Transcription
You fig he going to make a maneuver and they still got new bad. [Applause] [Music] Oh. [Music] [Music] We stood right in front of the elevator, Theis and I, and 18 other people from my office. These are all big shots: the head of Human Resources, the general manager, all these big shots. They're standing up right there, not a word. I said the elevator door was open; we got in. [Music] As I'm getting out of the door, the security guard looks at me and says, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going home. I saw fireballs falling from the other building." He said, "Your building is safe, secure. Go back to your office." You can hear the whoop whoop signals. "Your building is safe, is secure. Go back to your office." Nobody else is coming out. Del Le stepped out and she says, "Stan, I'm scared. I want to go home." I said, "Well, go, go, go take the rest of the day off."
I had that choice to go back into that elevator at that point or go home. So I don't know what to do. The doors are about to close, and Jack Andre AO is holding on to one end, and Manny GZ is holding on to the other end. "Come on, Stan, you're not scared to go back up. Come on, Stan, we don't have all day here." And I walk back in that elevator, and all I was doing was being faithful to authority. They said, "Go back." All right, so we're going back. The door closes, and I can still remember to look at the faces of everybody in that elevator because I was the last one who stepped in, and everybody's looking at me like, "Why did you take so long? We were waiting on you," not realizing I would never see them [Music] [Music] again.
We saw a lot of things that day that no one should see. To this day, I still have my times when I can't take it anymore, you know, and I still think about it. There were times when I would go over the Brooklyn Bridge going into work, and it just got me so bad that I couldn't take it anymore. As I was driving over the bridge, I actually felt myself almost trying to jerk the wheel off to the side to just drive off the edge of the bridge, just so I didn't have to deal with it anymore, you know? And every time I did that, I was like, "Can't do this, you know? Just keep going, just keep going. You can do [Applause] this."
I worked as an emergency medical technician. I was a young 21-year-old kid, and we were driving down to the Trade Center to help people. As we pull up, we see hundreds of people just running out to us, and you're just looking through, and you don't know where to go because there's just so much chaos going [Applause] on. I remember as I was grabbing my equipment to go see what we were going to do, some people kept on running up to me and like, "You got to help my friend, you got to help my friend." I'm like, "Okay, I'm like calm down. Where is your friend? What happened?"
"They jumped." "Like from where?" "From the 30th floor, from up there." I'm like, "They're dead. The bridge is that way, just [Music] run." I remember we just grabbed the first four or five people that we saw that had blood on them, and we ran them to the back of our ambulance. The rules almost went out the window that day. You did what you could for who you could.
"Hey, can you look out your window right now? Can you see GU about 4,000 ft about 5 Eastport right now?" "Yeah, I see him." "Is he descending for the building also?" "He's descending really quick too. Yeah, 500 ft now. He just dropped 800 ft in like once, once a week." That's another [Music].
I'm on the 81st floor in the South Tower in a huge glass-enclosed office. The phone is ringing. I pick up the phone; it's a young lady from Chicago on the other end. "Stan, get out." "Why do I have to get out?" With the phone in my hand, I'm standing up, not looking in any particular direction, but something caught my attention looking towards the direction of the Statue of Liberty.
What I saw was a tiny little speck, the force of a plane, and within a split second, it's getting larger and larger. "Oh my God, it's coming towards me, it's coming for me." I love light contact, and I have some watching. Within split seconds, I can see this plane start tilting very gradually, and I'm watching this plane like being hypnotized. Can't move my eyes away, and I can hear this revving sound this engine is making, like when the plane takes off. That sound that it's making, multiply that by a thousand, and it's coming towards me. My mind is reacting so fast, and I don't know what to do.
The next thing I remember saying, and I don't know why I said it, is "Lord, I can't do this. You take over." I drop the phone, scream, dove under the desk. [Applause] Oh my God, oh my [Applause] God, a second airplane, a 727, just ran into the building. [Music] Where do I go? Do I go home? The US air traffic control into, "Yo, I'm going to get out of the city."
When the plane hit, I got blown out of my shoes, and I hit the marble wall in front of me with my upper body. Then my strong will or my obstinance kicked in. I'm like, "Oh no way, I am not orphaning my kids in this building. I am getting out of [Music]."
We got into the stairwells, and we stumbled across this gentleman who had artificial legs. He sat down and said, "I can't go anymore." Two men just had no way, not on our watch, and they picked him up and just started carrying him down. I encountered a woman on the stairwell who was having an asthma attack, and in my pocketbook, I had an inhaler. I handed it to her. I said, "Here, just use it." She was using it, and she said, "Oh my God, I can breathe," and she started down.
So you just did. Everybody was just doing what they needed to do to help. It was a constant, very quick flow, but people were kind to each other. [Music] We were like right in the path of all the debris from the second plane and from the building, and it was just shot right towards our ambulance. All the patients, they were all huddled on the floor, all crunched together with their hands over their heads, and we were just kind of on top of them.
We were scared in there. I mean, at least I, I know I can't speak for anybody else, but I can speak for myself. I was terrified. I looked at my partner and I said, "You know, we need to get out of here." When we pulled out of there, I hear him scream through the front, "I'm getting flagged, I'm being flagged." So I open up the back doors, and I'm like, "What's going on?" He's like, "This guy jumped in front of the ambulance. He said we need to help this lady."
So I'm like, "All right." So we jump out, and we see this one lady. She was lying half on the street, half on the sidewalk. Orlando and I were able to just move her over to the side a little bit, and we saw that her whole backside looked like it was just torn off from her shoulder blades all the way down to like the top of her thigh. It looked like everything was just ripped right off. We didn't know it at the time, but we found out later on that she was hit by the landing gear of the second plane, and it went right down and ripped off half her [Applause] [Music] back.
As we're driving, she was screaming out in [Music] agony. I remember seeing the three or four other patients in the ambulance, you know, and you can see them that they're scared. They're all crying, they're all looking around, and they're looking at me. Here I am, a 21-year-old kid. What do I know? I remember the woman on the stretcher. I go down, and she's awake, and she's looking at me, and she's screaming, "It hurts! I'm hurt! Help me! Somebody please help me!"
I remember just getting down on my knee and just holding her hand and getting close to her. I'm like, "It's all right, it's okay, we got you. I'm here now, I'm going to get you to the hospital. You know, we're going, we're going to take care of you. Keep the sidewalk [Music] clear."
There were a bunch of doctors just waiting for us at the door, and they start grabbing some of the other patients that we brought in and other people, and we're like, "No, no, no, forget those. Like this one, you got to take this one in right here." You know, just handing the patient over. It's like, "Okay, I've done my part. I did my part. I did what I could for her, and I brought it to people that can help her a lot more than I can."
[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I really thought I died. Here I am, alive. This is not possible. Upon impact, a large chunk of that plane was stuck in the office doorway. The air pressure was so great it was sucking everything out. It looks like a demolition crew came and just ripped the entire floor apart. Every wall is flattened, every piece of furniture is mangled. Hiding on that desk, it looks like somebody took a giant bag of cement and threw it in the air.
The jet fuel is smelling so profusely. The sound was so deafening that my ears, poof, I got temporarily deaf. All the cables that were hanging in the ceiling dropped, and they short-circuited. The sprinkler system came on, and part of the floor collapsed, and it's hovering like this right over the desk. If I don't get burned, well then I'll get electrocuted. If I don't get electrocuted and burn, well then the floor is going to collapse. I'm going to die, I'm going to get crushed. And if the three of them miss me, well then I'm going to get sucked over by the air pressure. One way, I'm gone.
I started to scream when the second tower got hit. That was a terrifying moment. Of course, now you realize this is no accident. This is intentional, and that changes your whole perception of what you're dealing with. Now, one of my thoughts was going through my head: stay calm. You know, you have to make, I knew I was going to be having to make some very serious decisions involving people's lives, which is my job, which I'm trained for, and they trained very well for on the fire department. I wanted to make it with as clear a head as I could, so I had to avoid that little panicky thing that you go through at [Music].
At first, I was climbing the stairs in the North Tower, and our orders were to report to the 23rd floor. So I'm walking around the floor, I'm looking for this chief I'm supposed to report to, and I hear a chatter. I hear people talking, and of course, I'm curious. What is nobody supposed to be there? I opened the door, and there's two people inside the stairway. There was an injured secretary woman, and her boss stayed with her. This is an incredibly heroic guy. I wish I could remember his name, but he stayed and took his trying to get his injured secretary out of the building.
They were in stairway C. No, they were alone. There was nobody else in stairway C. I was worried about them, so I told them, "Go to stairway B. The fire department's in stairway B. They will help you." They were frozen; they couldn't move. They just froze. Then I yelled at them. I felt bad, but I yelled at them. "Get you, you know how I stay away B. I'm not going to tell you again." You know, like that, but I had to do it, you know, because I had to startle them to get them out of that. They were in like a funk, you know? I mean, it was so, and finally they listened to me. They went over to stairway B, so they survived. They got out, so that was good.
[Music] [Applause] To help anybody, you got to start triaging. You try to determine the injury at a second of moment so that the unit coming behind you can immediately treat that person. Green tag for minor injuries, you can understand everything. Then you have the red tag for immediate, and then when we get to the DCS, that means no care needed at this time. This person is presumed dead.
I was underneath the towers going from area to area. I did not see any living person on the ground. Everybody was deceased. So going past, you just ripped the tags off and left the deceased until I ran into that one person. I put deceased, which is a black tag, and she says, "I'm not dead, call my daughter." But she didn't know what I knew, and she didn't see what I saw. Her head did not hit the ground, or I couldn't see that the head was because the hair was still intact. She looked like an office personnel. She looked like maybe a woman that was on the plane, and the makeup, but what I saw below the torso was complete crushed disfigurement.
This lady must have come down feet [Music] first. "You can't take, stop, stop! I'm not dead!" I could have done something immediately to help her, but I was panicking myself. I was dealing with death myself. Even though I did not fear death, I wasn't thinking about death, but I saw death, and I saw death, and I saw death. I told her she would not survive another couple of minutes, so I lied. I said, "You're okay. This is preliminary. This is just, I meant right. I tore the wrong thing off. Relax, they're coming, they're coming, don't worry about what I just did."
I had to go conscious about what I was saying, and that I was lying, but I wasn't lying in the fact of her condition. I was lying in the fact that I did think she was [Music] dead. That black tag stayed with me. It took me three years to push it back from this cortex part of my brain to the frontal part of my brain, a memory, or put it somewhere with the psychiatrist and the clinician that helped me move her around so that she's not in the mind's eye in the daytime or in the nighttime or at any time. The human body or the human mind is not positioned, or the brain can never be positioned to deal with tragedy.
Not a human being. It just reminds you that this could be your mother, this is your father, this is your family, this is a human being. You don't lie to the dying. [Music] [Music] [Music]
I came out on the 44th floor because that's where our stairwell ends, and there was panic and bedlam, and it was pitch black. Then all of a sudden, in this darkness, there's this voice. He was singing, and I think the singing distracted everybody that they stopped in their tracks to see why he was singing or where he was singing from, and it calmed everybody down. Then he said these words: "Today is a proud day to be an American." It was Rick RCA, our head of security. [Music]
Rick was so concerned for many years about the security and safety of everybody in the World Trade Center. It had been attacked before, and he was certain it would happen again. He did predict that if they came again, they would come from the air, and it's very hard to protect people when they come from the air. So the only protection would be to teach them how to get out in case a catastrophe happened. [Music]
Rick had them redo the stairwells, repaint them, make sure there was lighting so everybody could see where we were going. Four times a year, we walked from 70 all the way down to the sky lobby to get out of the building. You know, at first, people would just assume this is over the top, it was exaggerated. "Do we really need to do this?" I mean, in my mind, my favorite line was, "Lightning never strikes the same place twice." So after '93, I didn't even think about it because I was like, "No one's ever going to attack the same building again." [Music]
That day, things were on fire, you know, things were blowing up, and he really was able to refocus everybody pretty quickly and disperse the crowds to the proper stairwells to get them out of there. So seeing Rick was probably like seeing your guardian angel. When I saw him on 44, I wasn't nervous at that point. I really wasn't.
"Look at his big camera! Look at his big camera! Be able to tell your grandchildren you were there! You were [Music] [Music] there!" I wasn't emotional on that day. I was not frozen in fear. I wasn't thinking horrible thoughts. My mind thankfully protected me from absorbing any carnage. Now, you know, my mind blocked anything that might have been really ugly out there. I don't remember other than this grayness. Others died, and I didn't. I wasn't having any of that in my mind. Yet again, I cannot explain why.
I keep wondering, you know, "Am I cold-hearted?" I don't think so. I think I'm tender and compassionate when I need to be. Odd [Music].
I was stuck on the 81st floor. I crawled the entire length of the loans department to the lounge in the computer room and the communication room, and that's the farthest I could have gone because one lousy sheetrock wall stood firm. It's one wall, that period of waiting was the most painful thing you would ever imagine. That period of just waiting, hoping that somebody is going to come to get you, and I'm crying out to this invisible God that I've hurt so [Music].
From the 84th floor, I led a group of people down the stairs, and we arrived on the 81st floor. Me and the lead, as I arrived there, a heavyset woman came up and stopped me. "We've just come off a floor in flame and smoke, and we've got to go higher." And of course, I'm stopped now and can't get past her, and bump, bump, bump, in behind me comes the rest of my team, if you like.
So now there's this group of us, nine, ten people on the 81st floor landing who are now beginning the debate, listening to her and starting to discuss, "Well, do we go up? Do we go down? What do we do?" [Music]
Now I'm behind a wall, and I'm crying out, "Wait for me! Don't leave me to [Music] die!" What I heard was something like, "Help! Help! I'm buried! Is anyone there? I can't breathe!" Kind of again sobered up and said, "Okay, I've got a job to do here," and my flashlight back on again.
As I squeezed onto that floor sideways, I have this very, very clear memory of everybody on that landing turning around and starting to go up the stairs. So I started toward the stranger's voice. I can only hear that voice faintly. I had my hand to that hole, and I'm trying, "Please, please, my hand is here! Turn to your left!"
As I hear a little bit, his voice is walking away. "His voice is moving away from me. No, no, no! Come back! Come back towards your right! Come back! Come back towards your left! Come straight, straight, straight!" Now, as I can hear this voice closer, closer, sharper, "Look down! Look down! Look down!"
Here I am with my hand waving towards him. When that light flashed on my hand, all hope was there. "Somebody, this person with his flashlight, whoever it is, somebody's going to rescue me. I'm going to live!" It was that hope, that feeling of knowing that, you know what? I'm going to live. That feeling of knowing that you're going to live, that somebody is here to take you home. I'm going to get to see my children again. I'm going to be reconciled with my wife again. I'm going to live. They left me here to die, but I'm going to go home.
This man really did rescue me so I could go [Music] home. Hallelujah! I've been saved. He said one thing I got to know: "Do you know Jesus Christ?" That was a very strange thing to hear at that time, and I wasn't ready for a philosophical discussion. So I stammered out a rather pathetic reply: "I go to church every Sunday." That was the best I could do to that question.
"Come on, we got work to do here." So there was a lot of debris to the right, debris to the left of me, and this immovable wall between us. I told him that the only way out of there is for you to come up this wall. So he tried once, and I missed him. I said, "You must do this." Over the wall he came, and then his weight on me pushed the desk over. We fell back onto a pile of debris, and he gave me a big kiss.
He got up and says, "What are you doing? Fix his jacket and his tie." He stretched to sand. He says, "Brian Clark." I says, "Stanley Prim." He said, "I'm Stanley." He said, "We'll be brothers for life." I said, "Well, I have no siblings." I said, "We can be brothers." Then I noticed I had a puncture wound on my right palm, and Stanley also had a puncture wound on his palm, and I'm the one who did it.
I put our hands together and said, "We'll be blood brothers for life." We made our way off the floor back to the 81st floor landing. I shone the light down, and I took that, I didn't see flames. I saw some smoke coming up, and I took that gratefully, took that fateful first step down, and we continued on down. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]
When we got down to about the 22nd floor, the integrity of the building was really starting to deteriorate, and then there were cracks starting in the walls and this, and you know, we were like, "Holy crap, we have to get out of here." We really started to pick up the pace, like almost running, and all I kept thinking is, "This building's not taking me. I'm going home to my kids." So I kept going and going, and when we got to the bottom floor, we were yelling, "We're here! We're here!"
Some people were clapping, and they're like, "All right, we're right behind you." [Music] When we emerged out of the building, there was a sense of relief that we were [Music] safe. The thing is [Music] over. They ushered us across the street. My little group, we sat down on the curb, and they were triaging right behind us. They were carrying very wounded people behind us, laying them down, trying to triage what they could. [Music]
When we looked up and saw the burning on our building, my first thought was, "This is coming down. I'm not going to die here on the street. I just got out of that building. I have to get out of here." "You got to stay behind! Please keep moving! Please, sir, please keep moving!" Some of the people we work with encountered Rick on one of the lower floors as they were leaving the building. Rick was heading up the stairs, and they said, "Rick, come with us!"
He's like, "No, no, I have to do one more sweep to make sure all our people are safe." He could have gotten out, but he chose to go back up. Well, I knew that Rick was doing what Rick was destined to do, and that was get everybody out of that building. Knowing Rick, you knew he wasn't leaving until that last person was out.
"Got the helicopter! Holy, it's coming down!" The ash filled the air and blocked the sun, and very strangely, as we went down Broadway, and it wasn't densely populated, all of a sudden, Stanley was gone. I'm looking around, wondering where he is, and this feeling washed over me like, "Did I just imagine this? Was Stanley some sort of a guardian angel?" Like, I had real confused doubts about what had just transpired.
I learned later from Stanley that he had commandeered a guy in a pickup truck and told him, "You drive me to Brooklyn." Apparently, the guy did. Bryant said to me later on, had he made the choice to go back up like the others, he would have died. But there was something in that scream that held him to help me. So every time I tell this man, "Brian, thank you for saving my life," he says, "No, no, understand, thank you. Had you not screamed, I would have gone back. I would have died."
[Music] [Music] Being as young as I was at the time that day definitely changed me. You know, there are things that I live with to this day that still haunt my dreams from [Music]. You know, and when I start thinking about how bad it could be, I keep thinking of that patient that we picked up, the woman on the stretcher. We didn't think that she was going to make it through at all, but we found out a couple weeks later that she was still [Music] alive.
This is magnificent! I got him last night from a friend of my fiancé's. He is so much fun! I normally, there's only white blankets here, and then I got mad last night too. It made me realize that color has been absent in my environment, and it showed up when it really needed to be there. So, and I found out later on her name was Debbie, and I remember going to the hospital to go see her. They brought us over to her room, and she was still intubated at the time, but she was sitting up, unconscious, and she's looking at us, and you see her moving her hand, and she's like, "It's them! It's them!"
She was pointing to us, and all the people that we walked by in the waiting room were her parents, her fiancé, and the rest of her family. They came over to us, and they were just hugging us. You know, it became very emotional for Orlando and I, and Frank Ruma was the one, the guy who drove the EMT truck that allowed me to get on it. The few times that I was able to see her in the hospital, she was always upbeat. She's like, "Don't worry, I'm going to get better."
Throughout my time, she has been an inspiration for me to get me out of my dark places, knowing the fact that I gave someone back their family. I helped bring that person back home. Our orders were to go upstairs in the North Tower for search and rescue, and we heard a loud noise outside. I see Billy Burke walking towards me. He's got a funny look on his face, and I look at him and I say, "Is that what I thought it was?" Thinking that a piece of our building fell off.
He just looks at me and he says, "The South Tower just collapsed." Knowing what that meant, that right next door to us, thousands of people were just killed, some of our friends too. I did the quick calculations in my mind, and I said, "All right, if that one can go, this one can go. It's time for us to get out of here." My guys didn't react; they walked. They didn't want to leave. I said, "Let's go, it's time to go."
So we start our retreat down the beast stairway of the North Tower, and I just be whispering to Billy Butler's ear, "Billy, can you move a little [Music] faster?" The collapse of the North Tower starts with us still inside. [Music] [Music]