Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (34 page)

After the first few drills, Rescorla chastised the employees for moving too slowly in the stairwell. He started timing them with a stopwatch, and they got faster. He also lectured employees about some of the basics of fire emergencies: they should always go down. Never go up to the roof. Ever.

Rescorla did not grant exceptions. When guests visited Morgan Stanley for training, Rescorla made sure they all knew how to get out too. Even though the chances were slim, Rescorla wanted them ready for an evacuation. He understood that they would need the help more than anyone else. Like the patrons in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, they would be passive guests in an unfamiliar environment—a very dangerous role to play.

After the 1993 bombing, Rescorla wrote another report, this one warning Morgan Stanley executives that terrorists would stop at nothing to take down the towers. He even sketched out another possible attack scenario: terrorists might fly a cargo plane full of explosives into the Trade Center. Rescorla had the imagination that the government lacked, and it stalked him with hypotheticals. Finally, Rescorla recommended that Morgan Stanley move its headquarters to a low-rise campus in New Jersey. But the firm’s lease didn’t end until 2006. Partly as a result of Rescorla’s findings, Stewart writes, Morgan Stanley decided to sue the Port Authority to win damages from the bombing—and to be released from its lease. (The lawsuit was ultimately settled in April 2006 under terms that Morgan Stanley agreed to keep confidential.)

Rescorla’s drills went on for eight years, even as the memory of the 1993 bombings faded. “He used to say, ‘They’re gonna get us again. By air or by the subway,’” remembers Stephen Engel, who, as facilities manager, worked closely with Rescorla. When he hired security staff, Rescorla looked for more-sophisticated candidates than Engel had seen in those kind of jobs before. “He got people with a computer background, rather than a retired beat cop looking to add to his pension.”

Rescorla still relied upon fire marshals, but he had more of them, and he rotated the jobs often. “He was very serious about making sure everyone came out to the drills. We used to say, ‘Well, it’s the sergeant doing the drills again. It was kind of repetitive,” remembers Bill McMahon, a Morgan Stanley executive. “There were times when I just sat in my office and the fire marshal would come by and say, ‘No, you gotta go.’” Rescorla also made the fire marshals wear fluorescent orange vests and hats. “You’d make fun of the marshals: ‘Oh, you got your hat? Where’s your vest?’” remembers McMahon. “But in retrospect, thank God.”

Meanwhile, Rescorla’s own life changed dramatically. He fell in love with a woman he met while jogging in his neighborhood, and they got married. He was also diagnosed with cancer. He underwent painful treatments and gained weight. He didn’t look like a soldier anymore. But he kept coming to work every day at 7:30
A.M
. in a suit and tie, and he kept his people ready.

Rescorla was disciplined in everything he did, even his hobbies. He took up pottery and made a flowerpot for his friend Engel. “One day, he decided he was going to take up wood carving. A couple months later, he comes in with this duck. It was beautiful!” says Engel, laughing. Rescorla loved to watch old westerns, and he read voraciously. “If you mentioned something, martial arts or old movies, he would know something about it.”

In 1998, Rescorla was interviewed by a filmmaker named Robert Edwards, whose father had fought alongside Rescorla in Vietnam. The documentary focused on the nature of warfare. Watching the footage now, it is clear that Rescorla thought about terrorism a lot—and not just the way it might impact his own office. He warned that the nature of war had changed, and America’s leaders had not adapted. “Hunting down terrorists, this will be the nature of war in the future. Not great battlefields, not great tanks rolling,” he said. “When you’re talking about future wars, we’re talking about engaging in Los Angeles. Terrorist forces can tie up conventional forces; they can bring them to their knees.”

There were moments, truth be told, when Rescorla’s job felt too small for his imagination. In a September 5, 2001, e-mail to an old friend, Rescorla spoke about
kairos
—a Greek word for an existential or cosmic moment that transcends linear time. “I have accepted the fact that there will never be a kairos moment for me, just an uneventful Miltonian plow-the-fields discipline,” he wrote, “a few more cups of mocha grande at Starbucks, each one losing a little bit more of its flavor.”

“A Voice Straight from Waterloo”

On the morning of 9/11, Rescorla heard an explosion and saw Tower 1 burning from his office window. A Port Authority official came over the public address system and urged everyone to remain at their desks. But Rescorla grabbed his bullhorn, his walkie-talkie, and his cell phone and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to get out. They already knew what to do, even the 250 visitors who were taking a stockbroker training class and had already been shown the nearest stairway. “Knowing where to go was the most important thing. Because your brain—at least mine—just shut down. When that happens, you need to know what to do next,” McMahon says. “One thing you don’t ever want to do is have to think in a disaster.”

On 9/11, a handful of people might not have died if they had received Rescorla’s warnings. But they did not work at Morgan Stanley. About 50 percent of Trade Center employees did not know that the roof would be locked, according to the Columbia survey of survivors. In the absence of other information, some remembered that victims had been evacuated from the roof in helicopters in 1993. So they used the last minutes of their lives to climb to the top of the towers—only to find the doors locked. They died there, wondering why.

As Rescorla stood directing people down the stairwell on the forty-fourth floor, the second plane hit—this time striking about thirty-eight floors above his head. The building lunged violently, and some Morgan Stanley employees were thrown to the floor. “Stop,” Rescorla ordered through the bullhorn. “Be still. Be silent. Be calm.” In response, “No one spoke or moved,” Stewart writes. “It was as if Rescorla had cast a spell.” Rescorla immediately shifted the evacuation to a different stairwell and kept everyone moving. “Everything’s going to be OK,” he said. “Remember,” he repeated over and over, as if it were a tonic unto itself, “you’re Americans.”

Morgan Stanley employees had seen what had happened in the other tower after the first plane hit. They had a clear view of the flames scaling the building and people—people just like them—jumping out of windows, their ties flapping in the wind. So when the second plane hit, they knew exactly what was happening in the floors above them.

Rescorla had led soldiers through the night in the Vietcong-controlled Central Highlands of Vietnam. He knew the brain responded poorly to extreme fear. Back then, he had calmed his men by singing Cornish songs from his youth. Now, in the crowded stairwell, as his sweat leached through his suit jacket, Rescorla began to sing into the bullhorn. “Men of Cornwall stand ye steady; It cannot be ever said ye for the battle were not ready; Stand and never yield!” One of his security employees brought out a chair for him. But Rescorla chose to keep standing.

Later, U.S. Army Major Robert L. Bateman would write about Rescorla in
Vietnam
magazine. In this passage, he was describing Rescorla on the battlefield. But he could just as well have been writing about Rescorla in the Trade Center:

Rescorla knew war. His men did not, yet. To steady them, to break their concentration away from the fear that may grip a man when he realizes there are hundreds of men very close by who want to kill him, Rescorla sang. Mostly he sang dirty songs that would make a sailor blush. Interspersed with the lyrics was the voice of command: “Fix bayonets…on liiiiine…reaaaa-dy…forward.” It was a voice straight from Waterloo, from the Somme, implacable, impeccable, impossible to disobey. His men forgot their fear, concentrated on his orders, and marched forward as he led them straight into the pages of history.

On 9/11, between songs, Rescorla called his wife. “Stop crying,” he said. “I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.”

Moments later, Rescorla had successfully evacuated the vast majority of Morgan Stanley employees out of the burning tower. Then he turned around. He was last seen on the tenth floor, heading upward, shortly before the tower collapsed. Rescorla had his kairos moment. His remains have never been found.

People who knew Rescorla well knew he would not have left the towers until everyone else was out. “When the buildings went down, I never thought for a second that he wasn’t inside,” says Engel, the facilities manager. “Rick would want to go out in a blaze of glory.” No one knows exactly what happened, but Engel believes that Rescorla heard about a few people who had been left behind. In particular, a Morgan Stanley senior vice president had not left his office. The executive was last seen talking on the phone, even as everyone else evacuated. “Knowing Rick,” says Engel, “he’d go up and coldcock him and carry him over his shoulder.”

Self-sufficiency was a religion for Rescorla. He once told a friend that every man should be able to be sent outside naked with nothing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of the year, he should have a business and a savings account.

Rescorla taught Morgan Stanley employees to save themselves. It’s a lesson that had become, somehow, rare and precious. When the tower collapsed, only thirteen Morgan Stanley colleagues—including Rescorla and four of his security officers—were inside. The other 2,687 were safe.

Devolution

When people believe that survival is negotiable, they can be wonderfully creative. All it takes is the audacity to imagine that our behavior matters. It can happen in a moment, with a phone call or an idea muttered aloud.

In 1996, after a flood wiped out Parsons, West Virginia, for the second time in eleven years, Katie Little called up a couple of her friends and told them they needed to make some money. The three women, all in their eighties, started with a bake sale on the first Friday of every month, held at the local bank. Then they held gospel sings. They auctioned off a pig named Muddy Waters. At the end of the year, the women, known to all by then as “the cookie ladies,” had $40,000, which they leveraged to get $1.5 million in state money. Then they used it to build a floodwall to protect their town, which it did.

“What I’ve always found,” says James Lee Witt, FEMA director from 1993 to 2000, and the man who told me this story, “is that people will respond to meet a need in a crisis if they know what to do. You give people the opportunity to be part of something that will make a difference, and they will step up.”

Why aren’t there more evacuation drills and pig auctions? To understand how a country built on self-sufficiency could become so vulnerable, it helps to consider why people with the best of intentions miss opportunities to do better. In 2004, New York City passed Local Law 26, making the biggest changes to the building code in over thirty years. The new rules require more training for each building’s fire-safety director and more elaborate emergency plans. But the rules still do not include serious evacuation drills like the ones run by Rescorla. “Unfortunately, this is one aspect where we met with some obstacles,” says Captain Joseph Evangelista, who oversees planning for the Fire Department of New York. Just like the changes the Port Authority made after the 1993 bombings, the reforms focused on technological fixes and experts, not regular people. Why? Among other concerns, the city’s Real Estate Board was worried that mandatory drills could lead to injuries that could lead to lawsuits, according to Joe McCormack, a fire and safety consultant involved in the rule-making process. So in the end, the rules just require people to descend at least four floors once every three years.

The story of New York City’s missed opportunity is a reminder of the power of fear to distort our behavior. Like the fear of panic, the fear of litigation is a silent partner in emergency management. Two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin delayed calling for a mandatory evacuation. He had to check with his lawyers, according to a
New Orleans Times-Picayune
story from that day, to make sure the city wouldn’t be held liable by business owners forced to shutter their shops.

Like the fear of panic, this fear of being sued is not entirely irrational. Responding to a lawsuit, even a bogus one, can be punishingly expensive and stressful. It’s also true that lawsuits have made the world a safer place in many cases. But that benefit comes at a great cost. “Fear of liability slows response. It can cost lives,” says William Nicholson, the author of two books on emergency management law and a former general counsel for the emergency management office in Indiana.

Because of this fear, officials do not share vital information with the public, and uncertainty can stop good people from helping one another. The anxiety also poisons the relationship between the public and the people who are supposed to protect them. Every line of legalese breeds distrust. We start to confuse real safety warnings with legalistic nonsense. We lump fire drills and airline safety briefings together with the sticker on our new toaster warning against using it in the bathtub.

To make matters worse, the people in charge also routinely misunderstand liability. Ironically, after Hurricane Katrina, the government was sued anyway. One wrongful death lawsuit was filed by three families who had lost elderly relatives in the aftermath of the storm—including a man whose mother died in her wheelchair after waiting in intense heat for help to arrive at the Convention Center in New Orleans. The image of Ethel Mayo Freeman’s slumped corpse became a symbol of America’s tragedy around the world. But in the spring of 2007, the lawsuit was thrown out. The federal judge correctly noted that government officials enjoy immunity against many lawsuits—so that they can do their jobs without fear of lawsuits. “Fear of liability—like most fear—is, in my opinion, based largely on ignorance,” Nicholson says. In fact, most government employees are protected from lawsuits if they are doing their jobs in good faith, according to sound training. But not enough people understand emergency management law. “The ignorance of public officials, from leaders of government to emergency managers, is compounded by the ignorance of the attorneys who advise them.”