102 Minutes

At 9:02 a.m., as an announcement to casually evacuate, if one wishes to do so, comes over the loudspeakers, United Airlines Flight 175 smashes into the south tower, its wingspan running diagonally across the 77th through 85th floors. The impact kills many instantly, tears others apart, and leaves those people above the point of impactin a state of terror. There are people with broken bones, severed limbs, and burned faces. Many Mizuho/Fuji employees perish. Buried beneath rubble, Stanley Praimnath “called out onto a dark floor where no one else was alive to hear or help him” (85); eventually, he gets free. Only moments earlier he was leaving his wife a message saying he was fine, which is interrupted as Praimnath sees the U on the side of the United plane flying towards his office window. Bits of stone and cement lodge into the abdomen of Mizuho employee Ed Nicholls. Coworker Karen Hagerty, who a moment earlier joked she deserved a place on the overcrowded sky-lobby elevator because she had a horse and two cats, lays motionless. On the 78th floor, Judy Wein, of Aon, has several fractured ribs and a broken arm, but she can move. Mary Jos, of the state tax department, “had been knocked cold.