The Strange Case of the WTC’s Elevator Service Company
When the WTC was built, the Port Authority hired the world’s leading elevator company, Otis, to engineer, manufacture, install and service its elevators; the contract was worth US$ 35 million and was highly prestigious, as it was for the largest vertical transportation system in history comprising over 200 elevators plus a few dozen escalators.
www.otis.com/otis150/section/1,2344,ARC3066_CLI1_RES1_SEC5,00.html
Otis is owned by the United Technologies Corporation, which also owns companies like Pratt & Whitney (aircraft engines) and Sikorsky (helicopters).
http://www.utc.comWhat happened to the people stuck in the elevators during the 1993 bombing?
“When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, Otis Elevator's mechanics led the rescue of 500 people trapped in elevators. Some mechanics were dropped onto the roofs of the twin towers by helicopter. Others, carrying 50-pound oxygen tanks on their backs, climbed through smoke to machine rooms high in the towers.”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2001/12/19/usat-mechanics.htm (the “USA Today Article”)
Now that’s what I call service. I’d be somewhat concerned about going up in a helicopter, never mind jumping out of one onto a 1,400 foot high building that was still smoking.
What was Otis’s reward for this sterling work?
They lost the contract. In 1994 they left and the WTC elevators were taken over by a company called the ACE Elevator Company, Inc., who were based in New Jersey. I can’t find anything about this and believe you me I’ve tried (was the contract up for tender? was it terminated prematurely? how much was the new contract worth? I can’t find anything). You would have thought giving the world’s largest contract to a small local company like ACE would have raised an eyebrow to two, but there’s nothing. What makes this doubly odd is that ACE seems to have gotten some of Otis’ WTC employees:
“The strategy had worked after the 1993 terrorist bombing, when many of the same mechanics — working for Otis Elevator, which had the contract then — were hailed as heroes.” (USA Today article)
“The men that were there in ’93, most of them, a lot of them were still there.”
http://www.recordonline.com/adayinseptember/jones.htmOtis lost the contract and then ACE got their people? Sounds fishy to me.
Who the hell is the ACE Elevator Company?
“A.C.E. Elevator Co., Inc., established in 1980, is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. We are proud to be recognized as the largest privately owned Elevator Company in the tri-state area.”
http://www.nycooperative.com/Contractors/elevators.htmlThe only other reference I can find to a contract they held was in an Audit Report on the New York Yankees Rental Credits by the NYC Comptroller. It implies they had a contract with the NY Yankees.
http://www.comptroller.nyc.gov/bureaus/audit/PDF_FILES/FN05_122A.pdfI guess they must have had a few other small and medium-sized contracts in the New York and New Jersey area. However, they are never mentioned in industry analyses and they don’t appear to have any other big contracts.
This is a 33-page list of union claims against elevator companies in New York and New Jersey. ACE is mentioned once, Otis must be in there a hundred times. This shows you how small they were:
http://www.iuec1.org/claimlist.pdfACE also appears in another context – political donations. The donations were mostly small – a few hundred or a thousand dollars, but a Village Voice article added them up and came up with the number US$ 44,900 in total donations to the Conservative party in 1995-1998. They also made other donations, for example charitable ones.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/9843,barrett,874,1.htmlSo what happened on 9/11?
“Few elevators performed properly. Most elevators, even those on low floors, stopped functioning the moment the jets hit.
“In a fire emergency, an elevator is programmed to return to its lowest floor and hold its doors open. On Sept. 11, many elevators far below the crash zones failed to do this, although they continued to have electrical power. The reason for this failure is unclear. Some elevators returned to their lowest floors but didn't open. That made it hard for firefighters to know whether elevators had returned to lobby floors or were stalled somewhere higher. The doors of nearly 50 elevators in the north lobby alone were closed.” (USA Today article)
Gee, I wonder why they failed.
What should the elevator mechanics have done?
“The industry takes pride in rescues. In the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, elevator mechanics worked closely with the firefighters making rescues.
"Nobody knows the insides of a high-rise like an elevator mechanic. They act as guides for firefighters, in addition to working on elevators," says Robert Caporale, editor of Elevator World, a trade magazine." (USA Today Article)
And what did the ACE elevator mechanics who had so distinguished themselves when they worked for OTIS do?
Well, first they gathered in the South Tower lobby and then, “the elevator mechanics — many of the same men involved in the rescues in 1993 — left the buildings after the second jet struck, nearly an hour before the first building collapsed.” (USA Today Article).
Before I go on to what the elevator mechanics did after leaving the South Tower, I should point out that there is a discrepancy concerning how many mechanics actually assembled in the lobby. This is the official story:
“In an interview, ACE Elevator President Ron Baamonde says the crewmembers left on their own because they were in danger. He says ACE followed the Trade Center's emergency plan. After a jet hit the north tower, 81 crewmembers reported to the fire command station in the south tower lobby. Two reported by radio.”
And this is what one of the mechanics said:
“Not all personnel were there, naturally, because this was within a 15- 20-minute period after A Tower was impacted. We had at least maybe two-thirds of the total personnel that were there – close to 70 to 80 people that work for Ace at that time… In the lobby, some of the bosses were calling, they were taking head count, they were trying to figure out who was there, who was missing. They would come up with a name, they would call him on the radio. And in most cases, nobody was answering.”
http://www.recordonline.com/adayinseptember/jones.htmNot a big discrepancy, but it would be nice to know how many guys were actually there.
So, the mechanics left the South Tower, what then?
Well, they kept going, “We were ordered to go from Church Street up to Broadway. We stood there for about 20 minutes or so, and as we started to go up another block, we were about a block and a half away when B Tower finally came down… We ended up down on the South Street Seaport Museum… Everybody had soda and some drinks, and a lot of the men decided to leave.” They went home.
In stark contrast to the ACE employees, a passing elevator mechanic from another company rushed into the WTC and died trying to rescue trapped passengers.
Some people have called the elevator mechanics cowards, but I wouldn’t agree with that. There was no stampede, had they been told to go up with the firemen, as they expected, they would have gone. It was a failure of leadership. Why did the bosses want to stay in the towers?
What happened to ACE Elevator after the WTC collapsed?
“The Company filed for chapter 11 protection on Dec. 21, 2004… When the Debtor filed for protection from its creditors, it listed $5,285,000 in total assets and $7,700,000 in total debts.”
http://bankrupt.com/TCR_Public/041230.mbxHmm, that’s not a lot of assets for a company that had such a prestigious contract, is it?
OK, the elevator shafts, from which many of the core columns were accessible, were the easiest place to put explosives and there are a number of “oddities” related to the elevator maintenance company, but so what? This, in itself, does not mean that there were explosives in the elevator shafts. Now let’s turn to the eyewitness statements:
North Tower
(1) Erik O. Ronningen
“On September 11, 2001, from the south windows of my office on the 71 st floor of Tower One, I was sitting at my desk looking out across a beautifully crystal clear New York Harbor skyline. Sipping my normal 20-ounce cup of coffee, I was preparing for a scheduled 10:00 AM meeting on the 77 th floor.”
After the plane hit:
“The floor began to fill with smoke, and the carpets with water flooding out of the freight elevator shaft. And from all around, the cry of people yelling to evacuate the building.”
When he got downstairs:
“The main lobby was a shambles. Chandeliers down; the marble walls in broken piles on the floor; the giant directional signage dangling from the ceilings; all the windows broken, the revolving doors broken and off kilter and the elevator doors all blown out.”
http://www.projectrebirth.org/getInvolved/erikR.htmlComment: His narrative makes it clear that this is before the South Tower collapsed, as he comes out of WTC 1 and then sees it fall down. There were only three elevators from the lobby to the impact zone in WTC 1, so it’s hard to see why all the elevator doors should be blown out. Plus, the amount of damage to the lobby is too much for overpressures from 3 falling elevators and a couple of hundred gallons of jet fuel.
(2) Kenton Beerman
“Kenton Beerman, 24, was also sending e-mail at work when an explosion rocked 1 World Trade Center, making it sway back and forth for 10 seconds. At first, Beerman thought the building would fall into the Hudson River. Then he realized it had stopped moving and saw thousands of pieces of paper fluttering outside. ``We thought it was a bomb in the freight elevator,'' Beerman said, because the sound of the explosion seemed to have come from that direction.”
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/11_APwitnesses.htmlComment: The sound of American 11 hitting and exploding was above him.
(3) David Frank
“I noticed that the inch thick dark green marble lining the elevator bank's walls, had buckled and snapped. Major structural damage. They won't let anyone in here for a very long time.”
http://www.mwoa.org/David_Frank.htmlComment: This was on floor 78.
(4) Firefighter Cacchioli
CACCHIOLI AND CREW ENTER NORTH TOWER AND GO UP TO 24TH FLOOR
“… the north tower looked like a war zone. When he entered the lobby, Cacchioli recalls elevator doors completely blown out and another scene of mass chaos with people running, screaming and being hit with debris.
“I remember thinking to myself, my God, how could this be happening so quickly if a plane hit way above. It didn’t make sense,” said Cacchioli.
At that point, Cacchioli found one of the only functioning elevators, one only going as high as the 24th floor, a twist of fate that probably saved his life.
… the doors opened on the 24th floor, a scene again that hardly made sense to the seasoned fireman, claiming the heavy dust and haze of smoke he encountered was unusual considering the location of the strike.
“Tommy Hedsal was with me and everybody else also gets out of the elevator when it stops on the 24th floor,” said Cacchioli, “There was a huge amount of smoke. Tommy and I had to go back down the elevator for tools and no sooner did the elevators close behind us, we heard this huge explosion that sounded like a bomb. It was such a loud noise, it knocked off the lights and stalled the elevator.
“Luckily, we weren’t caught between floors and were able to pry open the doors. People were going crazy, yelling and screaming. And all the time, I am crawling low and making my way in the dark with a flashlight to the staircase and thinking Tommy is right behind me.
“I somehow got into the stairwell and there were more people there. When I began to try and direct down, another huge explosion like the first one hits. This one hits about two minutes later, although it’s hard to tell, but I’m thinking, ‘Oh. My God, these bastards put bombs in here like they did in 1993!’
“But still it never crossed my mind the building was going to collapse. I really only had two things on my mind and that was getting people out and saving lives. That’s what I was trained for and that’s what I was going to do.
“I remember at that point in the stairwell between the 23rd and 24th floor, I threw myself down on the steps because of the smoke. It was pitch black, I had my mask on and I was crawling down the steps until I found the door on the 23rd floor.”
When Cacchioli entered the 23rd floor, he found a “little man” holding a handkerchief in front of his face and hiding under the standpipes on the wall, used for pumping water on the floor in case of fire.
Leading the man by the arm, he then ran into a group down the hall of about 35 to 40 people, finding his way down the 23rd floor stairwell and beginning their descent to safety.
“Then as soon as we get in the stairwell, I hear another huge explosion like the other two. Then I heard bang, bang, bang - huge bangs – and surmised later it was the floors pan caking on top of one another.
“I knew we had to get out of there fast and on the 12th floor a man even jumped on my back because he thought he couldn’t make it any farther. Everybody was shocked and dazed and it was a miracle all of us got this far.”
When the group led by Cacchioli finally made it to the lobby level, he was unable to open the door at first, the concussion of the explosions or perhaps the south tower falling, jamming the lobby door.
Finally jarring it loose, the group entered the lobby finding total devastation with windows blown out and marble falling form the walls, but strangely no people. At that point, it was either left or right to an exit, Cacchioli, the man he originally found by the standpipes and another lady going right while the others went left, a move which by the grace of God saved his life.“
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x51793 (“philb”)
Comment: This is incredible. He noticed several discrete explosions (probably around 10:00), even if one of them was the South Tower collapsing, the others could not have been, as the South Tower only collapsed once.
(5) Firefighter Michael Yrembinsky
“When we got to 22 we heard there was Port Authority command post on 22. So we were stopped there my officer wanted to find out some information my officer lieutenant Andy Desperito he went over to the command post. We noticed in the hallway that the elevator shaft had been blown out there was nothing there no doors no framing nothing.”
(philb)
(6) Lieutenant James Walsh
”What else I observed in the lobby was that there’s basically two areas of elevators. There’s elevators off to the left hand side which are really the express elevators that would be the elevators that’s facing north. Then on the right hand side there’s also elevators that are express elevators and that would be facing south. And you could see the shafts of the elevators on the extreme north side and the other express elevator on the extreme south side. They looked intact to me from what could see the doors anyway. In the center of these two elevator shafts would be elevators that go to the lower floors. They were blown off the hinges. That’s where the service elevator was also.”
Q: “Were these elevators that went to the upper floors? They weren’t side lobby elevators.”
“No I’d say that they went through floors 30 and below, and they were blown off the hinges.”
(philb)
(7)
“We went in, busted through one of the windows, opened up, made like a door. The maintenance guy said I think the elevators are working, or it was the Chief said it. The Chief went around and says take a look at some of the elevators. I think we had a
maintenance guy with us at the time. He said these low-rise are working, it will get you up to 16. So we went up to 16, which was great because, walking 16 flights, we wouldn't be able to operate.”
“Now I'm about 20 to 25 feet from the windows and the building starts to shake, and I look out and I'm just seeing all the steel from the south tower coming down right in front of my face, just all the steel, I mean, everything. Then someone gave a Mayday to get out of the building. So it took us quite a bit of time to hit the lobby and it was just destroyed. I mean, it looked like -- it wasn't the same lobby 15 minutes ago. It was just completely gone, every window was shattered, all the ceiling tile, the elevator banks had let go it seemed, the floor was all crushed down.”
(philb)
(8) FIREFIGHTER BERTRAM SPRINGSTEAD
“We came to the lobby, and the lobby was a disaster. It never registered that the other building had collapsed. We came outside, and we walked the same way we came in. We went back to the -- you didn’t go through the doors. All the glass was broken on the ground floor when we came in the first time, I guess from the elevators collapsing or I don’t know. All the glass was gone.”
…
Q. “Okay. Did you get any sense that the elevators were running at any time when you got there or at any time was there any talk about –“
A. “The elevator doors were blown off.”
Q. “Blown off?”
A. “Yeah. You could see they were a disaster.”
Q. “Was there evidence of fire or smoke in that area? Did you get the sense that fire had been in that shaft or was in that shaft, the elevator shaft?”
A. “No, no, I never thought —- I just assumed that they must have plummeted from being cut –“
(philb)
Comment: What’s really odd is the questions that are asked, like “Was there evidence of fire or smoke in that area?” The answer “No, no.” was kind of unusual too.
(9) Mike Pecoraro
“Deep below the tower, Mike Pecoraro was suddenly interrupted in his grinding task by a shake on his shoulder from his co-worker. “Did you see that?” he was asked. Mike told him that he had seen nothing. “You didn’t see the lights flicker?”, his co-worker asked again.
Mike told his co-worker to call upstairs to their Assistant Chief Engineer and find out if everything was all right. His co-worker made the call and reported back to Mike that he was told that the Assistant Chief did not know what happened but that the whole building seemed to shake and there was a loud explosion. They had been told to stay where they were and “sit tight” until the Assistant Chief got back to them. By this time, however, the room they were working in began to fill with a white smoke. “We smelled kerosene,” Mike recalled, “I was thinking maybe a car fire was upstairs”, referring to the parking garage located below grade in the tower but above the deep space where they were working.
“The two decided to ascend the stairs to the C level, to a small machine shop where Vito Deleo and David Williams were supposed to be working. When the two arrived at the C level, they found the machine shop gone.
“There was nothing there but rubble, “Mike said. “We’re talking about a 50 ton hydraulic press – gone!” The two began yelling for their co-workers, but there was no answer. They saw a perfect line of smoke streaming through the air. “You could stand here,” he said, “and two inches over you couldn’t breathe. We couldn’t see through the smoke so we started screaming.” But there was still no answer.
The two made their way to the parking garage, but found that it, too, was gone. “There were no walls, there was rubble on the floor, and you can’t see anything” he said.
They decided to ascend two more levels to the building’s lobby. As they ascended to the B Level, one floor above, they were astonished to see a steel and concrete fire door that weighed about 300 pounds, wrinkled up “like a piece of aluminum foil” and lying on the floor. “They got us again,” Mike told his co-worker, referring to the terrorist attack at the center in 1993. Having been through that bombing, Mike recalled seeing similar things happen to the building’s structure. He was convinced a bomb had gone off in the building.”
http://st12.startlogic.com/~xenonpup/underground/underground_explosions.htmSouth Tower, probably explosives
(10) Will Jimeno
“Officer Will Jimeno of the Port Authority Police Department recalls his experience on Sept. 11, after he and four other officers, including his close friend Officer Dominick A. Pezzulo, entered the South Tower of the World Trade Center.”
“We are one floor under the main concourse area, where all the stores are, (Suddenly I hear a loud noise and) look over to the Sarge and say, "Hey, Sarge, is there a second plane coming?" “And, just then, it is like an earthquake when the plane hits the south building. The whole concourse above us collapses. There are a lot of civilians all around, and I don't know what happens to them, but I think it has to be bad.”
Dominick runs first, I am behind and the Sarge is behind me. Antonio is behind the Sarge, and Chris is bringing up the rear. But Chris never makes it, because the shock wave pushes him back into the main concourse area, and he takes the worst of it. Dominick and I and the Sarge just make it around the corner, but Antonio doesn't. Everything just starts hitting us, and then the wall comes down on top of me.
I am flabbergasted. My friend Dominick is crushed down in the push-up position, and my legs are pinned completely by heavy concrete. Sgt. McLoughlin sees the walls breaking apart, and they are falling on him. And the ceiling falls on him, 20 feet away from me. I can't see him, but I can hear him.
The lights are flickering, but they don't go out. Dominick begins to wiggle himself out. Sgt. McLoughlin does everything by the book, and so we are talking about what we have to do. I have an old pair of handcuffs, and I begin to scratch at everything around me, trying to free up some of the concrete. The Sarge is hurt bad, and he has a few thousand pounds crushing down on him. But he keeps talking to us to steady us, keep us calm.
Dominick is a weight lifter, and he finally pushes everything off him. He gets free, and he begins to work on getting me out. My left leg is completely stuck under immovable concrete. He is bending over just a little when we hear the collapse beginning.
http://www.jsonline.com/lifestyle/people/mar02/25560.aspComment: This is incredible. There is only one elevator shaft that goes from the impact area in the South Tower to the level “where all the stores are” – it’s a freight elevator shaft – maybe the one they were running towards. United 175 was carrying approx. 9,100 gallons of fuel. According to NIST, less than 15 percent was used up in internal fireballs, which gives us under 1365 gallons (let’s call it 1300 gallons) shared between the impact floors and the 20+ elevator shafts that ran from the impact floors. NIST estimates the pressure generated by the fireball to be over 3,000 pounds of force for a window and frame over 10 ft2 – more than enough to break a window. This gives us two problems: (1) if we assume half the fuel used in the internal fireballs (650 gallons) went down the elevator shafts (this is very probably an overestimate) and that it was equally distributed between, say, 25 elevators on the impact floors (actually there were probably more) then there should only be an average of 26 gallons in each elevator shaft; 26 gallons of jet fuel would expand in a fireball to cover an area of only around 9,000 cubic feet, which means the fireball would be much smaller than the elevator shaft, and (2) in any case, there’s no way a jet fuel explosion can destroy a concrete ceiling like that.
That’s enough eyewitnesses. I’m going to draw some conclusions:
(1) Much of the eyewitness testimony (number of explosions, scope of damage caused by explosions) is inconsistent with the idea that the damage was caused by the jet fuel. Therefore, I think there were explosives and that some of them went off prematurely.
(2) The eyewitnesses give me the impression the explosives were in the elevator shafts, which is supported by the fact that this would be the easiest place to put them, and by the strange goings-on with the elevator service company.
(3) If you’re planning a false flag operation where a plane hits a tower that you then take down with explosives, the absolutely worst place to put the explosives is in the elevator shafts, because some of them are going to go off due to burning jet fuel coming down the shafts. Whoever placed the explosives in the shafts was either (1) not expecting a plane, or (2) even more incompetent than Rummy. I go for (1).
This is what I think happened:
After the 1993 bombing the powers-that-be shat themselves at the thought of a successful repeat and decided that the most palatable alternative was to put explosives in the towers to prevent one tower falling on the other. Otis didn’t want to be part of that, so they got a small, local company that was only too willing to help out.
On 9/11 the explosives started going off without being triggered after the planes hit, causing two problems: (1) if the explosives went off out of sequence, they could actually cause the tower to topple to one side and destroy the buildings it fell on, and (2) having the explosives in the building was obviously illegal and them exploding was a bit of a giveaway that they were there, therefore it was better to destroy the towers to get rid of the evidence. The fact that the president’s father was meeting Osama’s brother that day might also have given the public the wrong idea about how coordinated the attack was.
See? It’s that simple.