2012 Touchstone Nominated Story. The following story from the Toledo City Paper was nominated for the Press Club of Toledo's Touchstone award for Excellence in Journalism.
The entire soundscape of New York City echoed with the desperate pleas of ambulances and police sirens; Carolina Wishner, armed with a video camera and very limited English-speaking skills, found herself in the back of a cab with a full police escort, being whisked against the grain of thousands of scared faces, headed in the direction from which the masses fled, straight into the epicenter of America’s most egregious tragedy. To offer her services, and perhaps her life, to the injured victims escaping the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center Towers, a place to be forever infamously known as Ground Zero.
Carolina now lives with her husband Alan Wishner and their daughter Caroline in Maumee. In her already extraordinary life, she has served as the Director of the Clinic of the National Police in her native country the Republic of Panama. She has prior experience working on large scale disasters by way of her efforts at Chernobyl in the mid-1980’s. She made the move to the Toledo area in 2006, and is currently pursuing her Masters in Public Health Administration at the University of Toledo. However, the memories of her by-chance rescue efforts on the morning of September 11, 2001, still linger after a decade’s time.
By all accounts, the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, appeared to be the start of a beautiful day. The sun boasted the glorious might of its rays without impediment from even the smallest cloud, and the temperature hovered around a comfortable 70 degrees. Carolina and her husband were splitting time between Panama and their apartment in Manhattan. She had spent all of the early morning of the 11th cleaning the apartment, as the couple had planned to take a flight back to Panama on September 12. Everything seemed normal except the outside noise of the city’s morning bustle sounded subtly different.

Running toward terror
“Our apartment had windows in front of the river, and I can hear ambulances and they don’t stop. I look out the window and see ambulances, police, completely black cars with many antennas. I think something is wrong—something is not right. There are many fire trucks and cars and something is not right.” Carolina recalls. “I put on the news and I saw the airplane hit the first building, and I think ‘oh my goodness, which movie is this?’ and then I could see the news at the bottom saying how the plane hit the building and now I thought ‘this isn’t a movie, this is true!’ and I immediately connected all the ambulances and fire trucks heading in that direction. Oh my god, I thought — this is not good. There must be something wrong with the pilot. It never occurred to me that this was terrorism.”
Realizing she had just disposed her perishable food in anticipation of leaving the next day, she ran to the corner market once the news mentioned a possible terrorist attack.
“I was in line to pay and the second plane hit and everybody started screaming ‘oh my god’ and crying. And everybody started running. I was in shock. I knew this was not good; something is happening to this country. I think the worst. You can see people running from that (the towers’) direction and you can see the terror in their faces. Once I had food, I thought ‘I need to go the hospital, because I can help.”
Carolina tried to reach her husband at his office, but couldn’t. So, without hesitation, and without knowing if more attacks were on the way, Carolina grabbed her video camera and headed toward the nearest hospital to volunteer. She would not get to talk to her husband until 11pm that night.
A month before the attacks, Carolina had finally talked her husband Alan into taking her to see the WTC. Alan had been to the towers many times and thought it was not worth the admission, just for the sake of the view. But after months of begging, he finally gave in and in early August 2001, Carolina, equipped with her video camera, and Alan visited the WTC like any other happy tourists. The couple took pictures from the base of the towers, looking up at their immense scale. They strolled along the attractions in the large enormous lobby. They bought little trinkets in the gift shop to take back to Panama. They ascended to the observation deck and marveled at the unparalleled view of the city. In an unintentionally surreal “touristy” moment, they posed for a picture with arms flailing and shocked faces, with the towers superimposed as a backdrop, so it would appear as if the couple had jumped off the towers. A month later, and forever after, Carolina was haunted by images of trapped office workers, plunging to escape a fiery death.

Lending a hand
When Carolina arrived at New York University’s Medical Center there were people already pouring in covered in thick ash. At that time her English was very poor. She could understand but had trouble expressing herself. So she spoke to the medical staff, desperate to lend aid.
“I explained — ‘Spanish, Spanish; my English is not good,’ so one doctor came up who could speak Spanish and I felt so good. I said ‘Hello, how are you? I am Carolina Wishner. I am a medical doctor. I have training in advanced trauma and life support. I can help, and I want to help.”
They immediately assigned Carolina to a team gearing up to take medical supplies as close as possible to Ground Zero to set up a makeshift emergency room. The staff recognized her credentials and her native language would be essential tools once they reached the chaos of the site.
That is how Carolina found heself in the back of a taxi, with other anxious volunteers accompanied by a full police escort. Racing against time to save as many lives as possible, and Carolina pressed on against a sea of people heading in the opposite direction, away from the carnage of Ground Zero.
Her team was made up of doctors, nurses, med students, ex-military personnel and any other rescue and aid volunteers drawn to the site by their sense of duty. Stationed close to Ground Zero, Carolina recalls hearing explosions from the site; reminders that they were still very much in harm’s way. Once the team set up their triage unit, people immediately started flooding in. Mostly they aided weary policemen covered in ash, ragged firefighters with debris in their eyes, or other tired EMT workers, who, once treated, headed back into the rubble to aid anybody they could find.
The team also got another appallingly grim task. They were given trash bags and directed to scan the site to find any missing scattered limbs. And even as night set in, the team never stopped. Soon other people started pouring in, but these people did not need aid. They came with food, supplies and encouragement for the medical team. Carolina remembers the crowd of strangers cheering and expressing their gratitude
Many mixed feelings
“You wanted to work,” she remembers. “You wanted to cry. You wanted to be there. You wanted not to be there. So many mixed feelings. It was horrible, so horrible.”
Finally, Carolina borrowed someone’s cell phone and got in touch with Alan. By the time she could reach a bus and walk the couple miles home, it was well past midnight. Since all flights were cancelled, her trip back to Panama was postponed. She got up early the next morning and returned to the site to continue working.
Carolina worked the entire week at the makeshift emergency room. And on September 16, she and Alan attended the mass memorial service held on Fifth Avenue. Taxi drivers, firemen, waitresses, stranded tourists and businessmen all lined the streets holding candles and gathering to honor those who had fallen along with the towers. Finally, the entire weight of the week hit Carolina and she sobbed on Alan’s shoulder. The next morning Carolina and Alan received calls from friends and family. A photographer had captured that moment of sadness. Alan and Carolina were pictured that day in the New York Times.
Carolina and Alan have since visited Ground Zero. They have an eight-year-old daughter now, Caroline, who was born after 9/11, so the tragic scale of the event and the small role her mother played in it may not resonate with her. But Carolina keeps a scrapbook and the surreal videos she took on that fateful day, to preserve the memories for Caroline. She has pictures from the triage unit, the memorials that sprouted around the city of the missing or deceased, and even the picture of her and Alan pretending to have leapt off the towers in a long-gone moment of innocence. 

