Inside when the planes hit
by digby
I remember reading this when it first came out and I’ve searched for it ever since. I’m not sure if Esquire didn’t have it online when I was searching or whether I just failed to find the right keywords (I didn’t recall which magazine I’d read it in.) In any case this account of being the World trade Center on September 11th is one of the most searing, horrifying first person accounts I’ve ever read. I’ve never gotten it out of my head.
Up to that day, I’d had a Brady Bunch, cookie-cutter, beautiful life. I now know what it’s like to have a 110-story building that’s been hit by a 767 come down on my head. For better or for worse, it’s part of my life. There are things I never thought I’d know that I now know.
It was as mundane a morning as you can imagine. Tuesdays are usually the days I go out to see clients and make sales calls. I get to my office at a quarter to eight, eat a bran muffin, drink a cup of coffee, and get my head straight for the day.
I was actually in a good mood. A couple of us were yukking it up in the men’s room. We’d just started sharing the eighty-first floor of 1 World Trade Center with Bank of America, and they’d put up a sign telling everyone to keep the bathroom clean. “Look at this,” one of us said. “They move in and now they’re giving us shit.” It was about quarter to nine.
All of a sudden, there was the shift of an earthquake. People ask, “Did you hear a boom?” No. The way I can best describe it is that every joint in the building jolted. You ever been in a big old house when a gust of wind comes through and you hear all the posts creak? Picture that creaking being not a matter of inches but of feet. We all got knocked off balance. One guy burst out of a stall buttoning up his pants, saying, “What the fuck?” The flex caused the marble walls in the bathroom to crack.
You’re thinking, Gas main. It was so percussive, so close. I opened the bathroom door, looked outside, and saw fire.
There was screaming. One of my coworkers, Alicia, was trapped in the women’s room next door. The doorjamb had folded in on itself and sealed the door shut. This guy Art and another guy started kicking the shit out of the door, and they finally got her out.
There was a huge crack in the floor of the hallway that was about half a football field long, and the elevator bank by my office was completely blown out. If I’d walked over, I could’ve looked all the way down. Chunks of material that had been part of the wall were in flames all over the floor. Smoke was everywhere.
I knew where the stairs were because a couple of guys from my office used to smoke butts there. I started screaming, “Out! Out! Out!” The managers were trying to keep people calm and orderly, and here I was screaming, “The stairs! The stairs!”
We got to the stairwell, and people were in various states. Some were in shock; some were crying. We started filing down in two rows, fire-drill style. I’d left my cell phone at my desk, but my coworkers had theirs. I tried my wife twenty times but couldn’t get through. Jenny had gone up to Boston with her mother and grandmother and was staying with my family. Our son was with her. Ben’s six months old. It was impossible to reach them…
I suppose we all wonder what we’d do in a catastrophe like that. This fellow found out.
It’s an amazing story, highly recommended. Just brace yourself.
h/t to Peter Daou who tweeted this link.
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