Courage after the crash : Flight 93 aftermath : an oral & pictorial chronicle
Courage After the CrashBy Glenn J. KashurbaSAJ PublishingCopyright © 2002 Glenn J. Kashurba, M.D.All right reserved. ISBN: 0-9721031-6-3Chapter One WHERE WERE YOU? September 11, 2001. Anyone who lived through that day will recall the details of what they were doing when the attacks on America unfolded. September 11, 2001 became indelibly stamped in the American psyche like December 7, 1941, and November 22, 1963. A great historic dividing line between the familiar past and the uncertain future. In Somerset County, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned as a warm, blue-sky day. The mood changed very quickly as residents watched with helplessness, horror and disbelief as the terrible events unfolded in New York City and Washington, D.C. Living in a rural area so far from those centers of power and commerce, they observed with a strange sense of detachment and a measure of personal safety. Everything changed when Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville. Shock, confusion and fear reigned as residents tried to locate their families and be reassured that, in the short term at least, everyone close to them was safe. Like the rest of the country, Somerset Countians watched the World Trade Center crashes over and over again on the bedtime news. However, unlike the rest of the country, their local newscasts were interspersed with stories of the Flight 93 crash that featured familiar faces and places. This surreal juxtaposition of images closed out September 11, 2001. * * * HOLLY L. MACKENZIE Holly L. MacKenzie, 42, Somerset. Holly is a flight attendant with United Airlines. Her husband, Gregg, is a pilot with American Airlines. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Holly had returned home after taking their four daughters to school in Somerset. Gregg was preparing for his descent into JFK International Airport in New York City. I was at home. I had taken the children to school and was getting ready for a doctor's appointment in Pittsburgh. I was just about to leave when my phone rang. A good friend of mine from United was calling from LA. He said, "Turn on the TV." I said, "I can't. I'm leaving." "Turn on the TV." "I am leaving, I have an appointment." He insisted, "Turn on the TV!" So I turned on the TV. I saw the World Trade Center on fire and watched Flight 175 hit the second Tower. I'm thinking, "What idiot would fly into the Trade Center?" When the second fireball appeared, I thought, "Is this another idiot or is it a fire resulting from the first one?" Then, they said that a second aircraft had just hit the second World Trade Center Tower." My phone started ringing frantically. The next call was someone saying that the first airplane that went into the Trade Center was American Airlines. My husband was in the air at the time on his way back from London. I was thinking that he was too far out. He could not have been in New York because he wasn't due in until 10:50 a.m., and this was 8:45 a.m. A few minutes later, I got another call saying it was United that went into the second Trade Center. I was thinking that this was just impossible and could not be happening. I had this doctor's appointment to go to. I decided I was just going to continue my life and go to the doctor. I was driving and my cell phone was ringing continuously. People were asking me where I was? Why was I not at home? Why wasn't I getting my kids from school? Then, on the radio they said that an airplane had gone into the Pentagon. I was starting to panic. I was thinking, "Where is Gregg?" So I started frantically calling his cell phone and just kept getting his voice mail. My phone rang again, and it was a friend of mine from Hidden Valley. She said that there was an airplane down in Somerset. I turned around right there because all I could think of was Somerset is small and I have kids in school. I kept listening to the radio. They were saying it was United Airlines that had gone down in Somerset. They originally said it was a 747. We have a 747 that does a Cleveland turn out of Chicago that is typically full with four hundred people. Then they were saying it could be a 767. We had a 767 inbound to New York. At that point, I didn't know which it was. I didn't know where it went down, but I knew I had to get home. I called my girlfriend back and said, "Send your husband for my children now!" Finally, I got home and turned on the TV. I was staring at the TV, still thinking that this was impossible. I called my girlfriend and told her that I would be over to get my kids, but, I couldn't move from the couch. My phone rang. It was Gregg's cell phone. I couldn't hear him and then it dropped. I hung up and thought, "All right, he's OK. He's OK." The next thing I heard on television was about all of these cell phone calls that came from Flight 93 and the other flights. So I didn't know that he was OK because I couldn't hear him. So I started frantically calling him again, thinking that he was calling from the air. I couldn't get through. At that point, I completely lost it. I couldn't find Gregg, and I didn't know who all I knew on the United flights that had already crashed. I felt like an airplane had crashed in my heart. [Stops and recomposes herself.] Gregg finally called at about 1 p.m. They had put him down in Boston. He had been at the top of his descent into New York City. He was headed for a hotel in Boston. I went over to my friend's house. They are a U.S. Air couple. Her husband was sitting there bawling. This was just more than anybody could believe. I gathered up my kids and took them home. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching TV and yet wanting to shield my kids from it. But, I couldn't shield them because they knew already. They were scared to death, and of course, they were saying to me, "So you are going to quit your job, right? And daddy is going to quit his job? How is daddy going to get home from Boston?" I couldn't sort anything out. * * * GREGG M. MACKENZIE Gregg MacKenzie, 45, Hidden Valley. Gregg is Holly's husband. He has been a pilot with American Airlines for seventeen years. Gregg usually flies from New York to London and back over a 48-hour period. On September 11, 2001, he was planning to land at JFK Airport in New York City after flying all night from London. I was finishing the second leg of my usual run. We were coming back from London and had just passed Bangor, Maine. At that point, we had been aloft for almost eight hours. Generally, we are the first flight back in the morning. It was very quiet and a beautiful morning. We were approaching Boston, which was actually in sight. We got a call from Air Traffic Control at the New York Center. They said, "American Flight 115. All of the New York Airports are closed. You need to find another place to land. We have a report that an airplane has hit the World Trade Center." We were tired and blurry-eyed because we had been up since midnight eastern time. So it took a second to sink in. We were shocked. It was a beautiful, clear morning. It was surreal. They didn't really elaborate, but our first instinct was that somebody in a small airplane had crashed into the Trade Center. There is a VFR Corridor (Visual Flight Recognition) that comes down the Hudson River. Private pilots can use that, and they come in at 1,500 feet or so. We thought that some idiot in a small plane was sight-seeing and flew into the Trade Center. So our initial reaction was that it was bad, but not that bad. Boston was the natural choice. I was unaware that the whole thing had started in Boston. I called our dispatch center in Fort Worth, and they were very reticent to give us much information. Did you think that was odd? Yeah. I thought it was very odd. In fact, I was a bit upset because, in retrospect, it would have been nice to have a little information. At this point, I was still unaware that it was a terrorist thing. I guess it occurred to us, but not really. Things were happening so quickly. So I just came back to them and said we would land in Boston. I think they told us to land once we got onto the approach. We began to notice that there was no one else out there. There was no one in the sky; no one on the radio. It would be like driving out of Pittsburgh on the Parkway at rush hour on Friday evening and not seeing one single car. It was spooky. It was like an Outer Limits episode or something. I think we both were beginning to get a very creepy feeling. But we didn't have a lot of time to talk because we were busy. We landed in Boston. It was dead quiet; no one was moving. It was beginning to sink in that something was very unusual. We attached the plane to the gate, parked the brake, and shut the engines down. We have automatic direction finders, which work on the AM frequency band. I tuned into WBZ, Boston, 1030 AM. Immediately, I heard about American Airlines Flight 11. I thought, "Oh, my God!" The American people came on the airplane. They ushered us off and into the terminal. That was when we got all of the information. Those were Boston crew members that had gone into the Trade Center. As you can imagine, things there were in an awful state. All of the employees were crying. Apparently, one of the flight attendants on Flight 11 had just phoned one of the girls in operations and was speaking to her when they went into the Trade Center. She was practically catatonic. Photographers and news people were everywhere. They were saying that other things were still happening. At that point, we didn't know what was going on. It was raining airplanes for all we knew. After they ushered us into operations, we sat there for about an hour. They found us a hotel, which was very surprising. Once we got to the hotel, we went out and had a drink. Again, it was very odd that things were so quiet in Boston. No airplanes. The only thing you could hear was an occasional F-15 go by. That is an unusual sound. An F-15 doesn't sound like any other airplane. Everybody was in shock. When did you get a chance to talk to your wife? I called her from the airport. It was hard to get through on a cell phone, but I talked to her. I didn't know that the airplane had landed in Shanksville, which was probably a good thing. I heard Pennsylvania, and I thought, "What are the chances?" When I talked to Holly, the first thing she said was that the kids were OK. Then she said that a plane landed in Shanksville. I was thinking, this is ... [Stops and shakes his head.] How did you get home? We stayed there for a few days. They wanted us to stay together. After two or three days, they realized that they didn't need me to ferry the airplane because there were a lot of pilots there. I got a ticket on Amtrak. They had plenty of seats. That surprised me, too. I left Boston for D.C.; my dad was going to meet me there. We were going through Providence when the train slowed down. The train engineer came on the intercom and calmly said, "Ladies and gentleman, we have run over a guy jogging on the tracks and killed him. So we are going to be delayed for a while." I went back to my book, and finally the train started to creep along. I looked out the window, and there was this poor guy in a body bag, right outside the window, not five feet from the train. The cops were standing there with disgusted looks on their faces, filling out all of their forms. We pulled into New York, and the Trade Center was still smoldering. So we were all gaping out of the window at that. We left Penn Station and pulled into D.C. My dad picked me up and drove by the Pentagon, and of course, it was still smoldering. It was quite a day. I saw everything in one day as a casual observer. It was like that movie. I was nobody, just in the background, but in all of these places where all of this stuff was happening. Did you have any idea when you were going to fly again? No. At that point, I think we just took it day by day. I don't think I flew the rest of the month. That next month, I took a temporary duty assignment to Boston. I flew to the Caribbean out of Boston. Is that what you were doing when the plane went down in Queens? No, I was back in New York. That one was actually a little closer to home for me because I knew those guys. I didn't know anyone from September 11, 2001, personally. I may have run into them or flown with them one time, but no one that I can actually remember. But Stan, a fellow from that trip, I had flown with before. The Airbus is the airplane I fly, and my home base is New York. That one really hit home. That one has affected me a lot more. Where were you then? I was working out at the gym when I heard about it on the news. My first instincts were that it was another terrorist thing. I went into the computer, and they had all of the information blocked out. It was about 48 hours before I learned who the crew members were. When you started flying again, how much did you think about terrorists? Actually, it is something I have given some thought to in the past. Not terrorism, per se, but intruders in the cockpit. There had been intrusions into the cockpit before, not necessarily by terrorists. The cockpit door is very flimsy. It is locked, but it is designed to kick out. The certification criteria was to avoid a solid division between the cabin and the cockpit because it restricts airflow and pressurization. Also, it facilitates rapid egress in case of an emergency landing. The original certification criteria had nothing to do with people being able to break through. Have you thought about what you would do in an intrusion? Yeah. [Describes a plan.] What do you think about pilots carrying weapons? I am very much in favor of having a gun. I would guess ninety-five percent of pilots are. I don't want to be a Marshall. I don't hunt or even own a handgun. But I am telling you, we are the last line of defense if they make it into the cockpit. * * * JOHN PETERS John Peters, 45, Somerset. John is a big man with an incisive, dry wit. He has a tendency to say what others are thinking but afraid to verbalize. John is a geologist by training who has worked for many years with the Somerset County Planning Commission. He and his wife, Michelle, have two teenage sons. We have little cubicles. I had my radio on WDVE. They didn't bother to interrupt a song, but right after a song, they said that there had been an accident at the World Trade Center. A plane had flown into the building. So, at that point in time, we figured that some dumb-ass with a little Piper Cub had gotten disoriented and flew his plane into the building, and that was that. Then they came on and said that it was a larger plane and that they would keep us updated, which they didn't. So we turned to NBC. While they were telling us that this was an accident, the second plane flew into the second Tower. We started to think it wasn't an accident. We all forgot about where we were and what we were doing, and that became the focus of the day. The next plane hit the Pentagon. Then, we were starting to get a little nervous. The guy in the cubicle beside me said, "Maybe living in b*#!*#k does have some advantages because at least we are pretty safe here." It wasn't too much later that Tom Brokaw reported to the world that authorities at the Somerset County Airport had announced that a plane had gone down near Shanksville. Up until that point, when they were talking about Somerset, we thought Somerset, New Jersey. Everyone just looked at each other and wondered if planes were going to start randomly falling out of the sky. Everybody got on the phone to see where their family members were. I found out where everyone was in my family. Once it became apparent that everyone was relatively safe, and it didn't look like any more planes were going to fall from the sky, my emotions turned really quickly to a state of anger and rage that someone would have the audacity to do this to us. Also, anger that the government, our own government, was so complacent. People believed that no one would ever touch us. We were safe. Well, we were more vulnerable than we ever thought we were. I remember feeling that the world changed forever that day. People made the analogy of Pearl Harbor, but that was a military base. This time they hit us right in our own backyard. I felt like I lived in Israel; like I was going to see something similar to this each evening on the news, just like they do there. The next week was an adjustment week. We were trying to figure out what the hell was going on and what was next. All of these weird things go through your mind: should we have put that fall-out shelter in like they had back in the sixties? Should we have thirty gallons of water and six months rations in the basement? The world changed. Our lives changed. We spent the next week accepting that. (Continues...) Excerpted from Courage After the Crashby Glenn J. Kashurba Copyright © 2002 by Glenn J. Kashurba, M.D. . Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Print Book, English, 2002
1st ed
SAJ Pub., Somerset, Pa., 2002
200 Seiten : color Illustrationen, color Karten : 22 x 26 cm
9780972103169, 0972103163
231980365
Courage After the Crash
By Glenn J. Kashurba
SAJ Publishing
Copyright © 2002 Glenn J. Kashurba, M.D.All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-9721031-6-3
Contents
PREFACE.......................................................................................................................................7PROLOGUE......................................................................................................................................11CHAPTER 1 Where Were You?....................................................................................................................12Holly L. MacKenzie, United flight attendantGregg M. MacKenzie, American pilotJohn Peters, County Planning CommissionBrooke Piper, Shanksville studentNicholle Piper, Shanksville studentChristine Piper, Brooke and Nicholle's motherHope Neiderhiser, chefDennis M. Kashurba, Licensed PsychologistHazel Yoder, grandmotherJ.P. O'Conner, Shanksville teacherFenna Queer, United Airlines employeeThe Honorable Richard Kasunic, State SenatorRyan Fisher, ten-year-old boySara Thompson, college studentAnna Ruth and Anna B. Fisher, Amish familyTerry Butler, witnessRick and Tricia King, owners of Ida's StoreCHAPTER 2 First Responders...................................................................................................................30Shanksville firefightersRick King, Keith Custer, Wes Fritz, Tom Tweardy, Jr., Joe Black, Dan Black, Steve Yoder, Terry Shaffer, and Amanda HaugerJill Miller, paramedicMike Sube, firefighterRoger Bailey, firefighterJon Meyer and Keith Hoffer, WJAC-TVGerald Parry, firefighterBill Baker, Emergency Management Agency (EMA)CHAPTER 3 City Builders......................................................................................................................44Rick Lohr, Director, EMABill Baker, EMAJill Miller, paramedicJeremy Coughenour, EMAGregory Menser, plumberBarry Kister, paramedicCHAPTER 4 Security...........................................................................................................................58Sergeant Patrick MadiganCorporal Craig A. BowmanTrooper Terry WilsonTrooper Mark HoganCHAPTER 5 Community Response.................................................................................................................74The Honorable Judge Kim R. GibsonTerressa Walker, therapist and motherJohn Peters, County Planning CommissionBill Cowher, Head Coach, Pittsburgh SteelersPatricia B. Stone, retired child care executiveMichelle Zarefoss, Friedens Elementary teacherSue Foor, Friedens Elementary teacherRuby Berkebile, Friedens Elementary teacherElizabeth Maul, Friedens Elementary teacherDonald Barclay, therapistPastor Edward DeVorePastor Robert WayJonas Scheffel, Scheffel EquipmentPastor James VandervortRobert C. Miller, child care executive and football coachCHAPTER 6 Relief.............................................................................................................................94Janis Yingling, American Red CrossGeorgia Lehman, American Red CrossMarilyn Albright, Salvation ArmySherry Will and Jennifer Ritchey, Wendy'sJean Croyle, freelance writerTerry Shaffer, firefighterCHAPTER 7 Investigation......................................................................................................................108FBI Supervisory Special Agent Wells MorrisonCHAPTER 8 Recovery...........................................................................................................................118Daniel W. Rullo, County SolicitorRick Lohr, Director, Emergency Management AgencyRoger Bailey, firefighterTerry Shaffer, firefighterPenny Reiman, x-ray technician and DMORT memberCHAPTER 9 Support............................................................................................................................136Mary Piatt-Bruner, therapistJustin Beal, therapistTom Bender, therapistSharon Griffith, therapistEric Haglund, therapistCHAPTER 10 Resorts Transformed...............................................................................................................154John Mates, Seven Springs Mountain ResortKisa Valenti, Seven Springs Mountain ResortBarry S. Lichty, Mayor, Indian Lake BoroughSue A. Opp, Seven Springs Mountain ResortCHAPTER 11 Aid and Comfort...................................................................................................................162Glenn J. Kashurba, M.D., Child PsychiatristFenna Queer, United Airlines employeeHelen Thompson, R.N., nurseMargaret L. Montgomery, R.N., nurse and midwifeDennis M. Kashurba, Licensed PsychologistMike Sube, firefighterRemarks by First Lady Laura Bush at Memorial ServicePennsylvania Attorney General Mike FisherRemarks by Lynne V. Cheney at Memorial ServiceJon Meyer and Keith Hoffer, WJAC-TVCHAPTER 12 Remembrance.......................................................................................................................184Jon Meyer and Keith Hoffer, WJAC-TVJohn Peters, County Planning CommissionBenedict G. Vinzani, Jr., Ph.D., Somerset Borough ManagerThe Honorable Dr. Robert Bastian, State RepresentativeMary Jane Kiehl, Flight 93 AmbassadorNevin Lambert, Jr., Flight 93 AmbassadorThomas J. Brown, firefighterRoger Bailey, firefighterGary Singel, Superintendent, Shanksville-StonycreekJames R. Oliver, Editor, Daily AmericanVicki Rock, Report, Daily AmericanPHOTO CREDITS.................................................................................................................................198DIRECTIONS....................................................................................................................................200
Excerpted from Courage After the Crashby Glenn J. Kashurba Copyright © 2002 by Glenn J. Kashurba, M.D. . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.