Manhattan-bound on a PATH train on September 11th, Danielle Briscoe (CAS ’98) watched as flames shot out of the upper floors of the first tower. By the time she got to the 9th Street PATH station, the first tower had already collapsed. She rushed to her office in TriBeCa to retrieve her Red Cross identification card and her steel-toed boots.
Briscoe, a member of the President’s C-Team during her time as an undergraduate at NYU, is also a trained Red Cross disaster volunteer. After picking up her identification, her next stop was the Red Cross headquarters on the Upper West Side. “It was frustrating to have to go all the way uptown just so that I could be sent back downtown, but the first thing they tell you in training is never self-deploy. They send out teams with specific assignments, otherwise it would be chaos,” she said.
By noon, Briscoe’s team was deployed and assigned to provide mass care. “Our job was to escort a team of mental health workers to Ground Zero and distribute food, bringing it out to the site for people who needed it. We were supposed to look for walking wounded and help them find assistance.”
She remained on site until midnight. “In a disaster, you’re not supposed to exceed a twelve-hour shift,” she said. By the time her team returned to headquarters, there was no food left and the volunteers were exhausted. “It was very chaotic,” she recalls, “very stressful. You could just see the state of exhaustion. But everybody just kept on going, doing what they knew how to do, but doing it in a state of shock and numbness.”
Briscoe returned to the site a week later with two other volunteers to hang drawings done by fifth graders to commemorate those who had been lost in the tragedy. “We hung pictures at the family memorial site and it was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. It was piles and piles of flowers, and teddy bears, and letters written to the missing by their family members. Some fifth graders had done drawings in memory of specific individuals; others were general tributes to the firefighters, police, and rescue workers. They were truly amazing pictures.”
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