Lost in Inferno of Smoke, Darkness : Survival: People curse--but not each other. Choking and blinded, they help strangers out of the daytime nightmare.

They were being evacuated from a vertical city, 100,000 people descending through darkness and smoke like frightened children lost in an amusement park house of horrors.

Down they came Friday afternoon through the stairwells of the World Trade Center, 26 stories, 58 stories, 107 stories. Hour after hour, they emerged in a surreal procession of sooty faces: urban coal miners in gabardine suits and cashmere sweaters.

The famous five-acre complex is the heart of New York’s financial district. Its 110-story twin towers, which look like giant ice-cube trays standing end to end, are the second-largest office buildings in the world. They fill with people who are used to all kinds of stress.

It was 12:30 when the explosion jolted the buildings. Richard Mancinelli, 33, was finishing the last bites of his tuna melt in the Dean Witter Reynolds cafeteria on the 44th floor. “You could feel the vibration, like an earthquake,” he said. “I was with my boss, and he said, ‘This may be our last supper.’ ”

The lights went out. But while some people grew jittery, most continued eating. A mood of crisis did not set in until five minutes later when the area began to fill with smoke.

Every office in the complex has a “fire safety committee.” Mancinelli is the designated “fire warden” for his employer, the American Bureau of Shipping. “The people who trained us from the building told us again and again that in case of fire we should take people to the stairways because that’s where there is emergency lighting. Well, that certainly was not true.”

The stairs were dark. People measured each step and groped for the walls. Smoke filled every breath. People were coughing and vomiting. “The building was totally unprepared,” Mancinelli said. “It was pandemonium.”

Maybe so, but it was a civilized pandemonium. There were no stampedes. People cursed the darkness--and the building management--but not each other.

Ralph Berger, 40, is an arbitration judge. He was hearing a case on the 55th floor: an injured toll collector with a grievance against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which, incidentally, own and operate the World Trade Center. Berger halted the proceedings.

“I thought a helicopter had hit the building,” he said. “Everything shook, and the lights went out. People started filing out, some panicky, some not. We made it down to 48, and then the smoke forced us back out of the stairs.”

He joined dozens of others in a big room, but it, too, began to fill with smoke. “Some guys busted out a couple of windows with an aluminum coat rack, and that was not such a great idea,” Berger said. “The smoke surged toward the open window, and for awhile, things got worse. We all sat down on the floor.”

After a two-hour wait, a firefighter came in and told the group to try the staircase again. The air was a bit better by then. “We moved very slow, holding on to each other’s coats,” Berger said. “It took us at least an hour. The further down we went, the wobblier and sweatier we felt.”

The arbitrator was responsibly toting his black briefcase, stuffed with the exhibits of his case.

Marileen Brown, 33, works for the World Trade Institute on the 55th floor. The organization hosts seminars, with hundreds of guests dividing into 15 different conference rooms. Foreign currency was the topic of the talk she was attending.

People began to meander in the corridors after the blast. Smoke billowed up from the freight elevators and the stairwells, and some stuffed clothing against the openings. “We tried to call security, but the lines were busy so people eventually decided to try the stairs,” Brown said. “I got down as far as 48, then I passed out.”

When she came to, she was in a large office. The smoke had crept in there as well. Someone threw a chair through a window, sending a shower of glass toward the street. A maintenance man was nearby. He said he had a handier tool. He broke a window with a wrench.

People were nevertheless able to joke. “Someone lit up a cigarette, and I told him, ‘Hey, this is a no-smoking area,’ ” Brown said. She got a few laughs.

Nicki Liberti works at Shearson Lehman Bros., entering trades at a computer terminal. Her descent was 101 stories. She moistened a paper coffee filter and used it as a protective mask for breathing. “You were completely on your own,” she said. “There was no plan for evacuating the building or anything. There was no authority figure, no official personnel.”

Most phones were working, however. With the electricity out, many people trapped inside learned what was going on only by calling people safe on the outside. The trapped began phoning TV anchormen to trade information.

In this way, those stuck in the offices or on the stairwells were fortunate. With the lunch hour in progress, the elevators were crowded, and those marooned in the 24 banks of cars had no way of knowing what calamity had befallen them--or even if they were in this mess alone.

Mike Rybeck, 45, was caught on an elevator with seven others. The car had stopped on the 26th floor; its lights had quit. “It seemed like a power failure, but then after about five minutes, the elevator began to fill with smoke,” he said. “Really, you couldn’t see the person standing right next to you.”

People tried to calm each other, though they could not help wondering aloud why no help was forthcoming. They sat on the floor, where the smoke was thinner. A few men pried apart the elevator door in a quest for ventilation.

Nearly 3 1/2 hours later, the car began to rise. The movement was barely perceptible. Rybeck stuck his fingers out the door and felt the wall inching by. Slowly, the elevator climbed to the 44th floor, where firefighters freed them and pointed them to the stairs.

Richard Williams, 35, was on an elevator that had stalled on the 58th floor. Eight others were crowded in with him and this was no group to passively await a rescue. Among them were two of the building’s maintenance men. They dislodged the panel on the elevator’s phone. Those in the car then took turns using the metal plate as a makeshift pickax.

Outside the elevator doors was a layer of sheetrock. “Chip, chip, kick, chip, chip, kick, that’s what we did,” Williams said. “After we got through the wall, there was a space of about 1 1/2 feet and then another wall, which turned out to be tile. So chip, chip, kick, chip, chip, kick.

“Finally, we broke through. Then we made the hole so it would be wide enough for the biggest among us. We all slipped through, into a bathroom, a fancy one, like some kind of executive bathroom. ‘Ni-i-i-ce toilet,’ we all said.”

And then the nine of them found the crowded stairwell--people going down and firefighters coming up--and they joined the slow exodus through the darkness toward the fresh air of the street.

A City in the Sky

The World Trade Center is like a vertical city with more than 100,000 daily residents. It’s comprised of six buildings, dominated by the twin 110-floor skyscrapers; only Chicago’s Sears Tower is taller.

The World Trade Center

The complex offers 10 million square feet of office space--seven times the area of the Empire State Building.

First occupied in December, 1970.

Weight: 1.2 million tons on foundations sunk 70 feet below ground in bedrock.

Owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

About the towers

The towers, at 1,350 feet tall, are so big that each has its own zip code.

Each tower has 104 elevators and an acre of rentable space per floor.