Goshen speaker shares 9/11 story of loss, survival and service

Dr. Gordon Huie stood before a Goshen audience and described the moment a routine morning in Lower Manhattan turned into a lifetime of loss and service. He was heading to NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital for a research interview when he saw both towers of the World Trade Center on fire, then ended up inside a makeshift trauma ward trying to help patients arrive from the disaster.

By noon, Huie said, he realized no more patients were being sent up, not because the hospital was full, but because no more survivors were coming in. That detail, stark even 25 years later, is what gives his story its force in Orange County: it is not only about remembrance, but about the realities responders still train for when they prepare for mass-casualty events.

Orange County brought Huie to the Emergency Services Center Auditorium at 22 Wells Farm Road as part of its Leadership Speaker Series. The event was free, but registration was required. County officials described Huie as the only recorded “Triple” in New York City history related to the Sept. 11 attacks, a rare combination of survivor, first responder and bereaved family member.

The personal loss was immediate and permanent. Huie’s sister, Susan Huie, died on Sept. 11, 2001, at age 43. Legacy.com identified her as a Compaq employee and a resident of Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Huie’s account tied that family loss to the broader death toll of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people and remain the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.

His story also underscored the medical strain that day placed on New York hospitals. NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell has said the hospital system rescued and treated many survivors of the attacks, and that four NewYork-Presbyterian EMS employees were killed. A Weill Cornell retrospective said NewYork-Presbyterian/Lower Manhattan Hospital treated 350 patients within the first two hours after the attacks, a scale that helps explain why Huie’s experience still resonates with emergency planners.

Huie now speaks regularly to groups and serves as a docent at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan, where the story of 9/11 is told through media, narratives and artifacts. He has also spoken publicly about multiple cancers linked to toxic dust and materials at Ground Zero, adding a long-term health burden to a story already defined by survival, duty and grief.

In Goshen, the message was clear: 9/11 is not only history. It remains part of how Orange County thinks about readiness, response and the human cost of disaster.