The last hour of your life

Remembering Welles Crowther, 5/17/77 - 9/11/01

What would you do in the last hour of your life?

You are sitting at your desk. It is 8:45am. The workday has hardly started, but your eyes are already starting to glaze over and your stomach is rumbling. Might be time for a trip to the break room for coffee and a donut.

All of a sudden, you hear the most deafening roar you have ever heard; it is unbelievably loud. Screams fill the room. What just happened?

You (and everyone else) walk to the edge of the building to peer out the floor-to-ceiling windows. You look down at the street, 104 floors below. Nothing.

Then you look up.

Across the street is another skyscraper, where smoke and fire erupt like from the bowels of hell. Massive chunks of concrete, steel, glass pour forth and you can only watch in horror as human bodies are carried out along with the current of carnage.

Before you even consciously understand what is going on, your stomach is tearing itself apart, and you know, deep down, that something is dreadfully wrong.

The others around you are starting to register it too. Some faint, others flee, racing towards the elevators. In shock, you follow. In the lobby, terror is starting to catch like wildfire— the elevators are out of service.

"The stairs!" someone shouts. Of course. Everyone races towards them, a torrent of bodies trying to fit through a three foot gap. You are swept up among them as you hurtle down the steps, unable to stop even if you wanted to. Finally, you reach the skylobby on the 78th floor, where the express elevators will take you all the way down to the ground, to safety.

But these elevators are also out.

No one knows what to do. Over two hundred people are amassed in this room that typically holds ten.

Then the unimaginable happens. A second deafening roar and everyone is rocked to the ground. Another gaping pit of hell opens right before your eyes. In less than a heartbeat, dozens of people around you have been eradicated. Gone. Many of those that remain are badly burned; some are missing limbs.

All of this is happening to you, but you are unable to make sense of any of it. You don’t know what to do and the primordial systems of your brain take over, all higher functions shut down and you feel only sheer panic.

You don’t know this, but this is the last hour of your life.

What happened

On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 at 8:46am American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City, New York.

Soon after, at 9:02am, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower, intersecting the building between the 84th and 78th floors— where the skylobby was.

Nearly 18,000 people were in the buildings on that day. A small city. There were 99 elevators in the South Tower, and most were out of service.

The office workers gathered on the 78th floor skylobby were unable to use any of the eight express elevators that would have brought them to safety on the ground floor. There were three emergency stairwells, and only one was accessible. But no one knew this. Everything appeared hopeless. They were trapped.

But on that floor there was a man named Welles. Welles was a regular white-collar employee like the others. But he had once trained as a junior firefighter, many years prior.

Welles didn't give up. Welles found that final functioning stairwell. But instead of fleeing down it by himself, he returned to skylobby, announcing to the others, “come with me.”

Welles led several employees down the stairwell to the 64th floor, where they met professional firefighters who were stationed there. The employees then evacuated the building safely with the firefighters.

Except for Welles.

Welles returned to the 78th floor skylobby. He was looking for more victims. But Welles was also a victim, in need of rescue. It didn't matter to him.

He rescued more employees, bringing them to the 64th floor, and returning again to the skylobby. Over and over, Welles continued his efforts until, at 9:59am, just 56 minutes after the second crash, the South Tower collapsed.

In the last hour of his life, Welles Crowther sacrificed himself to save others.

Conclusion

What would you do?

I myself am terrified to think about it. Not just because of the situation, but because I am afraid of myself, afraid that I would not have the guts to do what Welles did. I am afraid I would have ran for dear life, thinking only of saving my own skin.

But I don’t know. I want to think I would have done the noble thing, the heroic thing, to do what Welles did.

I too have trained as a firefighter. I have worked on the ambulance as an EMT. I have seen awful things, and have walked away unfazed. I have held dying patients in my arms. I have tried to resuscitate several people, doing everything in my power to bring them back to life, and failed. I have come across suicides (always in hotel rooms— I don’t know why). I have seen all of these things, and more. Knowing that something like that could be what awaits me behind any door of any call I get, even in the worst neighborhoods at the darkest hours of the night, I still press on with my job, fearlessly.

And yet— still I don’t know if I would have what it takes to do what Welles did.

The hardest part about all this is that we never know when our final moments will be. The workers in the World Trade Center that day (and the many first responders who arrived to help) certainly had no idea that it would be the last day of their lives, the last hour of their lives.

And so, I think, the only solution is to begin now— to act as if any day could be my last, even today. It probably won’t be, but just think. If it were, what would be the quality of the last hour of my life?

Would I be proud of the life I’ve lived so far? Would I be at peace with my relationships— the way I’ve treated my friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, bosses, strangers? Would I feel satisfied with what I’ve accomplished, how I’ve spent my time, what I’ve done with my gifts? I don’t know. These are difficult things to think about.

But in remembrance of Welles Crowther and the other 2976 victims that died on September 11th, 2001, I think it’s worth dwelling on today.

Please give me anonymous feedback here!

Welles Crowther with his mom

Source: The Man in the Red Bandana | SC Featured