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The Miracle of Stairway B

WHEN THE 110-FLOOR NORTH TOWER OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER COLLAPSED ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 IT BROUGHT HALF A MILLION TONS OF STEEL AND CONCRETE AVALANCHING TO EARTH. SOMEHOW, A FEW FLOORS OF A STAIRWAY IN THAT TOWER AVOIDED TOTAL DESTRUCTION. AND WITHIN THAT TINY POCKET, SIXTEEN PEOPLE SURVIVED THE CATACLYSM.

DATE: 2001 SITUATION: TERRORIST ATTACK CONDITION OF CONFINEMENT: TRAPPED IN THE NORTH TOWER OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ON 9/11 DURATION OF CONFINEMENT: 102 MINUTES MEANS OF ESCAPE: GOOD FORTUNE NO. OF ESCAPEES: 16 DANGERS: FIRE, CRUSHING, ASPHYXIATION EQUIPMENT: THE FIREMEN HAD TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT; THE OFFICE WORKERS HAD NOTHING

At approximately 9.59 a.m. the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed after being hit by a plane.

Caught in a catastrophe

It was 10 a.m. on 11 September 2001, and Pasquale Buzzelli, a 34-year-old structural engineer, was still in his office on the 64th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The South Tower had collapsed just moments earlier after burning for fifty-six minutes. He was on the phone to his wife who was seven months pregnant and watching the horror of 9/11 unfold on TV at home in New Jersey. Pasquale told her not to worry. He was about to head down Stairwell B with a dozen colleagues. There was no smoke. He’d be fine. He put the phone down, slung his briefcase over his shoulder and led his team to the stairs.

The narrow stairs were crowded, so they could only move slowly. It took them twenty-eight minutes to walk down forty-two floors.

Then, as Pasquale reached the 22nd floor, he felt the building shake. The concrete stairs beneath his feet lurched like a ship’s deck in a storm. He heard thuds, as if heavy objects were being dropped somewhere high above. The thuds got louder, really quickly. Instinctively he dived into a corner as the walls buckled and folded on top of him. Oddly, he felt himself in free fall, and then the blackness swallowed everything.

A good turn

Captain Jay Jonas and five of his fire crew were on the 27th floor of the North Tower when they heard a sickening rumble. The staircase swayed and the lights flickered off and on. Jonas’s radio crackled and a captain from another company told him that South Tower had just collapsed.

Jonas immediately decided to evacuate his men. The North Tower had been the first building to be hit by a plane. If the South Tower had just fallen, they couldn’t have long to live. He didn’t tell his men why they were going, he just got them moving. Despite each man carrying close to 45 kilos (100 lbs) of equipment, they set a fast pace down the stairs.

They ticked off seven floors in a few minutes and were at the twentieth when they ran into Josephine Harris. A car had hit the 59-year-old book-keeper just a few months earlier, injuring her leg. Harris had already hobbled down fifty floors and was now moving pretty slowly.

One of Jonas’s men asked what they should do. He knew that if they continued down she would be left to struggle on alone. If they helped her, they would be risking all their lives.

‘We got to bring her with us,’ said Jonas.

It was a decision that would save all of their lives.

Fifteen floors further down, just five from the ground, Harris could take no more. She stopped, utterly exhausted. Jonas knew they’d have to carry her the rest of the way. As he ran into the nearest office space to look for a chair another man, David Lim, stepped up and put an arm around Harris. They helped her down one more floor.

And then the wind started.

A skyscraper in freefall

At first there was no noise, just the eerie whoosh of fast-moving air inside the building. The people in Stairway B didn’t know it, but the 101-storey tower was collapsing on top of them, ‘pancaking’ down from the top.

The building was buckling where the planes had hit, throwing its weight onto the central columns. When these finally melted, the crown of the building dropped freely for a full floor. Had it even fallen for just 0.5 m (2 ft) it would have had sufficient force to flatten the next storey. Now it was unstoppable.

The air inside the building had to go somewhere, and much of it went blasting down the stairwells.

Fireman Matty Komorowski remembers being lifted clean off his feet: ‘I was taking a staircase at a time. It was a combination of me running and getting blown down.’ In the eight seconds it took the building to come down, Komorowski cleared three floors.

The people in Stairwell B couldn’t see it, but the entire North Tower, half a million tons of concrete and steel, was avalanching to the ground.

Walking out of the apocalypse

For those who were conscious, the noise was a physical presence.

‘The screaming roar of a thousand feet of building falling on top of them penetrated every atom of their bodies...’

It was like being at the bottom of Niagara Falls, except it was steel and concrete pouring over the edge.

Then, finally the roar faded. And one by one, the remaining people in Stairwell B realized that, incredibly, they were still alive. Komorowski had landed on his feet, buried to his knees in pulverized cement, but otherwise fine.

The rubble of the World Trade Center smoulders following the terrorist attack.

Captain Jonas coughed the dust from his lungs and radioed for help.

‘“We’re in the North Tower,” he broadcast. Another firefighter answered: “Where’s the North Tower?”’

From the outside, the building seemed to have been completely flattened. All that remained was an apocalyptic landscape of twisted metal, broken rubble and choking dust.

But as the thick cloud of ash began to clear, five flights of Stairwell B could be seen poking up through 100 floors’ worth of rubble like a chimney. Somehow that one section had avoided destruction.

Inside, the survivors noticed a tiny shaft of sun through an opening at the top of the stairwell. They scrambled towards it.

Josephine Harris had to be hoisted out, but thirteen people in Stairway B simply climbed out of their tomb and walked across the debris to safety. Two others, including Buzzelli, were rescued from the rubble.

People walk away from the World Trade Center tower after it was hit by a plane.

The impossible survivors

Sixteen people survived inside the collapse of the World Trade Center, and they were all in Stairwell B of the North Tower between Floors 22 and 1 when the tower came down. Everyone above Floor 22 died; most who were at Floor 1 or lower also perished. Four more survivors were rescued from the underground mall.

Had the people in that stairway walked a step or two slower they would have died; so, too, if they had moved a step or two faster. Was that fate? God’s will? Sheer chance?

‘What is certainly true is that if the firemen hadn’t stopped to help Josephine Harris, they would have been dead.’

One lucky guy

The light returned to Pasquale Buzzelli and he found himself sitting on top of a pile of rubble, his feet dangling over the edge, as if he were sat in his armchair at home. Astonished firemen plucked him from his perch and carried him away. He had fallen for 55 metres (180 ft) within the disintegrating building. His only injury was a broken heel.

A total of 2,752 people lost their lives on 9/11.