One Person's World Trade Center Experience

by Mike Englund

A number of people asked me to document my experience in the World Trade Center
on September 11 in an email, so that others could know what it was like from at
least from one person's perspective. Here, on the anniversary of the event, is
my attempt to summarize it. Sorry that it took me so long to write it, and I
apologize in advance for its enormous length! Also, I apologize if any of you
would rather not get stuff like this, but I thought I would bias myself toward
sending it to too many people rather than too few, as I thought that it was at
best unclear which of you would really want to receive this.

Generally, I like to think that I prefer brevity, but I thought it would be
worth recording the event in detail here and leave it to the reader to skim, or
for me to edit it down at some time in the future to a tolerable length for my
own purposes. Here, I simply tried to record all the images and thoughts that I
was experiencing, moment by moment. I left out much of the detail about my own
personal thoughts, which would obviously make this story even longer! I limited
what I wrote here to the facts as I experienced them. As such, I guess I am not
just apologizing for the excessive length, but also for the lack of any personal
thoughts about friends and family that obviously were on my mind at the time,
but that I chose not to record here for posterity.

On September 11, I was attending a NABE conference at the World Trade Center
with roughly 300 other economists. About half of the conference participants,
including myself, attended a breakfast meeting with the CEO of Morgan Stanley
starting around 8:00 that morning, in the first floor conference room of the
Marriott World Trade Center. The hotel was adjacent to both the North and South
towers, in the southwest corner of the WTC complex. The parking lot below the
hotel, which was previously called the Vista, was the site of the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing.

The conference room was typical of such conferences, with a couple of large
double doors at the entrance of a huge square room, and a high 30-35 foot
ceiling. Also as is typical of conference rooms, the ceiling lights were
configured to appear like an enormous chandelier, though this "chandelier" was
really a huge array of hundreds of individual small glass tubes with bulbs
between them, each suspended by a separate wire from the ceiling. The entire
array of ceiling lights was probably about 60 feet long and 30 feet wide.

The morning breakfast meeting started like any other conference session, and the
speaker had just started his remarks when, at 8:46, the audience became aware
that something was happening in the building.

The slow passage of a broad black "band" of temporarily unlit bulbs passed from
the east end of the conference room chandelier to the west end, and it took
several seconds to completely cross the room. The pattern was similar to the
slow passage of a black band on a TV set when the vertical hold is slightly out
of whack. Many of us looked at each other when this started, and the
"scientifically minded" were probably thinking about what sort of "harmonic
frequency" disturbance might cause this strange pattern in the electrical
system.

This pattern was quickly followed by the "tinkling" sound of the individual
glass tubes hitting each other. Many of us looked at each other again, but more
worried this time, as this indicated that it was a "physical" shock that was
impacting the building rather than an electrical shock. Though somewhat
worried, most participants acted at first as if the strange shock was over, and
the speaker kept talking through the episode.

But before the tinkling sound stopped, and probably within three or four seconds
of the first distraction, a series of crashing and screeching sounds started
that seemed to be coming from the floor immediately above. These sounds were
what you would expect if a bunch of conference room tables that had been folded
up and set against each other tipped over, and crashed onto the floor one at a
time, with assorted scraping metal causing the screeching. The sound was loud
enough to cause the speaker to stop talking, but not loud enough, at that point,
to prompt panic. In fact, it seemed for a second that the sounds had stopped,
and that the speaker would try to say something lighthearted to re-focus the
room.

But then -- and this was about six seconds into the event -- the sounds took a
nasty turn. First there was a string of banging sounds that were much louder
and deeper than the ones before, and that had the resonance of a huge
catastrophe rather than falling furniture. Underlying the loud banging sound
was an escalating roar, that also resonated with the building, and that you
could feel through your feet and chair, as well as hear.

The sounds may not have been as loud as I remember them, but my experience was
colored by my interpretation of what was happening. The earlier sounds seemed
like something you often hear in a building, so the natural instinct was to
"explain it away." But the later roar had a ferocity and depth that was at odds
with normal experience, and this likely made the noise seem much louder, and
more horrific.

My guess is that others actually shared my series of very specific, and partly
inaccurate, thoughts at that time. I immediately recalled the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing, as I often did when I entered the Marriott hotel. My first
thought was that Terrorists had set off a similar bomb at the bottom of one of
the two towers, and that the horrible roar was the collapse of one of the
towers. When I pictured the imaginary collapse in my mind, I felt it would
probably take five or ten seconds for the top of the building to reach the
ground, and I therefore sensed that I had just a few seconds left to "do
something" before the building we were in collapsed with it.

It was only then that I realized the stampede around me, as others were quicker
at assessing the risk of being in the middle of a huge conference room with few
structural supports in a collapsing building. The immediate sensation was that
we were doomed, as the ceiling seemed enormous, while the doors appeared tiny in
proportion. I started to run with everyone else, but was well aware that I
would never make it through the doors before the building collapsed. I
considered jumping under a table, but they were far to flimsy to be helpful. I
focused on the ceiling, with the assumption that I could dodge debris.

By the time I made it to the doors of the conference room, the roaring sound was
subsiding, and was being replaced by the diverging "tones" of dozens of voices.
Some voices sounded hysterical, while others were growing more determined. Most
people were quiet and watchful, as they looked around for leads. My own
sensation was of relief that the building had not collapsed, and that there was
a remote chance that the whole disturbance would prove to be substantially less
horrible than feared. Nevertheless, the crowd continued to scramble, and I
found myself telling people to slow down, as a few people closer to the front of
the mob had fallen, and appeared at risk of being trampled by the people behind
them. In total, the scene as we left the conference room mostly reflected a
diminishing degree of panic, but with some people clearly becoming more
agitated, and everyone becoming increasingly convinced by the breadth of
confusion in the hallway that a sizable calamity at some location near us was
underway.

It was noteworthy with hindsight that our crowd veered left, into the lobby of
the Marriott Hotel, and not right, into the lobby of the North Tower. Whereas
the hotel lobby revealed no physical damage within the building, and only small
windows through which to assess the crisis outside, the lobby of the North Tower
experienced a fireball of burning fuel, and large windows through which the
falling debris and fire would have been clearly visible. Without knowing it,
our meeting participants made a fortunate decision in running into the hotel.

Upon reaching the lobby, the panic was replaced by disbelief, as the crowd
strained to look out the window into the surreal landscape of crisis surrounded
the building. Building parts were everywhere, and chunks continued hitting the
ground with loud, powerful thuds. All the traffic on the West Side Highway was
at a complete standstill, which was itself an extraordinary sight for downtown.
Several cars were crushed by debris, and several small fires were visible, as
well as smoking objects. Right in front of the hotel was a bus that was
partially crush in its middle by a building part, and the driver was standing,
dazed, next to his bus with his hands reaching out. People could be heard
outside screaming and crying, even through the windows of the hotel.

The first thought was that it would be dangerous to leave the hotel, given the
continuous stream of large objects audibly crashing into the ground about once
every five to ten seconds. The crowd mulled for direction, and I had
conversations with quite a few people. Finally, I told one individual that I
was going to leave the building through a smaller south-side exit that I knew
of, and not wait for any sort of "official notification." About a dozen of the
people in the lobby went with me.

When I got to the south-side revolving door there was no-one there, so I went
partially through the door to the outside portion where I stopped to look up for
falling debris. Amazingly, it was impossible to tell if any large objects were
falling, despite the fact that it was a perfectly clear day. The sky was
peppered with millions of pieces of paper that were falling and swaying in the
wind, as in a ticker-tape parade. The objects blocked the capacity to focus on
any particular item, so it was clear that the exit strategy would be a straight
and rapid run across the street, and beyond the apparent impact zone, with no
chance that anyone could successfully "dodge" falling objects. Though it was
still not possible to see what had happened, it was at least now clear that some
kind of bomb had exploded in the building above, and it was also now
substantially less clear that the best strategy was to make a "run for it"
across the street.

This new decision point was brought to a quick close, however, when a young
police officer ran toward me from the south side of the street with a very
confused and terrified look on his face, while yelling that I should leave the
building while focusing his attention on the tower above. My first thought was
that he may know something that I didn't, and that this was why he was so
willing to have me take my chances with the falling objects rather than stay in
the building. It then suddenly occurred to me that the dozen people behind me
were stuck inside the revolving door unless I left, so the decision to leave had
effectively been made for me by circumstance. Somewhat relieved that I didn't
have to fully assess this new situation myself, I put my hand over my head and
ran to a place under a "skyway" to the southwest of the building that connected
downtown with Battery Park City" on the west side of manhattan. I then ran
across the West Side Hi-way underneath the skyway, while looking up at the
building over my shoulder for the first time to see the huge hole that is now
widely familiar to everyone. When I crossed the highway I felt safe from
debris, and was finally able to detach myself from my "crisis management"
mindset.

At this point, it was clear to me that I had to call my wife at once, as she
always watched TV in the morning, and clearly the sight I was seeing would be
the image on virtually every channel. Fortunately, the chaos of people in the
streets -- who were displaying the full range of human emotion and were quite
vocal -- did not include many who were looking for a phone. I was quite
familiar with Battery Park City because I had spent many occasions staying there
in a company apartment, so I knew where I could find a phone about two blocks
from the Towers. When I got there the phone was available, and I was able to
call Melissa and tell her I was safe, and that I would call her later in the day
when I had a chance. I asked her to call our office in Belmont, so they would
all know that I had gotten out of the building. I had no idea that this would
be my last chance to call out for quite a while given the problems that soon
emerged with most of the phones in the city, and that most of the horrors of the
crisis were still to be seen.

On my way to the phone, I participated in about a dozen separate conversations
with random store owners, commuters, and tourists, who were sharing information
in the sidewalk to help everyone assess the situation. Some people who were eye
witnesses of the impact, and who were also generally the most agitated people on
the sidewalk, were yelling that it was a cruise missile or some kind of military
jet, and that the city was under attack. Store keepers and others who seemed to
have come out of some of the small shops, and who had not directly witnessed the
impact, were saying that it was a small plane -- not a missile -- and that it
seemed to be some kind of aviation mistake. Most people were simply focused on
the huge hole and fire, and were talking or crying about the fate of the people
inside.

These conversations with passers-by continued after I hung up, though the tone
became decisively worse. As I started walking back toward the building to make
some kind of decision about where to go next, the "sidewalk talk" was that it
was actually a very large plane and not a small one. Though no-one talked
about the fire in specific while I was searching for the phone, the sense I had
was that most people expected it to be put out, and to visibly diminish in size
fairly quickly. On the way back though, the fire was growing bigger, and people
were talking more about the fire itself. The sense of crisis in the streets was
getting worse. As I got back toward the skyway, people started to yell
"jumpers" and the crowd broke into screams and cries for help. Though some
people were looking up at the building, pointing, and holding their mouths,
others were buckling over, or turning away crying. I looked up and saw a stream
of several people jumping, and quickly chose to look away myself. The flow of
jumpers seemed to continue from then on, and it became hard to look up at the
building.

I then noticed that the police were putting up yellow tape around the building,
and the tape was starting to cut me off from the rest of Manhattan where I would
likely want to go next. As I started jogging back toward the building to "beat
the tape," I quickly decided that I would return to my Standard & Poor's office
at 55 Water street, where I could tell my colleagues in New York what had
happened, and where I could also use the phone to call home again.

My timing wasn't good. I passed about two or three blocks straight south of the
South Tower at 9:03, where I was walking south and continuing to have
conversations with people I passed on the sidewalk about the situation. At one
point I started to realize that we were all talking increasingly loudly to shout
above a mounting roar that was adding to the sounds of the flaming building and
screamers on the sidewalks. Suddenly, a man in front of me looked up and yelled
"its another plane," at which point everyone on the street broke into a run away
from the building.

I never saw the plane. But as I looked over my shoulder at the roar that I was
now suddenly focused on, all I saw was an exploding fireball that reached from
the building to a point almost directly above me, with flying debris that
covered a vast expanse of the sky, and that made me and my small city block seem
puny. The illusion was that the Tower was falling on me like a huge tree, and
that my running was laughably futile. In my mind, the image of the building
grew more vast than it had ever appeared when I was walking around the streets
of New York, or on the many client-visits that I had made to the various floors
inside the Towers. The vast arrays of cubicles and trading desks on every floor
now seemed even more extraordinary in volume and number. It seemed to me that
this collapsing "tree" would crush all the buildings around me, that it would
crash through the pavement and deep into the earth, and that the sheer
concussion effect would topple buildings around the crash. I was almost
certainly going to die in about six seconds.

Though confused by these thoughts, I also had a sense that maybe it wasn't
really happening. That maybe, at least, the building wasn't really falling, and
that if I jumped under something big I would survive. There was a doorway to
the right where a glass door was open, and it was in the ground floor of another
tall building that appeared to constitute a viable shield. I veered right into
the doorway and into some kind of workout facility, again followed by a
spattering of people. As if the protection of the building wasn't enough, I
dove onto the ground between an array of stairmasters. In the back of my mind,
I dwelled on this last, silly, ignorant act -- puzzled why I would think that
the Tower would crash through a few dozen floors of the building above me, but
would be stopped by an array of workout equipment. I wondered if there was one
last thing I could do to improve my chances, and I started to wonder when the
building would hit the ground.

Instead of the horrible crash I had expected, I heard a splash of glass and
metal objects slamming into the streets around the building. I never felt the
"concussion" that I was braced for. With a few seconds pause, I realized that
the building had not fallen, though I wasn't sure what to expect outside. I
stood up but stayed between the stairmasters, on the assumption that a building
collapse remained a possibility even if it hadn't occurred yet. A guy near the
window got up, looked out the window, and said that there was another huge hole
in the Tower. This actually seemed like good news, as it implied that the
building was still standing and looked "stable." I decided to get out of the
area, and consider myself lucky that my sudden imaginary brush with death was
now behind me.

The street was now littered with building debris, and the obvious conclusion
that this was a terrorist attack that could be repeated seemed quite clear to
everyone around me. I ran slowly but deliberately through the city blocks in a
zig-zag pattern so that I could put buildings between me and the Towers in a
diagonal pattern that would provide protection if the building was to fall
sideways. With hindsight, I realize that a collapse would be "downward" and not
"sideways," but this was not the intuitive sense I had from the perspective of
the street. My route took me straight to work, where I was anxious to see my
colleagues and tell them what had happened, as well as to call my family again.

The tone in the streets changed as I put distance between myself and the
building. The people near the building at the time of the second strike clearly
perceived themselves to be "inside" the crisis, and escape was their goal. The
flow of foot traffic was decisively away from the building. By about the fifth
or sixth block, the traffic pattern was random, and the majority of people were
more grief-stricken than scared. These people did not perceive themselves to be
in personal physical danger, but were focused on friends or family that worked
closer to, or in, the building. By the eighth block, the flow of foot traffic
was toward the building.

When I reached 55 Water Street, there was a huge collection of employees in the
lobby, so I started to wonder if I should look for colleagues there rather than
going up to the office. A security guard announced that people should return to
work, though the flow of people up the elevators and down was relatively
balanced. I ended up finding John Doyle -- a long time colleague -- in the
lobby, and the two of us discussed a plan, including my own personal plan. Only
now was I beginning to realize that I may not be going back to my hotel room at
the Marriott later that day, and that my only belongings were now the suit I was
wearing, my wallet, and my NABE name tag. John offered that I could go home
with him that evening, and probably unknowingly committed himself to what turned
out to be my three night stay with his wife and son in Queens. Since the Tower
had not earlier collapsed, I strangely re-adopted my earlier assumption that the
fire would eventually be put out. My assumption at that point was that my
inability to return to my hotel room would be because of police barricades
blocking the building for some period of time, and not the reality that the
hotel would collapse soon after the two towers.

John and I decided to return to our office on the 46th floor to tell all the
analysts that we should all go home for the day, and to make sure that no-one
felt compelled to stay at work. We reached our own "trading floor" around 9:40,
and immediately began talking to the cluster of analysts that were at the
windows, through which we had a painfully clear view of what was happening at
the Twin Towers. I was running through my experience with them, and we started
to compare notes on what the inside of the Towers was like, and how the people
above the two burning holes in the building were likely getting past the fires
on their way down.

Right at that point, which was apparently 9:50, I started to notice that the
South Tower seemed to be moving, and within an instant everyone on our floor was
gasping as we realized that this enormous building was about to collapse to the
ground right in front of us. Someone yelled "get back from the windows," and I
suspect others shared my fear that the collapse would send such a powerful shock
through Manhattan that other buildings would be shaken. One employee grabbed a
rope to close the blinds, though our windows stretched across the entire length
of the building, so this act was pointless. I yelled to run toward the center
of the building, and I ran to an interior room near the elevator shaft, which I
thought would be the safest place to be if the building absorbed a jolt, and
parts of the building, or the glass, gave way.

As is it was, there was no jolt, and I quickly ran back to the window to see
what had happened. Indeed, there was only one tower remaining, and all of
downtown below the 15th-20th floor seemed to be gobbled up by an enormous
"upside down" mushroom cloud that had engulfed lower Manhattan and was
broadening out rapidly to absorb Brooklyn.

It was immediately clear that we were now all going to leave, and everyone
started to talk about whether they could avoid breathing in the cloud that they
could see below. John said that he was going right away, and again invited me
to drive back to his house in his car. All the analysts, John, and myself left
the building.

I walked with John back to his car, and the air was actually quite clear given
that the wind was blowing toward the east and we were south of the Towers. As
we got to his car, however, we were starting to enter the "cloud," and it
started to become hard to breath or see clearly. John's car was a convertible,
and we drove through the heart of the cloud in a mild north-bound traffic jam,
alongside an enormous foot-based exodus around us. Most people looked like us,
with a light covering of white dust over business suits, maintaining a steady
but deliberate pace to the north. But at any time you could see at least one or
two people that were heavily doused in white dust, and there was a continuous
peppering of people in the crowd that were limping, yelling, crying, or running.
At one point in this exodus we heard a powerful rumbling sound, and it was clear
to John and I that this was the sound of the second tower falling.

We eventually made it past the downtown area and started heading at a more rapid
clip northbound on the East Side Highway to leave Manhattan, though we were
aware from the news on the radio that the bridges were closed. John parked his
car in a place where we could easily enter a bridge entrance ramp when it
opened, and we left the car in search of a phone. We tried several different
phones, and made repeated attempts at a call, before we finally got a "line
out," so we could tell people what had happened. I again called my wife to give
her the "short version" of this story, and asked her to call others and let them
know that I was O.K., as were my colleagues. She was quite relieved at the
call, given the coverage she was seeing on TV. And the people in our Belmont
office were particularly relieved given that they had little contact with any of
the analysts in New York through the crisis, and really didn't know what was
happening to anyone. Of all places, John and I then went to a bar(!), where we
had a beer and watched the TV news for updates. We soon read on the scrolling
news that the bridges were re-opening. We quickly went back to the car and
drove in surprisingly little traffic up the on ramp and across the bridge, with
a brief stop to pick up a hitch hiker.

There is really no natural end to this disaster story, and the events that
followed were in some ways as surreal and as difficult to grasp as the attack
itself. It took three days for me to find a flight home to Boulder, which I
spent with John and his family. We all re-lived the events and discussed what
was still happening around us, and what was likely to happen in the world going
forward. We had conference calls with colleagues to discuss our policies at
work and, of all things, our economic outlook. I had repeated opportunities to
call home and talk with my wife, kids, and parents, to discuss what had happened
and reassure them that I was O.K. My home, meanwhile, became a little "media"
center, as my name appeared in some Standard & Poor's news report somewhere, and
the press immediately surrounded Melissa in search of TV and newsprint
interviews. It was obviously a great relief when I was finally able to get a
flight home from Newark, reunite with my family, and bring at least my own
physical parameters of this unbelievable disaster to a close.