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her off her feet.
    Right after the tremendous crack of the collapse, there was total quiet. Zedeño remembers thinking she must be dead, perhaps because of that silent blankness. As soon as she realized she was still alive, she realized she couldn’t breathe. The dense gray matter of Tower 2 was lodged in her nose, mouth, and ears. She dug her hand into her mouth to clear out the debris, but more debris took its place. “I kept trying to catch my breath, but I couldn’t. Oh my God, it was horrible,” she says.
    During this moment, choking on great piles of ash, the anger she felt on the forty-fourth floor came surging back. This time, it was more than anger; it was rage, and it was directed not at herself but at God:
     
I was thinking, “I was outside already! I almost made it! Why couldn’t I get out?” After all that trouble! I just didn’t understand. And this anger, this overwhelming anger is saying, “Why can’t you give me a break! I was there in 1993. I’m here now, I was almost out, and I’m still here! Ah! God almighty!”
     
    The dust started to settle. Zedeño was able to empty out her mouth, and as she leaned against a wall, she tried to clean her glasses and blow her nose. She couldn’t see through all the dust, but she heard a voice asking her to move out of the way. It was a firefighter and he was trying to break through a wall to get them out. She moved and stumbled over some debris, falling on top of someone else. It turned out to be a police officer. He was screaming that his eyes were burning. And at the same time, he was telling her, “Don’t worry, don’t worry! We’re gonna get out of here.” Zedeño could see his hands shaking. But she never saw his face.
    By then, her anger had vanished again. She got very quiet. It helped to have the police officer there, even though he was hurt. Then she heard a voice: “I found a way out. Everybody, hold hands.” And that’s what they did. They went into Borders and out through the door at the corner of Vesey and Church Streets. The books were still on the shelves, Zedeño noticed. “The idea of what had happened slipped away completely. Gone! I had no feeling anymore. It was almost like I was daydreaming.”
    Zedeño had traveled a long way. From the seventy-third floor to the ground, she had invented at least three different explanations for what was happening, all of which she had been forced to abandon. She had passed in and out of bouts of rage as her brain worked to make sense of it all. Denial both slowed her down, by distracting her with false hope, and kept her moving, by calming her down.
    The Ten-Thousand-Pound Planters
    Before the 1993 bombings, the fire safety plan for the Trade Center was naïve: each tenant company selected a volunteer to act as a fire marshal. Then the volunteer was allegedly trained to know what to do in a fire. That meant there was about one volunteer marshal for every fifty employees. As it turns out, the vast majority of the fire marshals had never left their own floor or the building in any previous alarm or drill, according to a NIST survey of all the marshals after the 1993 bombing. As a result, most of the fire marshals were unfamiliar with the stairs, despite the fact that they were the only ones “trained” to get out. In fact, they were trained only to meet in the corridor and wait for instructions. But no instructions ever came. The bomb, which was relatively weak compared with a 767 airplane, disabled the power and communications systems in the towers.
    Afterward, many of the 1993 fire marshals complained about their lack of training. They hadn’t known that two-thirds of the stairwells required people to wind through transfer hallways. No one had told them that it would take firefighters several hours to reach the upper floors. So they waited and waited, some for four hours before descending. Logically, the study’s authors concluded: “Training should not be limited to members of the fire