An ex-girlfriend called with the news: airplanes had crashed into both World Trade Center towers. They were burning only a mile away.
An hour later, Dr. Emil Chynn '87 would be trying to find someone to save in the worst terrorist attack in American history.
Chynn turned on the television, saw the destruction, and called the hospitals he worked at to volunteer for trauma call. They said to stand by.
But Chynn did not want to wait. He had been an intern at St. Vincent's in 1993 when the WTC was attacked. Over 12 hours passed between that strike and the moment casualties started arriving in the Emergency Room.
So Chynn gathered an eye surgical kit and 30 complimentary eye kits consisting of eye shields, goggles, tape, antibiotic drops and artificial tears. On Rollerblades, it took Chynn a half-hour to cover the one mile to hell.
Fifteen minutes before he arrived, the second tower had collapsed. Chynn didn't know.
"It was so smoky you couldn't see where the towers should have been," he said in a telephone interview with The Dartmouth.
"Everything was burning. It smelled like rubber, plastics, wood, glass, just synthetics burning. All the cars were burning. You couldn't really breathe at all. You couldn't see more than 10 or 20 feet in front of you."
At his feet were the debris of thousands of offices: sheets of accounting paper, framed pictures of smiling families, teddy bears that had once inhabited office desks.
As an ophthalmologist, Chynn had mostly worked on eye trauma. Arriving at the scene, he expected to treat glass lodged in eyes, lacerated corneas and ruptured eyeballs.
But there was no one to treat, so Chynn established a morgue in an evacuated Brooks Brothers store.
"We had the morgue right in front of the mannequins," he said.
Chynn met up with about a dozen other healthcare workers, including an anesthesiologist, a trauma resident and a few nurses. They moved into the only nearby building that was standing and had electricity, the local Burger King.
There they set up a triage to treat the exodus of people they all expected to come.
The triage "is where you take the initial victims and you decide whether they're going to be resuscitated, operated on at the scene, if you're going to stick them into the ambulance to go to the hospital or if you're just going to let them die," Chynn said.
While moving a group of apple pies to make space for the IVs, the group realized they lacked several crucial items such as catheters, basic surgical instruments and ACLS (advanced cardiac life support) supplies.
"If any victims were brought to us in critical condition, there would be real trouble," Chynn said. One doctor got so frustrated he cried and beat his head against a wall.
There was no hierarchy in the chaos. "A Fire Battalion Chief came in and asked 'Who's the doctor in charge?' We just kind of looked at each other. So I said 'I guess maybe I'm in charge,'" Chynn said.
"There was no order. The cops and firefighters couldn't organize the scene; they were just trying to find each other, find their buddies."
Chynn recalled being in charge of setting up the morgue and initial triage, noting that is not what he is trained to do. But as with many others, he responded to the situation.
It was "not really my area of specialty. I'm an eye surgeon. But there was no one else to do it," Chynn said.
Some of the group went to scout the surrounding ambulances for supplies while the rest of the group set up the triage.
"We set up IVs, sterile area for operations, a crash cart in case you need to do CPR with the paddles, a suture area in case people are "thumpers" -- what you call arterial bleeders -- and a place where you can sew them up. There were basically no supplies. If we had 500 intakes, 100 would die just because we didn't have the right stuff," he said.
But no walking wounded came.
Around 1 p.m., the dense smoke shrouding the space where the World Trade Center should have been suddenly thinned. Chynn and his group came to a standstill. The towers were gone. They realized it then: very few victims of the attack would come for treatment.
They treated only two victims the day of the attack and only three the following day.
Chynn volunteered for the next six days, treating mostly rescue workers for abraded corneas and eyes affected by foreign bodies.
Since then, Chynn has helped coordinate some of the donation efforts of ophthalmic companies and has collected charitable contributions through his vision correction practice.
Now, he realizes, he is lucky to be alive.
"I was thinking that if I didn't have to walk my dog, I would have been there 15 minutes earlier," he said. "I could have been dead. It's all strange."
