Scrambling to Safety Was a Gamble

Rescuer recalls how fellow worker was lost

By William Murphy | STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2001

Life and death might have been as simple as running in a particular direction when the World Trade Center towers collapsed after the terrorist attack last Tuesday.

"None of us ran the same way," paramedic Manuel Delgado, 45, of Astoria, said yesterday. "We all ended up in a different place."

Delgado ended up in the safety of his trim home on 21st Street yesterday, with his wife, Veronica, and two children, Michelle, 12, and Eric, 8.

His good friend Carlos Lillo, whom he trained as an emergency medical technician with the Fire Department, is missing.

"He was a very good medic, compassionate," Del- gado said. "We called him Little Ricky because of his Hispanic accent," a reference to Ricky Ricardo in the old "I Love Lucy" sitcom.

"I don't know which way he went," said Delgado, who has been on the job for 18 years.

Delgado spends most of his workday making sure that the city's ambulance crews, paramedics and emergency medical technicians are properly certified.

When he saw the first reports of the attack Tuesday morning, he jumped into a department vehicle and raced across the Brooklyn Bridge with two other medical workers, starting a weeklong effort to provide medical support for the civilians and emergency workers at the scene.

For the next several hours, Delgado recalled yesterday, he jumped from command post to triage units as the collapsing towers pushed rescuers farther back from the scene.

When the first tower crumbled, it felt like an impossibly loud airplane roar, he said. "Then I saw the [second] tower leaning toward us. I thought it was going to fall on us. I didn't know it was going to pancake," he said.

Delgado said that he, an unidentified fire marshal and a plainclothes police officer ran toward a nearby building and tried to get in.

"I remember telling the cop, 'If you've got a gun, shoot the door,' and he did," Delgado said. "He put two bullets in that door and it came down."

The trio broke through the glass, then lifted a security gate and let civilians rush into the safety of the building.

Delgado returned downtown yesterday and was one of a crew of rescue workers and officials at a ceremony to reopen trading on the New York Stock Exchange.