Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [113]
Rescorla and his friend wrote a report to the Port Authority explaining their concerns and insisting on the need for more security in the parking garage. Their recommendations, which would have been expensive, were ignored, according to Stewart. (The Port Authority did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this book.)
Three years later, Ramzi Yousef drove a truck full of explosives into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, just as Rescorla had predicted. After the bomb went off, sending vibrations through the tower, Rescorla stood in Morgan Stanley’s large, open trading floor and shouted. Everyone ignored him, just as they had when he had tried to run fire drills before the bombing. So he stood on a desk and yelled, “Do I have to drop my trousers to get your attention?” The room quieted down, and he handed out flashlights and directed the employees down the darkened stairways.
After the 1993 bombing, Rescorla had the credibility he needed. Combined with his muscular personality, it was enough to get Morgan Stanley employees to take full responsibility for their own survival—something that happened almost nowhere else in the Trade Center. He understood the danger of denial, the importance of aggressively pushing through the denial period and getting to action. He had watched the employees wind down the staircase in 1993, and he knew it took too long. He had made sure he was the last one out that day, so he saw the stragglers and the procrastinators, the slow and the disabled.
Rescorla also had an unusually keen sense of dread. He knew that the risk of another terrorist attack did not diminish with each passing, normal day. And he knew it was foolish to rely on first responders to save his employees. His company was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, a village nestled in the clouds. Morgan Stanley’s employees would need to take care of one another.
From then on, no visitors were allowed in the office without an escort. Rescorla hired more security staff. He ordered employees not to listen to any instructions from the Port Authority in a real emergency. In his eyes, the Port Authority had lost all legitimacy after it failed to respond to his 1990 warnings.
Most impressive of all, Rescorla started running the entire company through frequent, surprise fire drills. He trained employees to meet in the hallway between the stairwells and, at his direction, go down the stairs, two by two, to the forty-fourth floor. Not only that, but he insisted that the highest floors evacuate first. As the last employees from one floor reached the floor below them, employees from that floor would fall in behind.
Only someone with an advanced understanding of human behavior in evacuations would know to do this. Without specific training, people become bizarrely courteous in an emergency, as we’ve seen. They let those from the floors below them enter the stairwell in front of them. The end result is that people from the upper floors—who have the farthest to walk and therefore face the most danger—will get out last. Training people to resist this gallantry was smart and wonderfully simple.
The radicalism of Rescorla’s drills cannot be overstated. Remember, Morgan Stanley is an investment bank. Millionaire, high-performance bankers on the seventy-third floor chafed at Rescorla’s evacuation regimen. They did not appreciate interrupting high-net-worth clients in the middle of a meeting. Each drill, which pulled the firm’s brokers off their phones and away from their computers, cost the company money. But Rescorla did it anyway. He didn’t care whether he was popular. His military training