Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [20]
To help me focus, I use my watch to time our descent. Each step takes about a second, with a full flight of stairs equaling about twenty seconds of travel time. With sixty-eight floors remaining, and assuming we can keep up our current pace, it will take us just over twenty-two minutes to evacuate. However, chances are there will be some slowdowns along the way. So far we’ve been lucky.
The stairwell is heating up from the mass of bodies, and I begin to sweat, my dress shirt sticking to my back. Roselle is getting warmer, too, her breath heavier and faster. The air feels heavy and the jet fuel smell is still there, sometimes faint, sometimes stronger than ever. I can wonder again what it must smell like to Roselle.
Then we hear shouting from somewhere up above. “Look out!” a voice cries. “Burn victim coming through. Please let us by.” I move to the right, gripping the railing, and pull on the harness, nudging Roselle in close to my legs. We stop for a moment as a knot of people rushes by. Their breathing and hurried steps tell me all I need to know. I can feel Roselle watching, her head tracking the group as they pass by and go down.
After the group passes and we start back down the stairs, I call out to David. “What did you see?”
“A woman,” David says. “She is burned so bad that she doesn’t even look like a human being.” The group of hurried people had surrounded the woman to help her get down. Somehow she is still able to walk. She is the first injured person we’ve encountered, although I know there must be many more.
But where are they?
We continue down. Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs. Five minutes later there are more shouts, directing us to move aside. I pull Roselle in again as another burn victim hurries down the stairs. Again it’s a woman, and David says this one looks even more horrible than the first. Deep in shock, she walks like a zombie, eyes straight ahead and expressionless. Her clothes are partly burned off, her skin blistered and separating, her blonde hair “caked in gray slime.”1
A number of people on or near the sky lobby on our floor were sprayed with burning fuel after the plane entered our building. One of these I heard about later was a forty-four-year-old woman named Virginia DiChiara. She was in an express elevator, waiting to leave the 78th floor when the plane hit the building. Fire flashed into the elevator then left just as quickly. The lights went out and burning jet fuel dripped down through the elevator shaft and onto Virginia’s shoulders and back. Roy Bell, another elevator passenger, said, “It looked like sheets of white fire, thin sheets of fire. The flame was coming through the elevator car doors from the inside out, shooting through the elevator shaft.”2
Somehow Virginia forced her way out of the car into the sky lobby. She erupted in flames, her hair and blouse burning. She used her hands to put out the flames in her hair and then rolled on the ground to stop the burning on her body. When she finally sat back against the wall to rest, she saw that her hands and arms were completely burned. She didn’t know that her face was badly burned too. She felt no pain. Two men helped her to the stairwell then walked ahead of her “so that they could catch her if she fell. She had to walk carefully because the burns on her hands kept her from holding onto the stair rail.”3 Virginia may have been one of the burn victims who passed by.
About the same time the burn victims are passing by us in the stairwell, another plane hits the South Tower, our sister tower. United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashed into Tower 2, lower this time, exploding into the sky lobby on the 78th floor. But in the concrete stairwell, it’s as quiet