9/11 Memorial in New York City. Picture taken by Petr Kratochvil. Picture was obtained from PublicDomainPictures.net.
Transcript
Jim: My name is Jim Feldman. I was at the World Trade Center on 9/11 2001. I ran a Marketing and Communications and Branding Firm on the corner of Canal and West Broadway. It was a beautiful morning; I had just walked to work down West Broadway which gave me a clear view of the tower. The sky was crystal clear; there were light clouds and people looked good and happy because it was the weather that we all wait for in New York City all year.
I went up to my office which was on the fourth floor of the building on the corner of Canal and West Broadway, about 12 blocks north of the World Trade Center. Started work and then I heard this horrible bang or series of bangs. It sounded like a bunch of dumpsters have just been dumped on the sidewalk outside my window. I went downstairs to see what was happening and I looked up and caught the eye of a woman who was standing right by the front door of my building. We looked each other in the eye and our eyes then turned up to the World Trade Center and we saw the second plane hit.
That point my fiend Ellen who I’ve known for many years came screaming out of the building saying that her mother was there. Ellen’s mother I have known for a very long time. Also, she was a woman in her 80s at that point living in an apartment building about 100 yards from the North Tower. Ellen and I against any good sense of judgement ran towards the towers as opposed to away from the towers. Thousands of people were running away from the towers. We were the only two people heading in that direction. We got through a couple of police blockades by begging them to let us through so that we could get her mother out of the area. Since no one knew what was happening, they just let us through.
As we got closer, we saw sheets of metal of what the building was clad in falling to the ground and things in flames falling to the ground. It didn’t stop us; we kept going, we got to her mother’s building and shortly after we got in the earth shook, we heard a horrible roar and found ourselves crouched on the floor near the one wall that did not have a window in it. What had happened, which we didn’t see, was that the building next to it was the building we had watched with the panels falling down had just collapsed basically on top of us. We were lucky because we were in a part of the lobby that was protected by the rest of the building and like I said there was no glass right there. It was pitch black or very dark, maybe not pitch black. What we had seen before it went dark was this wave of debris coming at us.
As our eyes adjusted to being in this nighttime inside the building, we saw people streaming down staircases and there were probably about 150 people total. Ellen’s mother, who was walking with a walker somehow made it down the stairs. We found her and got her into a position where she would at least be comfortable. But nobody knew what was happening outside the building. We were completely unaware that the towers have fallen. It was something that was so inconceivable that it didn’t pass through anyone’s mind. What people were saying was that it was the beginning of World War 3 and we were trapped there. The doors to the outside were closed because the debris that had fallen forced them to stay closed. It was kind of like waiting for Pompeii to finish happening.
At a certain point there were so many rumbles and so much movement in the ground we decided it would probably be best if we went to the basement. About 150 of us went to the basement and were there for maybe half an hour or an hour before water started coming through the walls. Some water mains had broken and that’s when we all went back upstairs and waited it out.
About noon that day we saw a little light coming through the doors and 4 or 5 guys walked in that were covered in ash. They were police and firemen who were off duty who had realized that there were people in the building and they came to get us. They led us out of the building through shin deep debris and dust onto boats waiting for us to take us out of the area.
Ellen’s mother was sent to New Jersey because that’s where they were sending older people. Ellen and I they took up as far as almost 14th street when the boat pulled out. The crazy thing is that when the boat pulled out where it was tied up on the railing of the promenade, was that when we looked where the towers had been they were no longer there. That was the first time we realized that the towers had fallen. We had no idea whatsoever.