A Decade of Hope (7 page)

Our life or our job is made more joyful or sweet because it's not without risks. You can only achieve positive things if you are true to your basic vision and philosophy. But that is not without risks. It was a risky thing to do to take that patient out of a protective environment; he was intubated and in critical condition. If he passed away in that environment, it would have had no consequence to me or the Fire Department, except that we would have lost a soul. If he passed away during transport, it would have had damning consequences to me and to the department's Bureau of Health Services, because he would have passed away under our responsibility. These are very tough experiences to live through, but you become stronger because of them. And they just magnify your life.

On the morning of 9/11 I was doing what I do, and Dr. Kelly and everyone else were doing exactly as always—which was to be aware of the department's health needs. We immediately saw this is a huge event, with the potential for mass casualties that we might be able to triage or treat. It would be incredibly likely that there would be near fatal or fatal firefighter or EMT [emergency medical technician] events that we would interact with, as liaison or whatever. I cannot tell you that I looked at the towers and said, Oh, 343 firefighters and nearly 3,000 people were going to die that day. In fact, it didn't occur to me at all, and interestingly, it didn't occur to me that this was a terrorist event. I only thought, when the first plane hit, that it was an accident, but I knew it's where I belonged, and so I got in the car. On the way my wife called me, saying she had seen on TV that a second plane had hit. You knew then that something crazy was going on here.

Dr. Kelly responded from Staten Island; I responded from the Bronx. She got there a little earlier than I did, but both of us arrived after the second plane had hit and before the first tower collapsed. I parked a few blocks north of the command center, which was on West Street. I went down to the command center and reported there, as I'm supposed to. I saw Chief [Peter] Ganci and spoke to him but did not see Dan Nigro [see page 1] until later on.

In 1993, when the first bombing at the Trade Center occurred, I was not in a position where I could respond. Dr. Jones was then head, and I was really a one-day-a-week lung specialist. I had heard, whether it was correct or not, that there was a doctor who was already in the towers—not a Fire Department doctor, but a regular doctor who had helped a pregnant woman and had set up a little treatment area on one of the floors. I always felt that's what I would have liked to have done in similar circumstances. You were there to help people, not to watch. So now I kept bothering Chief Ganci, whom I knew: “What can I do?” I realized that he had his job to do, and I couldn't really bother him too much, because he couldn't concentrate. To give me something to do, and possibly get me out of his way, he said, “Why don't you go over to West Street and the South Tower, on the corner, and just stay there, and when victims come out you can triage them and decide what they need? We'll send one or two ambulances to meet you.”

As I was walking the few blocks there, I saw what I originally thought was debris and then realized was people jumping off of the towers. When I got there I was met by several EMS—I think two—ambulances, maybe three, and by an EMS chief. He looked around, saw where we were, and said, within minutes of my arriving, “This is not the place where we need to be. There's stuff falling. We should not be on the sidewalk here. We should walk into the middle of West Street.” Obviously there was no traffic—it had all been cordoned off—so we set up our triage evaluation area there. I, along with the few EMTs and paramedics who were there, followed the EMS chief.

That single decision saved our lives, because within a minute of our turning around and walking toward the Hudson River, somebody realized that the South Tower was collapsing, or that stuff was falling. I was looking away from the tower, and when all of a sudden people in front of me started running toward the water, I said to myself,
What are these cowards running for? What's going on here? We're going to start the triage center, so why are they running?
But you get this sort of herd mentality, and so I started running too, toward the water. It was surreal—I'd never been in war, I'd never been attacked, I'd never experienced a tsunami or hurricane or earthquake or a volcano eruption. So this was a first for me. You hear about experiences in which your life flashes by you in an instant. It is so true. As I was running across West Street I was going over in my head several things, again and again. Number one, I was saying to myself—and I can remember it like it was yesterday—was though I had not seen the tower collapse, I hadn't heard anything either. I have no auditory memory of this at all. I remember the sheer silence afterward, but I don't remember whether the collapse was loud or silent. All I have is people in front of me, and alongside of me, running, and stuff falling all over me and, literally, beams to the left of me and to the right of me. And I said to myself, over and over again,
I have shown up here, and I'm going to get killed, and I have helped no one. This isn't fair.
In the short period of time getting across West Street, I must—at least in my memory—have said that to myself a million times. The other thing I said to myself was that my wife knows I'm here, but she is not going to be able to survive without me. My wife had some medical problems, and I just felt that I was now dying, I had helped no one, and I was hurting my wife in ways that no one could imagine. And this just seemed unfair. And then, before I knew it, I didn't actively jump, but I was blown what felt like halfway across West Street. I became engulfed in debris that was falling and falling and falling, and I thought it was never going to stop.

And then I remembered—this is how stupid you can be, or how stupid I was, because I never try to play firefighter, but I do listen to patients—one guy who came to me maybe twenty years before, and he had a knife on his belt. Firefighters don't come in uniform when they see you unless they are injured on the job. He was not uniformed, but I was wondering why he had such a large knife on his belt. And he told me that a firefighter always needs a knife, because if you got caught in a building collapse, what you needed to do is to get down on all fours, cut a hole in the carpet, pull up the carpet, stick your head under the carpet, and suck out whatever air you could until somebody came and found you. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but I remembered it as I was being engulfed with all this stuff. A firefighter would know how humorous this is. I had no knife, and below me appeared to be asphalt, so I wasn't going to be cutting a hole in anything to get air. But this story came back to me, and I said to myself,
I need to create an air pocket so I can survive. Somebody will find me. The Fire Department will rescue me. They don't know where the hell I am, but they rescue everybody else, so they're going to rescue me.
I was 100 percent convinced of this. I'm telling this because I find it unimaginable that a person could have these thoughts during this event. I am amazed at how these thoughts occur.

So—stuff was falling, I had no idea where I am, and I was wearing everything that I preached a first responder should not wear in a disaster: a sports jacket, a tie, pants, and regular shoes, along with a stethoscope. I had no hard hat—no hat at all—no gloves, no respirator, no SCBA [self-contained breathing apparatus], nothing. I was doing exactly what you should never do in a disaster, which is to take an asset and convert it into a liability. My training made me an asset, but now, caught in this disaster, I was a liability.

I had no idea where I was except that I was somewhere on West Street. I could barely breathe with so much dust, and I couldn't see anything at all. I knew there was stuff above me that I couldn't seem to get out from under, because it just kept coming down, and I ended up lying prone, facedown on a hard surface, which I later found out was actually the asphalt on West Street. But at that time I didn't know. And I got it into my head that no matter how hard it was going to be, I was going to get on all fours. I was going to lift myself up. Obviously I could not stand up to run away, but that's what I would have loved to have done. I was caught in all of this debris, but I was going to get on all fours, because then there would be an air hole underneath me that I could live off of until somebody came and rescued me. Now, the stupidity of this notion did not occur to me at the time.

I was now suffering greater injury, with more stuff getting at my head, because I was not protecting it, and this air pocket that I tried to create just got filled in with dust and debris. But I survived. Everything stopped suddenly, and I was able to crawl out from between crevasses. It seemed that Sheetrock or plywood or beams of some sort must have fallen in a way that created a sort of roof for me. In addition, I was lucky enough to have been blown, or almost catapulted, to the end of West Street, directly under where the pedestrian bridge meets the ground, so there was a sort of natural crevasse that also must have protected me. When you hear on the radio that they had spent, like, $12 million to build a narrow pedestrian bridge over a highway, and you say to yourself,
How could that possibly have cost $12 million?
, I now look at it as money well spent. Build those things as strong as you can. Again, I didn't figure this out in advance; I didn't purposefully aim to be shielded by the bridge. I just ran across the street and got blown under the bridge. I was just lucky.

Let me fast-forward to about 11:00 P.M. that night, after having survived and then having worked the entire day there. Around 11:00 at night I was finally able to call my wife. I said, “I'm okay,” and she said, “Thank goodness.” She said the towers collapsed, there are no more towers, and I kept telling her about my day, and we kept going back and forth until I interrupted her and asked, “Wait a minute, honey, what did you just say? The towers are gone? What are you talking about?” Because to that moment, I thought that the only things that had fallen were from where the planes had hit. I did not know that the entire tower had collapsed. I wasn't watching TV, so I didn't have any visual images of this. I was very busy thereafter and was looking in the opposite way from the towers. This was a complete revelation to me. And I ask myself how someone could have been down there the whole day and not realized that the whole towers had collapsed. I realized that tower 7 had collapsed, because they asked me to move our triage area, and we had been on Broadway, right in the shadow of tower 7. I don't remember the North Tower collapsing. It might have collapsed while I was still under all of the debris.

 

Getting back to that morning: When I got out from under the debris I was all alone, but I saw one or two firefighters and fire marshals on the street with me. We started walking away from the dust cloud toward the Staten Island Ferry. I got all the way to the ferry, and that's where I met Dr. Kelly for the first time, and Chief Nigro, as well. Dr. Kelly told me how she had been rescued on two occasions by two different firefighters: one pushed her through a revolving door and another under an overhang, away from the onslaught, which shielded her from the dust clouds. I still did not realize there were collapses, thinking it to be debris from the airplane destruction. She'd actually treated one of our firefighters, who had been severely injured, and helped evacuate him to an ambulance. So she had been able to actually accomplish something.

The three of us walked a little east and up Broadway. When we got close to Vesey Street, Chief Nigro went off on his own to command the event, and Dr. Kelly and I decided to set up our triage center there. So with the help of several firefighters, we broke into one of the buildings on Broadway, where there was a Duane Reade, so that we could get supplies from its pharmacy. We had the firefighters break down two separate entrances, so we would have an ingress and an egress for the wounded. We had anticipated that we would have many injuries, and the two of us would do the best that we could.

Police officers must have known that we were there and directed people to us. We wound up being a magnet for many other health-care professionals who wanted to help, including a surgeon friend of mine whom I didn't know was down there, along with Dr. Ira Feirstein, the psychiatrist from the Fire Department. We built a minitriage area where we could treat the wounded, give them psychological counseling, do eyewashes, albuterol treatments for people who had irritant injuries, and we actually even had a little surgical center in case somebody needed emergency treatment before we could get him to a hospital. We had no major injuries but were treating a lot of eye and nose irritation, giving them nebulizer treatments with albuterol, and a lot of walking wounded as well.

And then, late in the afternoon, a chief came in and said we were in the shadow of tower 7, which could collapse right on top of us, and we had to move our triage area. I was a little upset about this, because we had really organized it very nicely, but we moved to Pace University, across the street from city hall, which turned out to be a better place for us, with a lot more room. When tower 7 fell the dust from the collapse came all the way up the stairs of Pace University, so we just missed the very periphery of that dust cloud. We stayed in our new location, again treating the same types of problems: no life-threatening injuries, just wounded people, eye irritation, and pulmonary irritation. I was helping a lot of people.

I didn't know until the next day that Chief Ganci was gone. I was too busy. I had no idea that 343 firefighters had died. I had no idea how many deaths there were. I had no idea that Father [Mychal] Judge [chaplain of the New York City Fire Department], with whom I was very friendly, had died. I had immense respect for him—immense. And I loved him. When I had been involved previously with some protective equipment research, he was really very helpful to me.