[Nevada-Announce] Not Just Surviving the Disaster of September 11 but Providing Leadership in a Deadly Emergency

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               Not Just Surviving the Disaster of September 11
               but Providing Leadership in a Deadly Emergency
                             by Michael Hingson
      Dr. Maurer, fellow Federationists, and friends: during the past few
months we have seen the reprise of a phrase that rang out loud and strong
after 9/11. Every time today I hear people say "We've got to get back to
normal," I think about the fact that in reality we can't--because normal
will never be the same again. Rather than trying to get back to normal, we
need to find a new normal: a normal that incorporates that which happened
to us and that which will help us move forward.
      Sometimes a new normal becomes our way of life gradually. We got a
new normal in our lives when we started flying in airplanes and
transportation became easy for long distances. A new normal began to emerge
when radio was developed. And, yes, a new normal emerged when television
came on the scene. The new medium, it was called, although, as Fred Allen
says, "I understand why it's called the new medium,
because everything they do in television is only medium."
      Normal is sometimes thrust upon us, as happened with 9/11. We in the
National Federation of the Blind are involved in creating a new normal
every day. Our opportunities to do that are regularly challenged, however,
and I refer specifically to one instance that recently occurred when Dr.
Richard Besser, ABC medical correspondent, reported on what could be a
major breakthrough in stem cell research on June 23 of this year. Dr.
Besser reported about stem cells and how one's own stem cells out of the
eye could be used to regenerate corneas. But he started his report this
way: "Imagine all the beauty of life gone in an instant. Suddenly blinded
by a terrible accident, you can only see light and dark, but now, through a
seismic breakthrough, using stem cells from one's own eye promises new
sight to those blinded by burns."
      The report was great; the report was fine. It is great to see stem
cell research moving forward, especially using one's own stem cells to
regenerate organs and parts of one's own body. But look at how he started
his report. He did it on the backs of and at the expense of blind people by
saying, "Imagine all the beauty of life gone in an instant." Dr. Besser
made it very clear that blind people, in his estimation, cannot see the
beauty of life; namely, he believes you can only experience the beauty of
life through sight. In reality we know you experience the beauty of life by
vision, which does not need sight. [applause]
      Dr. Besser's report had shock value, but, as we have heard today, he
(like many in the ophthalmological and medical profession) needs to learn a
new normal. Oh, it's normal in many people's minds that blind people can't
do a lick of work or do anything at all, but that's their perception. And I
suppose from their perspective that makes it normal, but we know that the
reality is different. We who are blind need to show Dr. Besser and others
that the beauty of life goes far beyond sight. We need to show him that we
do experience the beauty of life. Sitting in my backyard, I hear the hawks
flying overhead, trying to find the baby ducks--and we save the baby ducks
by shooing the hawks away. But we can hear them; we can experience them; we
see the beauty of life in many ways. The beauty of life is here in this
room, in this organization [applause]--an organization founded seventy
years ago by a man who was born on July 6. Happy birthday, Dr. tenBroek.
[applause]
      But we also see the horrors of life. We, like those who have sight
but not vision, see the horrors of life. We see it every time we experience
discrimination. We see it every time blind parents are told they can't keep
their children and have to fight to get them back. We see it every time a
blind person is denied the right to fly or to enter a building.
      We also see the horrors of life because we have grown as a people so
much that we are out in the world like everyone else. Certainly for me the
greatest horror of life I could ever have experienced was being in the
World Trade Center on 9/11. I want to tell you this story because, out of
the horror, out of all that happened, it also is a beautiful story. It's a
story of teamwork, a story of people helping each other, and a story of
growth that makes what happened in the World Trade Center so important and
such a pivotal point for positive gains in all of our lives.
      Every time I think of what happened on 9/11, I am reminded of the
words of Mahatma Gandhi, who once said, "Interdependence ought to be and is
as much the ideal of man as is self-sufficiency." On 9/11 everyone helped
everyone else. For me it started at 1:00 in the morning when we started
experiencing a thunderstorm. My guide dog at the time, Roselle, did not
like thunderstorms. Today she's a little better about them, but we don't
have many in California. Back then she was very fearful, and we had a
thunderstorm early in the morning. So we got to go down to my basement,
where we usually go, turn on the stereo, turn on the computer, do some
work, and try to mask the noise for her. She hides under my desk.
Especially, though, that morning it was a little bit frustrating because I
had to prepare and be ready to go in to do some special work in our office.
I worked at the time for Quantum Corporation and was the regional sales
manager for the Mid-Atlantic region. We were going to be conducting special
training sessions that day for some of our reseller partners. I was going
to get up earlier than usual to be in the office before everyone arrived
and still had to do it even though I had to be up for an hour and a half in
the middle of the night.
      I went to the office. The best laid plans always go awry in one way
or another. I planned to take an early train, and the trains broke down, so
I didn't get there early after all. I arrived just as a gentleman from the
Port Authority cafeteria complex was bringing food that we were going to
serve that day (as I tell people, some of the best ham and cheese
croissants I have ever had-I still miss them terribly.) I went to my
office. Soon David Frank, a colleague from our California office who was in
that day, also arrived with some of our early guests. David was there
because he had account responsibility for some of the people who were in
that day. We set up the laptop to do the PowerPoint presentation. I was
going to be doing that. It's great when a blind person does a PowerPoint
presentation. Everybody thinks I can't do it. What's really fun is doing it
and never turning around to look at the screen because I know what's on the
slide, so all I have to do is point back. I have often been told, "You
know, we didn't dare fall asleep when you were presenting because you kept
looking at us. We had forgotten you were blind, and we thought you'd
notice."
      My response of course was, "I would have noticed. Besides, my guide
dog Roselle takes notes, and we know who you are." [laughter]
      Nevertheless, David was there; some early arrivals were there; we
were all set up, waiting for the rest of the guests to arrive. At 8:45 in
the morning David and I were in my office preparing a list of attendees for
Port Authority Security when suddenly we heard a muffled explosion. The
building shuddered, and then it began to tip. The whole building began to
move in one direction: not shaking back and forth as we in California know
earthquakes do.
      As we learned later, that was as it should have been because the
building had expansion joints that made it operate like a very large
spring. Those of us in the physics world understand that. So the building
kept tipping and tipping and tipping, and David and I said, "What's going
on?" No noises were coming from our conference room. David and I
speculated. Having grown up in California and being used to earthquakes, I
moved to the doorway, recognizing that building moves, go to door. Doesn't
matter whether it's an earthquake or not; it doesn't even matter that we
are seventy-eight floors above the street--move to the door anyway, it's
habit. I moved to the door. David stayed holding onto my desk. He's from
New York; he didn't know earthquakes. Roselle was asleep under my desk.
David and I said, "Are we going to fall to the street?" The building kept
tipping. We moved about twenty feet. David and I said good-bye to each
other because we thought we were going to fall seventy-eight floors to the
street below. About that time the building stopped and began moving back
the other way. It moved--hope against hope that we weren't going to fall--
and suddenly the building was straight up again. I went back into my
office, meeting Roselle coming out from under my desk. I took her leash. I
told her to heel, which meant to get on my left side and sit, which she
did, and about that time the building dropped straight down about six feet.
That was also as it should have been, although we didn't know it at the
time, because the expansion joints were contracting. The building worked
perfectly.
      As soon as the building dropped, David released his hold on my desk,
turned around, looked out the window, and shouted, "Oh my God, there's fire
and smoke above us, and there are millions of pieces of burning paper
falling outside the window. We've got to get out of here right now." I
could hear the paper falling outside. I wasn't smelling smoke, but I
certainly believed what David was saying. Buildings don't do what ours had
just done without something being wrong. He kept saying, "We've got to get
out of here."
      I said, "Slow down, David," because, you see, I had taken the Port
Authority classes on emergency evacuation. I had also participated in fire
drills, and, thanks to the Port Authority, I also had a copy of the Fire
Safety and Procedures Manual in Braille. Somewhere along the line, after
receiving that manual, I had taken it home. (It is still in a prized place
on my bookshelf today.)
      David kept saying, "We've got to get out of here."
      I kept saying, "Slow down, David. We will, but we're going to
evacuate in an orderly way."
      He said, "No, you don't understand. We've got to get out of here
right now."
      I kept saying, "Slow down." Our guests began to scream. They started
moving toward our exit. David was still yelling his warning. You get the
picture. The sighted guy is seeing all this horrific stuff, and the blind
guy is saying, "Slow down."
      But I knew something that David didn't. I was observing something
that David was not. It goes back to using all the skills that we have, all
the wisdom that each of us has gotten from the National Federation of the
Blind and our own life experiences. I was observing a dog sitting next to
me who was wagging her tail and yawning and not indicating in any way that
she felt nervous. Although our situation could have changed in a moment, at
that instant I knew that we could evacuate safely, according to procedure.
I finally got David to focus and said, "David, get our guests to the stairs
and start them down, and then we'll leave." He did. He took them to the
stairs and started them on their way down. Meanwhile I called my wife Karen
to let her know that we were going to be evacuating because there had been
an explosion or something and that I would call her as soon as I could.
      I should explain that we both have disabilities. Karen is in a
wheelchair. It works out great. She reads; I push. I always wanted to be a
pusher, you know--California. So David came back. We took one sweep through
the office. We tried to power down some equipment. We knew we weren't going
to be back for days, so we wanted to save power, but we had no idea how bad
it really was. We left, went to the stairs, and by 8:50 we started down.
Almost immediately I began smelling a familiar odor, but I couldn't place
it. People around me couldn't figure it out. Suddenly I realized that what
we were smelling was the fumes from burning jet fuel; it was kerosene and
propane. I said this, and people said, "Yeah, you're right. That's what it
is." We assumed that an airplane had hit our building, but we didn't know
why.
      We all went down the stairs, and after a few floors somebody shouted
from above us, "Burn victim coming through. Move to the side of the
stairwell so that they can get by." Then a group of people passed us with a
woman who was badly burned on her upper body. There were burns all over
her, but she was ambulatory, able to walk.
      David said, "She looks in shock," but she was moving down the stairs.
After she passed us, we started down again, and a few floors later we heard
it again: "Burn victim coming through. Move to the side." We did. The same
scenario again: a group surrounding someone very badly burned passed us on
the stairs.
      Almost as soon as that second party had gone, a woman near us on the
stairs stopped and said, "I can't breathe; I can't go on; We're not going
to make it out of here."
      All of us around her stopped, surrounded her, and had a group hug. We
said, "Look, we're in this together. Of course you can go. We're with you."
We kept going down the stairs, and so did she.
      Soon after that, however, my friend David said, "Mike, we're going to
die. We're not going to make it out of here."
      So now I'm going "Oh sheesh." I said, "Stop it David. If Roselle and
I can go down these stairs, so can you." He told me later that snapping at
him like that brought him out of his funk. What he then did was something
that today I think was truly remarkable. He left me and walked down a
flight of stairs and then started shouting up to me everything that he saw:
what floor he was on and if he saw anything on the stairs. But it wasn't I
who needed this information the most; it was the other people around us for
whom David became a scout, a beacon of hope as he shouted, "I'm at floor
forty-eight, now forty-seven: everything is okay; forty-six, forty-five,
floor forty-four. We're at the Port Authority cafeteria entrance," and he
continued down. Up above, I knew that the fear was palpable; you could cut
it with a knife, as they say.
      I knew most of all that I had to keep Roselle focused, so I continued
to praise her: "Good girl; you're doing great; keep going down the stairs;
good girl; hop up; just keep focusing." I was told later that this ongoing
praise also helped a bunch of people, but it really helped me because it
kept me focusing on her, rather than on what was going on around us.
      I kept an ear out for any noises from above that might say the
building was going to fall on my head. A lot of good it would have done,
but focusing on her and speaking confidently helped her focus, and her
guiding down the stairs and not looking back at me and not acting fearful,
in turn, told me that she was okay and that I could be okay.
      We all helped each other going down those stairs; we were
interdependent; it was teamwork. But you know, I did have a fear going down
the stairs. I grew up thinking that blindness really wasn't the handicap
people so often thought it was, and I knew that in certain situations my
blindness could be an advantage. What really scared me was the thought that
we might lose power and lights and I'd be on the stairs with thousands of
functionally blind people who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag.
So I said to people, "I don't want anyone to worry. If the lights go out,
Roselle and I are here, and we're offering a half-price special: get you
out safely--today only." (Got to sell too, you know.)
      We continued down the stairs. We all helped each other. Sometimes we
helped with humor, sometimes with speculations. We heard rumors that two
planes had collided and that one had crashed into the towers. Someone else
had heard that there weren't two planes but that one had gone out of
control.
      We also talked among ourselves. At one point I remember saying, just
to lighten the mood because it sounded as if it was getting pretty somber,
"Hey now, on the first day they allow us back, let's all meet on the
seventy-eighth floor at 8:45 and walk down the stairs together. What a
great way to lose weight, huh?" I was not dumb enough to suggest that we
start at the bottom and work up. I know about gravity.
      "Thirty-three, thirty-two, floor thirty-one," David called. "Hey,
everybody, firemen are coming up the stairs. Move to the side. Let the
firemen by." I went on down to where David was, and I asked him what he was
seeing. He said, "I see firemen coming up the stairs. They are all dressed
in their heavy protective clothing, and they're carrying all their
equipment on their backs: the oxygen cylinders, fire axes, shovels--all the
things they need to fight the fire."
      Finally the first one got to us, and he stopped, the good New Yorker
that he was, and said, "Hey buddy, you okay?"
      I said, "Yes, I'm fine. We're good."
      "We're going to send somebody down the stairs with you to make sure
you get out."
      I said, "Don't worry about it. We're okay."
      He said, "Yeah, maybe, but we're going to send somebody with you."
      I said, "Look, don't worry about it." It wasn't the time to give him
the lecture about "blindness isn't the handicap you think it is."
      He said again, "We're going to send somebody with you." But I was
worried. I had this fear that, if he sent somebody with me who was really
needed up above and something happened and they were minus one person who
could have made a difference, I didn't want to be responsible for that.
      Again I said, "Look' I've got my guide dog. We've come down from the
seventy-eighth floor without any help. We're really okay."
      "That's nice, what a nice dog." He started petting Roselle. It wasn't
a good time to give him the lecture about not petting the working guide dog
in harness. He said, "Yeah, we're going to send somebody with you," and I
finally used my last gun.
      I said, "Look, I've got a friend named David. David can see. We're
really okay." He turned to David.
      "You're with him?" he said.
      David said, "Yeah, we're good. Don't worry."
      "Okay." He gave Roselle one more pat. Roselle gave him some kisses--
probably the last unconditional love he got in his life--and he went on up
the stairs.
      The firemen were truly heroes--all of these people we lost were
heroes. We have to recognize that, but I never ask people to mourn their
passing. I've spoken to many firemen since. I'm going to do what I've done
with them and ask you not to have a moment of silence to mourn their
passing, but help me celebrate the lives of the people we lost by giving
them a round of applause. [extended applause]
      While firemen continued to pass us going up the stairs and our wide
stairwell was now cut in half, we continued down the stairs. David
reassumed his scouting position: "Twenty-eight, twenty-seven," and we
continued down the stairs, slower than before with more bodies on the
stairs, but we kept going. It kept getting warmer because of all the
humanity. Water bottles were passed up so that each of us could have a
drink. We shared a bottle of water--Roselle, David, and I, and we kept
going. David again took up his scouting position. Finally David got to the
first floor. We were on the second floor, and he said, "Hey everybody, hey
Mike, the water sprinklers are on in the stairwell at the bottom. You're
going to have to run through the water to get out into the lobby," and then
he was gone. We got to the bottom. There was this torrential downpour. I
took Roselle's harness and said, "Forward," and then said, "hop up," which
is a command to speed up. We burst through the downpour that was acting as
a curtain to keep fire out of the stairwell or in the stairwell and out of
the lobby if it came down the stairs.
      I burst out into the lobby of Tower One ankle deep in water. With
every step we took, we trudged through water and broken ceiling tiles that
had fallen and pieces of marble that were cracked and broken. People were
in the lobby shouting, "Go this way, go this way," never letting anyone go
outside, but rushing everybody through the lobby, through the central
doors, into the arcade that separated the towers.
      The arcade was a typical shopping mall that had all the usual things
that you'd find in a fairly small but very busy shopping center: a Hallmark
greeting card store, a Radio Shack, a 24-hour passport photo. And then
there were the important places--the ones that really mattered: Godiva
Chocolate, the deli, all places that you'd find in a mall typically full of
thousands of people at about 9:35 in the morning, but now totally quiet. I
could hear my footfalls as I ran through the lobby, through the tower
arcade, and finally up an escalator.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Both towers of the World Trade Center engulfed in flames]
      At 9:45 in the morning we burst into sunlight for the first time
since leaving our offices.
      As we got outside, we were told to leave the complex, but, before we
did, David looked around and said, "Mike, I think I see fire in Tower Two."

      I said, "What are you talking about?"
      He said, "There's fire up there." We had no idea; we had heard
nothing; no one had told us anything. We had no clue about what had
happened. But, as we were told to do, we left the complex, circled back
around to get onto Broadway, and started traveling north toward midtown
Manhattan, crossing several streets, and then finally reaching Fulton
Street, where we stopped. We would have been on the southwest corner when
we stopped, which put Tower Two diagonally across the street from us, less
than a hundred yards away. David wanted to take pictures of what he could
see. I tried to call my wife Karen but wasn't able to reach her. David was
just putting his camera away, and I had just put my phone away after
getting another circuits-are-busy message, when a police officer nearby
yelled, "Get out of here. It's coming down now." Then we heard this rumble
that quickly turned into a roar: this incredible cacophony of sound that I
can only describe as a combination of a freight train and a waterfall all
together. It was Tower Two collapsing less than a hundred yards diagonally
across the street from us. Keep in mind, it was four hundred yards tall,
less than a hundred yards away, and everyone turned and ran for their
lives. No one was helping anyone. David was long gone. I bodily turned
Roselle around and started going back the way I had come.
      I remember as I ran thinking, "God, I can't believe you led us out of
a building just to have it fall on us."
      I will tell you something I don't tell many people, but, because of
some of today's presentations, I will. I heard in my mind, as clearly as
you can hear me, a voice that said, "Don't worry about the things that you
can't control. Focus on running with Roselle, and the rest will take care
of itself." I had that conviction of peace that, if we did as instructed,
we'd be okay. So we ran. We got to the next street and turned right to try
to put a building between us and Tower Two collapsing (as if it would
really make a difference). I ran a little bit and suddenly caught up to
David, who had realized that he had run and that we were separated. He had
turned around and was going to come back. I caught up with him, and he
apologized and said, "I'm sorry, Mike; I left you."
      I said, "David, don't worry. The building is coming down. Let's keep
going." So we ran.
      Almost immediately we were engulfed in the dust cloud composed of the
fine particles of Tower Two's break-up. The dirt and debris that David
described were so thick that you could only see about six inches in front
of your nose. I can tell you, it was so thick that we could feel it going
down our throats with every breath we took. We were drowning in it, and we
knew that we had to get out of that. We began looking for an entrance to a
building on our right. Rocks and debris were falling around us. We were
partially protected by an overhang, but still I was hit in the ear and in
the head a couple of times by small rocks. We kept running. I kept telling
Roselle, "Right right," which means that she should look for the next
available turn. David was looking. I was listening for an opening. Suddenly
I heard an opening, and Roselle obviously saw it because she turned right,
took one step, and stopped dead.
      All this time Roselle had been working appropriately. She had been
doing everything that she should, so I knew that, if she stopped, there had
to be a reason. Reaching out my foot, I discovered that we were at the top
of a flight of stairs. She had done exactly what she was supposed to do.
[applause]
      We walked down the stairs and found ourselves in the small arcade to
the Fulton Street subway station. When I reached the bottom of the stairs,
I heard a woman crying and saying, "Help, I can't see. My eyes are filled
with dirt, and I don't want to fall into the subway."
      I happened to be close to her when I got down the stairs. I reached
out, took her arm, and said, "Don't worry, I happen to be blind, but I have
a guide dog named Roselle. She's doing well. She will make sure that
neither of us falls down the stairs. You're okay."
      How quickly teamwork reasserted itself--helping others--working
together.
      I introduced myself to the woman. She said her name was Carol, and
then a guy from the subway system came up the stairs and said "My name is
Lou. I work for the subway. Come with me." There were about eight or nine
of us there. We followed him down the stairs into the subway complex. He
took us to an employee locker room, where there were benches, a water
fountain, and a fan; Lou told us we could stay there.
      After about fifteen minutes a police officer found us and said, "You
need to leave now. The air has cleared up above." Without saying anything
else, we followed him. He brooked no response at all--he was busy doing
what he needed to do, and we followed him like sheep: up the stairs,
through the arcade, and then up the final set of stairs, emerging into
sunlight again.
      The air was a little better than it had been when we went down. David
looked around and said, "Oh my God, Mike: there's no Tower Two anymore."
      I said, "David, what do you see?"
      He said, "All I see are pillars of smoke hundreds of feet tall, but
there's no Tower Two."
      I said, "Are you sure?"
      He said, "Yeah." We stood there in shock for a moment and then just
turned and walked west on Fulton Street.
      We walked for about ten minutes and then decided to circle back
around to try to get to midtown Manhattan. As we started, suddenly we heard
that freight-train-waterfall sound again. We knew it was Tower One
collapsing. We thought that we were far enough away that we wouldn't be
hurt and hit by debris, but David did see another dust cloud coming, so we
ran to get out of the path of the main cloud, covered our faces, closed our
eyes, and waited for it to subside. When it did, we opened our eyes, and
David looked around. I remember what he said, "Oh my God: there is no World
Trade Center anymore." I asked him again what he saw, and he said, "All I
see are fingers of fire, pillars of smoke hundreds of feet tall--the World
Trade Center is gone."
      We just stood there in silence for a couple of minutes, and I tried
to call my wife Karen on the phone. This time I got through. After tears on
both ends of the line, she's the one who told us that two aircraft had been
deliberately crashed into the Towers and one into the Pentagon, and a
fourth was still missing over Pennsylvania. We had been attacked.
      We started making our way toward midtown Manhattan. We got to
Chinatown and stopped at a little Vietnamese restaurant for a while to
rest. While there, we heard aircraft in the skies--this loud aircraft
sound. Everyone gasped. Many ran outside and suddenly burst into applause
as we saw that it was our guys controlling the skies again. [applause]
      We finally made our way to midtown Manhattan, and later that day I
was able to catch a train to Newark, New Jersey, and then later to
Westfield. Meanwhile, a close family friend, Tom Painer, whom Karen had
known since high school in California, had come to be with her, and, when
he arrived, he didn't even know whether I was alive or dead. Later that day
he drove Karen to the train station to pick me up. I heard the van as we
arrived. I went down the stairs, across the sidewalk, up the ramp, into our
van, and hugged Karen for the first time. As we compared notes later, we
both had been thinking the same thing: what else had they planned that
would have caused us never to see each other again? But we had been able
to.
      We went home and began trying to make sense of what had happened. Our
story became visible in the media. I've had a number of opportunities to
appear on television shows like Larry King Live several times, The Morning
Show, Regis and Kelly Live, and others to tell the story: the story of
horror but the story of beauty and the story of teamwork--the story that
says we can survive disaster; we can survive change, and even the worst
change, the most horrific change, may indeed be a way to bring about a
change for good. But we need to work together to make change happen. We
need to act as a team.
      I tell the 9/11 story to help people understand what happened and how
they might be able to survive change. I tell it to help them think about
preparing for the change that you don't expect and to make the changes that
you do expect. I tell the story so that people learn to expect change and
to make it happen--in other words, to find a new normal.
      Dr. Besser, the new normal really is here. You may not know it; you
may not see it; but close your eyes and use your vision, and you'll learn a
whole lot more than you now know. [applause]
Braille Monitor
                                                 December 2010
https://nfb.org/sites/nfb.org/files/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm10/bm1011/bm101103.htm