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CNN Live At Daybreak

America's New War: Surviving the Fire and the Experience

Aired September 18, 2001 - 07:43   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Right now I want to introduce you to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who has been with us since last Tuesday filing reports from area hospitals, visiting with families who are trying to figure out what happened to their loved ones. And you have an update for us this morning. Good morning.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.

Many of the survivors of the World Trade Center certainly, we've heard about them being the walking wounded, so to speak, cuts and abrasions, eye injuries, smoke inhalation, things like that. But there were people who survived this World Trade Center tragedy, but barely. And a lot of those patients are actually at the Weil Cornell Burn Center, which was luckily the largest burn center right down the road from where this took place.

I had a chance to actually go speak with them and certainly heard about their burns and things like that, which was really remarkable. But what I learned more than anything else was that their pain really reaches beyond the physical.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MANU DHINGRA, BURN VICTIM: All of a sudden as I'm walking in the hallway I hear a door explode and just this big ball of fire just engulfed me. I just froze, I didn't do anything, I just stood there.

It's somebody from the building maintenance. I'm sure they came up and they said we have to evacuate, we have to evacuate. And I'm thinking how am I going to get down, you know, and I just -- all my arms are burnt, my back is burnt, face.

And so one of my friends they're like, Manu, you have to get out, you have to get out. You know there's nobody here, you have to get out. So I just, I don't know how, I just jumped up and just started running down the stairs and people were very nice. They saw that I was burned and they let me go in front of them.

GUPTA (voice-over): That's got to be shocking for you to even see, let alone think about how to treat.

DR. ROGER YURT, WEILL CORNELL BURN CENTER: What was more shocking was seeing so many with big burns at the same time. LING YOUNG, BURN VICTIM: I was very fortunate I was in the back of the elevator. This -- OK, anybody in front of me either killed, no leg, no face, it was just disgusting.

She said I can't breathe, I've got to get the hell out of here. And they said, no, we've got to wait for one more. She says, if you don't let me get out of here I'm not going to be able to make it. Finally the EMS said, OK, let's go. After we turn around the corner, the whole building collapsed on us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: I don't know if you caught that, at the very end there she said she thought she was the last one out of the building and it actually collapsed right behind her. That's a story she shared with me when I was at the hospital visiting with her.

The road for these patients, all of them, the three that we spoke with and certainly all the patients in the burn units, is a very long road. The burn surgery and the treatment for burns is among the most painful of all. It actually involves peeling away skin layer after layer up to two times a day for months. And even with that, sometimes the survival, because of infections, can be severely limited.

A couple of interesting things that I learned when I was at the hospital, just in terms of the temperature in this building, they think it got up to 1,000 degrees. And just to give you a frame of reference, a 155 degree temperature exposure for even one second can give you a third degree burn. So you can only imagine what a ball of fire at 1,000 degrees could possibly do.

These patients certainly have a long road in front of them. We're going to sort of keep an eye on them, Paula, as we go along.

ZAHN: I'm stunned by what you're saying. One second of exposure to that heat at that temperature would give you third degree burns.

GUPTA: Well, actually, they say one second at 155 degrees and this, they say, could have reached up to 1,000 degrees. So, you know, it's certainly five to 10 times that. And they were describing these balls of fire coming down the hallways and they were, you know, as anybody probably would, didn't know what to do and a lot of times were just being engulfed by these.

The first gentleman we met actually is a dark skinned gentleman. You can -- and you noticed his face is completely pink, if not white, because of all the burns over his face.

ZAHN: And once again, because of the high degree of risk involved here and the healing process, what is the point at which these people can rest comfortably and say I'm OK?

GUPTA: Right. Excellent question. And one of the interesting statistics when you're talking about burn surgery, they actually measure the percentage of burn on your body and add that to your age and that gives you an estimate of your likelihood of death, not survival, death. So, you know, if someone has a 40 percent burn and they might be 45 years of age, there's still an 85 percent chance that that person won't survive the incident. The biggest risk, infection. The skin is the largest organ in the body and it's really the greatest barrier against infection. And, you know, that skin is gone now so infection, pneumonia, all those sorts of complications are risks that the doctors are worried about for several months to come.

ZAHN: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you very much for your perspective this morning.

GUPTA: Thank you, Paula.

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