I was on the bus on my way into work,
and I got a phone call
and I was running late,
so I actually thought I was in trouble
for being late to work because we had a big exercise planned the next day.
So when I picked up my phone, I was like, yeah, I know I'm late.
I'm going to be there in a few minutes.
And they were like, no, they're like a plane
just went into the World Trade Center. Get here as quickly as you can.
So I immediately got off the bus, went to the bus driver, and I was like,
let me off the bus.
I showed him my ID.
I was like, I got to go to work and I got to work,
and I was up in the emergency operations center.
I got there before the second plane hit.
I don't think anybody was thinking about terrorism.
And so when the second plane hit,
we realized it wasn't an accident and we needed to evacuate.
So everybody that was in the emergency operations center
evacuated down the twenty three flights of stairs.
And then we were in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center when the first
tower collapsed.
The people that were in the
lobby huddled in a small room
off the lobby entrance and then we made our way out to the street
and we found all the other New York City OEM people that were there.
And we got on the command bus and we went north.
We picked up people along the way that were fleeing.
They were on the command bus with us. And we got a little further,
and then we decided to go to the police academy,
because that was the next best location for us.
The first couple of days I did logistics.
We were coordinating the movement of resources to Ground Zero.
We coordinated the movement of cranes, rescue personnel,
other other assets in, light towers down to Ground Zero.
I worked on the debris operation and also on the public assistance reimbursement
Because we had lost our EOC, which was in seven World Trade Center,
we lost all the technology that we normally use.
We didn't have a lot of working phone lines,
so we had very limited connectivity.
So it was a lot of paper,
a lot of just, you know, landline phones, talking to people as best we could.
For a long time, we were doing rescue.
You know, we were searching for potential victims that were trapped.
That was being led by the fire department and the police department,
and the city's Department of Design and Construction was overseeing
kind of the construction aspects of that rescue operation.
And then eventually we shifted to a recovery operation.
And the city's Department of Design
and Construction and New York City Emergency Management fire and police
formed a unified command work with other agencies,
retained construction contractors to organize the site,
so we could ensure that it was safe to conduct recovery operations,
but also to move the debris away so that we could begin rebuilding.
That debris was taken to a landfill on Staten Island.
A whole slew of law enforcement agencies were at the landfill doing recovery
efforts, looking for human remains, looking for personal property.
They were cataloging everything so that it could either be returned
to family members or identified so people could be, could be buried .
My whole life changed after 9/11.
You know, I was a planner in New York City Emergency Management;
just going about my work, writing plans for emergencies, participating
in exercises like the one that we had planned for September 12th, 2001.
And everything changed after that,
and we went into this very large scale, complex disaster response
and recovery operation. I learned a lot from that.
I was personally impacted by 9/11.
I was in the lobby of seven World Trade Center when one of the towers fell.
You know, I almost died.
And then, you know, working with people who were also victims of 9/11
and then also responding to 9/11, it was hard for everybody.
A couple of events in in our modern history where you mark time,
you know, especially in the emergency management community,
if you think about Hurricane Andrew, the Oklahoma City bombing,
Y2K, you know, 9/11 is an event where we mark time.
It changed our whole profession.
FEMA was absorbed into the department.
Billions of dollars have been provided to state, local, tribal
and territorial governments to prepare for acts of terrorism to prevent them.
And so every day we think about
how are we positioned to prevent another 9/11.
There are a lot of FEMA
employees past and present that helped New York City after 9/11,
and I think we all owe them a debt of gratitude as well.
One of the reasons why I was interested in coming to work at FEMA later on.
I carry 9/11 with me every day.
I think about my coworkers at New York City Emergency Management,
often almost on a daily basis.
I think about the impact of that event, not just on our office,
but on the whole nation. Right.
And the people who died in 9/11.
I like to think that I carry them with me every day
and think about them to keep their memories alive.
And you know that's that's kind of how it's impacted me
and how I try to honor the people who were killed on that day.