Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [8]
A few days later, Zedeño was right back at work in a neighboring building. One month later, her office reopened on the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. She started riding the same elevator to work. But it was months before she could get the taste of soot out of her mouth. She thought about leaving the towers, but not with any conviction. “I remember saying, ‘This could happen again.’ And someone said, ‘Lightning never strikes twice.’”
“Don’t Worry. It’s in Your Head!”
Zedeño has a small stature, round glasses, and Dizzy Gillespie cheeks when she smiles, which happens often. She came to America with her family from Cuba when she was eleven. Her parents had spent her entire childhood plotting to get away from Fidel Castro. When they finally got permission to leave in the early 1970s, they moved to West New York, New Jersey, where their daughter could see the brand-new Trade Center Towers sunning themselves almost everywhere she went.
When she was nineteen, Zedeño visited the Trade Center for the first time. She came to apply for a secretarial job with the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey. She had no idea what the Port Authority did—or even that it owned the Trade Center—but a girlfriend convinced her to fill out the application. When she returned for her second interview, her mother came with her. The boss hired her on the spot, and, on her lunch break, Zedeño ran to the plaza to tell her mother. “What will you do?” she asked her mother, who had no idea how to get home to New Jersey. “I will sit right here and wait for you,” her mother announced. They took the train home together that evening.
Eventually, Zedeño got promoted to the finance section. Her office had regular fire drills, which consisted of gathering in the hallway to gossip. During a blackout in 1990, she and her office mates walked down the tower’s stairs. That’s how they learned that homeless people had been using the lower stairwells as bathrooms. “We were laughing and talking,” she remembers. When Zedeño talks, her voice goes up at the end of her sentences, like a child telling you something outrageous. “The whole thing was a joke!”
Zedeño is a witness wherever she goes. She remembers life in surround-sound detail. When I ask her what it was like to leave Cuba as a little girl, she tells me about the day she left in April of 1971. Her mother was doing her hair when they heard the sound of a motorcycle. “Only one man in town had a motorcycle, and it didn’t sound like that,” she says. Suddenly, the sound stopped in front of their house. A soldier walked in the front door without knocking and told them to leave. Zedeño knew this was good news: they had finally won permission to go to America. Fifteen minutes later, they left their house forever. They were terrified the whole journey out, but they made it. When they arrived in Miami, Zedeño ran down the aisles of a supermarket yelling out descriptions of everything she saw.
By September 2001, Zedeño had worked in the towers for over twenty-one years. She was forty-one years old, and she managed five employees on the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. Her group oversaw the Port Authority’s engineering consultants. On 9/11, Zedeño got to work a little after 8:00 A.M. She settled into her cubicle and listened to her voice-mail messages. In an hour, she would head up to the cafeteria to get some breakfast, as usual.
The Trade Center did not feel like a cluster of seven buildings; it felt like a city. Every day, fifty thousand people came to work there, and another two hundred thousand passed through. The plaza underneath held the largest shopping mall in Lower Manhattan. “You didn’t need to leave for anything,” Zedeño says. The complex had 103 elevators—and its own zip code (10048). Bomb threats and small fires were not uncommon. The engine company