Courage and Pure Luck Save Them From Death

New York Daily News ^ | 9/13/01 | ROBERT HEISLER

[kattracks]

Dive & crawl out of debris

Instinct, experience, stone-faced determination and dumb luck pulled survivors through the destruction of the World Trade Center — but all were left wondering why they were spared when so many others died.

For several hours, co-workers thought fire paramedic Gary Smiley was dead. The 17-year veteran survived the avalanche of debris that had been 2 World Trade Center by diving under his damaged ambulance.

"I just knew I wasn't going to outrun it," Smiley, 38, said. "I got under my truck as far as I could go and just prayed to God that it wouldn't collapse."

Around the ambulance, Smiley said, bodies and building chunks "the size of cars" were falling from the building. He fixed his mind on his 11-year-old son and survival.

"I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't see," Smiley said. "I just thought, 'I'm not dying today.'"

The barrage continued for several minutes, after which he slid out safely and ran north to a deli, where a shopkeeper hosed off cops, firefighters and EMS workers.

Then he went back to work until 2:30 a.m., when he was admitted to Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn for treatment of smoke inhalation and exhaustion.

Two blocks from the south tower, Christopher Ramnarine bought a disposable camera at a Duane Reade to take pictures of the burning buildings. As he squeezed off his 22nd shot, 2 World Trade Center collapsed.

"To my lefthand side is a newsstand," he said. "Me and the people around me dive right over the papers and into the newsstand.

"I turn around and I see the people who were still looking at the building get hit with chards of glass. I see blood. Suddenly I'm closing my eyes and holding my mouth because of the ashes of the building collapsing, and it goes totally black.

"I was scared because I thought I was completely covered, that the debris covered the entrance I dove into," he said.

Ramnarine, 28, of Wantagh, L.I., then ran into an open building and found himself in the lobby barber shop. He washed the dust out of his eyes and then joined the stream of dazed people walking over the Brooklyn Bridge.

For 30 years, Ernest Armstead used his emergency medical bag to save lives. Tuesday, he used it to save his own. Armstead, 53, reached up to cover his face when the debris rained down on him. The kit in his hand deflected pieces of metal.

"My bag saved my life," he said from Bellevue Hospital, still holding the bag. He was being treated for smoke inhalation, but he knows it could have been worse. "Whatever hit me, it came and I was able to hold my bag on my face. It is the Lord who saved me."

Alice Gomez, a cop for six years, had no cover to protect her. Gomez, 35, was moving people out of the lower level of 2 World Trade Center. "The building shook. You couldn't hear. You couldn't hear anything..... It was like a deafening silence. The lights went out and then boom. Debris fell on everything everywhere.

"A group of us — someone had a flashlight — we followed the wall. We crawled. We crawled. We found our way into the subway and then we came out.

"People were sitting outside in the dust..... So we grabbed them and made they come with us."

The word "dazed" isn't in Louis Lesce's vocabulary.

Lesce didn't budge from his desk on the 86th floor of 1 World Trade Center when he heard the first explosion in his building. He called his wife and gathered the other five people in the office to figure out a plan.

"I'm stupid that way. I should have left quickly," said the 64-year-old Howard Beach career counselor and grandfather of 10. "I refused to believe what was happening."

Within 20 minutes, Lesce, who has survived quadruple bypass and stent surgeries, was a believer. A Port Authority guard escorted the group down single-file. When he reached the lobby level, the tower next door collapsed and he was thrown to the floor.

Again darkness. "I kept asking, 'Anybody here?'" he said.

Lesce said he remembers telling himself that he would refuse to die. "I said to myself, this is bulls---."

Long minutes later, "a guy took my arm and guided me one step at a time outside. When I stepped out, I felt like I was the last man on Earth. There was nobody else around."

Sitting on her husband's hospital bed yesterday at Beth Israel Medical Center, Karen Lesce interrupted: "This is your Lotto, Lou," she said. "There is emotional damage, of course."

Lesce also had a message for the terrorists:

"I may take a punch, but I won't get knocked out," said Lesce. "You screw with the bull, you'll get the horns."