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from: David McReynolds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "undisclosed-recipients:;"
This was sent me by a friend - it rings very true and gives a
terrible sense of reality to what it was like inside the building
on the 11th.
. .
David
Dear All,
Now that I can begin to think clearly again, I would like to take
the time to thank each and every one of you for your concern of my
well- being. It was a very close call, and I am grateful to be
alive. As you probably all know by now, I narrowly escaped from
the World Trade Center attack this past Tuesday, unlike the thousands
who are still trapped beneath the rubble.
At 8:48am on Tuesday morning, I was reading my e-mail like I do
every morning. I had just gotten off the phone with a traffic
engineer at the Port Authority regarding a file that I had transmitted
to him on the previous day. As I was finishing off my usual peanut
butter and jelly sandwich, I heard a loud explosion, which was
immediately followed by tremendous building sways and vibrations.
As I was thrown out of my chair, I immediately thought that this
was an earthquake, but still thinking rationally, I thought that
it was abnormal since there are no earthquakes in NYC, especially
of this magnitude. I remember thinking that the building felt like
it was going to collapse from this initial explosion.
As I picked myself up and ran to the emergency staircase located
in the core of the huge building, I saw through the east facing
windows debris and fireballs falling from the top of the building.
The building had stabilized by the time I reached the stairwell,
and evacuation had commenced quickly but calmly. Not knowing the
gravity of what was happening above us, people had started pouring
into the stairwell from the hallways of the different floors. I
saw a coworker from my floor (72nd), and we held and consoled each
other.
There were no public announcements in the stairwell, but the
evacuation seemed to be going smoothly, there were no more explosions
as far as we could tell, no smoke coming up the stairwell, and the
building had stopped swaying. We all felt like we were out of
imminent danger. As we started to make it down the stairwell, people
started chatting and gathering their composures. I heard some people
who had been there in '93 telling others that this was a piece of
cake since the stairwell was dark and full of smoke in '93. Others
were joking about how Mr. Silverstein, who had just recently taken
control of the complex, must be fuming at what was happening. A
few moments passed and people began to receive messages over their
pagers that a 767 had accidentally hit our building. There was no
mention of a terrorist attack, and at no time was there any panic.
Mobile phones were completely out in the core of the building due
to its immenseness and the large distance from the core of the
building to the exterior where signals were usually stronger. There
was no smoke at all in the stairwell, but there was a strange
peculiar smell, which I later remembered it smelling like how it
does when one boards an aircraft. I later found out that this was
jet fuel.
Soon we heard shouts from the people above us to keep to the right.
I started seeing blind people, those with difficulty moving,
asthmatics and injured people filing down to our left. People were
burned so badly that I won't go into describing it. People kept
filing down orderly and calmly, but stunned.
Sometime around the 30th or 40th floor, we passed the first
firefighters coming up the stairs. They reassured people that we
were safe and that we would all get out fine. By this point, they
were already absolutely breathless, but still pushing upward, slowly
and unyieldingly, one step at a time. I could only imagine how
tired they were, carrying their axes, hoses and heavy outfits and
climbing up all those stairs. Young men started offering the firemen
to carry up their gear for a few flights, but they all refused.
EACH and EVERY ONE of them. As I relive this moment over and over
in my mind, I can't help but think that these courageous firemen
already knew in their minds that they would not make it out of the
building alive and that they didn't not want to endanger any more
civilians and prevent one less person from making it to safety on
the ground.
We continued down the stairwell, slowly and at times completely
stalled. The smell of jet fuel had gotten so unbearable that people
began covering their mouths and noses with anything that they could
find - ties, shirts, handkerchiefs. Every few floors, emergency
crew were passing out water and sodas from the vending machines
that they had split open from the hallways. I had no idea how much
time had passed by as I didn't have my mobile phone with me. Around
the 20th or 15th floor, the emergency crew began diverting the
people in our stairwell to a different stairwell. They led us out
of our stairwell, across the hallway where I saw exhausted firemen
and emergency crew sitting on the floor trying to catch their
breaths. I began to think why? What's going on? This whole operation
looked very confusing.
Nobody was giving us any indication as to what was going on. The
wait in the hallway to get to the other staircase was excruciatingly
long as we had to wait and merge with the people who were coming
down the staircase into which we were filing. Why had they diverted
us? As we started to get down to the lower floors, water started
to pour down from behind us. I figured that a water pipe had burst
or that it was water coming down from the rescue on the higher
floors.
At this moment for the first time since the initial explosion, a
sense of panic began to grip me. Only floor 7, then 6. A few more
to go, and I would be free. I couldn't wait. It didn't matter that
the water was ankle deep. I was a few floors from the ground. Floor
,,,,4,,,,then all of a sudden, a loud boom, and the building began
to shake unbearably again. People started falling down the stairwell
as smoke started to rise from the bottom. The emergency lights
flickered and then went out. The building was still shaking, and
I could hear the steel buckling.
Rescuers below us shouted for us to go back up the stairs. At this
moment, I was choking and shaking tremendously. I managed to climb
back up to the 6th or 7th floor and opened the door to that floor.
The water had already risen to my ankles, and the floor was completely
dark. A fireman led us with his flashlights to another staircase
by the voices of another fireman who was guiding him through the
darkness. We finally made it across that floor to the other stairwell
where we were greeted by the other fireman and told to hold. The
look on that fireman's face said it all. He said something under
his lips to our fireman indicating the severity of the situation.
With the image of the firemen communicating to each other and
hindsight, I believe that the fireman had whispered to the other
one that Building Two had collapsed.
After a few minutes of huddling by the stairwell on the 6th floor,
we were given the green light to run for our lives. I made it down
six flights with a few other people and came out onto the mezzanine
level of our building. I don't know what I was expecting to see
when I got out of the stairwell, but I was not ready for this
apocalyptic scene.
It was completely covered in white dust and smoke. My initial
reaction was that I couldn't believe that one plane, albeit a 767,
80 floors above our head caused all this damage on the ground floor
- inside. I covered my head and ran towards the huge opening in
the north side of the building through which we were being evacuated.
As I approached this threshold, the firemen yelled to us to get
over to the wall of the building quickly.
Debris was still raining from all sides of the building. We could
see the other firefighters who were outside standing underneath
the cantilevered parts of the black immigration building (4 and/or
5 WTC).
At their cue, we ran from our building to the outside world and
back underneath the immigration building. I was completely disoriented,
coughing, and looking at the strange new landscape at the WTC plaza
- burning trees, wreckage, fireballs and dust, nothing short of a
nuclear winter. I climbed over huge pieces of steel wreckage and
made my way through to the skybridge leading to 7 WTC (building 3
to collapse). From there, I descended the escalators down to the
street level onto Vesey Street and trotted to safety onto Church
Street. I immediately looked back and saw the charred remains of
the upper floors of my building. Smoke filled the sky, and I began
to have this eerie feeling that WTC 2 was not there. I couldn't be
sure because of all the smoke that was billowing from my building
blowing eastward. As I was trying to find WTC 2, I saw the unthinkable
happen in front of my eyes. WTC 1 began to disintegrate from where
it was burning. I turned around and ran.
I later learned that another 767 had hit WTC 2 around the floors
where sit in my building. I later learned that WTC 2 had collapsed
when we were still inside my building on the fourth floor when it
began to shake for a second time. I later learned that I had been
spared from the sight of people falling from the higher floors. I
am grateful to be alive and uninjured and to be able to share this
life-changing experience with you. And, I am so grateful for the
courage of the firemen and policemen who gave up their lives to
help us down the burning tower.
==========================================
September 26, 2001
A Time of Gifts By STEPHEN JAY GOULD
he patterns of human history mix decency and depravity in equal
measure. We often assume, therefore, that such a fine balance of
results must emerge from societies made of decent and depraved
people in equal numbers. But we need to expose and celebrate the
fallacy of this conclusion so that, in this moment of crisis, we
may reaffirm an essential truth too easily forgotten, and regain
some crucial comfort too readily forgone. Good and kind people
outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human
history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts
of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems
can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but
an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every
spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of
kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the "ordinary" efforts
of a vast majority.
We have a duty, almost a holy responsibility, to record and honor
the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses, when
an unprecedented act of evil so threatens to distort our perception
of ordinary human behavior. I have stood at ground zero, stunned
by the twisted ruins of the largest human structure ever destroyed
in a catastrophic moment. (I will discount the claims of a few
biblical literalists for the Tower of Babel.) And I have contemplated
a single day of carnage that our nation has not suffered since
battles that still evoke passions and tears, nearly 150 years later:
Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor. The scene is insufferably sad,
but not at all depressing. Rather, ground zero can only be described,
in the lost meaning of a grand old word, as "sublime," in the sense
of awe inspired by solemnity.
In human terms, ground zero is the focal point for a vast web of
bustling goodness, channeling uncountable deeds of kindness from
an entire planet the acts that must be recorded to reaffirm the
overwhelming weight of human decency. The rubble of ground zero
stands mute, while a beehive of human activity churns within, and
radiates outward, as everyone makes a selfless contribution, big
or tiny according to means and skills, but each of equal worth. My
wife and stepdaughter established a depot on Spring Street to
collect and ferry needed items in short supply, including face
masks and shoe inserts, to the workers at ground zero. Word spreads
like a fire of goodness, and people stream in, bringing gifts from
a pocketful of batteries to a $10,000 purchase of hard hats, made
on the spot at a local supply house and delivered right to us.
I will cite but one tiny story, among so many, to add to the count
that will overwhelm the power of any terrorist's act. And by such
tales, multiplied many millionfold, let those few depraved people
finally understand why their vision of inspired fear cannot prevail
over ordinary decency. As we left a local restaurant to make a
delivery to ground zero late one evening, the cook gave us a shopping
bag and said: "Here's a dozen apple brown bettys, our best dessert,
still warm. Please give them to the rescue workers." How lovely,
I thought, but how meaningless, except as an act of solidarity,
connecting the cook to the cleanup. Still, we promised that we
would make the distribution, and we put the bag of 12 apple brown
bettys atop several thousand face masks and shoe pads.
Twelve apple brown bettys into the breach. Twelve apple brown bettys
for thousands of workers. And then I learned something important
that I should never have forgotten and the joke turned on me.
Those 12 apple brown bettys went like literal hot cakes. These
trivial symbols in my initial judgment turned into little drops of
gold within a rainstorm of similar offerings for the stomach and
soul, from children's postcards to cheers by the roadside. We gave
the last one to a firefighter, an older man in a young crowd,
sitting alone in utter exhaustion as he inserted one of our shoe
pads. And he said, with a twinkle and a smile restored to his face:
"Thank you. This is the most lovely thing I've seen in four days
and still warm!"
Stephen Jay Gould, a professor of zoology at Harvard, is the author
of "Questioning the Millennium."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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