Ordered and Calm, but Stunned
At 8:48 am on Tuesday morning, I was reading my email like I do every morning. I had just gotten off the phone with a traffic engineer at the Port Authority regarding a file that I had transmitted to him on the previous day. As I was finishing off my usual peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I heard a loud explosion, which was immediately followed by tremendous building sways and vibrations. As I was thrown out of my chair, I immediately thought that this was an earthquake, but still thinking rationally, I thought that it was abnormal since there are no earthquakes in New York City, especially of this magnitude. I remember thinking that the building felt like it was going to collapse from this initial explosion.
As I picked myself up and ran to the emergency staircase located in the core of the huge building, I saw through the east facing windows debris and fireballs falling from the top of the building. The building had stabilized by the time I reached the stairwell, and evacuation had commenced quickly but calmly. Not knowing the gravity of what was happening above us, people had started pouring into the stairwell from the hallways of the different floors. I saw a coworker from my floor (72nd), and we held and consoled each other.
There were no public announcements in the stairwell, but the evacuation seemed to be going smoothly. There were no more explosions as far as we could tell, no smoke coming up the stairwell, and the building had stopped swaying. We all felt like we were out of imminent danger. As we started to make it down the stairwell, people started chatting and gathering their composures. I heard some people who had been there in '93 telling others that this was a piece of cake since the stairwell was dark and full of smoke in '93. Others were joking about how Mr. Silverstein, who had just recently taken control of the complex, must be fuming at what was happening. A few moments passed and people began to receive messages over their pagers that a 767 had accidentally hit our building. There was no mention of a terrorist attack, and at no time was there any panic. Mobile phones were useless in the core of the building due to its immenseness and the large distance between it and the exterior where signals were usually stronger. There was no smoke at all in the stairwell, but there was a peculiar smell, which I later associated with how it smells when one boards an aircraft. It was the smell of jet fuel.
Soon we heard shouts from the people above us to keep to the right. I started seeing blind people, those with difficulty moving, asthmatics and injured people filing down to our left. People were burned so badly that I won't go into describing it. People kept filing down orderly and calmly, but stunned.
The Severity of the Situation
Sometime around the 30th or 40th floor, we passed the first firefighters coming up the stairs. They reassured people that we were safe and that we would all get out fine. By this point, they were already absolutely breathless, but still pushing upward, slowly and unyieldingly, one step at a time. I could only imagine how tired they were, carrying their axes, hoses and heavy outfits and climbing up all those stairs. Young men started offering the firemen to carry up their gear for a few flights, but they all refused. EACH and EVERY ONE of them. As I relive this moment over and over in my mind, I can't help but think that these courageous firemen already knew in their minds that they would not make it out of the building alive and that they did not want to endanger any more civilians and prevent one less person from making it to safety on the ground.
We continued down the stairwell, slowly and at times completely stalled. The smell of jet fuel had gotten so unbearable that people began covering their mouths and noses with anything that they could find – ties, shirts, handkerchiefs. Every few floors, emergency crew were passing out water and sodas from the vending machines that they had split open from the hallways. I had no idea how much time had passed by as I didn't have my mobile phone with me.
Around the 20th or 15th floor, the emergency crew began diverting the people in our stairwell to a different stairwell. They led us out of our stairwell, across the hallway where I saw exhausted firemen and emergency crew sitting on the floor trying to catch their breath. I began to wonder why. What was going on? This whole operation began to look very confusing.
Nobody was giving us any indication as to what was really happening. The delay in the hallway to get to the other staircase was excruciatingly long as we had to slowly merge with the people who were coming down the staircase into which we were filing. Why had they diverted us? As we started to get down to the lower floors, water began to pour down from behind us. I figured a water pipe had burst or that it was water coming down from the rescue on the higher floors.
At this moment, for the first time since the initial explosion, a sense of panic began to grip me. Only floor seven, then six. A few more to go and I would be free. I could hardly wait. It didn't matter that the water was ankle deep. I was a few floors from the ground. Floor four — then all of a sudden, a loud boom, and the building began to shake unbearably again. People started falling down the stairwell and smoke began to rise up from the bottom. The emergency lights flickered and then went out. The building was still shaking, and I could hear steel buckling. Rescuers below us shouted for us to go back up the stairs. At this moment, I was choking and shaking terribly. I managed to climb back up to the 6th or 7th floor and open the door to that floor. The water had already risen to my ankles, and the floor was completely dark. A fireman led us with his flashlight to another staircase by following the voices of another fireman who was guiding him through the darkness. We finally made it across that floor to the other stairwell where we were greeted by the other fireman and told to stay there. The look on that fireman's face said it all. He said something under his breath to our fireman indicating the severity of the situation.
Running for our Lives
With the image of the firemen communicating to each other and hindsight, I believe that the fireman had whispered to the other one that Building Two had collapsed.
After a few minutes of huddling by the stairwell on the 6th floor, we were given the green light to run for our lives. I made it down six flights with a few other people and came out onto the mezzanine level of our building. I don't know what I was expecting to see when I got out of the stairwell, but I was not ready for the apocalyptic scene before me. Everything was completely covered in white dust and smoke. My initial reaction was that I couldn't believe that one plane, albeit a 767, 80 floors above our head had caused all this damage on the ground floor, inside the building. I covered my head and ran towards the huge opening in the north side of the building through which we were being evacuated. As I approached the threshold, the firemen yelled to us to get over to the wall of the building quickly. Debris was still raining from all sides of the building. We could see the other firefighters who were outside standing underneath the cantilevered parts of the black immigration building (4 and/or 5 WTC). At their cue, we ran from our building outside to where they were standing underneath the immigration building. I was completely disoriented, coughing, and marveling at the strange new landscape of WTC plaza — burning trees, wreckage, fireballs and dust — nothing short of a nuclear winter.
I climbed over huge pieces of steel wreckage and made my way through to the skybridge leading to 7 WTC (the third building to collapse). From there, I descended the escalators down to the street level onto Vesey Street and trotted to safety on Church Street. I immediately looked back and saw the charred remains of the upper floors of my building. Smoke filled the sky, and I began to have this eerie feeling that WTC 2 was not there. I couldn't be sure because of all the smoke that was billowing from my building and blowing eastward. As I was trying to find WTC 2, I saw the unthinkable happen in front of my eyes. WTC 1 began to disintegrate and collapse in on itself. I spun around and ran for my life.
I later learned that another 767 had hit WTC 2 around the floors where my office was located. I also found out that WTC 2 had collapsed while we were still inside the central staircase on the fourth floor, causing the second violent shake. I later learned that I had been spared the sight of people falling from the higher floors. I am grateful to be alive and uninjured and to be able to share this life-changing experience with you. And I am so grateful for the courage of the firemen and policemen who sacrificed their lives to help us down the burning tower.
