Medical Ground Zero: An Early Experience of the World Trade Center Disaster

11 September 2001

8:50 a.m.: Our pregnant chief resident says, “Did you see the World Trade Center is smoking?”

For years the twin towers of the World Trade Center had guarded Bellevue Hospital's southern horizon.

9:03 a.m.: The second tower explodes with flame and smokes heavily, like an upward mudslide. From my wife, “… we are okay, I saw the smoke, I'll be in touch.”

10:05 a.m.: The south tower collapses.

One chief tells me of a senior resident who won't leave her home, distraught because her fiancé works at the World Trade Center and she can't reach him. I call her. Her voice is panicky. She calls back a few minutes later—he ran down 21 flights of stairs, out of the building, and 4 miles home without stopping. She will come in as soon as she stops shaking.

10:28 a.m.: The second tower falls.

This occurs in a distance, without sound or smell.

We truck 5-gallon water cooler bottles with us to 17 West, the medical staging area. Residents mill about. The chief residents organize teams. One resident charges in with news. He has set up a smoke inhalation unit. Another says all admissions should go through the emergency room. Another says patients are being discharged or domiciled in a clinic. The hospital calls an official disaster.

Alumni begin to arrive. Outside volunteers appear. Twenty nursing students in green scrubs flock in. A group of podiatry residents in starchy whites ask what they can do. We send the post-call residents to sleep and set up shifts.

Three senior attendings begin planning, anticipating needs. We review smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide, cyanide, and crush. We assign administrators to phones, to run, and to forage for and guard supplies. Small groups listen to the radio and ponder. Who did this? Who trained them to fly? …