Links
9-11 deaths in the ND family
9-11 survivors
9-11 essays
and Monk's diary
Firefighter
Greg de Sousa '95 essay, Scholastic Magazine
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Witnesses, rescuers, relief workers and others
Sophomore Tom Galvin's father, Thomas Galvin Sr., deputy
chief of the New York fire department's Division 3, was inside the Marriott
hotel adjacent to the World Trade Center's first-hit (north) tower and
about to take command of operations in the south when the south tower
collapsed. About 40 firefighters were in the hotel at the time, and he
was among the 30 who escaped. . . . NBC News correspondent Anne
Thompson '79 was at home on the upper east side of Manhattan
and getting ready to go to work when she saw the first tower burning on
television. The newsroom told her to get down to the World Trade Center.
A cab could take her only as far as the Manhattan Bridge, so she started
walking toward the office complex, still more than a mile away. She was
hoping to spot an NBC camera crew and satellite truck along the way but
never did. At Fulton and Broadway, a block or two from the towers, she
says, she heard an earthshaking rumble followed by a tidal wave of dust,
soot, ash and heat coming down Broadway -- the collapse of the south tower.
Unable to outrun the cloud, she pressed herself against a building and
covered her face for what seemed like five minutes. Debris rained down.
"A beautiful sunny day went black. It was almost impossible to breathe.
I choked on all the sediment in the air." It was only after she went into
the building, she says, that she learned what had happened. The building's
staff gave her and the others seeking refuge towels and water along with
face masks. She phoned the news desk again, found out where the network's
satellite trucks were and headed back outside. "I got about 15 yards from
the building and I heard the rumble again," she says. As she raced back
inside, the north tower came down, sending dust and debris into her building
through its broken windows. A fire marshal eventually told everyone they
had to leave the building because it might not survive another explosion
or collapse. Her navy blue suit gray with ash, her hair matted, her eyes
red from all the dust clinging to her contacts, she began walking up Broadway
wearing the face mask. She says it took another hour of walking and two
more phone calls before she finally found a news crew and truck. She went
live on the Today Show and began reporting for the NBC Nightly
News with Tom Brokaw. . . . Joe Delaney, a senior
executive with the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche and president
of the Notre Dame Club of Staten Island, helped develop a disaster management
plan for his company's more than 4,000 employees in the World Financial
Center (across the street from the World Trade Center) after the first
WTC bombing in 1993. He witnessed the second plane hit the towers and
then helped evacuate. He was two blocks away when the south tower imploded.
Some people suffered respiratory problems from the dust cloud, he says,
but Deloitte & Touche lost only one employee. In 1994 the accounting
firm moved out of the World Trade Center because of the parking garge
bombing. The firm had occupied what became Cantor Fitzgerald space, says
George Travers '90, a partner with Deloitte
& Touche. . . . Lou Zacharilla '80 M.A. had worked
in the second tower as senior partner and co-founder of Alan Anthony Inc.,
a strategic business development firm. But the company was unable to negotiate
a new lease on its 86th-floor space and on August 7 moved to a building
five blocks southeast of the complex. . . . Notre Dame women's basketball
coach Muffet McGraw nearly became a victim of the airliner
hijackings. In planning a September recruiting trip with a stop in New
England, she originally reserved a seat on United Flight 175, which became
the second plane flown into the World Trade Center. Fortunately, one of
her assistant coaches convinced her to leave from the Providence, Rhode
Island, airport instead. He was taking a flight home out of that airport
the same day. The two ended up driving a rental car back to South Bend
along with men's head coach Mike Brey, whom they ran into in the airport.
. . . In September 2000 Greg de Sousa '95 gave up his
job in the financial world to become a New York City firefighter. Nine
months after graduating from the fire academy, word of the attacks reached
the fire company where he was working, 12 miles north of Manhattan. He
became part of the rescue and recovery crew at Ground Zero and later described
the experience in a piece for a special issue of Scholastic magazine
(see links).
. . . . Officer Tim Malin '99 of New York's 13th
Precinct (Gramercy Park) finished his shift at 8:30 the morning of September
11 and headed home on a train to Westchester, New York. When he arrived,
he turned around and went back to participate in the rescue and recovery
effort. Malin had worked for the dotcom DoubleClick Inc. before deciding
to become a police officer. His precinct lost two people. . . . Officer
Paul Mertens, son of Jack Mertens '54, also helped extract
bodies from the rubble at Ground Zero. One was a comrade whose wedding
he had attended two months earlier. Another son of Jack Mertens was with
a volunteer fire company that went to the Bronx to cover the neighborhood
while its local company was called to the trade center. . . . Firefighter
Fred Cassel '86 of the Linden (New Jersey) Fire Department
joined other professional and volunteer firefighters from Union County
to cover the Staten Island area so its companies could respond to the
emergency. After two days he and a few coworkers joined in the work at
Ground Zero. For months afterward he and other volunteers continued to
work at the landfill in Staten Island where debris has been taken. They
searched for Vehicle Identification Numbers of destroyed vehicles, possible
body parts, aircraft parts, and any other personal effects or seemingly
important items. . . . Mine Safety Appliances Company in Pittsburgh, headed
by John T. Ryan III '65, chairman and CEO, shipped truckloads
of gas masks and other essential equipment to Ground Zero. . . . Bradley
Mayer '92 witnessed the attack while walking his dog across the
East River in Brooklyn. He later agreed to serve as art director on the
national relief telethon America: A Tribute to Heroes. He was
asked to volunteer his talents (no one associated with the program was
paid) by the show's production designer, with whom he'd worked previously
on such projects as the GQ Men of the Year Awards, MTV/VH1 telecasts,
Faith Hill and Marilyn Manson concert tours, and the Ringling Bros. &
Barnum & Bailey Circus. . . . Mike McNerney '90 was
seated at his computer and had just taken a look at the scene of the burning
World Trade Center on CNN.com when his own building was jolted. He was
working in the innermost ring of the Pentagon. He says he figured a bomb
had gone off. "I didn't even consider a plane. Go figure." McNerney is
a policy analyst in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs. As of late November he was
spending the majority of his time supporting the Defense Department's
role in humanitarian relief in Afghanistan. Last summer he was supposed
to relocate to new offices in the area of the Pentagon hit by the plane,
but the move was postponed due to administrative reorganization and delays
putting finishing touches on the offices. . . . Two days after the attack,
Tom Gibbons '84, Notre Dame's regional director of development
for New York City, and friend Jeff Alton '84, a financial
consultant, went down to Ground Zero to see if they could lend a hand.
They ended up collecting food from nearby stores and restaurants for the
work crews and helping shuttle workers in and out of the site. On Thursday
they were assigned to a FEMA support site and worked the night shift.
On Friday they reported at 11 p.m. and didn't leave till 5 p.m. the next
day. . . . At one point Gibbons looked up and recognized former Notre
Dame football player Mike Rosenthal '99, now with the
New York Giants. He was there with his wife, Lindsay '99, and
two other alumni who play for the Giants, Dusty Zeigler '96
and Luke Pettigout '98. The group had been doing volunteer
work in New Jersey and came over to cheer up the troops and see the devastation
up close. . . . At a memorial service September 20 in Saint Patrick's
Cathedral, Philip Purcell '69, chairman and chief executive
officer of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company, talked of the heroism
of Cyril "Rick" Rescorla, the company's first vice president for security.
Rescorla led the evacuation of Morgan Stanley employees from the second
tower. He perished when he went back to check for stragglers. Purcell
likened him to the Good Shepherd in the Bible who looks for the one sheep
missing from the flock. . . . ND law professor Jimmy Gurule,
on leave while he serves as the Treasury Department's undersecretary for
enforcement, is overseeing the investigation into the money trail behind
the terrorist attacks. . . . . Father Malloy visited
Ground Zero 40 days after the attacks as the guest of New York City Police
Sergeant Eddie Colton, one of the officers who came out to campus for
October's Blue Mass. Monk toured the entire site and even descended into
the remains of the south tower. At the temporary morgue at the site, everyone
had a story to tell, Monk wrote in his journal from the trip. The towers
were office buildings, "Yet, in the rubble, they had found no glass, no
desks, no filing cabinets, no evidence of the primary work that went on."
Someone told him that the search dogs, trained to find people trapped
at disaster sites, were becoming emotionally scarred from sniffing out
only cadavers. To revive the dogs' spirits, the rescue units had begun
staging simulated rescues with live people. (See Links to read Monk's
journal entries in their entirety and other essays on the tragedy.)
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