9/11 Survivor Recounts Harrowing Escape From 81st Floor of World Trade Center Tower

David Paventi was on the 81st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11.

Paventi, a banker from Charlotte, North Carolina, was in New York at the time on business. His company had a new office in the World Trade Center, where it was still moving in, with TV brackets screwed into the walls, but the TVs had not yet been installed.

The day before, September 10, Paventi remembers looking out the skyscraper window, on a day so humid and foggy that he couldn’t see the streets below.

“There was another gentleman… who was up there with me that day – he and I had gone for coffee that morning and went upstairs – and I remember him saying to me, ‘How do planes not hit that building?’” Paventi recalled.

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He didn’t think much of the comment at the time, simply assuming that there were air safety and control methods in place to ensure that didn’t happen.

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The next day, Paventi said, was a bright, crisp taste of fall. Just before he and his World Trade Center building team began their morning meeting around a long table in a conference room on the 81st floor, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the 93rd floor of the North Tower, just 12 stories above Paventi’s office, at 8:46 a.m.

He said he felt the same way he imagines an earthquake would feel, even though he had never experienced one himself.

“I remember looking up … and the light was swinging back and forth over the table,” Paventi said. “So my first instinct was to hide under the table, because I didn’t want the light to fall on my head. And as I was doing that, literally everyone in the conference room got up from their seats and ran to the front of the room.”

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Some of the people in the building that day had experienced a bombing outside the World Trade Center in 1993.

Paventi began following his colleagues out of their office and down several flights of stairs, which he remembers were crowded and very quiet, before deciding to wait for his friend Bob, who had stayed behind to make sure everyone had left the office. Bob joined him a few minutes later and they walked down the rest of the stairs together.

“We all know how New Yorkers are, they can be loud and boisterous. You would think there would be some commotion in the stairwell, but there wasn’t,” he said. “It was very quiet.”

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He recalls being asked to stand aside while two people helped a badly burned man down the stairs quickly. He and Bob smelled something unfamiliar in the stairwell, which they now believe was kerosene.

Going down dozens of flights of stairs to get to the first floor was very stop-and-go because of the number of people trying to escape, and Paventi said he and Bob seemed to have the same unspoken thought that maybe they were in the wrong place; maybe they should try another flight of stairs to get down faster.

“And every time one of us was about to say something, the line would start moving again,” he said.

At the time, they both had pagers, and on the 30th or 40th floors, they started getting messages that a plane had crashed into their building. Then they learned that a second plane — United Airlines Flight 175 — had crashed into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.

Paventi said the walk from the 81st floor to the lobby took him about an hour and a half, adding that he felt more flight instinct than panic. He just wanted to get out. During that time, he watched firefighters rush into the building, moving in the opposite direction as everyone else tried to escape, which he described as a “sobering” memory.

Firefighters had stopped to catch their breath in the stairwell as they were dressed in full gear and carrying heavy equipment, encouraging people to keep moving as the ground floor was open.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, let’s talk about a gut test,’” Paventi said.

Eventually, they reached the lobby of the building, which Paventi described as a scene from “Die Hard,” with large windows that had been blown out and debris everywhere.

A woman wearing some sort of official law enforcement jacket told Paventi and Bob to run “and don’t look back,” which they did. Paventi turned around at one point to see a huge cloud of smoke heading toward them, but they cut a corner and got behind a building just in time to avoid it.

Getting out of the city was a logistical nightmare. Paventi didn’t want to take underground transportation after the terrorist attack and thought the bridges were the best way to get off Manhattan Island, so they walked to the nearest one. Paventi remembers watching the South Tower completely collapse.

“I remember looking over to where the Trade Center used to be. Our building was gone and there was just rubble and smoke and everything going up. I remember looking over and at that moment the second tower started to collapse and it literally melted,” he said. “It looked like it was blending in with the rest of the city. It was… disturbing and eye-opening and just… the strangest thing you could ever see.”

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He and Bob then hitchhiked to JFK thanks to a good Samaritan who picked them up, rented a Chevy Blazer and drove first to Bob’s family home on Long Island, then eventually back to Charlotte, with many setbacks in between.

Paventi’s wife received calls from family and friends concerned about Paventi as she continued to try to find out if he was okay. He was unable to call her until he arrived at Bob’s family home on Long Island.

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Paventi said that immediately after the attacks, he felt some anxiety. Loud noises frightened him, though he is not particularly nervous. In recent years, Paventi said, he thinks about those who were not lucky enough to make it out alive that day or the first responders who sacrificed their lives to help others. He also thinks about how much security has changed since 9/11.

“Even a few days after that… there were no flights. Everything was grounded, and it was very bizarre. … There was a very strong sense of patriotism. People had flags hanging on their houses, which you don’t normally see. I think it’s sad that it takes an event like that for people to recognize the level of freedom that we have in this country and then think about some of those freedoms that have been taken away in response to everything that’s happened.”

Nearly 3,000 people died and thousands more were injured, some of them still suffering from illnesses resulting from the harsh chemicals and fumes to which they were exposed that day and in the days and weeks that followed in response to the catastrophic attack.

Source of the original article: 9/11 Survivor Recounts Harrowing Escape From 81st Floor of World Trade Center Tower