RPCV Fellows/USA Profile: Sean Nagle

Bolivia 1997-1999

A Peace Corps Fellow Recalls September 11

It was a typical early September morning. I was sipping my coffee and reading class notes, when the phone rang and my friend’s unsettling voice suddenly asked if I was safe. Confused, I replied, “yes” and listened as he told me the reason for his call. After popping my head out of the window of my apartment on 56th Street I gaped at the spectacle of the towers shrouded in smoke. People assembling on the corner were gasping and shading their eyes as they gazed south, wondering what was happening to our city.

As I cruised on my bicycle to the West Side Drive, I overheard news accounts of a 757 en- route to downtown two hundred feet above 5th Avenue and the Pentagon under attack. I felt a sense of chaos, and wondered whether our entire country was being systematically attacked. The ominous sight in the distance was temporarily put out of mind as I listened to radio blurbs from taxis with their doors open, and overheard people in garages and stores speculating on what was happening. People leapt up on vans to get a better view.

As a returned Peace Corps Volunteer who had worked in the disaster relief efforts of the El Nino floods/droughts/food shortages in Bolivia in 1998 and in the post Hurricane Mitch crisis mitigation in Honduras in 1999-2000, I thought I had been exposed to a great deal of human suffering from disasters. What I lived through in September enabled me to identify more with the Hondurans and Bolivians I worked with. In my own hometown of New York, many of my friends, family, co-workers and I were now experiencing the great loss and suffering that I observed in Latin America during my development work. I knew that Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center, where I work in the Ethics Department (as a Peace Corps Fellow), would receive the brunt of the victims, as it had from the ‘93 World Trade Center bombing.

Then, suddenly and without warning, the massive building that was standing and burning before me one second ago was now falling into itself as the cloud of dust suddenly billowed high above. I was not sure I could accept what I was seeing.

Once I passed Canal Street, I was assaulted with the horrible reality of the situation. The ubiquitous fine white powder, the charred sheets of office papers (court subpoenas, Staples order forms, and everyday office paper work suddenly seeming like personal artifacts), and the stunned dusty faces confirmed what a terrible event was upon us. My bicycle tires were no longer treading on cement, but rather on this snow-like substance, which had engulfed Toyotas, the Chambers Street subway light post, my shoes, my hair…everything.

The hospital greeted me with another macabre sight -- dozens of gurneys were lined up outside the Emergency Department (E.D.) ready for an unnatural flow of patients. I was assigned the task of racing through the hospital stripping offices of their chairs and tying sheets on them. For the next two hours I put sheets on the gurneys as trucks, cars, buses and ambulances started flowing into the hospital receiving area. The victims were sent to a decontamination area first, a method of keeping the E.D. free of the dust and debris the victims and vehicles were bringing from downtown. This garage was probably designed for washing ambulances, not people. However, this was only one of many brilliant innovations and adaptations to accommodate the tragedy’s victims.

I was exhausted just watching the scene. Although I never opened the door on the ambulance, or resuscitated a patient on his way up the E.D. ramp, I felt these actions personally as the victims were wheeled by, one by one. They seemed rocked to their very souls; bewilderment and pain accompanied every ambulance drop. The patients were asked their names, yet the voices of these shocked victims were almost inaudibly muffled. The scene was developing rapidly outside. A makeshift supply table was set up, oxygen tanks were trucked in, and the victims began arriving with horrific consistency. Unfortunately this steady flow of surviving victims would be short lived.

I talked to some of the victims as they were getting cleaned before admission to the E.D. I think they were having a hard time believing what was coming out of their own mouths, recounting the horror that they had just been through. A women told me her incredible account of making it down 82 stories in less than 15 minutes and narrowly escaping the building as it collapsed behind her while she hid behind a hot dog stand. She was later found by an EMT. Her incredible story spoke to me of what hope and courage humans can find in the face of such evils.

It is also one of many examples of how the relief effort brought people together in unusual ways. A police officer was unable to locate his unit until a nun grabbed his hand and showed him the way. A slew of administrative assistants helped the families find out if their loved ones were accounted for. People’s compassion was endless. The hospital employees were re-inventing their functions left and right. I felt truly impressed and proud as our institution became an “extended family” as the day continued.

As a research assistant in the Ethics Department at St. Vincent’s and as a Health Services student at the New School University, I felt that the institutions at which I studied and worked, my two reasons for being in New York, had now been transformed into a massive response to the crisis. My work place was the “front-line” of the medical response, and my educational center was proving its social responsibility to the city. My school had set up a family information center. I was proud to know that my classmates and professors were also doing their part. This response to the attacks fortified the relationship between my employment and educational partners of my Peace Corps Fellowship experience. This fall I felt I had merged the two functions of the fellowship into one and the population I was serving was my own community; this reality helped me find the strength to complete one of the hardest semesters I have ever encountered.

This day will not be soon forgotten. I wrote this not to preserve my memory, but to register what had flashed before my eyes so quickly that I almost missed it. As I rode home on my bicycle, my tires and shoes were white from the powder, my brow and back sweaty from my mental and physical activities on September 11, 2001.

Last updated Sep 29 2008