Carol Marin Survived 9/11 Thanks to a Firefighter She'll Never Know
Longtime Chicago reporter Carol Marin, who was a CBS reporter at the time, interviewed by Dan Rather on 9/11 after fleeing the collapsing second tower and being saved by a firefighter.
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September 11, 2001 was a regular Tuesday morning for longtime Chicago news anchor and reporter Carol Marin, who was working with CBS News and 60 Minutes in New York. A few hours later, Marin was nearly killed as the second tower at the World Trade Center collapsed.
“I was one of the only ones in early that morning and on the monitors I saw a plane hit the first tower. I thought it was a Cessna. Then it began to dawn on everyone it was not,” said Marin, who retired from TV news last year. “When the second plane hit the second tower, I told whoever was in there that I was going down there because I knew that from reporting on disasters before that you’ve gotta get to the site before police establish lines closing it off.”
Marin recalls fighting a huge crowd on foot as she tried to make her way to the towers, all headed away from Ground Zero. She saw the first tower collapse from a distance, but continued toward the site looking for a CBS crew.
“A firefighter told me to walk in the middle of the street and the ground began to move. He turned around and screamed ‘run!’ And the second tower began to collapse towards us,” she said. “[The firefighter] saved me by throwing me against a granite wall of a building nearby that had an overhang. He covered me with his body and saved me.”
She never learned the firefighters name.
“It turned daylight into darkness,” Marin recalls of the collapse of the second tower. “The air was absolutely filled with the black cinders and remains of people and things. You couldn’t see. So you had to find your way out of that enormous cloud of debris into the light.”
Through an empty ambulance and a damaged New York City bus, Marin was taken the 5 miles or so back to the CBS Broadcast Center. She was immediately whisked in the studio to speak with Dan Rather on air.
“I walked in, they looked at me, grabbed me, and put me in the studio,” she said. “It’s what you do. It’s what we do. We run toward the thing that we’re covering. We go to work right away and the reporting is the minute-by-minute processing of what you’ve seen. Then being a witness for the people who haven’t seen it or haven’t been there. And that’s what I did.”
Marin said it took time to realize what she had been through.
“It hit me in waves. It still, to a much more limited degree, does,” Marin said. “I left the studio, checked in with 60 Minutes and we begin reporting out different parts of the story. I was on and off the air all that night until midnight or one o’clock. When I finally got sent home, which was back to my hotel, everything had changed. New York had changed. When I got to my room and got into the shower, I all of the sudden felt this enormous sting and realized the first firefighter told me to take my high heels off when I ran, I had run through the rubble in my bare and stocking feet. I had lost skin on my toes and never noticed all night. I just worked. Adrenaline takes you a long way.”
While Marin is retired from television, she is still co-director of The Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence at DePaul University in Chicago.
“We have students who are 21, 22, 23 years old. They don’t remember 9/11,” she said. “I don’t want people to forget some of the lessons, that for a brief moment this country was united in the face of this calamity, and we squandered that solidarity, frankly.”
She says part of the duty is making sure future generations don’t forget what happened.
But, to this day, Marin still thinks about that firefighter, how she made it out, and about those who didn’t.
“I do think about that day. Not all the time, but I do,” she said. “This is the story of the 2,000 who perished, much more than it’s my story. That’s how it should be. “