The Unthinkable Read online

  I’m slowing down because I’m starting to realize I’m not just looking at debris. My mind says, “It’s the wrong color.” That was the first thing. Then I start saying, “It’s the wrong shape.” Over and over in my mind: “It’s the wrong shape.” It was like I was trying to keep the information out. My eyes were not allowing me to understand. I couldn’t afford it. So I was like, “No, it can’t be.” Then when I finally realized what it meant to see the wrong color, the wrong shape, that’s when I realized, I’m seeing bodies. That’s when I froze.

  “Freezing” is as common as fleeing in the repertoire of human disaster responses. But it’s also a fascinating, complicated response. It has meant certain death for many thousands of people over the centuries. Zedeño, however, had a personal savior.

  Just then, a woman—a stranger—appeared at Zedeño’s side and linked arms with her. The woman said: “We’re getting out of here.” Zedeño looked down at the woman’s arm. She still remembers the woman’s dark skin tone, similar to her own, and the red sleeve of her shirt. And then, Zedeño stopped being able to see altogether. “Because of the smoke?” I ask her. “No, no, no. There was no smoke there. I didn’t see anything at all.”

  Zedeño went temporarily blind at that moment. When she describes this remarkable occurrence now, she does it matter-of-factly. She was not frightened when this happened, she says. Just numb. She relied on hearing—and this woman in red, who began to pull her toward the doors. As they walked, the woman talked and talked. Zedeño can’t remember a word she said. “It’s funny how I tuned out everything she said. But she kept talking, she never shut up,” she says, laughing. “It was so weird! She never shut up.” But when the two of them got outside, Zedeño did hear her say, “Look, we made it.” In response, Zedeño remembers saying: “Yeah, we’re outside.” But in fact she still couldn’t see anything. She never saw the woman’s face.

  At that moment, Zedeño heard a new sound. It was a rumbling, and it was close by. It was 9: 59 A.M. At the time, she thought, “It’s another airplane.” Three notions passed through her mind in rapid sequence: “Airplane, war, a building is coming down.” With that, she screamed—either out loud or in her head, she can’t remember which—“Inside!” Her vision returned, just when she needed it again. This time, there was no denial. She turned and saw the revolving door of Five World Trade, with Borders bookstore on her right. And she ran through the door. She never saw the woman in red again.

  “The only thing I remember is the sound getting louder behind me, and I felt a strong wind. And when I felt the wind rushing right through me, I remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to outrun this. It’s too late. I can’t run fast enough.’” As the other tower—Tower 2—collapsed like a locomotive running into the ground, the force knocked her off her feet.

  Right after the tremendous crack of the collapse, there was total quiet. Zedeño remembers thinking she must be dead, perhaps because of that silent blankness. As soon as she realized she was still alive, she realized she couldn’t breathe. The dense gray matter of Tower 2 was lodged in her nose, mouth, and ears. She dug her hand into her mouth to clear out the debris, but more debris took its place. “I kept trying to catch my breath, but I couldn’t. Oh my God, it was horrible,” she says.

  During this moment, choking on great piles of ash, the anger she felt on the forty-fourth floor came surging back. This time, it was more than anger; it was rage, and it was directed not at herself but at God:

  I was thinking, “I was outside already! I almost made it! Why couldn’t I get out?” After all that trouble! I just didn’t understand. And this anger, this overwhelming anger is saying, “Why can’t you give me a break! I was there in 1993. I’m here now, I was almost out, and I’m still here! Ah! God almighty!”

  The dust started to settle. Zedeño was able to empty out her mouth, and as she leaned against a wall, she tried to clean her glasses and blow her nose. She couldn’t see through all the dust, but she heard a voice asking her to move out of the way. It was a firefighter and he was trying to break through a wall to get them out. She moved and stumbled over some debris, falling on top of someone else. It turned out to be a police officer. He was screaming that his eyes were burning. And at the same time, he was telling her, “Don’t worry, don’t worry! We’re gonna get out of here.” Zedeño could see his hands shaking. But she never saw his face.

  By then, her anger had vanished again. She got very quiet. It helped to have the police officer there, even though he was hurt. Then she heard a voice: “I found a way out. Everybody, hold hands.” And that’s what they did. They went into Borders and out through the door at the corner of Vesey and Church Streets. The books were still on the shelves, Zedeño noticed. “The idea of what had happened slipped away completely. Gone! I had no feeling anymore. It was almost like I was daydreaming.”

  Zedeño had traveled a long way. From the seventy-third floor to the ground, she had invented at least three different explanations for what was happening, all of which she had been forced to abandon. She had passed in and out of bouts of rage as her brain worked to make sense of it all. Denial both slowed her down, by distracting her with false hope, and kept her moving, by calming her down.

  The Ten-Thousand-Pound Planters

  Before the 1993 bombings, the fire safety plan for the Trade Center was naïve: each tenant company selected a volunteer to act as a fire marshal. Then the volunteer was allegedly trained to know what to do in a fire. That meant there was about one volunteer marshal for every fifty employees. As it turns out, the vast majority of the fire marshals had never left their own floor or the building in any previous alarm or drill, according to a NIST survey of all the marshals after the 1993 bombing. As a result, most of the fire marshals were unfamiliar with the stairs, despite the fact that they were the only ones “trained” to get out. In fact, they were trained only to meet in the corridor and wait for instructions. But no instructions ever came. The bomb, which was relatively weak compared with a 767 airplane, disabled the power and communications systems in the towers.

  Afterward, many of the 1993 fire marshals complained about their lack of training. They hadn’t known that two-thirds of the stairwells required people to wind through transfer hallways. No one had told them that it would take firefighters several hours to reach the upper floors. So they waited and waited, some for four hours before descending. Logically, the study’s authors concluded: “Training should not be limited to members of the fire safety team. Many fire marshals weren’t even in their areas when the incident occurred…. All building occupants need some level of training or education if they are going to react safely to a fire in a high-rise.” It wasn’t enough to rely upon volunteer fire marshals or even firefighters. People needed to be able to get out on their own.

  After 1993, it was obvious that changes needed to be made. The Port Authority spent more than $100 million on improvements. But notice where the money went: the perimeter of the complex was ringed with ten-thousand-pound planters to prevent vehicles from getting too close. Some two hundred cameras went up. Truck drivers were photographed on their way into the truck dock. Dogs sniffed for explosives. The Port Authority also installed a repeater system to help boost the fire department’s radios when firefighters had to go up into the buildings.

  But the new vision for the World Trade Center did not feature a role for regular people. Alan Reiss, who was the director of the Port Authority’s World Trade Department, which ran the World Trade Center, put it this way in his testimony to the September 11th Commission: “Evacuation protocols did not change after 1993, but training and equipment certainly did.” Safety engineers’ recommendations to widen the stairways were overruled. It would cost too much money in lost real estate. Fire drills were held twice a year, but the Trade Center’s definition of a fire drill was to ask everyone to gather in the middle of their floors and pick up an emergency phone to obtain directions. Employees did not generally go into the stairwells, let alone down them.
/>   Information and responsibility remained the province of the exclusive few—the building’s fire safety director, the Port Authority police, and other first responders. The role of regular people was to await orders.

  On 9/11, the ten-thousand-pound planters didn’t help, unfortunately. Neither did the repeater: it was never correctly turned on, and, in the chaos of that morning, firefighters concluded it was broken. Meanwhile, the relatively cheap addition of glow-in-the-dark strips along the stairs after 1993 made the evacuation much easier, survivors reported. But many thousands of people did not even know where the stairs were. Fewer than half the survivors had ever entered the stairwells before, the NIST report found. Only 45 percent of 445 Trade Center workers interviewed after 9/11 had known the buildings even had three stairwells, according to the early results of a study conducted at Columbia University. “I found the lack of preparedness shocking. People were not thinking vertically. They were thinking horizontally,” says lead investigator Robyn Gershon, a professor at Columbia. “Many people said they hesitated to get into the stairways because they didn’t know where they would end up.”

  Most people had no idea how to navigate the transfer hallways on lower floors. Only half had known the doors to the roof would be locked, according to Gershon’s findings. The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that people may have died as a result: “Once the South Tower was hit, civilians on upper floors wasted time ascending the stairs instead of searching for a clear path down, when stairwell A was at least initially passable.”

  After 1993, the fire-marshal system remained in effect. Zedeño was a marshal on 9/11. In fact, she was the only member of the fire-safety team on her floor that morning. Everyone else had yet to arrive to work. Keep in mind that each floor of the Trade Center was about an acre in size. Zedeño was a “searcher,” meaning she was supposed to search the women’s bathroom before she went into the stairs. In reality, she didn’t search for anyone anywhere. She didn’t even remember she was a fire marshal until months after the towers had collapsed.

  It turns out that on 9/11, fire marshals did not know much more than regular people. Of those interviewed in the Columbia study, 94 percent had never exited the buildings as part of a drill. Only 50 percent said they were knowledgeable enough to evacuate on their own.

  After she left Tower 1 on 9/11, Zedeño walked north with the police officer with the burning eyes. Eventually, they were picked up by ambulances. Zedeño was taken to Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, where she was given oxygen and a change of clothes. She then wandered from one train station to the next, trying to get back home. Around 7:00 P.M., she finally found her way back to New Jersey—and to her parents, who had watched from their balcony as her tower collapsed over eight hours earlier.

  Over a period of three years, Zedeño met with me many times to relive her ordeal in microdetail. It can’t have been pleasant for her. But she did it because she wanted her experience to be worth something. “In helping others understand,” she once wrote in an e-mail, “I am reaffirmed as to the reason I survived.”

  Today, Zedeño still works for the Port Authority. Her office is now in Newark, New Jersey, on the eleventh floor of an eighteen-story building. She also helps run the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, which has over two thousand members. Two years after 9/11, Zedeño adopted a three-year-old boy from Newark. She named him Elias. Her sister shares custody of him, just in case anything ever happens to Zedeño again.

  Through my long talks with Zedeño, I came to appreciate the duality of denial. I was amazed by how consuming it could be, even in the presence of smoke and flames. But, as I would come to learn about most of our disaster responses, denial could also be lifesaving. If Zedeño had been forced to reckon with reality all at once on 9/11, she might never have been able to make the long, tedious trip to safety. Denial created blinders for her brain, letting her see only what she needed to see.

  But the more I learned about denial, the harder time I had identifying its boundaries. Where did it start and end? Did denial shape Zedeño’s response the morning of 9/11? Or did it start its work long before, after she was trapped in an elevator in 1993 and decided it could never happen again? Denial is the most insidious fear response of all. It lurks in places we never think to look. The more I learned, the more denial seemed to matter all the time, even long before the disaster, on days that pass by without incident.

  2

  Risk

  Gambling in New Orleans

  ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1965, Hurricane Betsy slammed into Louisiana with winds of up to 125 mph. In Eastern New Orleans, Meaher Patrick Turner and his family did what they always did: his four children, wife, and elderly father rode out the storm together in their shotgun house. But this time, the ferocious category 3 hurricane breached the levees around Lake Pontchartrain, and the streets began to gurgle with water. As the water rose, first one foot, then another, the children noticed a faint meowing sound from under the floorboards. A cat had found its way into the crawlspace under the house. As the hours began to pass, its cries got louder. It would be days before the water receded. It was clear that the cat would either drown or starve, and they would have to listen to it die.

  This would not do. Turner told the kids to get down on their stomachs and put their ears to the floor. Find the cat’s exact location, he told them. After crawling around on their bellies, the kids concluded that the cat was under the washing machine. So Turner moved the washing machine into the kitchen and got his saw. Then he carved a circle out of the wooden floor, just like a character in a cartoon, and the cat bounded up out of the hole to safety.

  Turner was a World War II veteran who had a job of some responsibility at the Federal Housing Administration. The rest of his life was about his family. He liked having them around, and he dedicated himself to the rituals that kept them together. Every Sunday, he cooked a big family dinner of roast beef with mashed potatoes and green beans. On holidays, even the minor holidays, he decked the house with ornaments. On St. Patrick’s Day, he stationed leprechauns all around the house. On Valentine’s Day, he hung little cardboard hearts from the bushes. It was known in the neighborhood as the little holiday house, and people would drive by to see it. Christmas was the grand finale. On Christmas Eve, Turner hosted a party for all his relatives. Nearly a hundred people would pack the house. Cousins flew in from San Francisco and Birmingham. Every year, no matter how warm it was, Turner put on a big, heavy red suit and played Santa Claus. He did this for forty-eight years. “He was very handsome,” remembers his youngest daughter, Sheila Williams. “He had a full set of white hair.”

  But Turner was also stubborn. And the older he got, the more obstinate he became. “My dad was always right,” Williams says. “He was strictly Catholic. There was no other religion that existed except Catholicism. And ooh, my gosh, don’t say nothing bad about President [George W.] Bush. He kept his Christmas card Scotch-taped to the window in the kitchen.”

  Sometimes Turner’s certainty masked his fear. He hated hospitals, for instance. “He was an Archie Bunker, a terrible patient,” Williams says. He had a deep distrust of doctors, convinced they were using him for his Medicare reimbursements. He didn’t often talk about his experiences in World War II, but the memories stalked him after dark. Several times a week, he used to wake up at night crying from nightmares. And he was also afraid of dying, Williams says. “I know he was scared.”

  When Hurricane Katrina began its approach toward New Orleans in August of 2005, Turner’s children, now grown, knew it was serious. By Friday, three days before landfall, they had moved past denial and toward deliberation. They started calling motels in Mississippi, looking for rooms. Then Williams called her father, who was then living alone. “And that’s when he started giving us trouble,” she says.

  “Let’s wait,” he said. “It’s too early.”

  By Saturday, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was advising residents to evacuate. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a test. This is the real de
al,” he said at a news conference. Even in Nagin’s lazy drawl there was a sliver of urgency. “Board up your homes, make sure you have enough medicine, make sure the car has enough gas. Treat this one differently because it is pointed towards New Orleans.”

  Williams called her father again. He said he had made up his mind: he was staying. “These storms always make that turn to Pascagoula,” he told Williams. She argued with him. He laughed. “You are all very dramatic,” he said.

  On Sunday morning, less than twenty-four hours before the hurricane’s landfall, Nagin called for an unprecedented mandatory evacuation. “We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared. This is very serious,” he said on TV. “I want to emphasize, the first choice of every citizen should be to leave the city.”

  Turner went to Mass, just like he did every day. There weren’t many people there. After the service, when the priest asked him what he was going to do, he said he would stay put. “My family’s aggravating me, but I’m staying.” Turner was stuck in denial, while everyone else around him moved on to deliberation and decision. It wasn’t that he thought he was immortal. He thought often about death, especially as his siblings began to pass away. No, Turner was in denial about Katrina because something else scared him more.

  Williams and her brother decided to ride out the storm in a neighbor’s house, which was well built and far from any trees. That way, her father wouldn’t have to deal with evacuating the city. She asked him to come spend the night with them. He would not. He invited her to come to his house, a one-story structure two blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, but she said no. “Something just came in the pit of my stomach,” she says. She made one last request of him: “I said, ‘Daddy, I don’t know if you remember Hurricane Betsy. But they found claw marks in people’s attics. People couldn’t get out. If you’re going to stay, please put some tools up there in your attic.”