Throughout 102 Minutes, the constant references to the chaos of the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, and past catastrophic fires—like the Triangle Waist Factory fire earlier in the century, which killed so many—raise the lessons not learned from these tragedies to the level of symbolic resonance. It was a longstanding, continued refusal between fire and police departments to work together, coupled with the unchecked desire to reduce to safety restrictions—like reduced number stairwells, and inadequate fireproofing—in the name of increased rental space, which meant increased profits, that contributed to the massive death toll.

The authors state:

The indifference to the lessons of history, or the inability to integrate them, were hardly limited to municipal government of New York, of course. Ultimately, all of the people in the trade center that morning were at the head of a pin on which history had come to rest […] The last, best hope for the community of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center rested not with national policymakers but with private firms and local public servants (242).

Those private firms and policy makers put profit ahead of human life, and the indifference on their part toward looking backward and learning from mistakes is a large part of the book.