Head Count.(The Talk of the Town)(steam pipe explosion left Hudson News Co.'s)

After September 11, 2001, New York City businesses were forced to revitalize their disaster evacuation plans. Cubicle workers volunteered as in-house fire wardens; interns began xeroxing phone trees. A few weeks ago, the employees of the three Hudson News stores in Grand Central Terminal conducted a run-through: if something were to go wrong, they would wait for police notification, lock up the shop, and proceed in an orderly fashion to their meeting place, the sidewalk near Pershing Square, on Forty-second Street. After a head count, they would gather at the Lincoln Building in the office of James Butt, their general manager. The drill went smoothly. "They did a great job," Butt said the other day.

Last week, when a steam pipe exploded under Forty-first Street, near Lexington Avenue, spewing a giant blast of steam and mud, the Hudson News office-evacuation plan went live. With chaos all around them--reports of LensCrafters workers leaving their clients and exercisers abandoning their wallets on the treadmill--the newsstand employees stayed put. "People were running like crazy. They were throwing shoes down!" Anna Drammeh, the operations manager for the main newsstand, recalled. Butt was at home, so Drammeh, who is from the Gambia and wears gold chains and red lipstick, became the group's de-facto Al Haig. "I tell my people, 'Don't run,' " she said. " 'We have to stay until the cops tell us it's O.K. to leave.' "

All around the Hudson News employees, commuters were tearing out of the terminal. After watching the stampede, five cashiers--Kazi, Faiza, Promilla, Rukhsana, and Mukta--mutinied, deciding to make a run for it. Faiza was the most frantic. "She said, 'I have to go! I have to go!' " Drammeh recalled. Drammeh relented, telling them, "O.K., go to the meeting place." (They all went home.) Then, using the authority vested in her by the office hierarchy, Drammeh rounded up her remaining charges--eleven managers, security guards, cashiers--and instructed them to evacuate in pairs. Before leaving, they had to scoop money off the candy counters: customers had thrown down bills and taken off with their Skittles.

At stage two, the workers encountered another problem: their meeting place was in a police-enforced "frozen zone." Drammeh decided to take a head count. Shortly after seven, the staff, minus the ...