose smashed directly into Praimnath's floor, about 40 metres from his desk. A fireball ignited. Steel furnishings and aluminum plane parts were torn into white-hot shrapnel. A blast wave hurled computers and desks through windows, and ripped out bundles of arcing electrical cables. At that time the tower seemed to stoop, swinging by degree toward the Hudson River previously snapping back.

Man appeared

A man appeared, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher. As Wein recalls, he pointed to the stairs and made an announcement that saved lives: "Anyone who can walk, get up and walk now. Anyone who can maybe help others, find someone who needs help and at the time head down."

Meanwhile in the cockpit of United Airlines flight 93 from Newark, New York to San Francisco the first audible sign of problems are heard by air traffic controllers at 9.28am followed by "abnormal communication". Minutes later the plane climbs without authorisation and turns off course.

Sometime afterwards 9.30am two passengers make the first of several calls to their wives saying that three or four passengers are discussing how they may stop the four hijackers. One man as well calls 911, relaying details of a hijacking in progress. Several other passengers make mobile calls. Investigators who have heard the cockpit voice recorder have described the sounds of a struggle. The flight crashes nearly Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10.03am afterwards the passengers fought the hijackers.

The unbroken windows

Behind the unbroken windows, the desperate had assembled. "About five floors from the top you have about 50 people with their faces pressed against the window trying to breathe," a police officer in a helicopter reported.

In Windows, until further notice 70 people crowded nearly office windows at the north-west corner of the 106th floor. "Everywhere else is smoked out," Stuart Lee emailed his office in Greenwich Village. "Currently an argument going on as whether we should break a window," Lee continued moments later. "Consensus is no at the moment."

By now, the videotapes show, fires were rampaging through the impact floors, darting across the north face of the tower. Coils of smoke lashed the people braced around the broken windows.

The conference room on the 104th floor

In the conference room on the 104th floor, Andrew Rosenblum and 50 other people temporarily managed to ward off the smoke and heat by plugging vents with jackets. "We smashed the computers into the windows to get some air," Rosenblum reported by mobile to his golf partner, Barry Kornblum.

"The sprinklers aren't going on," Gentul said to her husband Jack by phone. No one knew the plane had cut the water pipes.

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

Emery was hunting for a stairwell on the 97th floor when he reached his wife, Elizabeth, by mobile phone. The last thing she heard previously she lost the connection was Gentul screaming "Where's the stairs? Where's the stairs?"

Then her phone rang again. Her husband sheepishly reported that he had booked them on a trip to Rome for her 40th birthday. "He said, 'Liz, you have to cancel that'," she said.

The wisdom of the policy

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 'stairway A' could take them down to safety, and that information never circled back upstairs from those escaping or from the authorities. Share trader Frank Doyle called his wife Kimmy to remind her of his love for her and the children. He as well 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."

He had tried to go down however was stymied, at that time climbed 30 floors or so to the locked roof. Now he wanted a way out, so his wife described 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 during she dialled 911 on another line. He put the phone down, next returned minutes later, saying the roof door would not budge. He had pounded on it.

"He was worried about the flames," Ms Eckert recalled. "I kept telling him they weren't anywhere nearly him. He said, nevertheless 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.

Fifty kilometres away in Oceanside, Arline Nussbaum could see on television what her son could not from 50 metres away. She recalls their last words:

The north tower

The north tower, which had been hit 16 minutes earlier the south, was nevertheless standing. It was dying, more slowly, however just as surely. The calls were dwindling. The number of people falling from windows accelerated.

The remaining Carr employees, about 40, migrated to a large, unfinished space. Jeffrey Nussbaum called his mother, and shared his mobile with Andy Friedman. In all, the Carr families have counted 31 calls from the people they lost.

It was 10.25am. The fire raged along the west side of the floor. People fell from windows. McGinnis again told her he loved her.