Lying on the floor in her darkened luxury Indian hotel room, Rachel Cirincione heard terrorist gunfire, blasts from grenades lobbed throughout the building, and people screaming as they were gunned down trying to escape.
“You can hear people shooting right in the hall in front of your room. It was terrifying,” the former New Hampshire resident explained yesterday after a harrowing escape from a coordinated attack on the Taj Mahal hotel in India.
As the hours passed inside her second-story room, Cirincione still believed Indian police would rescue her. Then she heard what she thought were people running in the hallway, and she looked through the peephole. The swooshing, crackling sounds, however, were not made by panicked guests but by fires coming at her from both ends of the hallway.
“This was a combination of Columbine and 9/11,” said Cirincione, 43, who grew up in Holderness, graduated from Plymouth High School and still has family in New Hampshire. Relatives monitored her rescue via the Internet.
“The whole thing with people after you with guns and then your little safe house isn’t so safe. If it was just me in my room hiding from these guys, that would have been terrifying enough. Then it turned that wasn’t safe enough.” Cirincione is a tour director with an international tour company. She had completed a six-week training session on how to conduct tours in India and was scheduled to fly out of India earlier last week. Her planned departure had been delayed, however, by an apparent bout with food poisoning. Had she not been in the hospital for a day, she would have avoided the attack entirely.
She recounted her experience in a telephone interview yesterday from her Staten Island, N.Y., home.
“There were a lot more terrorists than they originally realized,” she said, telling her story while the situation at the hotel was still not completely under control.
It has yet to be learned how the terrorists got into the hotel, she said. She noted there was a large wedding party in the ballroom of the massive hotel at the start of the assault.
“I don’t think people realized they were going into (rooms) and taking people hostage right away, but they were,” added Cirincione,
When another explosion rocked the hotel, Cirincione’s telephone went dead. That phone had been her lifeline since the terrorists stormed the hotel about 8 p.m. Wednesday, India time, enabling her to stay in touch with a colleague on the hotel’s fourth floor.
“At that point, I was trapped. Hiding in my room was no longer an option,” she said.
Cirincione opened her door. To the left, the fire was too big for her to make a run for it. To the right, the fire was not as bad, and she knew the stairs were on that side, but she heard gunshots from that direction. Cirincione shut the door and turned to the window for her escape.
That choice likely saved her life.
“In the end, I learned they were shooting people as they were running down the stairs,” she said.
Cirincione smashed a chair against the window, but the furniture splintered into a million pieces without leaving a dent on the double-paned window. The window, it turned out, was welded into its frame.
With smoke now billowing into the room, she took a wine opener from the mini-bar and began chiseling away at the window’s wood frame.
Spotting firefighters out the window, she turned on the room lights and waved.
“They were looking up, but they didn’t see me,” she continued. “Now I know what they were looking at — the massive fireball that was above my room.
“I was able to get a tiny, millimeter opening in the window, and I was breathing through that. I was just trying not to panic,” she said.
Then Cirincione remembered she had an emergency head lamp with a bright, blinking light in her tour gear. She grabbed it and waved it near her window.
Firefighters immediately spotted her and, within minutes, three of them were on a ladder truck outside her window. They smashed it with axes and guided her down the ladder to safety about 2:30 or 3 a.m. Thursday.
Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire, Cirincione’s anxious family watched the rescue live over the Internet. Her mother, Barbara Cirincione, was in her Manchester home when her grandson called her to the computer, where she saw uniformed officers walking Rachel across the street away from the hotel.
“I had no doubt she was going to be okay,” explained Barbara Cirincione, 75, a retired nurse who was part of the prayer line at Bethany Chapel Community Church in Manchester that had been praying for her daughter since she first got word that terrorists had stormed the hotel.
“I just knew people were praying for her,” she said. “Somehow, you just know when God is there and that he is working with her, and that’s just what happened.”
Rachel Cirincione, whose only injury was a minor cut to her hand, said she has handled lots of emergencies in her 10 years as a tour director.
“In my job, you have to be very level headed in an emergency. I work on a lot of exotic tours. … I know that I’m good at emergencies, and that’s why I’m attracted to the more difficult destinations. But nothing prepares you for that,” she said.
“I don’t think I will ever be able to go into a hotel that locks their windows like that,” she said.
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Original Article:
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