Community Corner

Remembering 9/11: Sleepless Nights

Carol Gamble thought it was tough enough being mayor during 9/11. Then, she learned one of her residents was a victim.

Carol Gamble was mayor in a city that wasn't yet 2 years old. In her business as a security consultant—some of her clients are among the tallest buildings in Los Angeles—she knew she was in for a long day as she watched United Flight 175 fly into the World Trade Center. As bad and hectic as it was in those first few hours, it was about to get worse.

She was in Rancho Santa Margarita's Emerency Operations Center with its banks of phones when someone tapped her on the arm and whispered into her ear, "We lost a resident from RSM."

"I remember having this strange sense at that time that I have probably met everyone in the city at least three times to get cityhood in the ballot," said Gamble, who was 38 at the time and had been the face of the Cityhood Committee's five-year push for incorporation.

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Lisa Frost's death upped the ante for Gamble as residents of her city wanted to know what they could do, how they could help. Foremost, "My feeling is that the city needs to take direction from the family, whether they needed traffic control or if they wanted to be left alone" as the media descended on the home of Tom and Melanie Frost.

For Gamble the days were all about the city being an efficient clearinghouse for accurate information about church services, blood and food donations, financial contributions, grief counseling, and memorial times. It was about conveying a sense of safety within the community.

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Reflecting back, she says she has a deeper sense of duty in the aftermath of 9/11, that she takes her role even more seriously.

"It was a huge day in my life, and it would have been less impactful if I had not been the mayor," Gamble said. "I would have had more normal reactions like other people had. To be in that role and carry out all the duties that were necessary at that time, made every moment so much more impactful and important. It wasn't a time that I could have private thoughts, it was moving from one great crisis to another."

Over the next four days, between her work as a business owner and her work as a city leader, she perhaps got a dozen hours of sleep, "if that."

"You'd sit and doze off, but your mind wasn't at rest," Gamble said. "It was ticking off the list of 'I've got to call this person, check on that thing, I need to return this phone call and reach out to this group,' and you're contemplating how to head things off at the pass, you're anticipating things hoping to intervene prior to them becoming problems. You spend time in reaction mode, and pro-active mode, and there's no time left."

She made sure city staff reached out to houses of worship to know what they were doing to minister to the community. "It was days and days of real gut-wrenching emotional work," Gamble said.

She attended every church service or memorial, anything in the community to do with the tragedy. Sometimes they overlapped and she arrived late, but she says she got the them all, dozens of them.

"I didn't attend anything officially because it wasn't about being the mayor," Gamble said. "It was about being able to take the pulse of what the community was feeling so I could go back and report that we have deep grief, we have confusion, we have fear. How can you lead if you don't know the feelings of the people?

"I’m hoping that in retrospect, 10 years later, that people feel that we did."


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