Kathy MacGregor was an EMT who remained awake for the approximately 30 hours her unit was in New York City after the 9/11 attacks.
A former EMT in Mantua recently described her experience in the aftermath of 9/11 during a talk at the township’s Norris Street School and Historical Museum.
Kathy MacGregor – a member of the township Historical Commission – had spent 13 years as a volunteer EMT before 9/11, and on that morning, she started the day by awakening around 8 a.m. to feed her cat. She got a call from her captain a short while later.
“She said, ‘Kathy, turn your TV on,'” MacGregor recalled. “‘There’s an airplane. It flew into the one World Trade Center building.’ As I was going to the TV, she said ‘Oh my God. Another one flew into the other building.’
“I turned the TV on, sat down. I was looking at my TV, she was looking at hers … It was like a terrible nightmare to see all this stuff going on.”
MacGregor immediately checked her ambulance, a responsiblity she had as first lieutenant in her unit, to make sure it was ready if called. At about 11 a.m., her unit was told to meet up with five others in the county at the Deptford Mall. They were assigned to North Jersey and eventually headed to Meadowlands Stadium, where they expected to help care for 2,000 patients who never came.
“We were going up the (New Jersey) turnpike and I looked out the side window and I could see off in the horizon, and see that it was smoke alright,” MacGregor recounted.
She would continue to describe the anxiety and fear she felt that day, including rumors of more terrorist targets and not knowing who would be next. When buses to the stadium eventually arrived, only drivers were on them.
“It was a letdown,” MacGregor said. “We were so anxious to help people.”
She eventually went home for the day and four days later, on Sept. 15, she received the news that her unit was headed to Ground Zero. They made their way into the city through the Holland Tunnel, where a group of supporters thanked them for their help as they crossed into New York.
After stops at Chelsea Pier and Battery Park, MacGregor would see the aftermath of the attacks in person.
“We got halfway down and see all these buildings and cars, parked along the road, and they’re all covered in about an inch, in places, of a powdery dust,” she remembered. “I’d never seen anything like it before. I see this and go, ‘Oh my God, there are cars of people that worked there, parked and now will never come back for them because they’re dead.'”
MacGregor spent about 30 hours in the city and was awake for all of them. Among her duties was to pick up body parts at Ground Zero that she suspected were those of passengers from the second plane that hit the towers. Her unit left the city on the morning of Sept. 16.
“As awful as it was, it was the experience of a lifetime,” MacGregor told the audience at her talk. “It was like living a nightmare. It was like stepping back in history; it must have been like World War II. It was our way of helping and it will remain embedded in this EMT’s memory, forever.”
Following her presentation – which included photos of the attacks shown on a nearby TV – others in the audience shared their own stories of what they were doing when 9/11 happened. Among them were Carolyn Olsen, a historical commission member who was a teacher at the time.
“As a teacher, I wasn’t allowed to say anything,” she explained. “I spent the whole day wondering about my children, one in kindergarten, one in middle school, what they were doing, was anyone saying something to them.”
But MacGregor and others also talked about how 9/11 brought out the good in people: “Everyone wanted to help.”
