Editor’s Note: A week after the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, victims of the incident are beginning to share the horrific personal details surrounding that tragedy. Mila Goldman, a New York resident, was working in the World Trade Center when a hijacked plane crashed into it. This is her first-person account:
I had an amazingly lucky day. I got to work at about 8:40, 8:45. No one else had arrived in the office yet.
I checked my voice mail and e-mail and left for the restroom. While there, I heard and felt a faint rumbling, like someone on the floor above doing construction, but it went on for a few seconds too many.
Then I heard creaking, and more rumbling. The partitions started to sway, and sway more, and creak, and then they began to pull away from the ceiling.
One split second later, I zipped up to peek into the hallway.
There wasn’t a soul in sight, and I took another moment to notice debris at the other end of the hall.
One microsecond later, I reached for the door to the egress stair, at which time I saw hundreds of people evacuating from the upper floors.
I had lots of thoughts running through my mind, but a few people were mumbling about an airplane accident.
That settled my stomach for a short time, because it sounded like just an accident.
My office was on the 22nd floor, and we knew the crash had occurred much higher than that. We saw the fire department crew, and it didn’t seem like an appropriate time to panic.
It was still early, and we didn’t know about the second hit yet. So we were all walking calmly down the stairs. Only a few older women were hyperventilating a bit, and some crying softly from fear, and their co-workers were trying to calm them down all the while.
Still, things seemed relatively routine in terms of the professional way in which the security team was handling the evacuation.
We only made it down to the 17th floor, because the stairwell got very crowded and we were all asked to enter the 17th floor office suite.
We did, but that seemed to cause a little more frustration and fear among some of the people.
Everyone was trying to use the phones in the office suite, but because the employees had left earlier, no one knew the code to dial out. Finally, someone yelled, “Dial 8 first!” and every phone was abuzz.
I called (my husband) Waco, and told him I was OK and trying to get out, and asked him to call my parents and let them know the situation.
Maybe five minutes later, they asked us to re-enter the stairwell and continue to go down. But on the way down, they stopped us again and had us go back to 17, at which point I called Waco again.
I told him that I was still inside and that they wouldn’t let us go just yet.
He sounded anxious and told me to get out as fast as possible. What no one had told us was that the other building had just been hit. Waco had seen it live on the news and told me about it. He sounded extremely anxious.
I dropped the phone, because once again they were leading us down the stairs.
We all started to walk, but had to wait to all fit inside the doorway as people sensed an increasingly dangerous situation and began acting like it.
Someone from the end of the line began passing out paper towels to put over our mouths to keep the smoke out. We just kept passing them to the people ahead who had already entered the stairwell.
I took some too, even though the smoke and dust was not too thick yet, because I didn’t know what lay ahead.
We had to stay on the right side of the stairs, because firefighters with heavy equipment and protective suits were coming up the stairs on the left in a constant stream, one right after the other — maybe 20 guys, all with red faces and breathing heavily. They had already walked up 17 flights of stairs, and seen who-knows-what.
Then, maybe five or ten minutes later, we made it down to the 13th floor, and someone started yelling, “Burn victim coming down!” And they walked down the stairs with this woman who had some minor burns on her arms.
I tried not to look, because I knew it would make me panic a little, but I accidentally caught a glimpse of her arm. It looked like the top layer of skin was just peeling away in sheets — like a terrible sunburn.
We continued to descend ... 7th floor, 6th floor, 5th floor. There was water everywhere; puddles on the stairs, pouring from the ceiling ... and then finally, the lobby. The lobby was the first real sight of the destruction.
It only began to look like an attack at that point. All of the glass in the revolving doors was knocked out.
We walked through the secure area, then up an escalator and out. There were people everywhere, and all I could think was, What are they doing? Why don’t they get away? They were all so close to the towers.
I walked briskly, then ran, to the closest subway, burst through the gate without paying the fare (my purse was left in the office with my Metrocard, my money, etc.) and took the first train home.
People were lined up at the pay phones because everyone was trying to reach their families, and cell phone line availability had already been reduced.
I just kept walking until I was in our apartment.
We watched my building go down minutes later on the news.
