9/11 AND BEFORE

Today as I staggered away from my mailbox with an armful of credit card offers and Christmas catalogues I found something new in the heap. It was from my old employer, the New York Police Department, and it was a questionnaire asking for my opinions about their work for a survey now being conducted by two professors from local universities who want to probe beneath the surface to find out what the department is really all about.

Boy, what an opportunity! Will I tell them a few things! Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire…Oh clouds unfold, bring me my chariot of fire. Does that give you an idea? It does me, that maybe I’m coming on too strong and I need to tone it down a bit. But even so, look at the questions they’re asking. On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate the fairness of the promotion process…? Are they kidding? It’s a racket and always was. And furthermore…

There’s a whole page of questions asking how crimes get reported and whether any pressure is used to get them reported, well, favorably. That means things have changed. Now people are being rated according to the figures they report. My answer as one brought up in the old system, will be “Nobody Cared.“ Figures didn’t matter, connections did. Some had the merit but others had the system. Things went to hell, but City Hall never knew. Nothing changed until fourteen years after I left, when Rudy Giuliani took over. He is the reason figures now do matter. I’ll bet promotions have changed too, but I’m an outsider now, so I’ll let my answer above stand. It was true for my day.

Relative to those days I still preserve my two documents that prove conclusively that the department was then run by a clique of incompetents, for whose incapacity the citizens at large paid the price. My proof? These two General Orders both identify the reductions in various crimes that are to be achieved for the year. The one I cared about was robbery, the key crime that has to go down before all others. The target? A reduction of -- can you believe it -- 2%. And even that wasn’t achieved. A few months later it was reduced to 1%. Can anyone imagine the CEO of an American company announcing that he hoped to achieve a 2% increase in sales in the year ahead? He wouldn’t last another day after his board heard about it. Small minds are out of place in business. They’re out of place in government too, but they can be found there. We had ‘em.

Before I sat down and started writing this diatribe against the Great Satan I had intended to memorialize 9/11 by retelling a story about it to which I had a personal connection because the protagonist is married to my wife’s cousin. I’ll now switch there and tell the story as he has told it -- after a year of silence before he was able to do so. His name is Neil Getter and he was working on the 102nd floor of the South Tower when he looked across at the North Tower 150 feet away and saw it ablaze with smoke pouring out of the floor opposite his. He also saw a man trying to shimmy down the outside of the building to escape the smoke. They looked at each other and the man fell.

To find out what was actually happening Getter telephoned the Huntington Fire Department where he was a volunteer Chief. He got a friend there and asked him to check the TV for reports. The answer came quickly. “It looks bad. You’d better get out of your building.”

Getter, who had gone through the 1993 car bombing of the trade center, didn’t need any more urging even though the Port Authority public address system was blaring out messages for the occupants to stay in their offices. This caused confusion among the employees for whom Getter was responsible as fire marshal. Some refused his pleas for them to leave, but others left without waiting for him. He finished with a group of five whom he led to an elevator. This was a feeder elevator only going to the 78th floor where a mainline elevator was waiting. A fire marshal outside the elevator tried to make them go back upstairs, but Getter pushed him aside and his group got into the waiting elevator.

During the subsequent descent the group felt a jolt that impacted their car, but were able to continue to the main lobby on the ground floor of the building. There Getter pushed them into the ATM enclosure of a bank in order to avoid the stampede of other workers who were now fleeing the building in response to the jolt the group had felt while descending in their elevator. The jolt was actually the impact of a second airplane which had slammed into their building at the 60th floor.

When the first rush of the crowd subsided the group went looking for exits known to them, but found most of them unusable due to the debris pouring down from their own building, which they still didn’t know had been hit. It took them almost an hour to find a useable exit and when they did, their tower collapsed , creating an enormous dust cloud from which they had to run at top speed. Having seen nothing of the outside scene since they first left their office, they had to be informed by others of the two plane crashes that had caused all the destruction.

No public or private transportation was available and calls home were also impossible due to overloaded phone lines, so the pilgrims began a hike of almost thirteen miles to the home of their nearest member, who was able to provide transportation home for the others. Later in the week they found out how lucky they were. Their company, AON Aviation had lost 175 workers, the third highest toll of any company in the World Trade Center. No wonder Neil Getter couldn’t speak about it for a year afterward. But when he did he told a story that will never be forgotten.