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Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management Crisis and Emergency Management Newsletter Website |
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February
2006
Volume
10 - Number 1 |
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A Personal Experience with Disaster
By Mark Phillips My morning started early that day, around 4:45 in the morning. I arrive at work around 5:50 in the pre-down hours. I was working a rotating shift at the time. Like many others arriving at the same time, we were relieving the night crew from their responsibilities. We were responsible for a 24/7 operational systems that supported the nation’s interests. Recently we had been suffering from morale problems within several of our workgroups. People were concerned about work/life satisfaction and our new strategic plan. The new plan was going to drastically change the way we were going to do business. We were having some offline discussions on how to address the problems. We were in a room with about 50 other people all going about there daily tasks. The walls of room were lines with big screen televisions for monitoring critical systems and for displaying news channels such as CNN, which was not uncommon in most large ops centers. It must of been about 9:00am that morning. I think most people had notice the World Trade Center tower on fire. No one paid much attention to the event, and carried about there business. Suddenly there were several gasps in the room as the second tower had been hit. Most people had missed the collision but had turned to see the resultant explosion. “What had happened?” everyone said. Then the replays of the event had started repeatedly. The mood and tone had suddenly changed within the room. All of the discussions had stopped, and focus had moved to the televisions. Everyone was evaluating the situation, we had never seen something like this happen before. It was not too much later that we received word of plane flying over DC. The White House was being evacuated. Many employees had family that worked in the district. Then we heard the Pentagon had been hit too. We had many former military officers who were clearly among the most distressed. Panic started to rise, and rumors started. Word of a 4th plane flying down the Potomac river for DC had quickly spread. Where was it heading, who was next? It took some time for the news channels to pick up coverage of the pentagon hit. The networks were not ready to cover this event. What was happening that we did not know about? The facility was concerned about what to do. Should we go down to essential staff only or should we keep people off the roads? Should we enable backup systems? When will this end? What is still left to occur? The remainder of the day was chaotic. Phone circuits were regularly busy, roads were closed, and nation was suddenly in a place that it had never been before. It was noted that we had two employees from our organization on a flight to LA on that morning returning home from a TDY assignment. It was later determined that they were on board Flight 77 that hit the pentagon. This was very hard for many to grasp. Sept 12 started a new day with new attitudes, new concerns and new perspectives on the security of the United States. U.S. airspace was still closed. It was still unknown who had done this to us. We were surround by people who were somehow directly affect by yesterdays events. How should we help them cope? Yesterday started with dealing with morale problems, today our challenges were much different. References: Wikipedia, Timeline of events on Sept 11, 2001 attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_September_11%2C_2001_attacks |