Afterward, she felt herself being lifted into the sunlight and gently placed in a basket-like stretcher. It took more than an hour to remove the steel beams that had pinned Guzman’s legs. She dug some more, and soon found that the hole was big enough that she could squeeze her hand through it.įrom the other side, another hand grasped hers. This time, some of debris gave away, and she could see a faint gray light.
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Guzman summoned up all her energy and shouted back, as loudly as she could.Īs she had done many times, Guzman used her free hand to claw at the loose rubble in the gaps between the concrete slabs above her. The beeping of a truck that was backing up somewhere, not far away. By an unfathomable chance, she did not.Īfter lying for hours inside the tiny cavity that both protected and entombed her, she became dimly aware of sounds: A siren. Everything went dark, and Guzman believed she would die. She crouched and shielded her face as hundreds of unseen objects collided and smashed all around her. She felt Rosa’s hand slip away, and then the stairs disappeared, along with walls and railings and people. And as she did, the walls of the stairwell exploded around her. She paused and stooped, just long enough to slip off a shoe. Her group had made it to the 13th floor when Guzman decided that her heels finally had to go. Holding hands, the two friends began the slow descent in their dress heels, starting at the 64th floor and continuing downward, through the 50s and then the 40s, passing firefighters who called out words of encouragement as they trudged upstairs against the tide of office workers.
Finally, when smoke began visibly wafting from the elevator shafts, the women joined a group of stragglers that was headed toward one of the emergency stairwells. So she sat with her friend, a fellow secretary named Rosa, and the two made phone calls and waited together for more than an hour. visa and didn’t want to draw attention to herself, was afraid to leave her post without permission. But she had not heard an order to evacuate, and Guzman, who had overstayed her U.S.
She should have fled at once, as others did. She ran to a window and gaped at the strange spectacle of thousands of pieces of paper floating in midair, like a confetti squall more than 60 stories above the ground. First came a strange booming sound, like a distant explosion, and then the terrifying sensation of swaying, as the top floors of the 110-story building swung outward and back again, like a palm tree bending with the wind. She had just arrived for her temp job on the North Tower’s 64th floor, and was chatting with another worker over a bagel when it happened. Her thoughts returned again to the previous morning, Sept. She made promises to God, and to herself. She repeated remembered prayers and offered up new ones.
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In her wakefulness, the Trinidadian immigrant and clerical worker took inventory of her injuries, willing her mind to survey every inch of skin and muscle along her shattered legs. Guzman could hear nothing of the world above her. Now K-9 recovery teams were beginning their grim work, sniffing through rubble piles less than 100 feet from where Guzman lay. In the vast debris field where the World Trade Center had stood, firefighters had long ago rescued the last of the handful of people who were found alive, huddled in a stairwell or in underground passageways. Americans were absorbing the shock of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, when history turned in a single hour. She tugged at something soft directly beneath her. With her fingers she probed the edges of her tomb, which at first had felt unbearably hot but had now turned cold.
But in the blackness she could not see her wristwatch, and had no way of judging how long she had been trapped. She found that she could move her left arm, which she used to clear away the dust that coated her eyes and face. She had spent the long night flitting in and out of consciousness, but she was alert now, jarred awake by pain, and aware of the essential facts of the previous day: Her workplace, the World Trade Center’s North Tower, had collapsed, and she was buried alive. Her head was wedged between broken slabs of concrete, and her legs were pinned beneath something she could not see. 12, 2001, in a terrible darkness, unable to move, feeling her 30-year-old body fading. Genelle Guzman woke on the morning of Sept.
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