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By Root 1481 0

planters didn’t help, unfortunately. Neither did the repeater: it was never correctly turned on, and, in the chaos of that morning, firefighters concluded it was broken. Meanwhile, the relatively cheap addition of glow-in-the-dark strips along the stairs after 1993 made the evacuation much easier, survivors reported. But many thousands of people did not even know where the stairs were. Fewer than half the survivors had ever entered the stairwells before, the NIST report found. Only 45 percent of 445 Trade Center workers interviewed after 9/11 had known the buildings even had three stairwells, according to the early results of a study conducted at Columbia University. “I found the lack of preparedness shocking. People were not thinking vertically. They were thinking horizontally,” says lead investigator Robyn Gershon, a professor at Columbia. “Many people said they hesitated to get into the stairways because they didn’t know where they would end up.”

Most people had no idea how to navigate the transfer hallways on lower floors. Only half had known the doors to the roof would be locked, according to Gershon’s findings. The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that people may have died as a result: “Once the South Tower was hit, civilians on upper floors wasted time ascending the stairs instead of searching for a clear path down, when stairwell A was at least initially passable.”

After 1993, the fire-marshal system remained in effect. Zedeño was a marshal on 9/11. In fact, she was the only member of the fire-safety team on her floor that morning. Everyone else had yet to arrive to work. Keep in mind that each floor of the Trade Center was about an acre in size. Zedeño was a “searcher,” meaning she was supposed to search the women’s bathroom before she went into the stairs. In reality, she didn’t search for anyone anywhere. She didn’t even remember she was a fire marshal until months after the towers had collapsed.

It turns out that on 9/11, fire marshals did not know much more than regular people. Of those interviewed in the Columbia study, 94 percent had never exited the buildings as part of a drill. Only 50 percent said they were knowledgeable enough to evacuate on their own.

After she left Tower 1 on 9/11, Zedeño walked north with the police officer with the burning eyes. Eventually, they were picked up by ambulances. Zedeño was taken to Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, where she was given oxygen and a change of clothes. She then wandered from one train station to the next, trying to get back home. Around 7:00 P.M., she finally found her way back to New Jersey—and to her parents, who had watched from their balcony as her tower collapsed over eight hours earlier.

Over a period of three years, Zedeño met with me many times to relive her ordeal in microdetail. It can’t have been pleasant for her. But she did it because she wanted her experience to be worth something. “In helping others understand,” she once wrote in an e-mail, “I am reaffirmed as to the reason I survived.”

Today, Zedeño still works for the Port Authority. Her office is now in Newark, New Jersey, on the eleventh floor of an eighteen-story building. She also helps run the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, which has over two thousand members. Two years after 9/11, Zedeño adopted a three-year-old boy from Newark. She named him Elias. Her sister shares custody of him, just in case anything ever happens to Zedeño again.

Through my long talks with Zedeño, I came to appreciate the duality of denial. I was amazed by how consuming it could be, even in the presence of smoke and flames. But, as I would come to learn about most of our disaster responses, denial could also be lifesaving. If Zedeño had been forced to reckon with reality all at once on 9/11, she might never have been able to make the long, tedious trip to safety. Denial created blinders for her brain, letting her see only what she needed to see.

But the more I learned about denial, the harder time I had identifying its boundaries. Where did it start and end? Did denial shape Zedeño’s response the morning