Report from Ground Zero

The looks on the firefighters' faces haunt Alan Sokolow '72. The fear of going into the building. The anguish in knowing what was waiting for them. The pain of crawling up flight after flight with 100 pounds of equipment carried on their backs. But they went in and it comforted him as he and thousands of others tried to get out.

When American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:58 a.m., Sokolow was standing on the 28th floor. He had come to work at about 7 a.m. Sokolow is the chief medical officer at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, which had about 10 floors of office space in the trade center.

After getting situated, he called a meeting at about 8 a.m. It lasted about three-quarters of an hour. It was a short time later he heard the sound of jet engines followed by an impact.

The entire building shook.

"People interpreted it as an earthquake. One woman from California dove under her desk and stayed there for some time," recalled Sokolow. "It didn't knock you down or knock anything off the walls."

He thought perhaps an errant plane had glanced off the radio tower or strayed into the building. "It didn't seem that severe at the outset."

None of them could have known.

People were upset and confused, Sokolow said. The consensus was that they should all get out of the building.

"I decided to call my wife--if a plane hit the building she would have seen it on television." He also wanted to let her know he was not hurt. When he finally got through, his wife told him there was a "news flash" coming on television, a report that something had possibly hit the 90th floor of the north tower.

"I told her I was fine, I was getting out and I would be home," said Sokolow. "As we were walking to the exit, which is in the center of the building, I started smelling jet fuel."

It took about 10 minutes from the time of impact before most of the people in the office had made it into the stairwell. "This was the worst part of the experience because it was agonizingly slow. People were very calm and very polite, but they were not moving very fast. Perhaps they were not paying as much attention as they should have to getting out of the building so those people above us could get out."

Every now and again, a message would come down the line, Sokolow remembered, to "keep moving because there are people behind you."

"The other thing that slowed everything up was the firemen were coming up the stairs. We would step aside and let them through. They were sweating, huffing and puffing. My impression was they weren't happy about going in," said Sokolow.

"You have to give them a hell of a lot of credit," he added, his voice beginning to waver. "You could just see the anguish on their faces going into this thing."

It took about 10 minutes to get down just six floors. Some smoke began drifting down into the stairwell. At 9:16 a.m., another loud noise was heard. "It sounded like someone had dropped some equipment. I couldn't interpret that as a plane hitting another building by any means," he said. There was information being passed along the line, that perhaps this was the work of terrorists, but Sokolow called it "sketchy information" at best.

Continuing down, Sokolow saw firefighters starting to bring down burn victims. Some were minor injuries, some were more severe. "From the fifth floor, I think people started to feel a sense of extreme urgency," he said. The evacuees began running in a single file line down the stairs. Water from the fire battle upstairs began flowing down in "torrents." "It was running down like a river."

When they got to the elevator lobby, Sokolow said it looked like they were on the wrong floor because of the damage. The marble facade was down, the plaster was fallen off the walls, the elevator doors were either gone or severely damaged. "The elevator shafts were a conduit for the jet blast of the impact. It looked like a bomb had gone off down there." Some of the damage was caused by elevators that fell from the upper floors.

By his estimate, it took about 30 minutes to get down to the lobby from the 28th floor. Once in the lobby, emergency personnel directed the evacuees to the eastern exit that runs under the courtyard. This was strange because it was not the door nearest the stairs. Sokolow later learned why this was being done. "There was debris and people falling there," he said. By going under the courtyard, they were protected from physical danger as well as from having to see bodies hitting the ground. "When we got out, people would say, 'Just run! Don't turn around! Don't look!'"

Crossing the street, Sokolow saw more fire trucks and ambulances showing up. Emergency medical technicians and paramedics were organizing a triage station in front of the Millennium Hotel. Certified in emergency medicine, Sokolow volunteered his services. "At that point, I did turn around and look up. I saw fire on both buildings--I didn't realize both buildings had been hit; I didn't understand why there was fire on both of them."

At the triage station, Sokolow evaluated the burn victims, deciding who needed the most urgent care and who could wait. He bandaged wounds and burns. He helped people into ambulances. "One fellow came up who gave me his telephone number to call his wife," said Sokolow. "He was badly injured with shrapnel wounds on his shoulder."

There were people with burns, people with bad cuts, one person who fell into an empty elevator shaft but was able to grab onto something before falling too far, a woman with heart problems, people with asthma. "I was there for probably half an hour," Sokolow recounted. "Then, I don't know why, I looked up at tower two just in time to see the top start coming down. As the top started to lean over, it just leaned to a certain point and dropped. On each floor you could see the windows blowing out...there was an incredibly loud noise, not to your ears but you could feel it.

"Everyone turned and ran. Then the thing hit us, like a volcano...it was the driest, hottest blast of stuff you could ever imagine. It just seemed like it was going to swallow us up," Sokolow said. He thought he was going to die. "Either there was going to be a fireball behind it or it would choke us to death."

Each breath was an effort. He said his nose and lungs were filled with the dust. "You just could not see. There was no light. That lasted for a long time, maybe a few minutes. Then it gradually started to lighten up a little bit. The relief of starting to see the light was just enormous."

He, and those around him, were able to begin moving out of the area. People were stopping to pick each other up. "I went across the street to a little shop. The people in there gave me some water. I flushed out my eyes. The shop owner said very wisely, 'I have to shut this store.'

"Then [an F-16 fighter] jet came by. It sounded like we were under an air raid. That was a frightening moment, thinking now we were under attack."

Sokolow continued moving away from the trade center until he reached a hospital. "I still had it in my mind that I was going to help." He was directed to where all those with minor injuries had been gathered. There were more doctors than patients, he said. "I realized I was much more of a patient than a doctor at that point, after what I had just been through. I cleaned myself up, trying to decide what I would do next.

"At that point, the second building came down. It covered the hospital with this stuff. I was far enough away that I heard the rumble and then the cloud came over. It shut out the light for a few moments.

"I pretty much had to make a decision to stay in the hospital or try and get home. The phones were dead. So I just got outside and started walking and managed to come across a bus that had been brought into the area to evacuate people. The funny thing was...one guy got on and said, 'Is the bus going to Brooklyn?' The driver said 'no', it was just going north. The guy called to his friend and said it was not going to Brooklyn. Ten people got off.

"It was so bizarre, so New York. This was a war zone and they expected to have regular bus service."

The bus only made it about 5 blocks before it stalled. The dust and debris had caused it to overheat. As he exited the bus, he was struck by the dichotomy between those who had just escaped the attack and those who were going about as if it was a "normal day."

"I stopped in a pub. People are drinking beers, watching it all on TV, and it's happening two miles away!"

He finally made it to Grand Central Station, having hitched a ride part of the way. The trains had been stopped because of bomb threats but were running again by the time he arrived. The cars were loaded "to the rafters" and all trains made all stops. Sokolow was now heading out of Manhattan toward his home in Darien, Connecticut, located about 40 miles outside of the city.

He has not returned to the World Trade Center site since September 11. It is hard for him to even see pictures of it.

"You see the rubble on television and it looks bad, but until you realize how big the buildings were and how extensive the area is where the building was..." He pauses. "It's not just a city block of something, it is a big, big, big area. Each floor was an acre itself."

He reports that nine people are missing and presumed dead, from his company. He knew two of them.

Physically, Sokolow said he feels okay, although he is concerned about any long-term effects from the dust he breathed in. "My father is currently suffering from an asbestos-related cancer. It plays heavily on my mind that I was in all that stuff and exposed to it for a long time."

During the interview, as he recounted the events of September 11, he was calm and collected. But he says his emotions are volatile. "Sometimes I feel more sadness, sometimes I feel more anger and outrage. Sometimes the hurt is just overwhelming," he explained. "I go through a whole range of emotions that don't last long and aren't terribly predictable. É There is a lot of unresolved anger and pain."

--Gary Scott
(Reprinted from the Claremont Courier.)