Hingson admitted snapping at his colleague: “And I said, ‘Stop it, David. Panic set in again around the 50th floor when Frank stopped and said they were going to die. The moment of compassion encouraged the woman to keep going, Hingson said. “And literally, eight or nine of us stopped and had a group hug right on the stairs,” he said. Hingson said Roselle began “giving her kisses.” Then she added that they wouldn’t get out alive. Soon, burn victims passed them and, at one point, a woman stopped and said she couldn’t breathe.

The group started to descend more than 1,460 steps. When Hingson entered the stairwell, he caught a familiar odor he remembered smelling at airports: Jet fuel. He directed Frank to steer people from the office toward the stairs, not the elevators, as he had been trained. And the clue that I took away from that was that whatever was going on, it wasn’t such an imminent threat to us that we couldn’t try to evacuate in an orderly way.”Īs the company’s local leader, Hingson had familiarized himself with the building’s emergency procedures, such as fire drills. “(Roselle) wasn’t giving any kind of fear reaction. “The problem wasn’t what I wasn’t seeing, it was what David wasn’t seeing,” he said. In contrast to the reactions of Frank and others in the building, Hingson said Roselle remained calm. When the explosion rocked the North Tower, he said in an interview Friday, Roselle came out from under his desk where she had been sleeping. A calming presence amid chaosĪt the time of the attacks 20 years ago today, Hingson - who now lives in Spring Valley Lake - was 51 and working as the regional sales manager in New York City for Quantum Corporation, a Fortune 500 data protection and storage company. In that moment, all Hingson knew was that they needed to evacuate in an orderly manner - a task that would require the help of him and his guide dog, a yellow Labrador Retriever named Roselle. What Hingson - and most in the North Tower of the World Trade Center - wouldn’t know until much later was that a hijacked plane had just slammed into their building about 15 stories above. “We gotta get out of here right now!” Hingson recalled Frank yelling.

He said he tried to calm Frank down as his coworker became frantic. “We moved about 20 feet.”Īfter the tower began to right itself, a colleague, David Frank, looked out the window and could see flames and smoke. Pieces of burning paper and debris rained down. “The tower literally just started tipping and tipping and tipping,” Hingson said. Michael Hingson was preparing for a day of sales seminars in his 78th floor skyscraper office when he heard what sounded like a muffled explosion.Īlmost immediately, he said he felt the 1,368-foot-tall building shudder.

Thunder dog roselle