A survivor's story
San Bernardino County Sun
Bill Burleigh was standing right outside the lobby of the World Trade Center's south tower, enjoying a mint, when the first plane hit the north tower on Sept. 11, 2001.
Burleigh, a training executive for Morgan Stanley on the 61st floor of the south tower, had just left a meeting on the 73rd floor when he went down to the lobby to buy mints, said Burleigh's sister, Claremont resident Dawn Scherer.
"He told us he was struck by what a beautiful day it was - and then the plane hit," Scherer said.
Burleigh declined to be interviewed.
At first, Burleigh went back inside the lobby and tried to get an elevator back up to his office. The glass in the lobby would not stop rattling. A taxi was on fire outside and the elevator was not responding, Scherer said.
Burleigh and his wife, Elizabeth, lived across the street from the Twin Towers in corporate housing. Despite the phone problems in the area, Scherer was able to be in constant phone contact with the two. At one point, both her and her brother's phones rang simultaneously.
Burleigh was trying to run toward the towers, fighting the throng of people running in the opposite direction. He searched for his wife's face in the crowd. At one point, he rescued a woman who fell and was being trampled by the crowds running from the area.
By the time he reached the apartment on the 14th floor, the second tower was coming down. The sheer force of the collapse blew out the window and drove metal shards into the wall where Elizabeth was standing a moment before, Scherer said.
The couple crawled into the hallway but could hardly see anything because of the white dust that permeated the air. They reached the basement where they huddled with other survivors until firefighters evacuated them.
Just before that day, Burleigh received word he was due to be transferred from the New York office. Two weeks later he was transferred to San Francisco, and later to Redlands. He has since been transferred back to New York state to the office in Binghamton.
His second week in Binghamton, Burleigh was evacuated from his office because of a major flood.
Lobbying trip
The booming noise of fighter jets flying over the White House terrified Janice Rutherford.
It was a noise that echoed in the Fontana councilwoman's ears and rattled her nerves on her annual lobbying trip to Washington on Sept. 11.
She was in a high-rise building in the office of the city's lobbyist when she heard the planes.
She rushed to the window to see if they were commercial airliners.
They were F-16s.
"All those people filling the streets to evacuate the city also stopped to look at the sky," Rutherford said.
"It was like a sci-fi movie."
The City Council had meetings scheduled that morning on Capitol Hill with Rep. Joe Baca, R-Rialto, and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta to lobby for federal funding.
The council members stood in their hotel lobby two blocks north of the White House when news of the attacks at the World Trade Center and Pentagon came across the television.
They described a state of confusion, chaos, and disbelief.
People fled the city. Streets turned into one-way exits. Strangers were hopping into cars to get a ride out. Military personnel were stationed on every corner.
The local politicians were stranded, unable to return to Southern California since all planes were grounded.
Council members called and e-mailed their families and left D.C. five days later.
"I wanted to be home. I wanted to be with my wife and kids. I wanted to be with my family and I couldn't get there," Mayor Mark Nuaimi said.
Councilman John Roberts, now a retired San Bernardino County firefighter, felt helpless.
"It was the most frustrating day of my life, I think, because we were there and probably the most significant incident in my lifetime is occurring in front of me and there's nothing I can do to be a part of the rescue effort," he said.
Roberts spent 31 years as a firefighter and was one year shy of retiring in 2001.
"When I think of 9/11, the first thing that comes to my mind is the loss of life of my comrades in the towers," Roberts said.
"I think that will be burned into my memory for the rest of my life as people are running to come out of building, my brothers are heading in to help people," he added.
"Then, when I saw the towers fall, I knew that it was over for many of them."
Later that tragic day, the council found an open restaurant in Georgetown and watched the president's speech on television.
"It was just one of those great American moments. Everyone put down their food and drinks and stopped talking and gathered around the TV," Rutherford said. "It was a very unifying moment."
The group then went on a walking tour toward the Washington Monument for reassurance.
"You cannot destroy what this country stands for. You cannot destroy liberty," Rutherford said.
"You can injure us. You can murder our people. You cannot destroy that ideal."
But later that night, she heard a noise in her hotel room and raced over to her window only to find out it was the air conditioner.
"It took me months before I could listen to the sound of a plane engine without tensing up," she said.
That day also signaled the beginning of turmoil for Rutherford.
Upon returning to Fontana, she and her husband moved to a new home and celebrated the holidays there. The day after Christmas, her husband said he was not feeling well and was diagnosed with leukemia two weeks later. He died shortly after.
Every anniversary of the attacks, Rutherford thinks of all the lives lost and the effect on their families.
"I got to stand by Thomas' bedside and hold his hand and kiss him and tell him I love him, and those families didn't get to do that," she said.
Like nothing he'd ever seen
Ron Holk, a paramedic liaison nurse from Loma Linda University Medical Center, describes what he saw at Ground Zero in one word - horrible.
The smell of smoke, death and rotting garbage greeted Holk and other volunteers when they arrived in New York in late September.
"Horrific - those images are still pretty foremost in my mind," said Holk, who was part of a federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team that was deployed to Ground Zero. "We were told it would be like nothing we'd ever seen before, and I'd seen the news reports but it was nothing like I'd expected.
"There was this huge pile of debris and everything was just covered with this blanket of gray dust. Everywhere we looked, it was like that."
Holk treated people helping with the rescue and recovery efforts. At times, he treated their physical injuries, at others he simply lent a sympathetic ear.
"Sometimes people just came in to get away from what they were doing for just a moment," Holk said.
Holk said he considered it an honor to serve at Ground Zero, a duty that lasted until early October. He still remembers the images there as "surreal."
"It was kind of like a movie set," he said. "We kept waiting for the director to say 'cut' so everything would go back to normal, it was that kind of moment.
"That this couldn't happen - that this didn't happen."
Honor guard answers call
Fontana police Sgt. Robert Ratcliffe stood at Ground Zero one month after the terrorist attacks, as a New York City police officer's body was carried out from the rubble.
The body draped with a flag made its way down the line of rescue workers.
"For us, it was a very solemn occasion," Ratcliffe said.
Other police officers were identified by their recovered duty weapon or by their body parts, he said.
Ratcliffe traveled from Fontana to New York to be an honor guard at funeral services for police officers and firefighters. He has served as an honor guard at 67 funerals over the last seven years.
"With every funeral, someone was trying to do something for other people they don't know and they got killed for doing that," he said.
"I always think, 'How would I have reacted and what would I have done?' And hope I'd do the same thing, which is help as many people as possible and hope for the best."
He said he will always remember what the fallen police officers and firefighters did that day.
At Ground Zero, Ratcliffe talked to the police officers, firefighters and construction workers assisting in the recovery mission.
They chatted about their stories of the tragedy and then about California. As keepsakes, he exchanged patches and service pins.
"We would give them a little bit of an escape for three or four minutes," he said.
He still stays in touch with some officers he met there.
From the moment the attacks occurred, Ratcliffe has volunteered his services to various airlines and airports to assist with security.
"We just wanted to do something, something to help impact the safety of the country," he said.
I am sorry, I don't in any way want to take away from the Sept 11, Anniversary, but I have to mention this because it seems that the people of New Orleans have seemed to think that they are somehow forgotten or somehow not mentioned or somehow left out of the whole importance scale of Disasters that occurred in the U.S. in the past five years. Katrina was a Natural Disaster, that could not have been stopped, I don't care if the Mayor, of New Orleans or the Gov. of the State of LA. Not even the President of the United States could curve or stop What or where Katrina Hit or what she did to the Gulf Coast. It was what we call a "Natural Disaster" Granted I have only been through a few Natural Disasters in my life and they were never what the Storm of Katrina Delivered to the Gulf Coast, that said. The Incident that Occurred in New York City was an ATTACK ON THIS COUNTRY!! It is like it doesn't even matter anymore that we were ATTACKED!! Those People Directed WAR at US on our OWN SOIL!!
Yet the People of this country are forgetting this because they are comparing Apples to Oranges and Pairs!! When it comes to New York City Compared to New Orleans other then they both start with New....they don't have anything in common then they both were new incidents.
New York and the Governor of New York City should have a better plan, with the rebuilding of the WTC, they should have been started with construction already, but they are not and no one seems to know why?
I still Suggest that they use the original Plans that they had with the original building use the original "Footprints" and build an extra story! That extra Story will be a Shrine for the remembrance of the people and United 93, even though that didn't happen there, but it would be a full acre that would be used to fill up!! Use the same plans that were there, make them stronger!! don't, desecrate the remembrance of the people that loved working in that building every day!! they loved that building the way that it was and they would love to be remembered in the 111th floor, of that building so they could have their family members go there every day if they wanted. just make it open from 0800 to 2000 and have a guard on duty in each side. that is what should be there, that is what would show the idiots that bombed us, and the people that flew planes into the buildings that they didn't hurt us we are back!!!
BSRanch
