This book is a manual on how to train and prepare for emergency response

books:

	• 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn Times Books, 2006 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 164 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

great account showing the inside story of the attacks

I was only in elementary school when the planes struck the twin towers on September 11th, and the attacks didn't exactly sink in until later that day. This book tells a lot more about the inside struggle to survive in one of the darkest hours in American history. People were working just like any normal day when the attacks happened; some were prepared because of the 1993 attacks, but others didn't know what to do. It tells the heroic stories of those who sacrificed their lives to save others and took. It was a total of 102 Minutes from when the first tower was struck, and when the last tower fell to the ground. Even though the South Tower was struck second, it was the first to fall because of where the plane had hit it. The South Tower was hit much lower in the building causing more instability than the North Tower. Only 18 people that were in the South Tower when it was struck actually survived- everyone else in the building could not escape. The North Tower was struck first and had much more smoke and heat than the South because the plane had struck higher. It was harder for people to breathe in the 90+ floors, but almost every other floor was able to evacuate because all the stairwells were still in tact. In the South Tower, however, only one stairwell out of three was still somewhat in tact but there was debris everywhere making it hard to move down the building. Reading this book opened my eyes to the experiences of those who almost lost their lives inside the buildings. It was a tragic day for all Americans, but this book can help anyone understand more about what exactly happened that day.

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This book is a manual on how to train and prepare for emergency response

I read this book while on an airplane en route to giving a presentation on emergency response.

What I did was scrap most of my prepared presentation and, instead, stood in the middle of the audience of senior emergency professionals, passed this book around, and suggested in the strongest possible way that they buy a copy and read it on the way home and mark the pages with little "yellow stickies", just as I had done.

This book is THAT good.

It doesn't matter whether the emergency is in a high rise or in a suburban sprawl.

All the essentials are in this book: the need for the police and firefighters to work together AND TO DRILL TOGETHER; that the real first responders in "102 Minutes" were the people who worked in the buildings and that there needed to be equipment prepositioned for the building occupants to use before the fire fighters and police arrived. That all forms of technology must be employed, including helicopters to access roofs ... and that building occupants must not be locked out of the roof access. [There have been numerous cases in which even very small numbers of helicopters organized themselves on an ad hoc basis and rescued very large numbers of trapped people ... including a Las Vegas hotel fire and a cruise ship off Alaska. Police and fire departments need to work together on this.]

Yes, there are "issues" ... police and fire personnel are unionized and (depending on the details) get paid by the shift ... which means that training sessions need to be specially organized to account for those contract details. Equipment and techniques need to be developed, tested, and practiced in new ways because new things are being discovered all the time and the traditional organizations need to be able to take advantage of them rapidly.

There were a lot of vulnerabilities that were exposed in "102 Minutes" that no one could have anticipated. For example, the fire alarms in the building kept sounding because they were triggered automatically, even though the need for the alarms was no longer necessary ... everyone was on their way out. But the blaring alarms jammed the fire department radios with the noise. Building security kept turning off the alarms, but the alarms were self-actuated.

Folded up fire hoses in cabinets blew out when the building occupants tried to use them.

Most of the firemen were heavily encumbered with bunker suits and carrying fire hoses, breathing equipment and demolition tools, but a few of the officers were lightly dressed and ran up quickly to the point of impact and they radioed down about "... structural instability ... " and then called down the staircase to get the firefighters to "get out". At that, the fire fighters turned around, started down, picked up and carried the people who were moving slowly due to age or disability. When they reached the ground floor, the civilians exited via the blown-out floor-to-ceiling windows ... following a human chain of police officers who calmly and softly directed the evacuees to the next police officer ... and the firefighters rallied at the fire emergency desk in the lobby to await further instructions to conduct rescues. Building managers (civilians in their 50's) would get reports of people trapped by fallen walls or jammed doors and would lead a dozen firefighters in a race up 20 or more stories to the location(s) and then the firefighters would crash through the walls and rescue the trapped people. They did this over and over ... until they all died.

There is a special place in Heaven for those people who worked to save others at the cost of their own lives.

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A One-Sitting Read

This was an absolutely amazing book. Not just because of the true-life accounts of many who survived (or, in many cases, didn't), but mostly because the authors pull no punches in telling the story of 9/11/01.

This isn't a book that bashes the government, both local and national, but it does tell both the good and the bad, the positive and the negative. While I was uplifted and encouraged by so many examples of human kindness, I was devastated to read that so very many deaths could have possibly been avoided, if there had just been better communication between political-minded departments.

Also, the fact that so many shortcuts were taken in building the World Trade Center, simply to create more rentable space, shows just how far people will go to make a buck. It saddens me that so many lives might have been saved if there were more staircases, if they had been spread out more, if they had had proper fireproofing.

If you're interested at all in the story that is 9/11, then this is a must-read.

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Terrifyingly Addictive

There are times you want to put this book down. It is hard to take. But it is a superior record of what we know - or sometimes, what we have to assume - happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Even those stories I'd heard about, they take on another dimension in 102 Minutes. It is thoroughly researched and painstakenly recounted. The horrifying moments when people in the South Tower are watching people plunge out of the North Tower ... actually seeing their faces so close but not able to do anything. One part of you is saying: I don't want to read any more about this. But the other part is saying: We can't forget what the terrorists are capable of doing to us.

One of the best books I've read in a long time. Highly recommending to everyone I know.

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The view behind the smoke and fire.

That day, through the television, I watched the buildings and tried to see through the smoke and the fire to the people inside. In fact, I remember saying to one of my sons, "The people! What about all the people up on those higher floors?" Then, in that first horrible instant, the buildings and the people were gone.....twice. For me, there was a horrible void, as if I didn't know something vital. I was haunted by the question - "What were all those people on the higher floors doing during the hour and a half?" I was almost beyond comfort.
Through this book, I met the people. I cried.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

?Searing, poignant, and utterly compelling?102 Minutes does for the September 11 catastrophe what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in his
masterpiece, A Night to Remember.? ?Rick Atkinson,
author of In the Company of Soldiers and An Army at Dawn
     At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages.
     Drawing on hundreds of interviews with rescuers and survivors, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts, New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn tell the story of September 11 from the inside looking out, weaving together the stories of ordinary men and women into an epic account of struggle, determination, and grace. Hailed immediately upon its hardcover publication as the definitive account of that terrible morning, 102 Minutes now contains a new Afterword that incorporates powerful firsthand material, including tapes and documents, that Dwyer and Flynn recently obtained after more than three years of litigation with the city of New York.
     Eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and translated into a dozen languages, 102 Minutes is a gripping narrative that is also investigative reporting of the first rank??in a class by itself,? according to Reader?s Digest. Dwyer and Flynn reveal the decisions, both good and bad, that proved to be the difference between life and death on a day that changed America forever.

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