On September 11, 2001, I was running about 15 minutes late for work at Tower One of the World Trade Center. What happened at that moment from the time the elevator stopped represented a defining point in my life. I believe that the experiences and lessons learned prior to that fateful day at 8:46 am had prepared me for all that followed. The year after that moment prepared me for the rest of my professional career.
While in the local elevator to my office from the 44th floor sky lobby to the 73rd floor with only one other colleague, Frank Bucaretti, an electrical engineer, we felt a bit of a shake and a muffled blast. The elevator came to a stop before our floor. Memories of 1993 came immediately to the forefront, but I also recalled the electrical substation explosion from 1990, when I was waiting to hear whether I had gotten the job at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA). After not hearing from Human Resources when my last interviewer, Assistant Chief Architect Robert Davidson, told me I would be hearing shortly, I called the PA and nobody answered!
We pressed the alarm button a few times and got no response. Then we smelled smoke, and at that point we knew something serious had happened. Voices from others on the nearby floors were heard, and, after prying open the elevator doors of the cab, we saw that we had stopped between floors. The elevator doors adjacent to the floor lobby could only be opened a crack, and we began to bang on them yelling for help. It was a good thing that there were only two of us, because with more, the potential for panic and other unhelpful behavior would only worsen. After a few minutes, Engineering Program Manager Jerry Dinkels heard us and called a number of our colleagues, who included Chief Engineer Frank Lombardi and Deputy Chief Engineer Peter Zipf. They tried to open the elevator lobby doors, using all kinds of metal devices, such as a stapler, and plenty of manpower. Nothing was very successful, but someone was able to jam a fire hose nozzle, presumably from a nearby fire hose cabinet, between the doors, creating a gap of a few inches, which might have helped us with a bit better air from the lobby, but we were still quite trapped. Meanwhile, we heard shouts about the building being hit by an airplane, which conjured up a small Cessna in my mind. My biggest concern was the smoke, knowing that is the most common cause of death in a building fire.
Being stopped between floors, I then noticed, right at my eye level, the door operator and associated metal cables that opened and closed the door. After pulling on one of those taut cables, it became clear to me that our escape was through cutting the cable. Our architectural model shop on the 73rd floor was a trove of all kinds of tools- without knowing that there it was there, I asked someone to go up and get some wire snips while we continued to try to open the doors using the “brute force” method. A good five minutes later, someone (I later found out who, Mark Jakubek, an Environmental Engineer) passed the wire cutter through the crack between the doors to my welcome hands. With the wire cutter in hand, I approached the taut wire. Frank, who had been in the background of my consciousness during the entire event, said, “Are you sure we should do this?”. No verbal response was required- I snipped the wires and we were able to leave the cab for a nearby fire stair.
