a fifth alarm for this box, and get us a staging area chief-- chief, somewhere on west street, k. >> pelleynals the end of a message-- a throwback to the 19th century telegraph, which, on this day, was punctuating the greatest crisis in the department's 136 years. >> hayden: right away, i got a deep sense that we were going to lose a lot of firefighters this day. >> pelley: division one commander peter hayden met battalion chief joe pfeifer in the lobby of the burning tower. >> hayden: well, i knew that we weren't going to be able to put out the fire. so, the order of the day was to search and evacuate as many people as we could. and then we were going to back away. >> pelley: the fire was 93 floors above. elevators were out. so, firefighters climbed tight stairwells, shouldering 75 pounds and more. >> hayden: and i thought we would have enough time to get the people out. and everybody that was above the impact of the plane, we were pretty much sure were either dead already or going to die. there were a lot of people jumping out already. >> pelley: 1,355 people were trapped above the fire.