On July 18, 2007 I stood in the lobby of the 14th floor of the Chrysler Center in New York City where my firm held offices. It was five o’clock and I was leaving early. Usually if I left work at five, it was at five in the morning. However, the partner I was working for insisted that I leave after having submitted a huge project. So I was standing there with my tote bag filled with my laptop and high heels and was wearing my comfortable flip flops to make my commute home. I was trying to decide if I should take the elevator that just opened and others were stepping onto, or if I should go to the restroom instead of waiting until I was in my apartment all the way in the Financial District. My sister always has said to never miss an opportunity to go to the restroom, because you never know when you get another chance, so the restroom won the debate. As I was washing my hands, I heard a large amount of commotion in the hallways. It sounded a bit like fits of laughter, so I thought someone had pulled a prank – a rather common occurrence amongst my colleagues. I came out to see what the ruckus was regarding when my friend Sandra grabbed my hand and said, “Come, we have to evacuate!” and she pulled me into the stairwell. I really did not have time to consider anything so I took off my flip flops and proceeded down the stairs along with hoards of others coming from their respective floors. I had no idea what had happened and so I asked. A stranger said, “There was a bomb explosion at the top of the Chrysler”. It was a chaotic stampede but really quiet. It was if everyone felt they were running towards doom rather than escaping it. The sounds we heard were like a loud, metal groan and I had heard this described before by survivors of the World Trade Centers.
I took out my cell phone to call my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time and was all the way in Germany, where he is from. It was two o’clock in the morning there, so he had to wake up to my somewhat panicked voice asking him to put on the news and tell me what was going on in New York. I felt surely there had to be reports already and that maybe his information could help us plan what to do once we came out of the building. He said nothing was on the news, but that European news was a bit late on U.S. happenings. So I told him that I was not sure, that some people were saying it was a bomb, and that I loved him and I hoped I would see him again. Yes, it sounds a bit melodramatic now, but when you are evacuating a building in New York because someone tells you that a bomb went off, your mind just goes there. I called my parents next to ask if there was anything on the news and as they were looking on the TV, our phones lost connections. My friend Melinda could not get back to her husband. We all lost our cell services. Again, our minds went there.
As we ran and ran, we started to get a bit delirious. We were only running down 14 floors, but the doors were numbered in an odd fashion. We came to door 4 of floor 6 and one lady thought that meant we were at floor 46 and she said, “We’re running the wrong way! We have to turn around and go the other way!” She truly thought we had to run up the stairs to exit. A friend of hers had to slap her to calm her down and two men helped her down the stairs as she cried hysterically saying she wanted to see her son. We could all tell that her mind went there.
After many painful flights of running, we finally started to see light as people had opened the emergency exit door, which was beeping painfully. I was not prepared for what I saw next. Across the street from where we came out was a very large black building. It was no longer visible as a cloud of smoke stood in front of it. We thought it must have collapsed. The clouds of smoke that poured out were large and kept pouring out. It was a very familiar site. I watched a cab driver get out of his car and just run. A woman got out of her car, grabbed her baby from the back seat and ran – leaving her car behind. We all started to run. People were dropping their belongings and shoes and anything else that might anchor them. I put my heels back on because I could run better than in flip flops. We ran for five blocks until it seemed that the smoke was far enough away and not that visible. We could see smoke at the top of the Chrysler and we thought a bomb must have gone off there too.
How long it took for us to meet up with other colleagues of ours is really not certain. Some of us still had no cell service, but some blackberries could email and some could send text messages. We all found each other in front of a Vietnamese grocery store where our colleague J.J. had finally heard the details of what had happened. It was not a bomb, the building had not collapsed, and the top of the Chrysler was still intact. It had been raining most of the day and rain always causes troubles with the steam pipe system in the city by causing breaks in the pipes or even explosions. (The pipe that broke by my building that morning resulted in, yet, another cold shower). Normally a steam pipe explosion won’t create this much damage. However, one steam pipe exploded in an intersection and hit some electrical components for the subways and intersection, so the steam had extreme temperatures to propel clouds of smoke up the 77 stories of the Chrysler. There was a poor man in a pickup truck in the intersection at the time and the explosion had swallowed his entire truck into the underground. Thankfully, he survived. What we did not know at the time was that only 18 people were injured and one person had died of a heart attack from the shock of the explosion. The damage to the surrounding buildings would put offices out of work for months and some of the subway stops would not be permitted in Grand Central Station until damages were repaired.
We had to walk as taking a taxi, bus or subway seemed impossible. We walked for 50 blocks, at least. I was grateful I had my comfortable flip flops, as I know my girlfriends were aching in their heels. One of them was daring enough to go barefoot in the city streets to relieve the pain. Most of my colleagues lived in Jersey, so we walked to Port Authority and across the bridge until we found a restaurant in which we could collapse, drink margaritas and calm ourselves from the perceived reality into the actual reality of what we had experienced. Looking back, I am thankful I followed my sister’s advice as I would have been on the awaiting elevator and leaving the building at the exact point of where the explosion took place. Only God knows what fate I would have been dealt in that scenario.
Later that night, I took a cab back to the Financial District. The police were still not counting out terrorism as a culprit, so I had to show identification and proof of where I lived. Ironically, I lived a half block from Ground Zero. If the Trade Centers had remained standing, they would have been visible from my apartment’s living room window. I did not know what else to do but cry. I cried for feeling like a fool and for feeling terrorized when there was no need to have been. I cried because without even trying or executing a plan, the terrorists pulled on the hearts and fears of New York City. I cried because all of our minds went there.
As we come to the eleventh year of the day that will live in infamy, the day when thousands of people’s lives changed forever in New York, Washington D.C. and Harrisburg. I want to ask all of us to try to strengthen our will and minds, and to not allow this day to become an Achilles’ heel. Let’s remember the lives of the people that were lost that day, but let’s also allow the terrorism to lie with the rubble of the Trade Centers. Let’s not allow the terrorism to live or to even be remembered anymore. Even further, let’s not terrorize ourselves anymore. Let’s make today a different kind of day.
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