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.
A Rock and a Hard Place
| A LONE CLIMBER IS TRAPPED BY A FALLING ROCK IN THE DESOLATE CANYONS OF UTAH. AFTER FIVE DAYS OF DEHYDRATION, STARVATION AND HALLUCINATIONS, HE MAKES THE DECISION TO CUT OFF HIS OWN RIGHT ARM WITH A PENKNIFE TO FREE HIMSELF FROM THE BOULDER. ONCE FREE HE STILL HAS TO ABSEIL AND WALK HIS WAY BACK TO SAFETY. |
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| DATE: 2003 SITUATION: CLIMBING ACCIDENT CONDITION OF CONFINEMENT: TRAPPED BY A FALLEN ROCK DURATION OF CONFINEMENT: 5 DAYS MEANS OF ESCAPE: CUTTING OFF HIS OWN RIGHT ARM WITH A PENKNIFE NO. OF ESCAPEES: 1 DANGERS: STARVATION, DEHYDRATION, BLEEDING TO DEATH EQUIPMENT: PENKNIFE |
Canyonlands National Park, Utah.
Loner’s day out
He wanted to be alone for this adventure, that much was certain. When Aron Ralston set out from home in Aspen, Colorado, he told no one where he was going. It’s common climbing practice to leave a route either with friends or on a piece of paper in your car. Ralston did neither. As an experienced climber he should have known better.
Nature is king in Canyonlands. Rain, river and wind have spent millennia gouging out deep, twisting canyons from the flat desert plateau. Like veins, they offer a route through the wilderness. Like veins they are also hidden from view, lying below the surface of the plateau. It’s a weirdly beautiful but also dangerous place: get stuck in a lost corner of a canyon and there is no reason why another human being would find you for days, months or years. If at all.
It was Saturday 26 April 2003 and Ralston had selected a particularly isolated part of what is already a remote area. His plan was to park at Horseshoe Canyon and mountain bike 24 km (15 miles) to Bluejohn Canyon. Bluejohn was the favoured hideout spot of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; its remoteness is one of its defining characteristics.
‘It was amazing that he was walking on his own, losing as much blood as fast as he was.’
He would then scramble and climb through the narrow ravine and hike back round to his pickup. By his standards, it wasn’t a particularly big day. Ralston, 27, was a keen outdoorsman and climber. He had already climbed forty-nine of Colorado’s fifty-five peaks over 4,300 m (14,000 ft), forty-five of them solo in winter. This outing was just a warm-up for a greater challenge: an ascent of North America’s highest mountain, 6,195 m (20,320 ft) tall Mount McKinley.
Ralston had packed accordingly. All he had in his rucksack were two burritos, a litre (½ pint) of water, a cheap Leatherman-like multi-tool, a small first aid kit, a video camera, a digital camera and some climbing equipment. He was wearing just