Ben Curtis on 9/11
Excerpt from the St. Petersburg Times

Then there was Sept. 11, when Curtis found himself in the midst of the crisis and a medical drama. He was asleep in his Lower Manhattan apartment three blocks from the World Trade Center when the first tower was hit. His roommate, a photographer, heard an explosion, grabbed his camera and left to see what happened.

"I went back to sleep, because I thought it was a gas explosion," Curtis says. "But when the second building was hit, I woke up and could see the fire. And I ran down to look for my roommate."

Curtis couldn't find him but witnessed the horror in every direction. As the first building crumbled, he raced down a flight of subway stairs. A cloud of debris poured into the subway entrance, so Curtis and others wrapped shirts around their heads so they could breathe.

"We couldn't see anything, so we ran down the stairs into another room," he says. That is where Curtis found an elderly woman. Her face was bleeding from a deep gash. Curtis quickly put his first aid training as an Eagle Scout to use. Working with another man with emergency medical training, Curtis assisted the woman, tearing off part of his shirt to make a bandage. But they could tell she was in shock and needed immediate help.

"There was glass on the side of her head, and we couldn't really touch it," he says. "So we got her back up to the top to a fire marshal."

Curtis temporarily took shelter in a bank that had been abandoned, and then ran down the street. "There was a bus, and I heard the word "uptown,' so I jumped on, covered with soot," he says. "I needed to get off, though, to find my friends at Union Square in Midtown, and they weren't letting anyone off."

Curtis was about to miss his stop and head for Queens. But what he heard next stunned him: "Somebody on the bus goes, "Hey, it's the Dell kid.' And the bus driver says, "Hey, it is,' and he let me off."