He said: "I am not sure how many survivors there were in the elevator but I was told it had dropped at that point. So we were fairly fortunate to be on the front. After finding a stairwell, they managed to get to the lobby where port authority officers and fire crews were trying to organise people to get them out of the building.
They did not want to waste a minute so they found the east side of the building and headed into the courtyard and then over towards the street. We got knocked down to the floor and we were behind a desk when it blew in over the top of us. Once the dust had settled we made our way into one of the bathrooms and grabbed wet towels and wrapped them around our faces to avoid inhaling smoke. When we hit the East River we found about a million other people.
Andrew believes it was instinct that got him out of the tower in time. I am deathly terrified of heights so that ironically might have saved my life.
Later in the day Andrew helped work the phones with other employees who survived and by the end of the day they had an idea of who got out and who didn't. Derek, his Dundee friend, was one of the 2, who lost their lives in the Twin Towers attack. The pair bonded over their Scottish roots on Andrew's first day in the job. The firm lost 67 employees that day.
The surviving staff spent the rest of the week in and out of New York hospitals checking logs to see if any of their colleagues had survived. Andrew, now 51, is a history and economics teacher in South Carolina. I photographed it as it collapsed and it was only then, when it no longer obscured my view, that I realised the South Tower had also fallen completely. As I ran from the mayhem, I took one frame of a man kneeling on the floor crying, his shirt all torn.
I switched lenses and saw a child running and screaming. I realized my digital cards were all full, so I ran a few blocks to the Getty Images office on Varick Street. There, I was uploading the contents of my memory card to a computer when we were told we needed to evacuate the building because the police suspected a bomb had been placed at the Holland Tunnel, adjacent to the office. I left and took a taxi back to my hotel, from where I filed the photos I had taken. My newspaper ran a late edition that day and used my photos for it.
For the rest of the day, I stayed in my room. I cried a lot. I remember calling my ex-wife but being barely able to speak. Between sobs, I screamed, trying to tell her how many people I had seen jump from the towers.
To this day, I still have no recollection of what I did between 6pm on September 11 and the following morning. It must have been because of the shock. When I woke up at 6am on September 12, I walked for more than 20 blocks towards the towers.
Today, I still have flashbacks — images of the people standing in the windows before they jumped. I wonder what it was they saw that helped them make peace with that decision. More importantly, it has always reminded me how fragile we are and that as human beings, we should give respect a chance.
Stan Honda reflects on the death and destruction he witnessed and some of the iconic images he captured that day. As I walked down Hudson Street in Greenwich Village around Tuesday morning, September 11, , the twin towers of the World Trade Center were clearly visible in the bright morning sun. Although not realizing it at the time, I was seeing them intact for the last time. But I barely noticed them. September 11 was primary day, and I was more concerned about articles in The New York Times on the mayoral race, stem cell research, the darkening economic outlook, and a new book by Weather Underground fugitive Bill Ayers.
When I arrived just before , most staff members were already settling into their normal routines. For the next hour and a half they checked their email, re-shelved naturalization records, answered reference letters, and assisted researchers in the reading room. At I responded to an inquiry about the best date for a program review. Around , senior records analyst Karen Lucas began her records management workshop with a short instructional film. A few minutes later, archivist John Celardo was putting the finishing touches on a genealogical inquiry: "Copies of the naturalization records you requested, along with a bill for In the stacks, archives technician Joe Majid heard an airplane overhead followed moments later by a loud rumbling.
Karen Lucas saw a blinding white light through the drapes in the conference room. We were stunned by what we saw: Smoke billowing from 1 World Trade Center and a gaping hole toward the top of the building. Archivist Greg Plunges informed Karen Lucas what had happened, and she told the workshop participants.
One person started screaming that it was a terrorist attack. Another turned on her portable television. People began asking if they were going to be dismissed. John Celardo instinctively ran back to his office, grabbed our new digital camera, and headed for the roof. He snapped a few pictures, moving from one side of the building to the other to get the best shot. At , eighteen minutes after the first crash, three staff members saw a second jetliner fly directly into the other tower.
With seven pictures still left in the camera, John captured the horrifying moment when a massive ball of orange flames erupted from 2 World Trade Center. Early news accounts on the radio did not give a definite cause of the initial explosion, but the second crash left little doubt that this was terrorism.
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