Georges Delerue

🇺🇸 The Stairwell That Should Not Have Been There Ladder 6 left Chinatown that morning. The Pride of Chinatown. Captain Jay Jonas and five men: Sal D’Agostino, Matt Komorowski, Mike Meldrum, Bill Butler, Tommy Falco. They went up the North Tower in Stairwell B. Gear on their backs. Twenty-seventh floor when the South Tower came down. The order came. Get out. On the way down they found a woman who could not take another step. Josephine Harris. Fifty-nine. Bookkeeper for the Port Authority on the 73rd floor. A widow. She had already walked fifty-three flights on a bad leg. At twenty she stopped. Tommy Falco looked at his captain. “Cap, what do you want to do with her?” They were running for their lives. They took her anyway. One step. Both feet. One step. Both feet. People behind them and had to squeeze past. At the fourth floor her legs gave out. She told them to leave her. They did not. Jonas went looking for a chair. He was a few feet from the stairwell door when the North Tower started to come down. It took thirteen seconds. Jonas said the building peeled away around them like a banana. Above them, no one in that stairwell lived. Below them, in the lobby, almost no one lived. They were sitting in the only piece that held. Fourth floor to first. Fourteen people were in that stretch of stairs. The six from Ladder 6. Josephine. A battalion chief. A Port Authority K-9 officer whose dog did not make it. Jonas later said if she had been faster, they would have been in the lobby. If they had left her, they would have been lower, or gone. They called her their guardian angel. Josephine died in 2011. She was sixty-nine. The six men from Ladder 6 were her pallbearers. They lifted her one more time.