From Inside: Survivors' Tales

By Sandy Keenan, Karen Freifeld and Laurie Garrett | STAFF WRITERS

September 13, 2001

Dan Baumbach, a software engineer who lives in Merrick, had an 80th-floor office at One World Trade Center, where he saw the flying debris and knew it was time to move.

But heading down the stairs, he and four other co-workers suddenly came upon 100 others, who were told by a building official, "We'll get you out; be calm, just stay here."

"There was no way we were going to stay there," said Baumbach, 24, who was then warned: "You can try it, but it's at your own risk."

Many stayed. Baumbach did not.

At 10-story intervals, he had to walk through burning corridors. Bizarrely, no sprinklers or alarms had been activated.

There were traffic jams of human beings.

"No one was pushing or yelling, but people were upset. ... The lady next to me said she was in the first blast, in 1993. I felt so bad for her."

Some people fell by the wayside, exhausted. After 30 minutes, Baumbach would reach only the 30th floor, and still, no one knew what had caused the accident - a helicopter? No one suspected terrorism. By the 20th floor, firefighters would pass by. Then, he would get to an escalator and see daylight.

At that very moment, the second tower would collapse. "The sheer force sent all this material flying through the windows at us .... I kept my eyes shut; everything was burning. I put my shirt over my mouth and took very short breaths. I remember bumping into people, but I didn't hear anyone talking."

Before the collapse, Baumbach remembers a police officer jumping on top of him, effectively saving his life. He would never see the officer again.

The survivors of the World Trade Center attacks are of different races, young and old, male and female. Some came from Long Island, some from Connecticut, or New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.

But for a few, frantic, endless moments on Tuesday, the survivors shared something that was uniquely their own: a fleeting sense that this day might be their last.

Nicholas Scinicariello, 62, of Yorktown Heights, worked for the Port Authority on the 86th floor of Tower One.

"I saw the plane come in. My office faces north. I just finished my coffee and I heard my friend say, 'Oh no, oh no.' This plane was coming right at us, then it went up and hit the upper floors. I opened the door to my office. The fire alarms were all going off, the fire doors were jammed because the building had been wracked. I finally made it to one of the stairwells. The lights started to flicker on and off. The stairwells were flooded. Firemen were passing us on the way up."

He finally made it to Broadway and lay on a subway grate for a half-hour, sucking in the fresh air.

Norbert Peat of the Bronx, who works at Personal Computer Rentals, was on the 79th floor of one of the towers. He had never been in the Trade Center before.

He had just made a delivery and gotten off the elevator before the plane hit. He and a fireman hid behind a police car when the building exploded and "he was able to give me oxygen. Thank God I was with the right person."

"There was a lot of gas when the plane hit .... I was trying to go back. There were two ladies back there. I was really worried about them. I couldn't get back, so I don't know if they perished or not."

Mark Oettinger, 35, a carpenter from Bay Ridge, was in One World Trade Center on the 10th floor when the windows broke. He looked at someone and said, "Let's get out of here." There was too much smoke, so he actually went up to the 20th floor and sat there for 20 minutes with about 100 others. When the building started to rumble, some people placed paper towels over their mouths and headed down again; others remained behind.

In the courtyard, "there were bodies all over. ... Parts of the building were falling off and killing people - panes of glass, as they broke, took out two or three people at a time. People were jumping out of windows. One guy no more than two or three feet from me jumped out a window.

"It looked like a meat market. There were shoes and feet ... [body] parts laying around."

Mary Conklin, 30, who escaped from the 72nd floor of the World Trade Center, walked the streets of lower Manhattan yesterday in a daze, searching for co-workers from the Department of Environmental Protection.

"I can't even find them," said Conklin, who lives in New Jersey but could not get home. "To be stuck here and have no one here I know is not a good feeling."

Conklin said she had walked all the way down from the 72nd floor, losing her shoes at some point, and that the building "exploded maybe five minutes after."

"I panicked on the 13th floor, and that's when the Fire Department took me out," she said.

A woman named Christina, who declined to give her last name, was on the 47th floor of One World Trade Center.

"The whole building shook, and we saw stuff flying all over the place, out the window. We smelled fire. We tried to run out, and it was all smoke. It took us about half an hour to get out. There was glass everywhere. Walking to the water, all of a sudden we heard the building collapse. You couldn't see, you couldn't breathe."