Samantha

Twenty five years ago today, six firefighters slowed down for the slowest person in the stairwell, and that is the only reason any of them are alive. Josephine Harris was 59 years old. A widow and a grandmother from Brooklyn. A bookkeeper for the Port Authority who worked on the 73rd floor of the North Tower. When the building was hit she started walking down. She was still recovering from an accident and her legs were bad, and she was descending a smoke filled stairwell with thousands of other people. She made it more than fifty floors on her own, which is an achievement most people reading this could not manage on a good day. Somewhere around the 20th floor she stopped. She could not go any further. She was exhausted and crying and people were flowing past her. Captain Jay Jonas and Ladder Company 6 were going the other way. They had climbed to the 27th floor when the South Tower came down at 9:59, and Jonas understood immediately what that meant for the building they were standing in. He turned his men around and started them down. Then they found Josephine Harris. They could have gone past her. They had every operational justification. The building they were in was going to fall and they knew it, they had their own men to get out, and she could barely stand. Instead Bill Butler put her arm over his shoulders and they went down at her pace. Step. Rest. Step. Rest. Six firefighters in full gear, descending a skyscraper they expected to lose, at the speed of a 59 year old woman with bad legs. They got to the fourth floor and she stopped completely. She could not take another step. They were still trying to move her when the North Tower came down at 10:28 in the morning. One hundred and ten stories collapsed on top of them. And a short section of Stairwell B, right there in the core, between roughly the second and fourth floors, did not collapse. It held. Fourteen people inside it lived. Jonas and his men, Chief Richard Picciotto, Port Authority officer David Lim, firefighters from other companies, and Josephine Harris. They were buried, in the dark, listening to the building settle. Bill Butler got a call out to his wife to tell her where they were. After a while the dust began to drift and clear, and sunlight came down through the stairwell from above, which is how they finally understood that there was no longer any building over their heads. They were pulled out hours later. Here is the arithmetic those men have lived with ever since. Ladder 6 was moving fast. If they had not stopped for Josephine Harris, they would have been in the lobby or out on the street when the tower came down, and the lobby and the street were killing fields. Her exhaustion held them in the exact place, at the exact minute, where the building chose not to fall. They had a jacket made for her. It said Josephine, Our Guardian Angel, with the Ladder 6 patch. It is in the 9/11 Museum now. She stayed close with those men for the rest of her life. When she died in 2011, the firefighters of Ladder 6 carried her casket. Three hundred and forty three firefighters died that day running toward people they had never met. Six of them lived because they refused to leave one woman behind, and she saved them right back.