Part two was behind a subscription wall. Finally found it at another paper.
The last man standing
World Trade Center survivor finishes his story
Andrew Duffy
CanWest News Service
June 6, 2005
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the conclusion of the two-part story of a Canadian man's escape from the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
The story so far: Hamilton, Ont.-born Ron DiFrancesco, 41, was working on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower when it was struck at 9:03 a.m. by al-Qaida terrorists who had turned a commercial airliner into a suicide bomb. He began down stairwell A with some co-workers from Euro Brokers, then after encountering heavy smoke, he ascended to the 91st floor in search of a safe place from which to be rescued. Unable to breach any of the stairwell's fire doors, he started down again, only to stop on a smoky landing in the impact zone.
Face down beside a dozen others in a smoke-blackened stairwell, with panic storming in his chest, Ron DiFrancesco heard a voice.
"Someone told me to get up," he says, recounting the moment that ultimately saved his life on Sept. 11, 2001.
A devout Roman Catholic, DiFrancesco believes God told him to get off the floor of that South Tower stairwell. He doesn't know why; he's not one to proselytize. His faith, like much about him, is a private matter.
"I just have no other explanation for what happened."
Heeding the insistent whisper, DiFrancesco struggled to his feet and inched along the wall, his hands crawling ahead of him. He felt his way through the smoke and started down the stairs again. After several steps, he saw a pinhole of light through the blackness.
He moved toward it, breaking through some drywall that blocked his way. Another sheet of drywall had fallen over the stairs and he slid down it, child-like, to reach the next flight. Flames licked the walls in the narrow stairwell. He covered his head with his forearms. The fire singed his arms, chest and head. He kept running.
DiFrancesco believes he raced down two or three storeys engulfed with flame. His arms and chest still bear the scars of that dash.
Finally, he emerged into a clear and lighted stairwell, alone, at the 76th floor. He was below the fire. Water ran down the stairs. He took off his shoes and socks to gain better traction. His lungs burned and he struggled to breathe, but he kept running.
DiFrancesco met three firefighters moving up the stairwell with their equipment. "I'm having trouble breathing," he told them.
"You can get help at the bottom," one of them said.
DiFrancesco continued down as quickly as his legs would carry him. When he reached the plaza level, a 10-storey high lobby, he headed for an exit which opened onto the five-acre square between the North and South Towers.
DiFrancesco was stopped by a security guard. "It's too dangerous out there," he was told.
Looking onto Tobin plaza, DiFrancesco was horrified at the scene. Dead bodies and debris littered the concrete. Each new victim falling from the tower sounded a shotgun blast against the ground. "It was like a war zone," he says.
He was told to turn around and take the south exit, the one that led to Liberty Street. DiFrancesco ran down a stalled escalator and began walking south with speed.
He was relieved to meet an older colleague from Euro Brokers, John Kren, who had left the office after the first plane hit the North Tower. He slowed to match the man's stride.
Walking south, they tried to leave the tower at Liberty Street, but another guard redirected them to the north-east exit that led to Church Street. They made their way back through the concourse.
It never occurred to either of them that they were still in danger. But the South Tower's steel supports were failing; the building was in its final moments as a skyscraper.
As DiFrancesco and Kren passed an adjoining hallway near the Church Street exit, they heard an ungodly roar. DiFrancesco turned to his right in the direction of Liberty Street, to see a massive fireball --compressed as the South Tower fell -- roiling toward them.
"Run!" he yelled.
The two men bolted for the exit. DiFrancesco was bowled over by the explosion as he reached some stairs. Something slammed into the back of his head. The last thing he remembers is the sound of his own voice: "Help me, help me!"
DiFrancesco met his future wife at the University of Western Ontario when he went to a friend's house in search of a clean sheet for a toga party. A new roommate, Mary Pace, answered the door.
She was the fifth of 10 children born to Murray and Angela Pace of North Bay, Ont. Dr. Murray Pace was an obstetrician who had delivered thousands of children in the city. The Paces were a fixture in North Bay; everyone knew at least one of them.
But during her first year of university, Mary Pace was all but anonymous. She lived off campus and felt distant from the rush of student events.
DiFrancesco would change that. An orientation leader, he took her everywhere and introduced her to his wide circle of friends. "He was very friendly to a shy person," says Mary. "He was very charming."
They would talk on the phone for hours every night. Eventually, it became obvious that they were right for one another. They were both athletes, both committed Catholics, both family-minded. The primary tension between them became Ron's unwillingness to enter fully into a relationship that he knew would end at the altar.
"He was really determined: he didn't want to be tied down so early," says Mary, who studied political science.
Their courtship would last more than six years until the inevitable happened: they were married. Children soon followed with Toby in 1991, Julia in 1993, Liam in 1995 and Sam in 1998. Their lives became enmeshed with the schools, churches, hockey rinks and movie theatres of their neighbourhood, Toronto's Bloor West Village.
Still, Mary jumped at the chance of moving to New York when the opportunity arose in 2000. She viewed it as a welcome adventure.
In Mahwah, N.J., the family was embraced by the local parish. They were even allowed to jump the queue to gain a space in the local playgroup. "They were very warm and very kind people," she says.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, DiFrancesco's wife Mary saw their three older children to the school bus at 7:30 am. Then she returned home to ready the youngest for playgroup. The phone rang as she was about to go out the door.
It was Ron, her husband. He told her a plane had just smashed into the North Tower, but that he was safe in the South Tower. Mary hung up and turned on the television. Then Ron called again to say he had decided to leave the building.
Minutes later, Mary watched in stark horror as a plane streaked across her television screen, straight into the gleaming glass face of the South Tower. It exploded, she knew, somewhere close to the 84th floor where her husband had just walked away from his desk.
"I felt like, 'This isn't really happening. This isn't real,' " she says.
Mary tried to douse the panic that fired in her heart. "He'll call me," she told herself. "He was on his way out. He'll call when me he gets out. He always calls. And that's what he'll do."
Mary phoned the children's school to ensure they weren't exposed to live TV coverage. They had been to the World Trade Center and would know their father was in danger. Her friend, Nancy, came over to look after Sam.
She talked to Ron's mother, Kitty, and his father, Dante, a Hamilton steelworker. More than a dozen relatives had gathered in their home, but Dante DiFrancesco was too nervous to join the crowd in his living room. He remained alone in his garage that morning, roasting red peppers on his barbeque, waiting.
Mary, meanwhile, talked to her own parents and to dozens of other concerned friends and relatives. Everyone vowed to pray for Ron. She could feel the network build.
Mary couldn't bear to watch the towers burn on TV. She walked around the house, then outside, and set about talking to Ron. She talked and she talked. "Come on, keep moving. You can do this," she told him. "Concentrate. If you're hurt, just keep working at it. Keep going. Keep moving. You've got to get out of there."
Mary felt connected to Ron, as if she was somehow navigating the danger with him. She talked to him about faith, about his family. She was sure he was on his way out.
That certainty flickered when the South Tower collapsed on itself; it took only 10 seconds for the skyscraper to fall, its steel supports fatally weakened by the intense heat. "Was there enough time?" she wondered. It had seemed like no time at all: only 56 minutes had elapsed since the attack on the South Tower.
She remained convinced Ron would call. Maybe he was hurt; maybe he needed to be rescued. But he always called. "I'm not giving up," she told herself. "I just have to be patient. I have to wait."
Mary kept the main phone line open for Ron. Hours passed. She waited and prayed and talked to him. Finally, at 1.30 p.m., a stranger called. He identified himself as a nurse at St. Vincent's Hospital. He said her husband was alive; he had just been brought into the emergency room. Ron had a concussion, but he had managed to provide her name and phone number. He said Ron would be OK.
Mary thanked him and told him to phone the next worried family. "Tell Ron I love him," she said.
Mary screamed in relief. She downed a stiff drink poured by her friend, Nancy, and began phoning friends and relatives to relay the news.
Early the next morning, the phone rang again in the DiFrancesco household. It was another nurse from St. Vincent's Hospital. Mary had kept in contact with the nursing staff through the night.
"Your husband is very upset," the nurse told Mary. "He's in very bad shape and you need to get here."
Mary didn't understand. The nurses she had spoken with the evening before had told her that Ron was agitated, but nothing else. New York City was in a lockdown. How was she supposed to get to the hospital?
"You tell them your husband needs you," the nurse said.
The nurse enumerated his injuries. He was unconscious. He had suffered serious smoke inhalation and was breathing with an artificial respirator. He had burns to 60 per cent of his body. He had a broken neck and a broken back. His eyes had also been damaged, possibly from his contacts melting in his eye sockets.
"What? What?" Mary demanded. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Nobody told me any of that."
She began to panic. Would he die before she managed to get there? Had Ron been terrified by himself in hospital? Had she let him down?
She called a friend who drove her into New York City. It took most of the day to get through the security cordon to St. Vincent's Hospital in midtown Manhattan.
The sight of him in his hospital bed made Mary cry. Ron's head was swollen to twice its normal size. He was in a neck brace. He was on a respirator. His eyes were taped shut. He was covered in bandages. "His head was huge, his lips were four times the normal size. His ears were huge," she says.
She found a quarter-sized spot on his face that wasn't burned or bandaged and kissed it.
He was in and out of consciousness for four days. Ron had to be sedated because his mind was still living the terror of that day. He was agitated and scared and tore at his respirator.
At first, he could talk about his experience only in broken pieces; he had no idea how he had arrived at hospital (Who pulled DiFrancesco from the rubble of the South Tower and how he got to hospital remains a mystery).
In addition to his burns and broken bones, he had suffered a serious impact wound that had gouged the back of his head. His body was peppered with shards of glass and stucco carried by the fireball (His wife would pick a two-centimetre long shard of glass out of his forehead about a month later).
DiFrancesco was slow to understand the magnitude of the tragedy.
He watched the towers fall for the first time on television. He found it hard to absorb the enormity of the loss suffered. One out of every five people who had worked with him was now dead.
"Some of them, I looked into their eyes that morning," he says. Even the man with whom he left the South Tower, John Kren, would die in hospital in October 2001.
DiFrancesco struggled with the idea of his own survival on a day when so many of his colleagues died. Why had he been the last man out? He still doesn't know the answer.
He was also distressed by what he perceived as his own failings. He regrets not taking other people with him down stairwell A, even though he has no idea whether anyone would have followed him. "I'm grateful for my own survival, that I got to see my family again, but I wish there had been more of us," he says.
DiFrancesco's wife also felt conflicted. In the weeks after Sept. 11, she was surrounded by death and grief as she attended a series of memorial services for her husband's colleagues at Euro Brokers. She knew that, but for an inexplicable string of circumstance, she would be the grieving widow. Then she'd feel guilty for thinking of herself at such moments.
"We wanted to celebrate Ron's survival, but find the balance with the devastation and loss that so many around us felt," she says. "And to be awestruck enough to realize that it was an incredible miracle that he survived. And that there's no other explanation other than to say that God decided that Ron was going to live . . . It was just against all odds that he lived."
It was four months before DiFrancesco could bring himself to visit the World Trade Center site, and five months before he returned to work. But he was never again comfortable. Each day, as he returned home, his children would be at the window, waiting.
DiFrancesco and his wife decided they couldn't live with that kind of anxiety. He told his boss at Euro Brokers that he intended to quit and return to Canada. But the company had another idea. They offered to set up an office for him in Toronto -- essentially a one-desk satellite of the trading floor.
The family returned to their Toronto home in August 2002. DiFrancesco now works in a five-storey building on King Street. His office is on the third-floor. He didn't want to work in another skyscraper; he wanted a building that he could escape in a hurry. "I know where all the emergency exits are," he concedes.
The World Trade Center and those who died there are never far from DiFrancesco's thoughts.
He travels to New York City regularly to meet with officials at Euro Brokers and to absorb the atmosphere of the new office, softened by the events of 9-11. "It's like visiting family now," he says. "But you realize some people aren't there."
When he goes out for dinner or drinks with colleagues, conversation sometimes turns to personal accounts from that day. DiFrancesco doesn't seek out such conversations, but admits to being curious about what happened to others. In New York, he also visits regularly with the widow of a close friend. Each visit is difficult, he says, but important to them both.
An avid cyclist, DiFrancesco is built square and strong and has the quiet intensity of a man climbing a mountain pass. It's readily apparent that he's familiar with pain.
His survivor's guilt has been slow to dissipate. He sometimes finds himself strangely agitated. He's sensitive to noise. He has sought professional counselling, which has afforded him some perspective, an understanding that there's nothing abnormal about his feelings of guilt and disquiet after such a tragedy.
He listens more carefully in church now. He takes more holidays. He spends more money on indulgences for his children.
He also follows closely the war on terrorism and the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks. But he insists that he bears no ill will, no personal sense of vengeance, against those who perpetrated the attack.
Mostly, DiFrancesco just wants to move on with his life.
He wants to watch his children play hockey and basketball and grow up sure in the fact that their father will be home after work each day.
Mary, too, is eager to put the trauma to rest, but she doesn't expect life to ever be the same as it was before Sept. 11, 2001.
"It seems like just now, in the last few months, that we are functioning more normally, that the fallout seems to be subsiding," she says. "But there will never be 'normal.' I think we'll always be trying to be worthy of it. The gift."
(OTTAWA CITIZEN) |
