story393.xml

story393.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-04-12

I work for Morgan Stanley and had started work at 8am that day. Everything was rolling along as usual when all of a sudden around 8:45 we started hearing a sound like someone was pelting the side of a house with snowballs. It was hitting along the windows and we saw thousands of pieces of paper flying by. At first we thought it was some kind of joke like someone had dumped confetti off the observation deck on the roof, but then we saw that a lot of this paper was on fire. Next thought was that a bomb had gone off either in the other building or in ours and all of us started heading for the stairwells. At 2 flights per floor we were looking at 136 flights of stairs covering about 800 feet, a lot when you want to be out of the building RIGHT NOW. I was surprised and happy to find no one panicking, everyone was filing down the stairs semi-calm. It took us about 15 minutes to get down to the 44th floor where the security desks and main elevators were. We had flat screen monitors on the walls in the lobby normally showing the financial news but right now they were all showing tower 1 next to us on fire. We were being told that possibly a small plane had hit tower 1 and that our tower was secure and that we were as safe here as on the ground. All I knew was that I was still 500 feet up and that was 500 feet too high. I think it was a group decision that we go for the stairs again. I know that some people stayed and that others went back up to their offices feeling the building was secure. My family is glad I didn't make that decision. We had only gone down a few flights of stairs when there was a load rumbling explosion and the whole stairwell shook violently, some people falling down, I was lucky to be holding on to the rails. The worst part was that the building started tipping sideways, swinging sideways, I was sure the other building fell into us and we were tipping over. I closed my eyes and waited for the floor to go out from under me and to die. The building stopped at an angle and moved back the other way, It rocked back and forth for a few more seconds then stopped. That was when people almost started to panic, we all yelled at each other to stay calm and started counting the floors out loud, 39,38,37. We continued down, I can't explain the relief we all felt getting to the ground. The police were there to guide us down into the underground mall. I was upset that they weren't letting us just go out the door on the ground level, but we didn't know that debris and bodies were raining down out there. We were escorted out through the basement and out onto the street from under building 5. My cell phone didn't work so I started looking for a shop that would let me use their phone. It was then that I looked up and saw both buildings on fire. At that time I couldn't understand how ours had come to be that way. All I knew was that the buildings were a quarter mile high so I needed to be a quarter mile away if it came down. I didn't know until I saw it on TV in one of the stores that a second plane had hit us and that it was a terrorist attack. There were groups of people, women screaming and crying "oh my god they're jumping" It took me a few minutes to believe my eyes that the debris I saw falling wasn't glass or concrete, they were people.
I eventually found a shop where I could make calls and assure my family that I was OK. I had been out of the building about 20 minutes when there was this load rumble and people were yelling that the building was falling. All of us in the street started running. I was glad I thought to get that far away because it gave me a good head start. I figured that the debris path was going to come straight up the streets so I zigzagged between a few buildings until I found the lobby of an apartment block and got in there. People were coming down from the apartments asking us if we needed any water or help. A group of us stayed in there until the dust cleared enough to breath and then I started to make my way far enough to where I might be able to catch a train. To make this long story short, I was able to get home around 5 o?clock that day.
I'm happy to see a web site like this that hopefully will keep future generations from ever forgetting what happened here. Thanks for letting me tell my story, it's good therapy :)