What I Saw That Awful Day

Editor’s Note: The following remembrance from a survivor of the September 11, 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center was among those collected for the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government’s 25th anniversary commemoration as part of its Jeanie Poole O’Shaughnessy Memorial Lecture. What follows includes graphic eyewitness descriptions that may be disturbing to some readers.

I was on the 66th floor of the south tower when the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It felt like the air conditioning in the building had kicked on. I was in an interior office, opened my door and looked out at what seemed to be a ticker-tape parade — confetti everywhere.

A friend, who had experienced the 1993 World Trade Center attack, was having breakfast with a client. He came rushing down the corridor and said, “They’re back.” He later told me he had watched the first plane come right for his nose and then swerve into the north tower.

A group of us took the elevator down to the sky lobby on the 44th floor. There was a man — who would die trying to save someone — with a bullhorn telling us to go back to our offices because the building was secure. Some did go back, but I happened to look to my left, saw the exit stairwell and decided to leave. Still carrying my Starbucks coffee, I entered the stairwell full of people walking down two abreast in a pretty orderly way.

When I reached the 19th floor, an announcement over the loudspeaker repeated the message to return to our offices, the building was secure. There was a door where I could have accessed the 19th floor, but I thought I would have to ride an elevator down to the main lobby before returning to 44 and back up to my office.

I actually calculated the time: it was taking me about 20 seconds per floor to descend, which meant I’d reach the main lobby in eight minutes via the stairwell, so I continued down. That decision probably saved my life. The second plane hit when I reached the ninth floor. If I had been in an elevator, I would have been incinerated.

I didn’t know then that a plane had hit the south tower. All I knew was that the building shook so violently that I thought the north tower had collapsed into ours. The stairwell filled with dust and people began to panic. I remember putting my coffee cup down as we started to run down the stairs.

I came out of the stairwell at the second-floor lobby, walked down an escalator that had stopped working and followed a sign to exit through the revolving doors onto Liberty Street. There was so much debris outside that the doors wouldn’t move. That delay also probably saved my life as a huge chunk of the building came down outside the door I would have used if not for the sign.

A young woman was next to me. I said, “Let’s go,” grabbed her hand and we made it out another door onto Liberty Street. We parted there and I crossed the street, turning to see the damage to the building and smoke pouring from the upper stories. I attempted to count the floors, estimating the plane had hit around the 70th floor (it was actually the 78th-82nd). My firm occupied the 44th through 78th floors. I concluded that many of my colleagues were dead — 13 perished that day.

I walked toward the Greek Orthodox church nearby. That’s when I looked down and saw an arm severed at the elbow. I knew it was a man’s arm because he wore a wedding ring similar to mine. As I looked around, I was shocked to see many body parts and other gruesome human remains. I later concluded that these were from people who had been in the first plane and had been shot across the mall from the north tower. The whole area looked like a war zone with cars smashed and on fire.

I noticed people all around me looking up at the towers. I turned my eyes upward and saw a speck in the sky. It dawned on me that it was a person falling. I watched that man fall with his arms and legs grasping vainly at the air until our eyes met just before he landed on the roof of the carport connected to the north tower. I can still hear the sound of his body landing, but I can’t describe it.

I think of that man often and the awful decision he made to jump. I will never get over the look on his face.

Michael Noble is retired and living in Hermosa Beach, California.