story130.xml

story130.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-03-04

My friend & I took a 6:30 AM train down to Hoboken that morning and proceeded to take the PATH train into the WTC as we've always done before. We were just going down to the city for the day, this time without our daughters. We'd just arrived, came up from the train and walked across into the Crabtree & Evelyn store. We were only in there less than 10 min. when we felt a muffled rumble. I assumed it was the trains down below. All of a sudden we heard a commotion outside the store and saw people running in droves past the store. One woman stopped in the doorway, and as she was taking off her highheels, yelled for us to get out because there'd been an explosion. We then thought it was a bomb because of 1993. We followed the crowd to the outside and there were papers and ash everywhere. There was still things falling down from the sky. We heard a man say that a plane had hit the tower. Everyone thought it was an accident at first. We started looking at all of the things on the ground. We saw a woman's black shoe lying on the sidewalk, airline and Amtrak tickets, stock papers, business cards from the 94th floor. Then we saw a credit card from the Bank of Boston. It was still intact except for being bent up a bit on the bottom. We didn't find out until a couple of days later by reading the paper that it belonged to a flight attendant from Flight 11. We turned over the few things we'd saved for ID purposes to the FBI.
We were still in the area when we heard another plane flying and the loudest noise I've ever heard. The explosion was deafening! We began running again. We found our way to a telephone to phone home and stood with others on a street corner listening to a car's radio. Later we found our way to a coffee shop, only to be trapped in there through both collapses. The smoke and debris just came down the street like a tidal wave and engulfed the shop where we were. It was pitch black outside. People came in off & on covered with ash, some in their eyes and some bleeding. It was like being in a war-zone. Hours later we were able to leave there, covering our faces from the dust, and walked uptown. We did manage to get out of the city that night by walking to Grand Central Station.