Twenty-five years ago, a fire chief climbed to the 78th floor of the South Tower, looked at the impact zone, and calmly radioed that he thought he could put it out. His name was Orio Palmer. He was 45 years old and he was the battalion chief of Battalion 7. You can still hear him. The tape exists. Understand the problem he was handed that morning. The fire was 78 floors up. The stairs were full of thousands of people coming down. The elevators in a high-rise fire are the one thing you are never supposed to use, and most of them in that building were destroyed or stranded anyway. Palmer was the wrong man to tell that to. He was a fanatic about the job in a way that borders on obsessive. He ran marathons. He was in the kind of physical condition that made other firefighters uncomfortable, and the FDNY later named its fitness test after him. He had also spent years studying the World Trade Center's elevator systems, going back to the 1993 bombing, until he understood the machinery well enough to work it himself. So on September 11 he found a freight elevator that everyone else had written off, got it running, and rode it to the 41st floor with members of Ladder 15. Then he climbed the other 37 floors on foot in roughly 50 pounds of gear. Next to him the whole way was Ronnie Bucca, 47, a fire marshal, who came up all 78 floors on his stairs. Bucca was a former Green Beret from the Vietnam era who later worked as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency and served as the fire department's representative to the Joint Terrorism Task Force until 2000. He had investigated the 1993 bombing of that same building. He is the only fire marshal in the history of the FDNY killed in the line of duty. Two marathon runners, one of them a Green Beret, went higher into those towers than any other first responders on either side of the site. When Palmer got to the 78th floor sky lobby he keyed his radio and reported what he was looking at. Numerous 10-45 Code Ones, which is the fire department's code for confirmed dead. That floor had been full of people waiting for elevators when Flight 175 came through it. Then he said this. "Battalion Seven, Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines." Read that again. He is standing in the middle of the impact zone of a hijacked airliner, 1,000 feet in the air, surrounded by the dead, and his professional assessment is that two hose lines will handle it. He was not wrong about the fire. Nobody in that building knew the steel above him was already failing. His last actions were working to free civilians trapped in an elevator on that floor. The South Tower came down at 9:59. The recordings of his transmissions only exist publicly because the New York Times and the families of firefighters had to sue for their release. The transcripts came out in 2002 and the audio in 2005. They are the reason we know how far up the fire department actually got, and they are the reason nobody can ever say it was hopeless from the start, because Orio Palmer made it to the fire and he was getting ready to fight it.