Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [14]
Everything feels unreal. I can’t believe that just a few minutes ago I was preparing for seminars in the conference room. Now we are on the run. But whenever I become uneasy, I listen to Roselle. The tough pads of her feet cushion her steps and since we keep her nails trimmed short, her footsteps are silent. But I can hear her breathing. Although we’ve been walking down the stairs for just a few minutes, Roselle is beginning to pant. The temperature in the stairwell is comfortable, so she’s panting not from the heat but from the exertion of her intense focus on her work.
Dogs have fewer sweat glands than people, who cool off as sweat evaporates from the surface of the skin. But canine sweat glands, located on the pads of the dog’s feet and on the ears, play a smaller role in cooling. Instead, dogs pant to cool off the blood circulating through the major blood vessels of the head, which surround the nose. The surface area of the tongue also provides cooling through the evaporation of moisture in the dog’s mouth. Roselle is not nervous, just warm. She’s at the top of her game, walking with confidence and a spring in her step.
The fuel smell is strong on certain landings. When I first noticed it, the smell was just a hint, a whisper of danger. But now it feels heavier and fuller, a toxic stench beginning to sink into my throat and my lungs. I swallow and it feels like I’m drinking a shot of kerosene. My eyes are starting to burn too. Roselle pants a little harder. I know she can taste it too.
There’s a reason we are inhaling the fumes of jet fuel in Stairwell B. We will learn later that when the Boeing 767 hit our building, it was carrying around ten thousand gallons of fuel, most of it in the wing tanks. The plane crashed into the north side of the building and obliterated several floors while spewing out jet fuel. The droplets atomized, forming a combustible mixture that exploded, ignited “by the enormous heat of friction, by sparks from pieces of steel, by hot engine parts, and most of all by short circuits in the wiring of the North Tower . . . The force of the explosion was so great that parts of the aircraft hurled out of the other side of the tower. After impact, bewildered passersby on a street near the World Trade Center stood around a huge cylinder of bent metal. It took a while before they realized they were looking at an aircraft engine.”1
Although the impact generated a tremendous explosion, not all of the jet fuel was consumed, and it shot out of the fuel tanks and sprayed over the floors below, a film of fuel covering stairwells, offices, and elevator shafts “at a rate of more than a hundred miles an hour. Curtains, upholstery, and carpets soaked up the fuel like wicks.”2
Fumes are floating along the air currents inside the building and infiltrating the ventilation system, so everyone in the stairwell can smell it now. I am the first to say it out loud. “I think the smell is jet fuel. Maybe an airplane hit our building?”
The people around us talk it over, trying to figure out what happened. We speculate that maybe there was some sort of midair collision, causing the plane to plow into our building. But we are not sure.
Actually, this isn’t the first time a plane hit a skyscraper in New York. In 1945, a B-25 bomber rammed into the Empire State Building, back then the world’s tallest building. The pilot, a decorated veteran of more than one hundred combat missions, got lost in thick fog and slammed into the 79th floor at two hundred miles per hour. In a stroke of luck, the accident occurred on a Saturday morning without too many people in the building. Still, fourteen people died, along with the pilot and two passengers. The damage was extensive, with the bomber blasting an eighteen-by-twenty-foot hole in the building, spewing plane parts, and shattering windows. In addition, when the bomber hit, its fuel tanks exploded and started a fire on