9/11 Attack, 2001, by Christina Dunigan

From MemoryArchive

Who: Christina Dunigan
What: The 9/11 attacks
When: September 11, 2001
Where: Rural Pennsylvania, near Shanksville

I was paying a medical bill at the Windber Hospital that day. Though there was nobody at the main desk in the lobby, there was a woman acting as a receptionist, answering a phone in a small office just off the main lobby. She was very helpful and friendly and started making calls, trying to find which office I should bring my check to.

A player piano in the lobby was playing some sort of modern music that sounded a lot like a somebody with dyslexia trying to sight-read classical music. It was annoying both of us, so I went over and unplugged it. This freed the receptionist up to turn on her radio. She tuned it to a country & western station and kept looking over her directory, trying to figure out who to send me to. But the phone kept ringing and she kept having to tell people, "I would have no way of knowing. You'll have to call the airport."

A man who appeared to be a doctor stuck his head in the office. Before he had a chance to speak, the receptionist said to him, "Do I look like a news bureau? People keep asking me why the airport is closed." She was referring to the nearby Johnstown airport. The man who looked like a doctor said, "There's been a plane crash."

I thought that maybe somebody's Cessna had gone down on the runway.

The receptionist kept calling people in her directory, in between answering the phone. It was slow going.

A woman who appeared to be some sort of administrator came in and said that there had been a commercial airline crash, that the hospital was to expect mass casualties. She needed a manual to look up a code. The manual didn't have the code she needed in it. She left to find another manual.

At that point I concluded that the plane had crashed at the Johnstown airport, and was either a small commuter flight that had been scheduled for Johnstown, or a larger commercial flight that had experienced trouble and diverted to Johnstown.

Then an announcer came on the radio. He said that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers, and that the towers had collapsed. Both of them. They were, he said, "gone. Just gone." He said that there was no word on casualties but that on any given day there were upwards of 50,000 people in the towers. He also said that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, and one had crashed in Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. (I assumed that he meant our plane crash.) He said that all flights had been ordered diverted to the nearest suitable airport, but that 14 commercial flights were still unaccounted for.

This was the work of terrorists.

I thought that if terrorists had crashed a plane someplace as obscure as Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that the planes must be raining down out of the sky like hailstones. "This is it," I thought. "We're at war. Life will never be the same."

I fell back against the wall, stunned. The receptionist asked if I was okay. I told her yes. I tucked my check under her pencil cup and told her, "I'm sure this can wait." She nodded, and I left, to go find out what I could do to help prepare for the mass casualties.

I found two women who appeared to be nurses, talking about the incoming casualties. I asked, "What can I do to help?" One of the women, who I guess was a supervisor, told me I could go with the other woman. They'd need plenty of hands to move things. I followed the other woman to an area of the hospital that evidently wasn't being used. The woman told me that some people were going to be bringing beds down from another wing and that we'd be moving night stands and chairs and such out of the way to make room for them. We were waiting for somebody to come with a key to a room we were to put the night stands and chairs into.

An announcement came over the public address system for all visitors to report to the lobby. I went and gathered with maybe twenty or thirty other people. Many of them asked what was going on. I figured that if they were visiting at a hospital but weren't watching TV to know what was going on, they had other things on their minds and didn't need to know right now how bad things were. So I just told them, "There's been a commercial jet crash nearby and they're expecting mass casualties. I guess they're just going to tell us that and ask us to stay out of the way and to follow any instructions."

The administrator woman who had looked up the code came into the lobby and said just what I'd expected her to say, and dismissed us. That was when I found out that the plane had actually crashed in Somerset County, which was just a short distance away. Windber was probably the nearest hospital to the crash site.

I went back to wait for the key. The woman I'd been waiting with had gone and another woman was there. I wanted to be doing something, being useful. I called the Red Cross and asked if now would be a good time to give blood, and was told yes, come in as soon as I could.

I went back into the hallway and waited with the woman who I assumed was a nurse. Another woman came and whispered something to her. I took one look at her face and I said, "We're not getting any mass casualties. They're setting up a morgue in Somerset." She nodded. Little did I know at the time how little there was left of the passengers and crew of Flight 93. I was picturing bodies pulled from recognizable wreckage.

As I drove to the Red Cross building in Johnstown, I channel surfed on the radio and found out that the plane had gone down near some strip mines. I was worried about the miners. But shortly after that a news report came in that all of the workers at the mines were accounted for and safe. This was a load off my mind, a small comfort on an otherwise grim day.

The Red Cross suggested I do apheresis, which is taking blood out, removing key components, and then putting the stripped-down blood back in. It's a fairly time-consuming process, but I had nowhere else to go that morning. So they put me in one of their big comfy chairs and hooked me up and I watched the 9/11 coverage on CNN. This was when I finally found out that it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd initially feared, that there had been time to evacuate most of the people from the Twin Towers, that only a portion of the Pentagon had been destroyed, and that the plane that had crashed near us had been the only other hijacked plane that day. So the shock and horror were tempered with relief. I have yet to meet anybody else who went through such wild extremes in their perception of what was happening; most folks either watched it all unfold, or didn't know about it at all until the dust had started to settle.

In 2004, when my daughter was having her baby, somebody was playing the piano in the hospital lobby. Suddenly my heart was back in Windber on 9/11, unplugging that piano, about to hear what had been happening in New York, in Washington, and in the sky right over my head. It was eerie.