After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed
370
After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed
370eBook
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Overview
Within days of September 11, 2001, Columbia’s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across the city to collect the accounts and observations of hundreds of people from a diverse mix of New York neighborhoods and backgrounds. With follow-up interviews spanning years, the project produced a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and communities in New York City.
After the Fall presents a selection of these fascinating testimonies, with heartbreaking and enlightening stories from a broad range of New Yorkers. The interviews include first-responders, taxi drivers, school teachers, artists, religious leaders, immigrants, and others who were interviewed numerous times since the 2001 attacks. The result is a remarkable time-lapse account of the city as it changed in the wake of 9/11, one that will resonate powerfully with New Yorkers and millions of others who continue to feel the impact of the most damaging foreign attack to ever occur inside the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781595587671 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 370 |
| File size: | 595 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Paramedic
James E. Dobson
Interviewed by Ed Thompson (11/1/01) and Gerry Albarelli (3/6/03)
James Dobson was born in 1952 and grew up in Astoria, Queens, New York. His father was a chef, and his mother and sister worked at St. John's Hospital Center in Queens. Dobson has worked as an ambulance paramedic since he was nineteen years old. He is married with two grown children. On September 11, 2001, Dobson and his partner, Marvin Bethea, began their day at 7:00 A.M. by responding to a medical emergency. After delivering a patient to Mt. Sinai Hospital in Astoria they received a radio call that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. They were told to drive to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, which leads into Manhattan, and wait for instructions. They met up there with a lieutenant from the Emergency Medical Services and soon headed over the bridge.
NOVEMBER 1, 2001
So as we're on the bridge going over to Manhattan, I'm in the tech seat and my partner Marvin Bethea is in the front seat. We had a student in the back who is in the paramedic class. As we're just about coming into Manhattan we find out that another plane hit the other tower. So the student says to me, "Oh my God. Terrorists."
Marvin says, "Yes, it's terrorists." He was on the phone trying to talk to his girlfriend, and she was watching TV.
Then the student says to me, "Anthrax." I look at him, and he's a young man who has two children.
I turn to him and I say, "Well, it's too late now. We're on our way in."
We hit Broadway, and we're looking up like everybody else, and the problem was that no one was moving. You had people going into stores buying cameras to take pictures of the fire. No one realizes that because the fire is half a mile up in the air that they are in danger. It seems so far away. It's just like a stampede of people coming through. Everything is so tight and narrow [in that part of town] and they're trying to keep people away. But the most they can keep people away is a block, and that's on Broadway.
So we're down there about five minutes and we're looking around. And they've got us on a side street and we see shoes all over the place. And I looked down and there is someone's telephone. And I said, "Oh my God. What's going on here?" Even though we knew what was going on, it just seemed, like, odd.
So then the lieutenant says, "Okay. We're going to go, and they are going to do on-the-scene triage, right on the site." They're setting up a triage area on Fulton and Church streets, which is the east side of the towers. I get out right away, and I go down to the corner of Fulton and Church, and there it is all patients. They have all these people sitting along Church Street in chairs. And there are all vehicles, and it has got to be a hundred, maybe two hundred people, just like milling around.
So I try to take charge because that's what I am supposed to do. I start treating people. I start telling the EMTs, "Get me this. Get me that." And we're tagging people, and when you tag people you tear off how critical they are, and if you leave the tag on and it's black, that means you're not going to take care of them. They're dead. But we're taking care of all the people that's coming out.
Six firemen are carrying a lady out on a door, and they said, "She just fell down an elevator shaft." It was a young lady, probably about twenty-five to thirty. She is laying on the board, she is alive, she's all bruised up and everything, and she's moaning and groaning. So a doctor came over. I don't know where he came from, but he was just a regular doctor in plain clothes. He says, "I'm a doctor. Let me look at her." So as he's looking at her he says, "She's all right. Just put her on a stretcher and take her."
I said, "No. No. Doctor, don't worry about it, I've got it." So I took out, like, all precautions for spinal injury, and I put her on a backboard and cervical collar and stuff like that, and I put her in the ambulance. I told the firemen [who] brought the lady out, "Okay. I've got this. I can handle this." I said, "You just go back in and get more people." And these are the kinds of things that bother you, what you said to people, because I'm sending them back in to their deaths. I didn't know that at the time. And they would have went back in anyway. But after it's all over it just plays on your mind.
So then all [of a] sudden they bring me out another unconscious person, and this is a man about [in his] forties to fifties. They say, "He's been unconscious for, like, thirty minutes." I'm down on one knee and I'm taking his blood pressure. And then all of a sudden I hear the noise, and it sounds like an avalanche. So I look over my right shoulder and I see it coming down. So, you know, I had to run. I started running and I'm saying, "I can't outrun this. I know I can't outrun it. This is like a mile-high building. Where am I running to?" So what we do is, on our ambulances, when you go to any kind of disaster you leave the windows open. So the windows were open in the ambulance, the lights were on, the engine's running, because you want to hear other sirens that are coming so you don't have a collision. So I get in the back of the ambulance, and as I'm going by, there's an EMT from the city there. Big, tall, blond-headed guy. I don't know his name. And I say, "We've got to get in the ambulance."
Now, his ambulances are locked. So he goes, "Okay. Okay." He jumps in the back with me. And we have a cubbyhole that goes from the back to the front, but because of my size I don't fit through that too well. And I know the windows are open. I weigh three hundred pounds, and I'm six foot three. I don't fit through that little hole.
Okay. So now I'm in the back, he's in the back, and we're just grabbing people and pulling them into the back of the ambulance, screaming and yelling and everything. And you hear this terrible roaring sound that's coming down. So now I go through the cubbyhole and I'm trying to close the windows because there is smoke coming in. It was really ground-up cement and it's just coming in. I scream to him, "Close the back door!"
So the ambulance is swaying and everything. Everything starts getting black. It goes pitch, pitch black. And I say, "Oh, Jimmy. This is not good. This is not good. I'm going to get buried alive here." I'm talking to myself in my mind, and I said, "This is a bad way to end a career." So I hit the switch for the lights in the back, and the air conditioner, because right now we already have like an inch of silt all over everything inside. So all you hear is all these explosions, and everything got black. And then all of a sudden you see the orange ball of fire go by. Now, the orange ball of fire, I don't know if it was from the building or from a vehicle that blew up.
Now, we have me in the back, we have four ladies and a gentleman and the EMT. There are seven of us in the back of the ambulance. So I tell them, "Okay. Everybody calm down now. We are going to have to work together." I turned the main tank of oxygen on and I hooked them up with oxygen masks, and I said, "We're going to do like skin divers do. We're going to buddy-breathe. You breathe a little bit and pass it on to the next person to breathe a little bit."
So I'm looking out the front windshield in the dark. It was black for so long, and then all of a sudden I saw it got a little lighter, a little lighter. So I open the side door, and when I came outside the ambulance there must have been like a foot of paper, debris. Everything to the left of us was all destroyed. And all the people I took care of were all swept away. They were all gone. So now I take the people that could get out of the ambulance and I am heading up the block with the EMT. I turned around, and for some reason I went back to the ambulance because it was still running. Everything is destroyed but this ambulance. I mean every vehicle is destroyed. For some reason it wasn't.
So, I said, "Okay. Let me see if I can move this thing." So I started driving the ambulance and it is moving. I said, "Oh man. Bonus." So as I go up the block they are banging on the side of the doors. People are starting to come out of the buildings where they sought refuge and they're opening the side doors. Five or six people jump right in. The back door's open, the side door's open, I'm behind the steering wheel. I've got no partner because at the time Marvin was working up the block, so I didn't know if he was dead or alive. The student was gone. So I'm by myself. I go up over Broadway and there is a lieutenant from the city there, and I say, "I've got six patients in the back. I'm going to go to Bellevue hospital."
So I start driving. I'm looking at the East River and you can see the clear blue sky. So I'm driving toward the clear blue sky, and I go down about three or four blocks, I don't know how many, and I make a left-hand turn and all of a sudden when I go up about a block all of these people are in medical outfits and there are stretchers on the outside. I pull over. I said, "It's better than no place. It's like an oasis." I open the back door, and all of these people are taken out on stretchers into [New York University Downtown Hospital].
So I bring the people in there and you see all the burned people, all the people that came to that hospital first. The staff was getting overwhelmed. They don't have stretchers. So I turn around, and they ask me, "What's going on out there?"
So I say, "It looks like the tower, one of the buildings came down."
They are saying, "Are you sure you're all right?"
And I say "Yes. I'm okay." So I'm there, and I have to admit I said to myself, "I'm safe now. I'm safe now." And I said, "No, but I've got to go back. I've got to go back." So I take the ambulance and I go back. The only place I know to go is back to where I started. So I go down Fulton and I go all the way down to the end. I thought maybe my partner Marvin's there. So I go back down there and I see there's a young doctor there. This is the part that was really upsetting. He was a young doctor, good-looking kid, about twenty-five, and there's a black man laying there, and he's bleeding from his mouth, his nose, he's having a hard time. He's breathing still, and he's moving the right hand. And there's another gentleman with him.
So I get the stretcher and the backboard. In the meanwhile there is a man, who looked like a Spanish man, but they had, like, chalk all over them; everything is kind of odd because everything is in black and white. Nothing has color anymore. So when we looked at the guy bleeding, it made it more vivid because you could see the red. So I get the backboard to the doctor and this other gentleman. There is steel on this man's lower legs and the other man wasn't moving; he was unconscious. First I grab the steel, I go to yank it, and it was twice as heavy as I thought. It was bent like a pretzel. So I try with all my might and I'm just teetering, and it slides off his legs. So we get him up and we put him on the stretcher, just laying flat on the stretcher because I have no more backboards. We put the other man on the seat and all of a sudden this lady comes out of nowhere who has — she's a black lady and she's completely gray — but she's not talking. She's just walking like she's a zombie. So I put her in the side of the ambulance door. One man who is dressed in a suit helping the doctor had a policeman's badge, a detective's badge, hanging out of his pocket. So he jumps into the ambulance past the lady and sits on the jump seat. So I just took the same mask that we were buddy-breathing and I put him on the oxygen. So I have the oxygen on both of them and I say to the doctor, "Come with me to the hospital, Doc."
He says, "You really need me?"
I said, "I've got no one back here. These two people are critical. They're dying."
He says to me, "Okay."
And then the police officer speaks up and he says, "Don't let this fool you." He shows me the badge. He says, "I'm a PA."
I said, "PA? Port Authority?"
He goes, "No. No. A physician's assistant for five years." He says, "I've got your back."
So the doctor says, "He's got your back. I'm going to find more people." So he goes around the corner and he's gone. I get in the ambulance and I drive. I don't go more than five or ten feet and the PA tells me, "I have no oxygen back here." He says to me, "I can't breathe." So I stop the ambulance and I look inside and [the oxygen tank] says two thousand, that's the normal pressure. Now I'm getting a little worried because these people are dying back here. He's pulled the hose off the patient's mask, and it's all bloody, and he's got the hose in his mouth and he's telling me he can't take the pain in his chest. He's having a heart attack on me. So the guy I'm going to rely on, he's critical. He's lying all over everything and he's like, "I can't breathe. I can't take the pain."
I just look over my shoulder, and I'm ready to call for the doctor, and the second building right in front of me starts coming down. So now I run around and we're going to leave that doctor, and I know he had to die. He didn't make it because he went around that corner, over the metal, everything else, and there's no way of running. He can't even run. So it's like I have to leave him too.
So I start riding the ambulance up Fulton back to where I started. I'm just hoping that it doesn't stall. I'm trying to outrun [the collapse]. I'm jumping over the curbs because there's police cars just abandoned, and vans abandoned, impeding me getting to safety. So I'm jumping over the sidewalks and you see people just holding against buildings and laying on the floor. And the second building comes down. It's nothing but black smoke. Just black, black, black smoke. So now I get on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge and now I'm going down back to the hospital. They ask me, "What have you got?"
I say, "I've got two crushed people from the first tower coming down, and I got this lady, and I've got this police officer who looks like he's having a heart attack."
[Dobson delivers his patients and, fighting back fear, turns his ambulance back toward Ground Zero.]
I'm getting just two blocks in, three blocks in, and people were just — I had policewomen running down the block screaming, "I'm going to die! I'm going to die!" People who were probably seasoned firemen and policemen, they all thought they were dying. They thought this was the end of the world. I was putting them in the back of the ambulance and now I'm like a shuttle bus. I'm just going up, grabbing like four people, back to the hospital. I kind of looked funny in my mind because I'm the only one going back and forth with this little shuttle thing, but I'm the only one who got out of that whole triage area.
I think it's the fourth or fifth time that I take a different route, and now I go up a different block, and I'm saying, "Well, maybe I can get closer to where the people are trapped." It's now like an hour and a half. I'm missing Marvin, I'm missing the student, and I go up and I get almost to Broadway. There are these firemen and policemen and they're in the street. And then there is no one around. It is so quiet. And if you look[ed] down the street all you saw was the black smoke and a fire. It looked like hell in front of you.
A police officer says, "Don't go no further because if you go further up, the street's starting to get mushy from the intense heat, the subway's there, and you may wind up in the subway."
So I say, "I've got to go up one more block. I've just got to go up one more block to check it." And I go up one more block and there's Marvin in the smoke looking up at this black wall of smoke and fire and flame with a cell phone to his ear. I don't even think the cell phones worked that day but he had it to his ear, looking, and he was just mesmerized. He sees me and I see him. So I get out, and he runs to me and I run to him and we hug each other. I say, "We made it. We made it, Marvin." So he gets in the ambulance. I make a U-turn and I say, "Marvin, where's the student?"
He said, "I don't know."
I say, "Oh no, we lost the student. Well, at least you're alive."
So now I've got to go up to the towers. I don't think I can just make a U-turn, and now I've got to go right where they are squirting the water. So now I'm driving off, and you're driving over things, but, you know, you're seeing body parts, and you're seeing stuff like that, and you feel that you are running over stuff, but you're not paying attention to what you are running over. You don't want to pay attention to what you're running over.
[Dobson and his partner start heading down to a rescue staging area by the Staten Island Ferry.]
So now the firemen come down the block and one guy tells Marvin, "I can't see. I can't see." So we put him in the back and Marvin starts flushing his eyes out. Marvin flushes out the fireman's eyes and we were telling him, "Stay with us. Your eyes — maybe you can't [see] ."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "After the Fall"
by .
Copyright © 2011 The Trustees of Columbia in the City of New York.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
About the Transcripts,
Brief Time Line — September 11, 2001,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter 1. - Paramedic,
Chapter 2. - Director, Human Resources, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
Chapter 3. - Film and Media Curator,
Chapter 4. - Computer Programmer, Manager,
Chapter 5. - Street Vendor,
Chapter 6. - Priest,
Chapter 7. - Psychotherapist,
Chapter 8. - Artist,
Chapter 9. - Taxi Driver,
Chapter 10. - Office Assistant,
Chapter 11. - Conflict Mediator, Educator,
Chapter 12. - Author, Computer Scientist, Composer, Visual Artist,
Chapter 13. - Captain, Emergency Medical Service,
Chapter 14. - Dentist, Anatomy Professor, Author,
Chapter 15. - Public School Teacher,
Chapter 16. - Banker,
Chapter 17. - Community Organizer / Activist,
Chapter 18. - Historian and Journalist,
Chapter 19. - Psychologist,
Copyright Page,
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