September 11th 2001 was long before my time in Nee Naw Control. I was working in Great Ormond Street hospital in an exceedingly boring admin role. Mid afternoon, I was halfway through a game of minesweeper when one of the doctors ran into the room.
“They’ve flown a plane into the World Trade Center!” she exclaimed.
We didn’t have the internet back in those dark days, so we had to rely on a radio to keep us posted.
One of the women across the office, Sabrina, burst into tears. We all gathered round proferring hankies as she explained, between sobs, that her brother lived in New York, worked in Manhattan and frequehtly visited the World Trade Center on business. She’d been trying to ring him, but his number was unobtainable. She feared the worst.
We later found out that it was impossible to get through to pretty much anyone in America that day, and Sabrina’s brother was safely away on business in another state. So that was one happy ending at least.
I watched a documentary about the Twin Towers the other day which featured reconstructions of the events inside based on 911 calls made that day. Apparently the “switchboards were jammed” with people dialling 911 to report that the WTC was on fire which made me laugh - whenever there’s a traffic accident we always get 20 odd people ringing in saying “Just in case no-one else has reported it…” so I can imagine the streets of Manhattan being lined with thousands of people dialling 911 to report a passenger jet flying into a 120 storey building - you know, just in case it had gone unnoticed… I don’t know how true this is, but someone told me people were even dialling 999 here in the UK!
More sobering were the calls made from inside the building. One scene showed people several floors above impact trapped in their office. They repeatedly dialled 911 because, well, that’s what you do in an emergency, isn’t it? They were asking the people on the other end - the American equivalents of me - what should they do? Should they stay put and wait for rescue? Should they go up to the roof and wait for helicopters? Try to make their way down? Could they break a window to get more air? Should they jump out the window to a certain death or wait inside and risk being burned alive?
Trying to put myself in the position of those dispatchers, I realised that occasionally a situation occurs that there was no protocol for. The instructions those callers were given could make the difference between life and death but no-one knew what the right answer was and no-one could have predicted what was going to happen. I just hope I never find myself in a situation where there’s a question I can’t answer.
