'You had to push your personal life to one side, despite the danger, and just deal with the patient'

“I never wanted to work in a burn unit,” says Daniel Haughie. “It didn’t appeal to me and I tried to get another job when I qualified, but they were scarce. It may seem gruesome but when I came to the unit I fell in love with it and have never met a patient who wasn’t grateful for the work you do.”

Mr Haughie was in his first nursing post at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Burn Unit when the World Trade Center was hit by two planes on 9/11. He was not working that day but, seeing the news that the first tower had been hit, he rang the hospital to ask if they wanted him to help. “They said no, they were clearing the unit and would let me know if they needed me.” But when he saw the second plane hit 20 minutes later, he didn’t bother to phone again. “I just called my wife and told her I was going in,” he says.

When he arrived around 10.30am, it was “pretty chaotic”. The unit had been cleared to make way for patients. Teams were divided up to each include a nurse, a doctor and a therapist; they worked on patients, got them stabilised and stayed with them for the rest of the day.

This was Mr Haughie’s first nursing job after graduating, and he had only been doing it for 1.5 years when the disaster occurred - but he was used to dealing with such accidents on a bigger scale.

“It wasn’t uncommon for us to take in large numbers of patients,” he says. “We’d had steam explosions or accidents on the subway or house fires, so we can go from being dead quiet to having admitted many patients in one go.”

What was unusual was the nature of the injuries. “We had one woman who wasn’t even in the towers. She was walking across the plaza at the World Trade Center when she was covered in burning jet fuel. She had burns from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. We stabilised her, but within 11 weeks, she succumbed to her injuries.”

Unlike in normal disaster situations, where staff would be told a patient was coming, they would just arrive because control was swamped. Mr Haughie says the expectation was that they would see a massive influx, but it never happened. “You could see the main road from the World Trade Center site to the hospital, and we kept waiting to see emergency vehicles, but they did not come. Patients just came in dribs and drabs.

“During the first day we took in eight or nine patients and, all done, we only admitted 23 people into the burn unit from the World Trade Center. Many had 90% burns.

“Working on the formula by which you can calculate someone’s chance of survival by factoring in their age, the amount of their body that is covered in burns and smoke inhalation, several patients had zero chance of survival that day. But of the 23 patients we saw, we lost four.

Life was abnormal for some weeks. “Three or four nurses and I just bedded down that night and got about three hours’ sleep.” Mr Haughie says he didn’t see his wife for more than 20 minutes in those first few days, only briefly chatted with his family and didn’t go home for 11 days. “But,” he says “you had to push your personal life to one side, despite the danger, and just deal with the patient”.

He says the worse thing was seeing relatives who had lost their family. “We incorrectly ended up on a list of places that had unidentified patients, so family members would turn up with pictures and flyers of their loved ones. But we didn’t have unidentified patients, so we would just be taking away those relatives’ last hopes. It was brutal to crush them like that.”

Not that any of it made Mr Haughie regret his choice. “I am not your typical nurse. This was a second career for me as I had been in the military first, but 9/11 reinforced that I had chosen the right path. It made me think, ‘this is why I am here. This is why I became a nurse’.”

» Channel 4’s 9/11 Emergency Room documentary, available on Channel 4 On Demand, tells stories of the emergency services.

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment.