102 Minutes

Chapter 13 documents the lack of coordination between rescue agencies, and the utter lack of information available to firefighters inside the north tower, after the south tower collapses. The chapter opens at 9:59 a.m. in the north tower, as Jeffrey Nussbaum, of Carr Futures, who is on the 92nd floor, learns via telephone from his mom of the south tower collapse. This leads into a discussion of the incredible amount of energy the south tower sent rippling into the north tower. The collapse registers on a seismograph in Lisbon, New Hampshire, 265 miles away. Months and years later, scientists struggled to explain to everyday people just how much force was involved in the collapse:

All the power used by the construction workers to lift steel, pour concrete, hammer nails had been banked in the buildings as potential energy for three decades, just as a sled at the top of a hill stores the verve of the child who tugged it up there […] Stockpiled in the south tower was a tremendous reserve of energy, 278 megawatt hours [...] enough power to supply all the homes in Atlanta or Oakland or Miami for one hour” (200).

This power ripples from the south to the north tower, 131 feet away.