It Sounded Like an Avalanche Article Assignment Attached is an article regarding the actions and reactions of a security professional, Mr. George Compas, w

It Sounded Like an Avalanche Article Assignment Attached is an article regarding the actions and reactions of a security professional, Mr. George Compas, who was directly impacted by the events of the terrorist’s attacks against the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11/01.Considering what you have learned in this course regarding protection from terrorism and the preparation of emergency and disaster preparedness plans, please post your comments on this article. It Sounded Like an Avalanche
By Teresa Anderson
One hotel security director looks back on September 11 and forward to what lessons
lodging professionals can learn from the catastrophe.
George Compas had worked in security for the Marriott Corporation for more than 15
years, but he had only served as director of loss prevention at the World Trade Center
Marriott for seven weeks when the planes hit the towers. As one of the survivors from
ground zero, he saw firsthand how traditional emergency preparations stood up during
a major catastrophe, and his experience has yielded lessons for the entire lodging
industry.
Compas spent the weeks leading up to September 11 going over evacuation, fire, and
emergency procedures, even though he had no way of knowing that his plans were
about to undergo the ultimate test. He updated all three plans simply because he was
newly transferred to the World Trade Center Marriott, and he wanted to make sure that
the plans had current contact information as well as the appropriate details on how
everyone at the hotel should handle specific threats. Compas gave all managers and
all 21 members of the security staff copies of the revised procedures, and in late
August, he held a management staff meeting to discuss the changes and each
position’s responsibilities in an emergency.
For example, in case of an evacuation, the front desk manager would be required to
make two printouts of the occupied rooms in the hotel. This manager would also make
a separate printout of all the handicapped rooms and whether they were occupied.
In addition, the fire-safety officer was given refresher training on how to respond to an
evacuation using the fire command station in the hotel lobby. Compas also purchased
extra two-way radios and gave one to each executive to expedite communications
during any emergency. Instead of the executives coming to Compas to ask what was
happening and what to do next, Compas could inform everyone at the same time.
While Compas had not yet scheduled fire drills, he did conduct training sessions with
management. In case of a fire, one manager from each department was to respond to
the fire command station and wait for instructions from the fire-safety director. Shortly
after the training, the hotel experienced a false alarm from a faulty smoke detector,
which served as a test of the training; all the hotel employees responded appropriately.
Plan limitations.
Compas had been mindful of the need to plan for emergencies. But those preparations
had their limitations on September 11. “You can’t prepare for a catastrophe like this,”
he says. “Everything looks great on paper, but you don’t know how each individual, or
you yourself, will react when the time comes.”
On that morning, the 22-story hotel, which was adjacent to Tower Two, was fully
booked, with about 1,200 guests and 200 employees on the premises. The hotel had
three main entrances, one at the front of the hotel on the west side of the building, one
on the north side connecting to the lobby of Tower One, and one on the south side
connecting to the WTC plaza and to Tower Two.
When the first plane hit, Compas was in his office on the basement level of the hotel.
“It sounded to me as if there were three loud bangs and then the building shook,” he
says.
Immediately, Compas walked out of his office and into the adjacent security command
station. He brought up a CCTV feed from a camera that overlooked the lobby of the
hotel. This lobby, long and narrow, led directly onto the WTC plaza via a revolving door.
So, by looking through the camera, Compas could see the lobby of the Marriott and
into the lobby of Tower One. Compas saw people running through the doors into the
hotel. They were surrounded by gray smoke.
Compas grabbed a radio and started to run upstairs to the lobby. At this point, he saw
the personnel manager standing near the stairwell with a number of employees.
Compas told the manager to evacuate the basement of the hotel, where personnel,
security, laundry, and housekeeping offices as well as the employee cafeteria were
located. Compas then ran up the stairs to the lobby, where he found people streaming
in from Tower One.
In an attempt to find out what had happened, Compas went out through the main
entrance of the hotel but had to run back in because of the falling debris. As he
returned, he found that the director of finance, the resident manager, the personnel
director, and the housekeeping director had also gathered in the lobby. Compas told
each of them to go to one of the three main entrances of the hotel and not to let
anyone out because of the falling debris. “Our evacuation plan quickly became a
retention plan,” says Compas.
Before taking further action, Compas knew it was critical to find out what had actually
happened. After informing security personnel of his plans via radio, he began running
through the hotel’s basement corridor, which connected to Tower One. Just before he
reached the doors between the two buildings, Compas saw the hotel’s assistant chief
engineer. He was holding a woman at arm’s length, trying to steady her. The woman
was burned over her entire body. She was in shock but was able to say that she had
been in the elevator in Tower One when she felt the impact and then fire–later
confirmed to be jet fuel–surge through the shaft. Compas and the engineer put the
woman in a safe place out of the way as a stream of people came through the doors
into the hotel.
Compas called for an ambulance on the radio. The hotel also had a nurse, hired by
Marriott, during the day, seven days a week. The nurse on duty at that time was in the
security office and heard the call. She ran to the injured woman and looked after her
until rescuers arrived.
Compas, now convinced that something large had hit the towers, went back to the
hotel lobby. He directed several managers to begin evacuating guests and staff out of
the southern hotel entrance, toward Tower Two. The front entrance was still blocked
due to falling debris.
While in the lobby this time, Compas ran into three FBI agents. The agents confirmed
that a commercial jet had hit the building. It had been five minutes since the impact.
Police and fire officials began arriving at the hotel and commandeered the concierge
desk as a command post. The health club manager called Compas on the radio and
told him that part of the plane had fallen into the hotel’s swimming pool–located on the
roof of the building. The fire battalion chief assigned a fire lieutenant and six firemen to
go upstairs to make sure that everyone was okay.
Compas sent two security officers and an engineer to accompany the firefighters. He
gave one of the officers the master room keys and told him to start knocking on doors
to ensure that everyone was evacuating. As the group began to walk toward the
elevators, the hotel mechanic told them that the main elevators were flooding with
water and that only the freight elevators were in operation.
Then the second plane plunged into Tower Two, located directly behind the hotel,
where people were being evacuated. Now guests faced burning rubble on the south
side of the building and falling debris on the north and west sides.
One of the hotel’s sales people offered to go help with the evacuation. Hundreds of
people were in the hotel lobby waiting to evacuate. When employees saw that debris
was no longer falling at the south entrance–though there was debris on the ground–the
salesperson, aided by police and hotel managers, would usher out as many people as
possible; when the debris started falling again, he would stop people from going out.
No one could get out of the front entrance because the falling debris was continuous.
Compas was receiving radio calls from various security personnel in different parts of
the building. One security officer reported that while the engine of the first plane had
landed in the swimming pool, everyone in the health club was fine, and all were being
brought to the lobby. Another officer radioed that the room-by-room evacuation was
proceeding and that all guests were being brought down to the first floor.
The procedure for having a printout of the handicapped rooms made available to
personnel evacuating the rooms, however, was not properly executed in the confusion.
Consequently, the front desk received a panicked call from the fifth floor, where a
woman in a wheelchair and her daughter were stranded. Compas immediately sent two
security officers to that room, and they carried the handicapped guest down the stairs.
A few minutes later, there was another call from a wheelchair-bound woman on the
eleventh floor. The officers went back up and carried her down as well.
In the lobby at the police and fire command post, firemen who had gone into the
towers were now coming back to replenish their oxygen. To help out, Compas sent
hotel employees downstairs to the basement to bring up cases of bottled water for the
firefighters. With the firefighters being attended to by hotel employees, the fire chief
told Compas that he was going to enter the towers to help. The chief never returned;
his body was later found in the rubble.
At about 9:45 a.m., everything in the hotel seemed to be proceeding as well as could
be expected. The evacuation was going well, and the room-to-room search was still
underway. There were hardly any people coming from the Tower One entrance, leading
Compas to believe that those who could get out of the building had done so. “But no
one dreamed that those buildings were going to come down,” he says.
The guests had been evacuated by now, and Compas began ushering staff out of the
building. He saw a group of about 12 men near the Tower One entrance. Compas sent
a security supervisor over to tell the men to leave. They were officials from the Port
Authority of New York and told the security supervisor they needed to stay and
monitor the situation. Compas walked over and told them to leave anyway.
Despite his commands, Compas could not get all of the staff to leave. The resident
manager, the personnel director, the salesperson helping with the evacuation, and two
engineers refused to leave. Compas was touched by their concern but was also
worried about them because he knew the situation was dire. While he was trying to
convince these staff members to leave, dozens of firemen came running into the hotel
from the towers. “They were yelling that everyone had to get out because the building
was coming down,” says Compas.
The firemen and hotel employees started to run away from the towers. They had run
about 40 feet before they began to hear loud banging noises. “It sounded like an
avalanche,” says Compas. “You could hear it coming on top of you.” Then Tower Two
landed on top of the hotel.
When the tower hit, everyone in the group was knocked to the ground. After he fell,
Compas covered his head and waited. “I don’t know how long this lasted,” says
Compas. “I lost all track of time, and all I could think was that we had gotten all of the
guests out and that I had to get the employees out safely.”
Then, debris began to fall on the group. “I felt something land across my legs and then
something landed across my back,” Compas says. At one point, he opened his eyes
and touched his hand to his nose. He couldn’t see his hand. The air was pitch black
and filled with dust.
Getting out. The debris finally stopped falling. For a few seconds, there was absolute
silence. Then all the survivors started moving and asking if everyone was all right. After
the initial shock, people started screaming and yelling. One of the firemen asked
Compas: “How are we getting out of here?”
Compas turned to an engineer, who had been with the hotel since it was constructed.
The engineer indicated that there was an emergency door straight ahead and to the
left, about 100 feet from them. The survivors headed for this exit, climbing over the
debris and dead bodies that had fallen from above.
The group reached the door. The door had a pushbar exit device, but it wouldn’t move.
The firemen used axes to knock the door off its hinges. But when they moved the door
to the side, all they could see was concrete and steel blocking the way. The exit was
impassable.
Searching for another way out, the group traveled west toward another side exit in the
hotel’s restaurant. As it was designed to, the fire door had come down. The firemen
lifted up the door, but it too was blocked by a grisly amalgam of glass shards, twisted
steel, disembodied arms and legs, and chunks of concrete. However, there was a
small opening that could just be seen through the smoke, now a gray haze instead of
a black cloud. Some members of the group said they were going to try and dig their
way out.
While the digging began, Compas tried to contact other managers via radio to see
whether they were okay. But he found that–although he could hear some managers
talking back and forth–he couldn’t transmit; the soot and debris were blocking the
signal.
A fireman turned to Compas and said that digging out would take too long and that
they needed to find another exit. Compas and three others decided to go back the way
they came and try to go out the main entrance, where debris had been falling before.
They walked past where they had originally been knocked down by the falling rubble.
In the area where police had set up the command post and across the horizontal
length of the hotel, there was debris 10 feet high–glass, steel, concrete, and bodies.
The group began climbing over the rubble.
As they mounted the pile of debris, they realized that holes in the rubble were open
several stories down to the basement, creating the risk that one of them would fall
through. The survivors had to jump carefully over these holes until they finally reached
solid flooring.
As soon as he had scaled the 75 feet of rubble, Compas heard two women screaming
his name and asking for help. A security employee and a member of the front desk
staff were on top of the mound and were attempting to crawl over. The men formed a
chain to get the two women down. Each person stood at a different location to make
sure that the women wouldn’t fall through the holes in the debris.
The six survivors then saw lights flashing. Making their way through the haze, the
group reached the lights and found that they were the roof lights of an ambulance and
a police car. The vehicles had been crushed, but their emergency lights were working.
It was only at this point that members of the group realized they were outside.
Compas turned around and saw that the entire hotel had collapsed, except for one
50-square-foot section where he and the others had fallen. Compas later learned that
the hotel was made of poured concrete but the section still standing was constructed
of reinforced steel.
“I thought we were at war,” says Compas. “So I suggested that we walk to Battery
Park because the buildings couldn’t fall that far.” As they were walking, a police officer
grabbed Compas’s arm and told him to go into a building about four blocks from the
WTC where a triage unit had been set up. Only then did Compas realize that he was
bleeding and his clothes were in tatters. Once inside that building, Compas felt it start
to shake.
“I knew I could not stay in another building,” says Compas. He ran outside just in time
to see Tower One collapse. As the dust cloud advanced on them, Compas, the WTC
Marriott employees, and several former coworkers from another nearby Marriott began
to run. When they reached Battery Park, they found about 1,000 people already there.
Determined to get the remaining staff out of Manhattan, Compas convinced them to
get on a waiting ferry. Eventually, with the help of family and friends, Compas got the
surviving employees home.
The missing. Two hotel managers from the WTC Marriott died on September 11. They
were both helping in the evacuation. One was killed when the building collapsed. The
last time anyone saw the second manager, he was on the third floor helping people
evacuate. Nine guests are still missing and presumed dead. However, it is impossible
to know whether they were in the hotel at the time of the attacks or in the WTC
conducting business.
Lessons Learned
After the search and rescue phase was over, hotel security experts wanted to learn all
they could about how evacuation procedures really worked in such catastrophic
circumstances. The Hotel Association for the City of New York invited Compas to
speak about his experiences. After giving an account of what happened to him on
September 11, Compas noted that most of the emergency procedures went as
planned but the scale of the disaster was too great.
Based on his presentation, the association’s board decided to devise a generic
evacuation plan noting several steps that security managers can take during a
catastrophic event. The generic plan was designed so that each individual security
director could then tailor a more specific program to suit his or her own property.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, the board based the generic plan on the fire-safety
plan that every hotel is required to have under New York City Local Law 16. Each
establishment must also have a fire command station in the lobby and a fire-safety
officer on duty 24 hours a day. The fire-safety officer can be a proprietary security
officer, but he or she must be certified by the New York City Fire Department. The law
also has other requirements that factor in during an evacuation. (These issues are
discussed in more detail later.)
Based on Compas’s experiences, the board organized the generic plan around three
main points–notifying guests, conducting room searches, and planning evacuation
routes.
Notification.
To notify guests and employees of an evacuation, the board recommended that
security use the public address system, which all hotels in New York must have as a
part of the fire command system. During the evacuation, suggests the plan,
announcements should continue to all areas of the building to reassure guests and
employees.
It is important for everyone to be continuously informed during an evacuation.
Announcements can be made to individual floors, groups of floors, and stairwells.
Initially, guests should be directed to an area of the hotel where they will not interfere
with emergency personnel or vehicles. Security should keep the lobby and front of the
building clear of obstructions.
At this point, a list should be used to account for guests who have been evacuated. If
an evacuation is going to take a long time or is being conducted in dangerous
situations, managers should be assigned to walk guests to other hotels or to a
designated outside meeting point.
Searches.
To ensure the safety of all guests, the plan calls for notification to be supplemented by
physical searches of each room. In conducting the search, the plan suggests that
searchers first place the back of a hand high against each door to determine whether
there is heat emanating from the room. If there is, the room should not be entered.
If the room can be entered, the searchers should announce their intention. One
searcher should stay at the door while the other checks under the beds, in the closet,
and in the bathroom. Also, any areas that are not within the line of sight, such as
dressing areas and sitting rooms, should be checked.
After leaving the room, searchers should close the door and make a mark outside on
the middle of the door, below the level of the door handle. The type of marking to be
used is not specified, but the plan does suggest that marks be made with either chalk
or marker, not with easily dislodged Post-it notes or hanging tags.
Bill McShane, security director for Manhattan East Suites Hotels, which has corporate
headquarters in midtown Manhattan, says that training for search teams is now
integrated into fire training. Approximately eight people are chosen from on-site
personnel to serve on the team. (T…
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