Thunder Dog Read Free Page B

She stays calm and focused even with things falling on top of her. David, Roselle, and I walk quickly out of the office and head out into the central corridor. People are running around. There is confusion, smoke, and noise.
    Each tower has three stairwells. We head for Stairwell B, in the center. Safety is somewhere down below and 1,463 stairs are the only way out.
    Forward.

3

MY OTHER
SOUL MATE
A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
JOSH BILLINGS
    T he atmosphere is chaotic as people hurry to escape the burning skyscraper. When we come out of the office door, we take a right. Across the hall from us are more offices. We hustle down the hall, which forms the side of one of the two inner squares of the 78th floor. At the end of the hall, we turn left, walk down another hall, and emerge into the sky lobby.
    Roselle walks with confidence, and so do I. Although I’ve had guide dogs since I was fourteen years old, I’m very aware that Roselle and I are a fairly new partnership; we’ve been working together for only twenty-one months.
    It takes at least a year to forge a good relationship with a guide dog. It’s like a marriage. Both sides have to get to know each other. I study my dog and my dog studies me, and over time we learn to read each other’s thoughts and feelings. Trust begins to develop, and we become interdependent, much like a surgical team or police partners who put their lives in each other’s hands. I trust Roselle with my life every day. She trusts me to direct her. And today is no different, except the stakes are higher.
    I hear a few people milling around the smoky 2,600-square-foot Sky Lobby as David, Roselle, and I pass through. Even if I had ignored my emergency training from numerous drills conducted by the Port Authority and had attempted to take one of the elevators, it would have been a waste of precious minutes because all of the elevators in the North Tower had been rendered inoperative by the crash. Plus, I know that all of the central elevator shafts stretch from bottom to top. The whole center of both World Trade Center towers is hollow, two outer sheaths of steel supporting almost half the building’s total weight. The buildings are lighter, flexible, and more efficient than older New York skyscrapers, such as the Empire State Building. 1 But those long, hollow elevator shafts also provide a conduit for fire and gases, so there is no way we are even going to try. As we walk quickly by the elevators, David mentions that the dark green marble trim around the elevator doors is cracked and buckling.
    The 78th floor is different from most other floors in the World Trade Center because it happens to contain one of the North Tower’s two “sky lobbies,” where people change elevators to get to the upper stories. On a normal workday like this one, twelve large express elevators carry people from the ground floor up to the 78th floor without stopping. The elevators are huge. I used to joke about taking one over as an office. The elevators travel at twenty-two miles per hour, and the ride takes forty-eight seconds; I had timed it. Once you make it to the sky lobby, you switch, taking one of a number of smaller elevators to get to the upper floors. In all, there are ninety-seven passenger elevators and six freight elevators in each of the two towers.
    While our smoke-filled sky lobby is relatively intact, it is a different story for the South Tower. In our sister building, the 78th floor elevator lobby would become a place where “life and death intersected most violently.” 2 Just sixteen and a half minutes after the first plane crashed into our tower, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston would crash directly into the 78th floor of Tower 2 next door. There are an estimated two hundred people in the sky lobby on their way out of the south building, and most of them will not make it out alive. Later, USA Today reporters Martha Moore and Dennis Cauchon