Copyright 2002© by Douglas Paul Casper, AIA, CCS. Used with permission.
The following attempts to be a factual recollection of the events that transpired on Tuesday September 11, 2001. Other people’s accounts, transmitted to the writer orally, may have been incorporated into the account and their accuracy will be verified – to the greatest degree possible. It should be noted that a calamitous event of this sort engenders much comment and, when accounts got the level where people were saying that their kids were saying that the terrorists were going to set off a bomb at the local shopping mall – you knew that, at this point, we were hearing fabrications.
I am an Architect who has been working on either the 72nd or 73rd Floors of One World Trade Center for over 15 years. I am under the employ of the Port Authority of NY & NJ (approx. 6000 employees). I work in the Architecture Unit (approx. 60 employees) of the Design Division (approx. 600 employees) of the Engineering Department (approx. 1000 employees). Everyone in my unit and everyone on my floor – except for one person who didn’t make it – survived the attacks with no noticeable injuries. As far as I know, we (the Port Authority of NY & NJ) lost a grand total of 75 employees: 37 police officers and 38 civilian employees, including Deborah Merrick, who was visiting the Trade Center from her office at the PATC and was caught in the maelstrom in the lobby of One WTC (arriving right when the plane hit at approximately 8:45 AM). Deborah was severely burned but “hung on” for 3 or 4 months. She finally died as a result of her injuries in January, 2002.
My title is Staff Services Architect and I specialize in architectural and structural specifications and materials research. I assembled and inventoried, over the years an approximately 1,000 volume architectural library used by our staff for project support purposes.
It started out as a normal day. I arrived on the 73rd Floor of One World Trade Center (the North Tower) around 8:05 AM. I bumped into Dale Serventi in the hallway and she reminded me that they needed spec notes from me that morning for a Contract that was going out for review.
8:45 AM — I am at my desk on the phone with Russ Carpenter. I was planning on going downstairs around this time to the P.A. cafeteria to have breakfast with a few friends. Little did I know that I wouldn’t eat anything until early that afternoon. I hear and feel an explosion in the building. I sensed that it occurred high above me. I said into the phone “There’s been an explosion, Goodbye!” and hung up the phone, simultaneously standing up to see beyond the confines of my cubicle’s partitions. What I saw surprised me.
I saw debris, looking like shrapnel or confetti raining down the north and east sides of the tower. Being only about 24 feet from the east exterior wall – as I spun around to face the east, I saw amongst the debris bright reddish-orange pieces that were long and skinny (approx. 6 to 8 feet long by 6” wide). These may have been pieces of the fuselage of the plane!
The entire tower rocked like it never rocked before, however I was not as aware of the rocking motion as others because I was in the process of getting up from my seat and merely felt dizzy. I recall holding onto the edge of my desk to keep from falling over. Also, I heard a sort of trickling sound like the sound of falling gravel, probably caused by the nose-diving plane careening thru concrete floor slabs (and exploding). I felt as though whatever was happening above us was bad enough that the building might actually start breaking apart and falling down into our floor. Kelly King, on the large open north side of the floor said, “Let’s get out of here!” in a very nervous tone of voice.
She was verbalizing just what I was thinking, so ... without the need for a formal invitation – I immediately started trotting at a brisk pace to the east stair, hoping to get a good start to leaving an area that was obviously a dangerous place to be.
The stairs were already fairly full, but moving at a good clip. I saw a number of people I knew, primarily P.A. Engineering staff. I recall seeing and speaking to Vinny Antes. Mike Valetta (from his 72 NE corner office) said he saw a plane hit the building. At the time I didn’t get the details. I actually assumed it to be a small pleasure craft, perhaps a Cessna, perhaps a guy from Tennessee taking his girlfriend on a pleasure ride around Manhattan, drunk (like the heroes in the recent box-office hit: Pearl Harbor). If I had known it was as large a plane as it was (reportedly a Boeing 757) – I probably would have been more scared.
We proceeded down the stairs. At the 44th Floor Skylobby, Security Personnel shepherded us to the connecting stair. Meanwhile, curiosity won out and I couldn’t resist walking over to the east exterior wall windows in the Skylobby and looking out. The sight was incredible, in terms of the amount of debris on the plaza.
As we were going down the stairs things seemed to bog down, but we were still inching forward. I was talking a lot to a friend, Bohdan Gerulak, someone who I had a long-standing relationship with thru CSI (Bohdan was chapter president in 1993-94 I was president in 1996-97). I said to Bohdan “ When we get out of here – if we get out of here – I’d like to head east to the South Street Seaport so that I could use a pay phone and call my wife and let her know I’m O.K. We were making small talk to keep our minds from dwelling on the immensity of what appeared to be happening here.
It was beginning to look like 1993 (WTC bombing) was a sideshow, that this (today’s attack) was the real McCoy. At the very least, at this point we knew there was some sort of “situation” up above (assumedly somewhere around the 85th or 90th Floors) which was serious enough to require evacuation of the entire building and which was fairly major in nature. We still didn’t know the full extent of what happened. Interestingly, the amount of smoke we encountered on the way down was significantly less than that in 1993. That’s because in 1993 the explosion came from below – not above.
Perhaps an incident that happened when we were about on the 60th floor was an indicator of the severity of the event. Two people (one male and one female) were being shepherded down the stairs on an emergency basis. They both had “flash-burns” all over their faces and appeared to be in near shock. They said, surprisingly, that they were from the 80th Floor. I say surprisingly because that was only seven floors above me and I didn’t think the damage occurred that close to where I was. In hindsight, I believe what must have happened is that they were standing near an elevator and got burned by exploding jet fuel that was fireballing down some of the elevator shafts. This was later verified by a friend, Bob Kosson, whose office equipment leasing business did business with a now nonexistent company, called Office Automation, located on the 79th floor of tower one and by an article I read in the November issue of Guideposts magazine.
Bob Kossin told me of this group of employees on the 79th floor. The story was very sad. They didn’t immediately evacuate their floor – a major mistake, especially when you were on that high a floor. After calling their boss (who wasn’t in the Trade Center) and verifying, through an outside source, that a plane had hit Tower One – they were about to leave when – to their horror – walls started collapsing and doors were jammed shut. They became – in effect – entombed in their offices. Other employees of Office Automation immediately took the escalator down from the 79th floor to the 78th floor Skylobby only to get incinerated by the fireballs shooting out of the elevators caused by leaking jet fuel. This business suffered terrible human, as well as economic losses and is no longer in business.
The article in Guideposts tells of a Mr. May on the 87th floor. He witnessed the effect of the main fireball from the initial impact of the plane firsthand. When he went into the corridor he discovered that half the corridor, half of the interior of the floor had blown-up. He then led his employees down, past the pandemonium on 78, to safety.
As an aside, at about 8:45 AM Stan Sienkewicz was walking towards the One WTC lobby (approaching from the Concourse) and witnessed a fireball exploding out from at least one of the elevator shaft. I later heard this fireball referred to as “snaking” around the lobby area. Also, Lauren Downing, a Landscape Architect, and Amor, a CAD draftsperson, were in the One WTC lobby when the plane hit. Lauren had just gotten into an elevator and the doors were just about to close when the plane hit. They evacuated the elevator, literally, seconds before it exploded out in a fireball. Whatever happened to Amor – it was too upsetting to talk about – and she ended up being right in the area when Two got hit and she also got caught (as did many) in the “dust cloud.” As an interesting footnote, Amor went directly after all this occurred to the architects offices, Ahuja-Priya, on 200 Varick Street in Greenwich Village where a small team of Port Authority architects have been reporting to work ever since. Amor, a consultant to the Port Authority, is working out of Ahuja-Priya’s offices, as well.
As time elapsed, I have heard some unbelievable stories. One underlying theme is that the approach that the Port Authority took to fire safety was, in my opinion, superior to the blasé attitude towards fire safety that far too many people had. I was the Fire Warden for my floor and we took fire drills very seriously. We also had the almost intuitive sense to know when the rule of just going down three floors and waiting for further instructions didn’t “cut-it.” Over the course of the last 10 years we had to evacuate the building twice – once because of the 1993 bombing and the second time because of a power outage in lower Manhattan in July. When something goes wrong and your over 1,000 feet up – the only way you can get out of the building is by using the fire stairs. Since 1993, by the way, the fire stairs were retrofitted with positive air pressure to keep smoke out of the stairwells. It worked.
As we continued down the stairs, we noticed a few things of interest. On the 22nd Floor a tall, good-looking, friendly man with a full head of dark brown hair and glasses was handing out cups of water and comforting people who were too tired to continue down. I’m not sure who this guy was but I recognized his face as being a Port Authority man and, in hindsight, I realized that he – because he was a good Samaritan – probably did not get out of the tower before it collapsed. Of course the same fate befell the hundreds of firemen, policemen, and other emergency services personnel who selflessly assisted others in evacuating the towers.
At about the 24th floor we started to see New York City Firemen going up, taking the inboard half of the stairs. They were all swarthy and strong young men, marching to their deaths. I remember seeing their faces in the half-light – they were kids! They were really struggling, lugging heavy equipment: oxygen tanks, fire-axes, etc. and wearing heavy, protective clothes. By comparison, I had already taken off my shirt – it was so hot. I don’t know how they could do what they were doing. The smoke at this point was moderate – I found it wasn’t really worth it to cover my mouth/nose.
The other thing was, starting at around the 18th floor - there was a steady stream of water coming down the stairs, favoring the outboard side of the stairs. This water (assumedly from broken sprinkler or other supply water mains) continued down and was streaming across the concourse when we finally went down the escalator (not operating) from the mezzanine to the lobby and continued out of the Trade Center complex via the underground concourse. At the time we passed thru the Concourse, there was about 2-4 inches of water but, reportedly, it increased later to as much as 8 inches. This may have been the water that could have helped suppress the fire above.
Right before we descended the escalator (not working) to the Concourse, we were on the Mezzanine level, which has a direct view out over the Austin J. Tobin Plaza. One sight that I initially blocked out of my mind was bloodstains on the plate glass windows. The other was what appeared to be large dark colored draperies that had fallen to the floor all along the exterior wall. What struck me as strange (at the time) was that they were on the outside, not the inside of the building. Also, the building never had draperies. Now, upon further reflection – I realize that what I saw was the clothing (just the clothing) of the people that had jumped! Bill Fox had told me that what they were doing is after people jumped; they were covering the bodies with towels to mop up the blood.
One can’t help but wonder how many of these selfless people, helping others escape the building, didn’t make it out alive themselves. If any of them had been outside the complex at this point (and also through communications via their walky-talkies) I’m sure they knew the severity of the attack on our beloved Trade Center.
9:30 AM — We were on the street (only 29 minutes before Tower two was to collapse). We walked/trotted across Church Street and, then, we (Bohdan and myself) stopped to the (north) side of the Millennium Hotel and looked up in horror. What we saw was unbelievable, unfathomable. The entire width of the trade center for practically the entire north and east faces of the structures looked like it had been raked by the claws of a huge lion – a swatch of 3 – 5 floors had what appeared to be bent of broken columns and there was fire and smoke coming out. It was an unbelievable sight. It appeared from that vantage point, that the damaged swaths were at about the same height for both towers – roughly 2/3’s of the way up. In actuality, the primary, visible damage was between 88 and 92 on Tower one and 65 and 75 on Tower Two. One aspect of the calamity that may have helped spell the doom of the trade center was that I noticed a hot burning fire from something that may have been a burning jet engine lodged in the northeast corner of the South Tower – sitting in a gaping hole at least two stories high. This corner was a solid structural shear wall and it was missing – a bad omen.
As we headed east I stopped at a Duane Reed that was off on a side street and bought a cold drink, a phone card, and a pack of Marlboro light cigarettes. (I guess I figured, hell, if it’s the end of the world I might as well enjoy a few cigarettes.) At this point, we ran into two good friends of mine: Shlomo & Vlad – both P.A. Structural Engineers. I hugged them both and we talked. I offered around cigarettes and Vlad & I had a cigarette. This is significant because Vlad does not normally smoke. They (interestingly) didn’t think the towers would topple. However, one has to bear in mind that going down (in their case 43) flights of stairs and being caught up in the moment – at this point it was only about 9:45 in the morning – it was hard to think rationally. Interesting my father received an E-mail a week later from Robert A. Kelly – a college friend who had worked for the P.A. and retired about 8 years ago – that was from some guy Matt on the 65th Floor (of Tower One) that stated that, even during the immediate aftermath of the attack, even before the towers imploded – there were people who knew that the buildings’ structure was compromised.
There was a story about Port Authority staff on the 64th floor that is very sad. Pat Hoey, Steve Fiorelli, and over a dozen other Port Authority staff worked for the Tunnels, Bridges and Terminals (TB&T) line department on this floor. They were holed-up in the Operations Control Center on the same floor. They stayed partly to avoid the hectic situation on the stairs and partly to help monitor the various Port Authority facilities. After they saw Two World Trade Center get hit and they felt the entire building shaking – they decided to try to get out. It was too late – at this point. By the time they got down to the lower floors the first five floors had already had collapsed and they had to climbthrough rubble to try to get out. There was a gentleman named Pasquale Buzzelli who was in that group. Beginning in the 44th floor, he led the employees into a stairwell on the north-east side of Tower One. The group had made it to the 22nd floor when the building began to sway. Buzzelli told everyone to take cover, then dived into a corner of the stairwell, curling his 6-foot-2, 275-pound frame into the fetal position. When he came to around 2:30 PM, he found himself on a peak of rubble, with other mounds of debris below him. He had fractured his right foot, but otherwise he was fine. Firefighters carried him off the pile.
The others were not so lucky, including Ed Keene – a Project Manager from Engineering who retired at age 65, three years earlier. He did the retirement thing – gardening, walks, etc. and got bored – so he rejoined the Port Authority as a consultant for the TB&T line department, only to have this happen to him. These men shared the belief that the World trade Center was invincible and couldn’t come down. They were sadly mistaken.
9:50 AM — A young man, named Stanley, was talking to us. He offered us the use of his phone in a nearby apartment, so we could call loved ones and let them know we were all right. I agreed to go and then, as Bohdan & I started to go upstairs – I realized that Shlomo & Vlad weren’t following us. I didn’t know what to do, I wanted to call my wife, Marian – so I continued up the stairs to the walk-up apartment on the second floor of the building on a side street about 5-6 blocks from the trade center complex. It turns out that, after we went upstairs, Shlomo & Vlad continued looking at the Trade Center, transfixed on the sidewalk. They started to see massive amounts of debris falling from Tower Two and decided that, even though they were a good four or five blocks from the Trade Center complex – it seemed too close for comfort.
They left the area at about 9:50 AM, Vlad continuing uptown to his Upper East Side apartment and Shlomo across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn and then, eventually, home in East Williston (on Long Island). He ended up running into Ralph D’Apuzzo, who accompanied him on the trip.
Meanwhile, Bohdan and I continued to “hang” at the apartment. I tried a few times to get thru to my wife, Marian, on the cell phone – but, to no avail. We found ourselves sitting in front of the T.V. watching the news.
At 9:59 AM, we witnessed the unthinkable – we saw Tower Two collapse on the T.V. screen. The landscape of New York City had become drastically, unalterably changed – forever. This was a very emotional moment. Its not everyday you see one of the biggest, most impressive, dare we say powerful – buildings in the world – in our “Universe” – become literally pulverized into a cloud of dust.
Some of the women in the apartment were starting to get extremely upset. This is understandable because their apartment, their home, had just gotten thrust into what, in effect, was a war zone. Also, judging from the fact that we were only 4 or 5 blocks from the Trade Center complex, blocks being about 200 feet and the towers being 1350 feet tall (plus the one remaining tower, Tower One, had the big TV/radio antennae on top) – there was an outside possibility that should Tower One happen to fall like a felled tree – it could fall on us.
For several reasons Bohdan & I decided to thank Stanley’s friends for their hospitality and wish them luck and then proceed out of their apartment building. What we saw next, when we emerged on the street, was the most amazing sight. The street a short 20 minutes ago was a regular New York City street – not stellar clean, but at least clear of dust, debris, etc. Now, it was literally covered with 3-6 inches of soot. It looked like a different place. The whole area looked like a movie set – everything looked surrealistic. You almost felt like you had died and gone to heaven, you had that unreal feeling.
As we proceeded north, police and other security personnel were, essentially, sealing-off lower Manhattan, everything from roughly the latitude of One police Plaza on down. As we trekked up we stole glances back to the dust cloud that was the World trade Center. Then, at about 10:30, another “unthinkable” event occurred – One World Trade Center collapsed. You were only really aware of it because you could see the T.V. antennae descend into the dust something like a sinking ship.
A note about phones: Shlomo had made out wonderfully. He, being in the 43rd Floor P.A. cafeteria, was fortunate enough to get out of the building by about 9:15 – a whole 44 minutes before the collapse of Tower Two. After he made it out onto the street, he paid a shopkeeper five dollars to let him use his phone to call his wife. I was not quite as fortunate. By the time I got out (9:30 AM) there was already quite a state of pandemonium. Any phone I saw, including phones in shops, had a line of at least 4 or 5 people waiting to make a call. As Bohdan and I made our way uptown, there were lines on all the phones – so I didn’t get a chance to call my wife and my parents until 1:15 PM.
A word about different people: There were people I saw in the stairs that, from other people (much later) I heard stories about what happened to them. Also, I had some interesting direct encounters with people. For example, when we passed through Chinatown, I noticed an interesting ambiance. People seemed to be less profoundly affected by the morning’s events. Shops were still open and people seemed to be going about their business in a near normal fashion. I purchased a bottle of water from a small shop on one of Chinatown’s side streets.
Then, when we crossed Canal Street – we ran into Stephen Law, a P.A. Geotechnical Engineer. Steve, a Chinese person, said he was trying to get in touch with his sister who, I believe, worked in Chinatown. We stood together for a few minutes and had a smoke together. An “incident” occurred about 15 feet from where we were standing. Someone was yelling at somebody else to get off the phone. Tempers were short because it was hard to get an outside line and, when secured, there was much to tell loved ones so the calls tended to be of a long duration.
We continued walking uptown. There were numerous cars parked on the side of streets with the windows open and radios turned up to full volume. Each one had a crowd around it listening to the breaking news. It really was a big day for news! It turned out that the attack on the Trade Center by two Boeing 757’s was performed (by terrorists) in unison with a similar attack on the Pentagon as well as what is assumed to be an attempted attack on another national monument such as the Capitol or the White House.
As we continued uptown, I realized that I hadn’t had anything to eat all day and, except for one or two 20 –30 minute periods that involved sitting, between 7:45 and noon had been on the go – nonstop. We stopped at a restaurant in Herald Square and both had tuna “wrap-style” sandwiches and drinks. So fortified, we continued uptown. Bohdan said his wife was upstate and that I was welcome to catch some R & R at his west 72nd Street apartment. By about 1:05 PM we arrived at his apartment building, I plunked myself down in front of his T.V. and just watched, dazed for the next six hours. We watched primarily BBC and CNN, channels that offered insightful analysis into the day’s tumultuous events. The day’s events were something that took the entire nation by surprise (which was unfortunate). Clearly it would take days, if not weeks for people to try to “get-over” what had happened and try to put their lives back in order.
How does one feel when his building, his place of work for over 15 years, a place where he established one of the premier working architectural libraries in the city was laid to waste, along with 3,000 of its inhabitants. A place of work is, indeed, like a home away from home. Joe Cosenza, a previous Chief Architect (deceased) said to me once “You spend one third of your life here at the Port Authority – you should make that time as pleasant (and productive) as possible.” Well, the experience of losing the world-class facility that we had was something akin to losing a loved one. The monster that consumed the Trade Center also sucked in thousands to their deaths, some I might add in horrible ways. I was fortunate because, of all the people that were lost – I only knew a handful of vague acquaintances.
At about 6:15, we went out for dinner, Bohdan’s treat! We went to a Chinese restaurant on West 72nd Street that was nearly deserted. Unfortunately, it appeared that the waitress service had gone out to lunch also. We waited and waited and no one appeared to take our orders. So we left and searched for another place to eat. Strolling up Broadway, we came upon Big Nicks, a nice friendly place that was bustling. We had burgers and beer and then got into a very interesting conversation with a man at the adjoining table, named Peter. Peter is a contractor from Philadelphia who found himself, more or less, stuck in New York City for the day. He told us of how he had volunteered at a local hospital for the day, trying to do his part to help out in the crisis. It’s nice that there are so many “Good Samaritans” around these days. It gives you a nice, heart-warming feeling. When it came time to pay the bill – Peter snatched it out of Bohdan’s hand and insisted that he paid it. When we objected he said “You’ve done enough today – I insist!”
The remainder of the day involved looking at Bohdan’s interesting architectural book collection, including notably the Richard Nuetra books. All in all a most tumultuous day had a pleasant end.
The next morning, Bohdan went to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and I proceeded to the Port Authority Technical Center, in Jersey City, New Jersey. The place seemed almost deserted but I spoke with several Engineering Department staff, including Richard Nersesian, Paul Crist, and John Bullard. Apparently a number of P.A. people had been standing outside the Tech Center the previous day viewing the burning/destruction of the Trade center. The impression they had was that, aside from the obvious fact that they had witnessed the performance of a heinous act of terrorism of the highest order, it appeared that - because of the speed at which the towers were destroyed – it seemed that we may have lost a good portion of our Engineering Department (as well as countless other individuals)!
This perception was shared by many people who were viewing the events (real time) on their television screens. Immediately after the bombing in 1993, the T.V. news channels showed footage of World Trade Center employees and visitors exiting the towers from all available exits. This footage contained memorable shots of people with smoke stained faces.
Bear in mind for a second the gross difference in scale between the 93 bombing and the 9-11 attack. In 1993 the sum total of all physical damages amounted to only $150 million, whereas the reported damages from the 9-11 destruction of the Trade Center and some neighboring building will amount to $30—50 billion. That makes the 9-11-01 attack 2,000 times worse than the ’93 attack! Also, 3,000 people lost their lives – more than were lost at Pearl Harbor – as opposed to only seven who had lost their lives in 1993.
Unfortunately, what happened on 9-11 is that the massive amounts, assumedly hundreds of tons of jet fuel that exploded into the towers, roughly ¾’s of the way up each tower – preceded to create a fire that was over 1700 degrees Fahrenheit (hot enough to melt steel which melts at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit). Fire tends to burn upwards and in this case created monstrous maelstroms on the floors above which continued up to the roof, as well as causing fires in the basement of Tower One and possibly Tower Two, as well. The lower level fires were caused by the jet fuel “fire-balling” down the elevator shafts to the lower levels and causing immediate explosions down there (as documented above).
The net result of this is that dozens and dozens of people on the upper floors were breaking out the approx. 22” by 96” window glass panels and jumping down over 1,000 feet to their deaths. Over ninety percent of the ground surface adjacent to the trade center’s twin towers is used as pedestrian sidewalk space, so – what happened is that innocent passers-by were getting killed not just by debris but by falling glass and falling people.
Some of the “Grisly” aspects of the trade Center Disaster:
Unfortunately what was happening is that people were getting decapitated or, in some cases, even getting there bodies cut in half by falling glass. Jose Rodriguez-Espinal told this observation to me. This grisly observation was added to by Bill Fox, who said that (right after some of the first people jumped) they were throwing towels over the remains, which were in the form of a puddle of blood.
Bill Fox, whose wife Joyce worked at Century 21 (on Church Street) had some harrowing, grisly tales to tell. Apparently, what was happening is that the net result, if you will, of a body falling over 1,000 feet onto hard concrete amounted to a puddle of blood. Apparently, people were throwing towels out to try to soak up some of the blood. All this was happening probably between 10 and 30 minutes after the planes’ impacts, making it between 8:55 and 9:15 AM for Tower One and 9:10 and 9:30 AM for Tower two. Just around the time that a lot of people were just showing up for work. Lovely!
In light of the above observations, what must have happened is that any news crews that made it to within 100 feet of the Towers must have either been turned back by police or, if they were able to take any footage at all – it must have been grisly footage far too gross to be allowed to be broadcast and the chances are that the people taking the footage were killed by dropping debris.
Bill Fox relayed to me another shocking story. A group of people exited the trade center as a human chain – all holding hands. They were fleeing right as the tower (probably Tower Two) was collapsing. The next to the last person of the chain looked over at the last person, as they were crossing the street and saw that all it was was a person’s hand!
Going back to 8:45 AM, Jerry Stern was in double window office at the north side of the 73rd Floor, right in the middle of the floor. Jerry recalls being very aware of something (assumedly a plane of some sort) whacking into the tower, somewhere up above. He and many others experienced a very pronounced significant swaying of the tower. Tom Nicklas and Ilonka Angelet were right next to Jerry, right by the window. They signaled to each other, simply using eye contact, that they should immediately flee the tower.
Kirin was just leaving the cashiers’ station on the 43rd. floor (of Tower One) with a cup of tea on a tray when the plane hit. He recalls dropping the entire tray and running (for the exit).
Matthew Silver owns a limousine service that operates throughout the metropolitan New York area. One of his clients, a woman from Morgan Stanley, had called him and asked that a limousine pick her up in Brooklyn. She was in a meeting on the 40th floor of two World Trade Center and the impact was so great that it sent her flying through the gypsum board partition. She then jumped up, losing her shoes in the process. She proceeded to run down the stairs, run out of the building and keep running across lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge to her limo ride.
Speaking with some of the survivors of the 82nd floor (of Tower One) sheds some light onto what happened. I spoke with two men that I’m friendly with, Tom Grassi and Jim Kalafatis. They are both Project Managers who worked for the Port Authority on 82, East (about nine floors directly above where I was). When the plane hit they were both thrown to the ground from the impact. What happened next is that they both fled the area. Another man, Prem, who worked in the next cubicle over, also fled. Tom and Jim made it out. Prem did not. (My theory as to what happened is that Prem may have taken the North Stairway – the one closest to where the plane hit.) Another man, Joe Brownstein escaped the 82nd floor, at about the same time, probably using the North Stair. Joe reports seeing body parts in the staircase.
Tom and Jim are lucky (as all of the World Trade Center survivors are) to have made it out O.K. However, their escape had a few harrowing twists to it, along the way. First, when they got to the 78th floor Skylobby – the stair exit door nearest them was jammed shut – so they went over to another stair to continue their exit. It took them a long time to get to bottom floor. They were in the Concourse, only about 200 to 250 feet from Two World Trade Center (right near The Gap store), when Tower Two collapsed. The impact sent them flying (again). They went sliding across the floor into the wall. After this there was considerable debris, but they were able to get out.
Michael Chin is an architect who sat right next to me on 73, east. He was about 50 to 100 farther away from Two, when it collapsed (right in front of Hale and Hearty Soups). There was so much dust and debris that he – at first - thought that the entire floor slab had collapsed below into the basement level. Firemen then appeared and told him to follow his light to safety, which he did.
