Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.BZ

For 17 years,

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ

I've been keeping this story to myself.

What was it like to be

one floor below where a plane flew into your building?

I've never talked directly about it.

I was one of the few people that actually saw this

thing coming at the building.

It hits you.

I looked out my window.

You can see a huge fireball.

And I knew the people that

I had just talked to were all dead.

We started the day as colleagues,

ended the day as lifelong brothers and sisters.

We succeed as a group, or we go down as a group.

Whether you went up or whether you went down,

whether you went left or whether you went right,

decided whether you were going to live or die that day.

Everything, every decision that was made,

it could've played out so differently.

It makes me realize just how close

to that line between who lived and died we were.

The morning of September 11th I actually arrived at the office

a little earlier than I normally do.

You know, it's time to get up and go, you know?

And I enjoyed… I enjoyed that.

Normally I'd wear a suit.

That day I was wearing just a short-sleeved shirt.

This one. Same shirt.

I drive into work every day.

Coming in, from no matter where,

I could see the Twin Towers.

I felt privileged to be working in these buildings,

because I felt like, you know, we were

on top of the world, literally.

I worked in the North Tower,

and everybody recognized it

by the spire on top, the antenna.

Tower two, which was the South Tower,

is where we worked at, and I…

Of course, Tower Two was better,

because we were there. You know?

The morning of September 11th,

I walked across the plaza.

To be able to see the top of the building,

you'd have to absolutely crane your neck up,

completely up to stare at the sky.

I'd never been in a building that… that tall before.

No. There certainly aren't any in North Carolina.

You enter an elevator that held maybe 50 people.

And it shot you up 78 floors in 45 seconds.

Feel your ears popping,

and you could feel the motions.

I never got used to travelling unnaturally fast

in an enormous steel box.

Good morning, American Eleven with you,

passing through 190 to 230.

American eleven, Boston Center. Roger,

climb level two-eight-zero.

Network Plus was this small little telecommunications company.

Our office was on the 81st floor,

and it was never hard to recruit anybody,

or hire anyone, cos everybody wanted to be there.

You know, it was my first office,

my first job as a business person.

Everything was unique to me.

The majority of the people that worked there

were in their early 20s,

were out to have a good time.

I mean, we worked for a telecom company,

we weren't bankers. We weren't hedge fund guys.

We were not all millionaires.

We were struggling kids, most of us.

When I started work there,

there was no other tenant on the rest of the floor.

So we had a quarter of the floor.

The rest of the three quarters of the floor was, was open.

We used to go into the unoccupied part of the office

to sneak cigarettes when we were on our break.

Yeah, when Bank of America

moved onto our floor, you know, that was our floor.

So they were coming in to our, our floor.

We were new kids on the block.

We had just moved there in June of that year.

It was our new office space.

Coming into this building, it was massive.

From one end of this floor to the other end of this floor.

The size of a football field. I loved it,

I can't say it enough, I loved it.

The windows on every floor

were 18 inches wide.

They ran from floor to ceiling though.

If you are looking down from where I was. You look down,

you get the feeling almost that you're gonna fall out.

You put your head against the window,

you get that that rollercoaster effect in your stomach.

You look down, like, "Wow."

I didn't have a problem

with Anne working at the World Trade Center.

I mean, a lot of people worked in each tower.

It was, you know, a lot of offices.

Oh, Anne was a dear. Lovely woman.

She was kind, sweet, always had nice things to say.

She had jumped from one job to work for the bank.

I kinda said, "Hey, that sounds like a really good position."

So… She did.

You know, I had… I had no clue.

I just didn't want to believe anything could happen.

Is that American 11 trying to call?

We have some planes.

Just stay quiet and you'll be okay.

Baseline just moved to the South Tower.

We took up floor 77 and a partial of 78.

On the morning of September 11th,

I get off at the 78th floor

and then take the escalator just down one floor.

An internal escalator to my office.

I put my jacket down, I put my laptop,

and my docking station and get all set.

Baseline was a company on the up.

We provided software and data to investment banks.

Everybody got along at Baseline.

It was a very close-knit company.

Even while being pregnant,

I was still excited to come to the office every single day.

Just to be able to work that high up.

Was like "Wow."

Steven was an accountant at Baseline.

And he was so happy with his job,

he loved working there.

This was a place that he felt that he would stay

for a long time.

That morning, at about,

approximately about 08:30 in the morning,

there might have been around 100 people

already on the floor.

I really had just sat down,

got my computer on,

looked at emails really quick to see

how many hundreds of emails came in overnight.

It was just another day.

We got a heads up for you, I've got an American 11

headed southeast right now. But we're not talking to them,

no one's talking to them for the last 20 minutes.

I dropped my food

and my workbag at my desk

and I headed off to the bathroom

to get dressed.

Neil comes by,

says you wanna go down for a cigarette?

I just wanted to grab my friend and…

Have a smoke break before

I was going out on sales calls.

So I'm standing with Peter at the elevators,

hit the down button.

That morning we had a team

up from Bank of America's corporate office.

And it was nice to show the new space off.

I'm on the phone,

I've got my feet on the windowsill,

I'm looking Uptown at Empire State Building,

and you see this plane coming at you.

Being a little hungover, you…

You look at it and you say, "Alright,

"there's a plane coming." You don't think twice about it,

you just go about your business.

I heard a sound which sounded like

a plane engine. Throttling down almost.

It sounds like it's a freight train.

And I remember, hanging up the phone

and turning around.

It hits you.

An enormous explosion.

The loudest noise I've ever heard.

The whole room jolted.

In an instant, there was terror.

Time was in slow-motion.

The wall tiles seemed to pop off the walls.

I remember the water pipe splitting.

The building felt like it moved.

Sideways.

It had gone too far over.

And I remember seeing the water from where I was.

And normally, you didn't see it.

Something was wrong. Like, something was very wrong.

I looked out my window.

I saw a huge fireball.

Flames and debris

shooting out from above.

People just stopped.

It was almost like time stopped.

Is the building going to fall down?

You can't even, in your mind,

you can't even fathom that.

Neil and I were stuck in this elevator.

Everything kind of froze.

In my mind.

Everything was just much more heightened.

Things looked crisper,

sounds sounded clearer.

I heard whooshing sounds.

Sounds like it's coming from everywhere.

And as we're prying open the doors, I look across

at the elevator bank in front of us and

one of the most vivid pictures I have of that day,

is this waterfall of fire falling down.

It was raining fire,

inside of the elevator bank opposite to us.

There's fire, then you notice that

some of that fire is behaving in a very different way.

Fire should not fall down. It goes up.

Something against nature was happening.

No idea what that was.

In retrospect, I have to assume it was jet fuel.

The only thing was get out of this situation right now.

We're trapped in an elevator

and I can see fire and debris.

Yeah, I mean, I thought for a split-second,

"That's it, I was dead, it was over, I was gone."

Neil and some other gentleman

opened up the doors.

And then, the next second, it was flight.

I yelled, "Stairs! Follow me!"

Turned right, and just started running.

There was a lot going on. Grown men on their knees,

people praying, people under their desks screaming.

Just as a 23-year-old kid, you don't see things like this,

nobody has any idea of what's going on.

I started yelling at everybody to calm down

and I got up and I immediately ran out into the hallway.

I saw destruction.

Ceiling tiles down

and debris in the middle of the hallway.

As I walked through the elevator banks,

I see flames.

But the stairwell was clear.

So I run back into the office And I was like,

"Alright, the stairwell is clear,

"everybody go to the stairwell."

As we opened the door to the hallway,

I remember the smell of what I know now

as jet fuel. And I'll never forget that smell.

At that point, I still had no idea it was a plane.

I was still in confusion.

I looked out of the window

to try to get a sense of what was happening.

I could see debris, dust, papers

falling from above.

And then, what caught my eye was a shoe.

A woman's shoe.

Red, high-heeled…

I don't know, uh, gosh…

You know, seeing that…

It wasn't a body,

but it was this clarity that

a human being was now

affected by what was happening.

That image, and that thought, and piecing that together

is chilling.

United 175, New York.

United 175, do you read New York?

United? United 175, do you read New York?

You knew the bang didn't come from our building,

but whatever it was, it was bad enough that

it shook the building.

And then, you got this really fast pervasive smell

of something that came flying through the office,

through, like, the whole ventilation system.

And I'm like, "What's going on, guys?"

You know, and I come out the office

and I see out the window all these papers flying,

and they look like they're on, some of them are on fire.

I look up and I see the North Tower

and I see black smoke.

It looked like,

like you'd used a rusty can opener

to try to open up a can.

I thought that a small plane, like a little Cessna

must have hit the building.

I didn't realise that what I was looking at

was the exit side.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing,

I'm like what's going on in that building?

I thought to myself,

this is definitely going to go out on the news.

Something happening to the Trade Center

is going to go out on the news.

And I yelled out to everybody that worked for me, I says,

"Call your home, call your people,

"and just tell them you're okay."

Make it a quick phone call, cos you gotta get out of here.

Anne called me

and I'm like, "What's the matter?"

She goes, "A plane hit the building,

"I don't know what's going on, I'll call you when I get out."

I was like, "You gotta be kidding me,

"how could a plane hit the building,

"you can't miss those things."

She didn't sound panicked,

but she just sounded like, "I want to get outta here."

Well, my mind started going,

"I gotta see what's going on."

We have a breaking news story

to tell you that apparently a plane has just crashed…"

And I'm looking at that and I'm saying, "That is a big hole

"and that is a lot of smoke."

"That is not a little plane."

And that made me feel a little worried.

I walk over to my desk and I look up and you just see,

like a waterfall over the window.

I saw this liquid just rolling down the window,

not knowing what it was.

I knew right away that it was jet fuel.

Holy.

What I feared more, was that it was going to ignite.

All right, people, let's go.

And I may have yelled a little bit.

"Let's go, pick it up. Let's go, go get your stuff."

I was with Anne Koster as we,

you know, proceeded towards the exit.

I turned around, and I remember looking 100, 200 feet away,

and that part of the building is on fire now.

My thinking is, "Can I outrun a fire?"

We knew the impact was bad,

we knew the visual was bad,

we knew something bad had happened.

Um, but the building was still there,

and I thought we were okay.

But I was… I turned out to be pretty wrong about that.

Kennedy Tower reports that there was a fire at the World Trade Center.

And that's, uh, that's the area where we lost the airplane.

Are you serious?

We knew that there was no elevator service.

The impact in the North Tower took out the elevator banks.

So our only way of leaving was the stairwells.

I don't think anybody really absorbed what 81 flights of stairs was like.

I did not have the most sensible shoes on.

I had like nice three-and-a-half inch heels.

They were lovely.

I was with Anne Koster,

and a few of the other people that I worked with.

Ann was kind of asthmatic.

And I was going to stay with her, no matter how long it took.

You picture a fire in a building,

and you picture people just trampling people to get out of it.

This is not what it was.

Two people by two,

in a very orderly,

almost mechanical tempo down the stairs.

I thought we were going to be out of the building in no time.

I hadn't gone very far in the stairwell,

and I heard someone yelling

that there are people stuck in an elevator.

I got out of the stairwell.

I went over to the elevator, and I was able to

get the doors open enough to see that the elevator's stuck between floors.

The guys in the elevator were panicked,

because the elevators had been compromised.

So, me and another guy run into an office,

and we… I happened to grab a bathroom key

with a stick at the end of it.

And he grabbed what looked like a leg from a chair.

And we get back to the elevator,

and we're trying to open the doors with these… these devices.

And we're not opening them this way,

the elevator doors are just kinking this way.

And we felt like we were going to do more harm than good,

so we gave them the stick

and the and the leg from the chair

to try to do it themselves from the inside.

And we left.

And they… That was it.

That was the last I heard, I, you know…

I don't know if they made it or not.

From the lower floors evacuating,

now, the traffic was starting to build up.

You know? From the bottom, up.

Once we hit 69, it was just

a step a minute.

We were hearing people yell from above us,

"Make room, make room, make room."

Everybody got out of the way and parted the waters for them to pass through.

There were people closer to the impact zone

who were really in very bad shape.

That was the point when I said to myself, "This is very bad."

I remember seeing the first wounded person.

The hair was burnt, and his face was sort of charcoaly black,

and he had a open wound from, sort of, his wrist to his elbow,

where the skin was sort of peeled back.

I remember thinking his wristwatch was still on.

Like, gosh that's really gotta hurt.

There's just people with their faces all sliced up from glass.

There was one woman that came down the steps

with her arms outstretched.

You could tell she was burnt,

and the skin was literally draped off of her arms.

Both arms.

That's something I don't… I don't ever forget.

-Hello? -Do you, uh, see that United 175 anywhere?

I can't get a hold of United 175 at all right now,

and I don't know where he went to.

In case of a fire, or an emergency,

it was very clear we would all need to go up to the 78th floor

and await further instructions.

I go back in my office and I grab the whistle.

And I left the hat.

I didn't want to mess up my hair.

"Everybody, time to go, get up to the 78th floor."

I went up to the 78th floor,

and the elevator banks there were just packed,

everybody from other floors were already evacuating.

I'll never forget one guy.

He literally jumped in the middle of the people,

and it was packed,

Being seven months pregnant and seeing that many people

trying to rush out of the building,

I felt a little unsafe.

There's a fire warden phone.

it's a red phone that's a direct line to the fire station

down at the lobby.

I'm holding onto the red phone, I have it in my ear,

and I'm waiting to hear something.

I don't hear anything

Some of my co-workers were just staring at me

like, "What do I do?" You know, "Do I leave? Do I stay?"

And I'm still waiting to hear something on this red phone.

I had it here.

No one answered this red phone.

And I told them, "Don't worry about it, just go ahead and leave."

I don't know if me holding onto the phone

and telling them to leave encouraged more people to leave.

I'm not sure.

Something inside of me just said,

"Forget this. Get to a stairwell and walk out."

The stairs were right there on the left,

so I just followed the crowd down the stairwell.

Hey, Joe, you see 3321 code

just southwest of Newark by about 18, 18, 20 miles.

We don't know who he is. We're just picking him up now.

All right. Heads up, man, it looks like another one.

All right.

Several managers decided to go to our areas

to make sure that

nobody else was on the floor before we left ourselves.

So I decided to go down,

take the escalator and go back down to my office area.

The north side of our floor looked directly at the north tower.

Within a couple of minutes,

we actually saw people start to appear

at the edges of this, this gash.

You literally could see everything up close.

You could see the expression on the people's faces,

you could see the smoke, you could see the fire,

and you were like, "Oh, my gosh!" It looked like hell in there.

I looked up in the sky and I see a gentleman in a white shirt

and a tie.

Nothing wrong with him.

He's not bleeding, he's not on fire.

He's physically fine,

except he's flying down like he was skydiving.

It's just a vision, you know.

I still, I can still see it.

I saw a group of three people.

with two men and a woman.

And they all made the sign of the cross

and they all held hands and… and jumped.

And I had to turn away.

I never saw where they landed.

That's one memory that is seared into my brain that will never, never leave.

I was starting to feel a little more scared,

even though we were not in immediate danger in the South Tower.

We had no idea the clock was ticking at that point.

It seemed like we were safe.

We didn't realise that we were in

the most dangerous place in the world at that very moment.

We have several situations goin' on here.

It's escalating big, big time.

Just get me somebody who has the authority to get military in the air, now.

I'd never been in the stairwell of the South Tower before.

It was just a sea of heads as you'd turn each corner.

Nobody's pushing, nobody's yelling,

nobody's shoving.

It's just orderly down the stairs together.

At that point I bumped into Henry,

and I said, "What's going on? What happened?"

And somebody said a small plane flew into North Tower.

I really still thought it was just a Cessna and a pure accident.

I didn't think that there was any terrorism.

I had no idea, the magnitude of what just happened.

Must be around 65th floor.

An announcement comes on,

and it's a woman who sounds a little bit nervous.

"Due to a smoke condition in tower one,

"that building is being evacuated.

"There is no reason to evacuate tower two at this time."

"If you want to leave, you can.

"If you want to stay, you can return to your office."

So, she really left it to whatever everybody wanted to do.

It was like the stairs opened.

People in mass amounts just left.

At least a third of the people,

maybe half of the people turned around and said,

"Fine, I'm going back to my office."

And you saw people going,

turning around right into the stairs where they were

and taking the elevator back up.

But my insides are telling me there's something wrong, you have to get out.

And my colleague says to me,

"I think we should keep going.

"It may not have been an accident."

15,000, descending.

Just Southwest of Newark, about 20 miles.

He's out of 9,500. 9,000 now.

This guy's a big boy, cos he's leavin' some big contrails.

Bob Levine and Steve Weinberg

had come down from the 78th floor,

which is where their offices were.

I was talking with Bob and Steve,

and Bob said to me,

he says, "You know, they're saying you can stay."

And I said, "These people can't get a fire drill straight."

And they said, "What are you guys gonna do?"

And we said, "We're leaving."

Stephen called me from his cell phone

and told me that he was looking outside at the other building,

that he could see debris, almost like confetti and smoke.

So, I said, "You need to leave."

And he said, "They're telling us that we're safe here.

"This was the other building. We're okay."

And I said, "I don't care. You need to leave."

So Bob and Steve went back upstairs.

It had to have been a couple of minutes past 9:00.

So, I got up, turned on the radio, and started listening.

A major disaster is occurring In New York City this morning.

As to how this happened, well, the FBI is looking…

Hey, can you look out your window right now?

-Yeah. -It's descending really quick.

He just dropped 800 feet in, like, like one, one sweep.

That's another situation.

When I got to the 44th floor,

we hit congestion.

As we got to that floor,

we were being directed to the opposite side of the building.

It was pretty much full of people

that had come down from other stairwells.

And as I made my way over to the window,

it caught my eye, this beautiful bright blue sky,

and there's sort of papers floating down.

I'm almost smiling at sort of the beauty of the scene.

And there was this sort of sound.

It sounded like glass, twinkling down the side of the building.

Sort of a wind chime almost.

I realise that it's the glass that's just cracking.

An enormous fireball came flying towards the window.

I did not know what that fireball was.

I'm right back into the terror.

It's just screams and pandemonium.

And then, I heard the announcer saying another plane is coming in.

Oh, my God.

It went through the 88th floor.

And I just started to scream.

And fell to the floor.

"Steven is dead! Steven is dead!"

Bang!

Boom!

It came careening through the building right above our heads.

Then all hell broke loose.

The building just went back like this.

And my head went back and snapped.

It felt like the building was going to snap in half.

I felt it going from side to side.

You know? It was just like being on a ship.

The sensation was that of falling.

Like the building was coming down,

and I felt like I was falling through the building.

It happened all in slow motion.

Everything slowed down.

All the glass went flying across the floor.

The tiles started coming down.

Duh-duh-duh-duh. Like a set of dominos.

The lights were out.

It was like literally one moment was day,

the next moment was night.

There was all this black smoke. Like somebody did a magic act, like nothing was there.

It just was like a surreal kind of…

Like, what in the world just happened?

Another one just hit the building.

Wow. The whole building just came apart.

-Oh, God. -Holy smokes.

I went into the bedroom and sat down on his side of the bed.

Praying for the phone to ring.

I had maybe a very, very, very small glimmer of hope,

because Steven always used to say to me,

"You always think the worst. Don't think the worst."

And so I thought, "Well then,

"I'm going to try to think of a little bit of hope, maybe?"

The news is on,

and I'm watching…

I felt…

like, "Is this really happening?

"This is crazy."

Alfredo and I had just gotten married.

I used to visit Alfredo at the South Tower.

And I kept dialing his number, and dialing his number, and there was nothing.

And you see another plane.

Oh, my God.

What the hell?

My husband was in that building.

And I still haven't heard from Alfred.

I don't even know what happened.

I'm walking down the stairs, and the next thing…

Everybody is knocked to the ground.

And there is this ringing sound in my ears.

All of a sudden, we're leaning,

and I'm fighting to keep myself standing.

The entire stairwell is rocking.

Swinging like as if you're on a Ferris wheel.

And then, all you heard was screaming.

I lost complete confidence in the structure that I was in.

The panic sets in. I need to get out of here.

I didn't know a plane hit that building.

I didn't know a plane hit this building neither.

All I'm noticing is what's happening in front of me, right?

I remember looking and seeing my office

caved in, collapsed, the ceiling was gone.

By this point I was really, really shaking.

Because I came down the escalator from 78 to 77

less than two minutes earlier.

And I knew the people that I had just talked to were all dead.

All the people above us, on the 78th floor

waiting for elevators…

To picture that in my mind is just an unbearable thought to think.

They didn't have a chance.

Whether you went up, or whether you went down,

whether you went left, or whether you went right,

that decided whether you were going to live or die that day.

Then I remember hearing Jonathan Weinberg yell,

"Over here, over here, over here."

And going to the north side, to stairway A.

The only person I could see was my boss, Carl,

and I was like, "Just follow him."

It was dark, and it was smoky.

That stairway was not passable.

I remember going to the central fire escape, stairway B.

I normally would see the windows on the other side and see daylight.

I didn't see nothing. It was pitch black.

It was like a big void.

It was almost like that whole area

just disappeared, that's how black it was.

We were not gonna go that way, that was not a choice, okay?

So we tried to get to stairway C.

I was a good 20 feet away,

and I could feel the flames from over there.

And I was like, "That's not a good thing.

"We're not getting out that way."

There was just no way to escape.

The thought I had was,

"Oh, my God! We're in the same situation now ourselves

"as the people that we were just looking at

"across in the other building."

I looked at the windows right there.

And I was like, "If you have to jump, you have to jump.

"You just do it quick and you're done."

I was just standing there,

really didn't know what to do.

I can't feel my baby move.

I remember seeing then Jyoti, who was seven months pregnant.

And somebody came back and grabbed my hand.

We need to make sure she gets out, you know?

If we have to sacrifice ourselves, we do so,

to make sure she got out.

So, it was important, okay?

That's the whole thing about Baseline. We were all a family.

The final image that I have

is of my co-workers standing there,

kind of banding together.

I just felt that we as a group,

we were all gonna die together,

or we were all gonna get out of there together.

In the 70s, I ran into my boss Mike.

He told me that everyone else in the office was

further along than we were.

And so we were the last two from our office.

And as we're going down, the entrance to the 68th floor was opened.

We could hear other people trying to figure out how to evacuate.

Mike and I entered this office

where we saw this group of people

just kind of standing around.

I'm like, "You've got to get out of here, the stairwell's clear."

And they weren't listening to us.

I started kind of grabbing people by the shoulder

and telling them to move and…

A woman steps aside, and there I see this woman in a wheelchair.

Now we understand why everyone else wasn't moving.

She seemed a little anxious.

We asked her if she wanted help, and she said yes.

And I said, "Okay, let's bring her down."

Thinking we'd be able to get her down the motorized wheelchair.

But the wheelchair had a heavy motor.

It wasn't meant to go down the steps.

And now I'm like anxious.

She told us that there was another option,

an evacuation wheelchair.

I picked up the woman out of the motorized wheelchair

and put her in the evacuation chair.

Because she was relatively petite,

we just picked her up.

There was a handle on each side

and I was on the left, and John was on the right.

And that's when I started just thinking about what the task was

going to be ahead of us to walk down 68 flights of stairs.

I'm making my way downstairs

in the middle of the worst event

as far as destruction on US soil

and not even know I'm in the middle of it.

We needed to get out of here.

Staircase C wasn't an option.

B was such an unknown.

And A wasn't any better! It was full of smoke.

We don't know what we were getting into,

but we knew that was the only option we had at this point.

I went back in my office and grabbed the flashlight.

When we first got into the stairwell,

was where we encountered a lot of white smoke

and we all had to hold hands.

The stairwell was cracked, it was damaged.

There's wires, and there's this water coming down.

I was thinking probably the sprinkler kicked in

and it's the water that we are walking on.

The smell on the stairway was distinct.

But for some reason I just, I didn't put one and one together at that point.

It was really, really dark.

You couldn't see more than a foot in front of you,

with the flashlight.

And somebody saying that they wanted to light a match.

I distinctly remember smelling something.

Half the people I was with smoked.

And then I realised, there was no sprinklers going off.

Something in me said do not light a match.

That's not water, that's Jet fuel.

The plane had essentially crashed right above us,

and had cracked open,

and the fuel was spilling down the stairway steps.

And if they had lit the match we would've burned up.

We're still moving pretty good pace

from 68 to 55.

There was a light hearted nature of conversation

that was really thinly veiling

everyone being worried about what was going on.

I wanted to call my parents.

I got out of the stair well and found a phone.

My phone rang at my desk,

and I picked it up and it was John,

Hey, Dad, it's me.

And I said, "Are you… are you okay?"

I said, "I'm in the building."

I asked him which floor he was on.

I think I lied and said I was way further down.

I'm almost out.

I said, "Well, just keep on, just keep oncoming out."

The tone of his voice was…

Yeah, it was intense.

I was worried

that he knew something and I didn't feel like asking him.

When I spoke to John I knew that

this was a deliberate attack,

it wasn't an accident.

I didn't think it was a good thing to tell him.

The circumstance didn't matter as much as

the job of encouraging him to get out of that building.

We had no idea what was going on.

We didn't have the perspective that the rest of the world had.

In the North Tower,

cell phone service was was non-existent,

I don't know if it was jammed, if it went down,

but there was no cell service.

There were no smart phones,

there's no way to know what was going on,

unless you spoke to somebody.

But I did hear someone say

"Oh, my Blackberry says

"that a plane hit the towers."

And I'm like, "What's a Blackberry?"

How do you have news on a phone?

It didn't compute, so I just dismissed it outright.

It was hot as hell in there.

It probably felt like 100 degrees in there.

Probably even higher, and you, everyone is sweating.

And you want to just be as calm as you can.

Being in a cramped stairwell with that many people,

my nerves were so on edge, I felt like I could crack.

I discovered being claustrophobic when I was in that staircase.

I started to panic a little bit,

and it's like being pinned to the floor and not being able to move.

Uh, it did a number on me.

A woman that was with us in the group said,

"Well, why don't you take your jacket off?"

Oh, that would be a smart idea.

"Oh, you can take your tie off, too,

"you know, you're not going to appointments today, Neil.

"You can sort of let it out."

But I didn't want to get undressed, because

I felt that if I didn't admit to myself,

that I didn't need these items anymore,

there was a sense that I'm getting out.

There's a sense that I'm alive.

I was with Ann Koster for a long time,

Very, very wonderful woman.

She was part of my team.

Anne was kind of asthmatic,

I was worried about Anne. I was worried about anything

that would cause her to have an attack.

I just didn't let myself go to pieces

cos that wouldn't wouldn't do anybody any good.

She was having trouble moving down the steps.

She actually at one point started going down the steps sideways,

one step at a time.

I tried to ease her burden by taking her jacket

and I took her pocket book from her,

and I carried that you know for as long as I was with her.

Maybe in the 30's or 40's,

we saw our first fire fighter come up.

and people were cheering him, people were, "Hey, the fire fighters coming,

"he's gonna put out the fire."

They were carrying hoses and picks and equipment

and just trudging up those steps.

I know I couldn't walk up

40 flights of stairs on my own with nothing on me

and here these guys are carrying 60,

100 pounds of equipment.

We would go into different floors

and find vending machines,

and we'd break the vending machines open so that we could get water

or soda or drinks.

We were giving them to the firemen

and pouring it on their heads to try to cool them off.

Someone that, sort of, seemingly in charge,

taken a poll of where everyone's coming from.

"What floor were you on?" And somebody going, "57."

"It was above us." And "67, it was above us."

And he asked me and I said, "81."

And his face just went completely white.

I'm like, look behind me, there's nobody left up there.

I'm like, "Let it burn."

And his answer was to me, "It's my job."

All right.

I wished him luck, and he went up and I went down.

I didn't know there was a second plane, I didn't know it was terrorist attack.

Didn't know any of that, but they did,

and they still went up.

As we were going down, there's no more stairs.

It's a landing, it leads us straight.

We kept on walking,

and eventually, now, we're in front of this wall.

There was a wall here, and wall here,

I was like, okay, this feels like a dead end.

There was a sense of panic among everyone.

If this not continuing, where do we go now?

Everybody has a quiet moment, that was my quiet moment.

I just was trying to keep myself together.

We're literally staring at a brick wall.

"Oh, my God, there's no way out of here."

I used to visit Alfredo at the 77th floor.

It's horrible. You're seeing it and you see it's on fire.

And it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

These are innocent people.

I was on the phone trying to reach Alfredo.

Not knowing where he was, it was devastating.

Having gone down only one flight of stairs,

and to be faced with a brick wall,

it seemed like that was the end, it could be game over at that point.

It's just an uncomfortable feeling.

Now I'm going to go back up, we're moving as to go back up these stairs.

And we finally see, there was light underneath,

and we see there's a door here that says "exit".

You're like "phew," that's a little relief, there, right?

We see a door, we open a door,

and it led us through this little corridor

that led us to another set of stairs. That was lit.

To this day I don't know why that stairwell angled like that,

at that floor, at that point,

but we were incredibly lucky that we were able to find our way out of it in the dark.

76 stories to go down at that point.

That's a lot of stairs.

Nobody ahead of us. Nobody behind us.

People who would've left, would've left already.

The person that really was leading was Jyoti,

because she was seven months pregnant at the time.

I became the, more like a focal point,

sort of like a distraction, so everybody was focusing on me.

We were only going as fast as Jyoti could go,

because nobody was gonna go ahead.

My focus was on my baby.

I didn't really feel her moving.

And not feeling her, it was a bit concerning.

She had that mother's

sense of "I'm gonna get out of here, because I'm gonna protect my child."

And I just wanted to get out there, get it checked out

and make sure everything was okay.

It must be around 9:40 and we reached the 21st floor.

So John and I were helping a woman who was using a wheelchair.

First responders have set up a sort of triage area.

The fireman was saying, as we're passing, "Just set her down.

"We can take it from there."

And get whatever medical treatment, she needed

and just get out of the congestion of the stairwell.

And I look at her and I said,

You know, "Do you want me to set you down here?"

It's no trouble to us

if you want to come, because we're leaving now.

And she's still, like, being hesitant

and not giving an answer.

And I said, "Listen,

"I'll take you all the way out of here, you just tell me what you wanna do."

And she said, "I want to stay with you guys."

That really intensified our, you know, our mission,

our camaraderie and our bond.

We were there for her, to carry her out.

But maybe she was there for us.

Yeah. It's three of us or nothing at all.

So, it's now probably about 10 to 10:00.

As we hit maybe the 11th, 10th floor, the floor's wet.

Had to put the shoes back on.

At first it's just wet, and then it's really wet,

And then it's rushing water.

It became very slippery coming down the stairs after that.

We're walking in almost ankle-deep water.

It was a rusty reddy colour.

And there was a moment where I thought, "Oh, my gosh, the ceiling's bleeding."

I don't know how long I held on to that.

I think it was probably just rusty pipes making the water

a little bit tannish, but it was a horrible image to have.

As we got closer to the bottom,

we see these people in the uniform.

And they're telling people, "Get out, get out, get out."

Was there sense of urgency to get out? Yes.

Was it a dire need to get out because

the building was gonna collapse? No.

Now the pace had picked up and finally we're…

Finally we're getting out.

When we got down,

you kind of merged up with the other

people that were coming out of the other stairwell.

They kinda came together.

I, literally, was inside the building for an hour.

Which insulated me from the outside world.

You come out of the stairwell

and there's a upper level to the lobby of the trade centre.

And you can see out in the courtyard.

And now I'm looking in that courtyard.

There're just pieces of recognizable wing,

airplane and landing gear.

I mean, you see the huge tire.

I saw just clumps of things hitting the ground.

And in my mind, it's not registering to me what that was.

You see,

you know, desks on fire, you see paper falling from the sky on fire,

and you just hear this noise…

Of people dropping.

You could see some remains

of people.

In the debris.

If you looked.

I looked away pretty quick though.

Outside was mayhem.

I was struck by the number of people

watching all of this unfold.

And some of them I recognised from being on the train with them.

We turned around and we looked, you know, and we saw

the two buildings on fire.

There's both of them on fire? Why are both of them on fire?

What happened? What happened here?

Remember, our mission is not over until Jyoti is taken care of.

Police officer asked if anybody needed help.

I said, I don't feel my baby.

He basically grabbed my hand, and helped me cross the street.

We saw Jyoti being taken and put in the back of the ambulance

and the ambulance driving off.

That.

Mission accomplished.

I go to put a cigarette in my mouth.

I'm bringing my lighter to the cigarette. I never got it lit.

Because all of a sudden the world shook again.

You're hearing sounds of metal twisting.

And I remember hearing a thunderous roar.

And then…

It started to just look like it was just toppling.

I actually thought that the building was going to fall on top of us.

Everyone just said, "Run."

And so it's, pick a direction

and hope you guess the right direction.

I remember knocking into a woman. She fell on the floor.

I got sort of sent flying.

My cell phone went one way.

I remember going for the cell phone

and trying to grab her at the same time.

Somebody picked me up and was sort of dragging me

with them as they were going as well.

To my right it's a beautiful September day,

and to my left is complete darkness of pure hell coming at you.

It looked like it was a physical object, not like smoke.

It swallows you up,

like a wave in the ocean.

I remember seeing when the South Tower collapsed.

That was, that was rough to watch that.

What went through my mind was wondering where my wife was.

Where was Ann?

Holy crap, where are you in all that mess?

I prayed.

I prayed a long time that day.

The building was vibrating.

Such a huge building vibrating doesn't bode well for safety.

I said to myself,

"We have to really get out of here right now, cos this is very bad."

I lost contact with Ann,

only because I went to aid somebody else.

And Anne Koster, kind of, went with two other gentlemen

and kept evacuating.

I still held on to her jacket and her pocketbook.

I just never realised I had it.

That two or three seconds when that initial dust ball hits you,

it feels like it's an hour.

There's no sun coming anywhere, there's no lights anywhere,

there's nothing except…

This dust around you.

It was just white, white everywhere,

just white powder, ash.

I hear a lot of the fireman's… The whistles that go off

when a fireman is down?

You know, the high pitched beep?

You hear that in the background.

The firemen I guess that were in the building are now down.

And you hear it.

And it's…

It's loud.

It's a sound that, I don't ever want to remember that sound ever.

But I do.

The awareness of how many people must have died was…

Was now a thing.

Like in the front of your mind.

My mind.

I was just thinking about my floor and my people.

And just how it had just been a little while before that I'd seen them.

It was a heavy…

The feeling in my…

How do you say it?

I knew exactly where Stephen's office was.

I knew there was no hope soon as that building came down.

That even if he had lived through the plane

coming into the building,

that there wasn't enough time for him to get down from 78.

And at that point,

I said to myself, "I think we have to plan a funeral."

The lower we got, the slower

the pace down the stairwell became.

Probably around the fifth floor, we get stopped.

Like now I'm not moving,

and people are screaming.

We were really in a bad situation, I mean, a super bad situation.

We encountered firemen

and we got out of the stairwell for the first time

into this 5th floor.

It was pitch black.

There was obviously some destruction in there.

Step over debris. Stop. Put the woman down,

move things out of the way. I did that a few times.

And we follow the firemen to this one side.

The fireman's like, "No, you can't go out this way."

We went back another way and tried another few other options.

Because we're going back and forth on the same floor,

and I'm on the 5th floor, it's dark and I can't get out of here.

Panic really started setting in.

And now being aware that there are about 100 stories

of this building above us.

My head is like, screaming like,

we're in a dark floor, I'm five floors away from getting out of here

and I'm stuck.

There's no way out?

There was this intense feeling of being trapped.

Before I knew it, I was 10, 15 blocks away,

covered in soot. Drenched in sweat.

And I turned around and just saw a space in the sky

that wasn't that there before.

Didn't make sense.

I just kept telling myself, keep it together until you tell someone you're alive.

Once you tell them you're alive, you can completely crack.

We were looking for a phone, cos cell phones weren't working at the time.

I remember looking at payphones and people were…

25, 30 people lined up at payphones.

I called my house and kept praying that the line would go through.

I just went, "Mom?"

And she just said to me, she says, "Are you okay?" And I'm like, "No."

Nope.

I heard my mum's voice, but I couldn't speak.

And that's when I let myself, sort of

break down

and sort of give in to the horrors of the day.

We follow the fireman.

This can't happen fast enough. And the longer it took,

the more anxiety set in.

We were stopped again. Why are we stopped?

So close to getting out, this might be just where we stay.

And then the guy goes, "Okay, it's fine now, let's go."

There's no more lights, there's water coming down the stairs.

It was stopping us from moving as quickly as we wanted.

It really heightened the anxiety level.

We continued down, we're down the steps.

So, now, the hallway gets flooded with light from outside as the door opens.

Saw one fireman in the lobby

who was directing us out through a broken window.

And we're walking out now

into this unexplained, like, dust and grey matter

all over the place.

We see an ambulance there,

facing south.

We put the woman in one of the ambulances

and said our goodbyes.

She starts to cry.

And I'm like, "You know, what are you crying for? We're out."

And I just handed her my business card.

And I didn't realise it at the time,

but we never even asked her her name.

It does seem weird that we

hadn't up to that point exchanged names and introductions.

But that wasn't an ordinary day.

It didn't seem like those ambulances were

in any rush to get out of there.

After I shut the doors to the ambulance,

I turn around and face The North Tower for the first time.

From my vantage point,

I couldn't see the South Tower wasn't there!

And just at that point,

there's a man with a camera, and I'm looking up

like, in shock,

and he's asking me questions.

Tell me what you saw and heard.

I still kept looking up, like, "What's going on?"

Who do you work for?

Uh, Network Plus, a communications company out of, uh…

-How do you spell it? -Mike Benfante.

We kept hearing these intense impacts

that sounded like car crashes. Several of them.

You know, you don't try to think about every sound you hear

until you see it.

I'm walking to John and that's when I see,

you know, people falling from the sky.

And, uh, and I…

And you know, that's where you're like…

Your whole world just turns upside down,

and it's like nothing makes sense anymore.

And I'm like, "This is chaos. This is chaos."

I stopped and took one last look at the building.

It looked like the smoke

started moving downward and outward.

I just hear this huge rumbling sound.

And I see the antenna on the North Tower

just dropping in the middle of the building.

And I heard this boom

that just rose up right behind me and I look back…

I take off, and I remember

there's a cameraman right there and I'm running by him.

And he's filming me and I'm thinking, "This guy's going to die."

And no matter how fast we ran, we could not outrun it.

Did my final prayer for really, my family.

My wife and I were

sat there pretty much in silence.

I think we…

both may have given up hope,

but we didn't want to tell the other that we had.

After the North Tower collapsed, I really

didn't wanna entertain the idea that Ann was not going to survive.

The reporters just keep on giving you just…

You know, bits and pieces, information…

The only way to identify anybody if you don't have

a body would be by DNA testing.

So I went upstairs to the bathroom, I got her toothbrush

and her hairbrush.

And put it in a bag, in case, they found anything.

Watching the second tower come down,

that was it. I thought he died.

I tried calling and calling and there was no service.

Towers were down.

You couldn't get anything.

I wanted him to tell me that he was okay.

That they're not taking him from me and the kids.

This is what I wanted.

I wanted to hear him tell me, "Honey, I'm okay."

My sister-in-law came over, hysterical,

"Oh, my God. What's going on?" I'm like, please.

I didn't need anybody going crazy,

cos I was trying to hold it together myself.

That's the day I turned white,

I was going grey, I turned white that day.

Ann, you know, is the love of my life.

Anne finally called me at 11:30.

It was like, "Oh, thank God."

It was great to hear his voice,.

It really was, it really was, it was wonderful.

9/11 has definitely brought us closer.

Very much.

We have friends that tease us,

because we do everything together.

Just think of what it would be if things were different.

And how much my life would be changed,

and not for the better.

Love you.

Love you, too.

I'm still trying to reach him and there's nothing.

I feel like I'm going to pass out.

But he walked in the door I was like, "Oh, my God, honey!

"Everybody's calling and crying."

And he said, "Are they… Did they start crying after they found out I was okay?"

Because this is what he does.

Aww, okay? Here you go, here you go.

9/11 Changed us because

we didn't take this relationship that we had for granted.

We had good times, bad times,

still, right,

but we were fortunate to have the time together.

You can't take anything for granted.

You have to live each day

and make the best of it.

When I found out that all of us survived from the 81st floor,

it was miraculous.

The only person that wasn't unaccounted for,

the woman we carried down.

It was very likely that

the ambulance that we had put the woman in never made it out.

Well, John and I thought she was dead.

Several days later…

I got a call from a journalist who

said that she wanted to do a story.

She said that it was…

It's admirable what you did in carrying Tina Hanson down.

I was like, "What, who?"

Her name was Tina.

And she made it.

Well, this picture here is me, Tina and John,

at my wedding one year later.

We were all pretty glad to be together again.

I'm very proud of what John did on that day.

I don't know I ever said how proud I am.

I brag on him every chance I get with friends and, you know.

I'm very proud of you. I sure am! You know?

Thank you.

What do we do?

You know, we were just going on to work

like every other normal American person going to work that day.

The Baseline family suffered four tragedies that day.

We think about Steven all the time.

We have pictures of Steven around.

We were a happy family.

Happy hurricane.

We all know that we're sad.

But we smile and we laugh

when we talk about him and the things he did, or the things he said.

He's only one of a few thousand that we lost that day.

But, I'll tell you, he was probably one of the nicest ones.

Losing colleagues, um…

Feel a little guilty that they lost their…

Why them? Like, how did that happen?

How am I sitting here? Why am I sitting here?

There's so many people that didn't get out.

And you ask yourself…

For 17 years…

What could I have done differently?

There's that guilt every day, you have,

and…

It won't go away until I'm dead.

We started the day as colleagues,

ended the day as lifelong brothers and sisters.

We needed to be able to call our friend from the office

and say, are you still having nightmares three years later?

"Yeah, still have nightmares." Okay.

I don't feel as crazy anymore.

They tried to take our spirit

And the American people and whoever was in that,

those buildings that day

kind of says, "You know what? Not with us, it's not going to happen."

The way people came together that day is,

is something to be appreciated.

It is a sad day.

But it's also a day to remember how

we came together for the good of others.

We stood together, because of Joyti,

I believe, in my mind, I truly believe

because of her we survived.

Because we stuck together.

Shailaja was born on November 24, 2001.

It means daughter of the mountain.

And literally I came down the mountain, called World Trade Center,

and survived, and she's here.

Because of you…

people made it out alive.

And I'm really grateful that they looked after us,

not just me, you and me both.

I love my name, like,

there's nothing about my name that I would ever want to change.

I earned my name.

The most positive thing about that day was that

I wasn't alone.

I was with a wonderful group of people.

Because if I had been by myself that day,

I probably would've died.

The person that went into that building is not the person that came out.

But I didn't stop living.

I'm glad I'm here to tell people about it.

The only thing I can say at this point is I'm glad I can…

I'm a "Walking piece of history," as my nephew says.