Dr. Samuel Conway kindly allowed me to re-publish this article in its entirety. I found it moving when I read it this morning and I really wanted to share it with you.

Anyone involved in emergency planning faces the same challenge on a daily basis: apathy from the “what’s the big deal” set. It ranges from eyerolling to grumbling to outright hostility. “We can’t leave now. We’re in the middle of an important meeting.” “It’s cold outside. Why can’t we go to our offices and get our coats?” “Fire drills are stupid. They do nothing but feed the egos of the control-freaks who think they’re God because someone gave them a megaphone.”

The control freak with the megaphone in the picture above is Rick Rescorla (born Cyril, but he hated that name). He was chief of security at Morgan Stanley, which occupied more than twenty floors of World Trade Center Tower 2. After witnessing the chaotic and, frankly, pathetic evacuation of the Center after the bombing attempt in 1993, Rescorla demanded quarterly evacuation drills that must have had hundreds of people cursing his name. Every three months, nearly 2700 Morgan Stanley employees were forced to walk down as many as 75 flights of stairs to the street below, with Rescorla urging them on with a megaphone that 90% of them probably wanted to stuff down his throat.

Eight years ago on a warm and sunny Tuesday morning that I remember all too clearly, all but six of the 2700 Morgan Stanley employees made it out of Tower #2 safely. They had left their offices and filed down those stairs countless times before, and thus knew exactly what to do, where to line up, how to keep moving, and what to do when they reached the street.

The picture above was taken that same morning by a secretary as Rescorla herded the employees downstairs, using his megaphone to keep them calm by singing Men of Harlech (he was Welsh) and other rousing songs. It was the last photo of him ever taken. Just as the last of the Morgan Stanley employees reached the street level, United Airlines flight 175 struck Tower 2. Rescorla ran back inside to try to locate the stragglers. He was last seen headed upstairs from the 10th floor landing. Someone shouted to him to get out of the building; his reply was, “As soon as I make sure everyone else is out.” He was not seen again and his body was never found.

I like to keep Rescorla’s story in my mind every time I conduct a fire drill at work and listen to all the sighs and the impatient grumbling and the “why the hell are they wasting our time with this?” It gives me and all other emergency planners the courage to do our jobs when we think of our fellow control freak with the megaphone and the nearly 2700 people who are alive today because of him.

Dr. Conway’s original post and comments can be found here.