Escape from the World Trade Center

Yesterday, Judy Colfer of Greensburg spoke of her experiences at a 9/11 Commemoration Service at .

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Colfer was attending a seminar on the 55th floor of One World Trade Center for her employer, Mine Safety Appliances. The following excerpts describe what happened to her immediately after American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into her building.

After her escape, Colfer eventually made contact with her husband, Gene, who thought that he had sent her to her death by suggesting that she enjoy the spectacular view from Tower One's observation deck prior to her meeting.

Luckily, Colfer did not take her husband's advice that morning, and she has survived to tell the story of the many heroes she encountered that tragic day.

"Port authority police were there and they were feeding people into the stairwell. They got us on a step. And I looked down over the edge, and I can't tell you what it looks like to look down 55 floors and see a mass of humanity in front of you. 

Everybody was lined up. We weren't allowed to move until they told us, because they were trying to feed in people from the bottom floors and the other floors as well, and doing it in an orderly fashion—as ridiculous as that sounds. 

We got out on the stairwell and we started down the steps. We weren't allowed to run. We were told we had to walk. The power went out. The emergency lights came on. It was dark, it was dank. Everybody just turned their heads and looked at each other. We were standing there, and they started us moving. And we came down the stairwell, not knowing what was going on. My cell phone didn't work. Some people's did, but the reception was not good. 

When we got down to about the 45th floor, the firemen had started coming up. And in the lead was one lieutenant. He stopped me, and I looked at him, and he said, 'Lady, what floor did you come from?  What did you see, what did you hear, and what did you smell?' And I told him. And he's screaming at the other firemen coming up, 'We're going to the 55th floor. We're going to set up operations there. The fire is not there yet.' And then everybody gasped, because then we knew the building was on fire. To that point, we had no idea.

This fireman looked so terrified. And seeing this man look so terrified—he had to have seen every type of hell there was—I knew that I should be scared to death that this fireman was that afraid, because they're not afraid of anything. This man reached out his hand and grabbed my arm and he said, 'Lady, you'll make it out of here. You'll make it out of here alive.' And he just kept going.

When the firemen came up the steps, they made us all stop. We had our backs up against the wall. The firemen were young firemen, coming up carrying two tanks of air. I could not even imagine how these guys were carrying all this stuff, walking up 55 flights. These firemen were getting people out of the building, and we watched them.

A guy's pager went off, and he started yelling 'A plane hit the building! A plane hit the building!' And that's how we knew what had happened. But we had no idea how bad things really were.

People were scared, nobody was crying, everybody was doing a lot of praying. Both my parents had passed away, and I was praying for them to help me. I'm of the Catholic faith, and between my older sister and I my mother lost three children. That's why my name is Jude. I was named after St. Jude, who's the patron saint of hopeless cases. And I kept thinking, 'God, please don't let me be a hopeless case today. I need my guardian angel and I need her bad.'

When we got down to about the 35th floor, the firemen started throwing bottles of water out of the vending machine and paper towels. They threw them at me and two of the people in front of me, and they were telling us, 'Take water and pass it, and pass the paper towels. I want you to soak the water in the paper towel so you can breathe. Put it over your face,' because the smell of diesel fuel inside that stairwell was so bad you could barely breath. And it was just getting worse—there was no ventilation. 

It was taking us so long to get down. Until I got down to about the 10th floor, I really didn't think that we were going to get out of that building. Whatever was wrong was taking too long. It took us about 45 minutes to an hour.

We were coming down from the 10th floor, and I prayed to God to help me get out of that building—and all of the people in front of me.  I probably have never prayed so hard in my life, to be quite honest with you. 

When we got down to the third floor, they were yelling for people to be careful because the water sprinkler system had burst in the building, and the water was flooding underneath all the doors. When I got down to the bottom, there was a port authority policeman there. And the water was so deep, it was up to the middle of my calf, and I'm a short person and I had three inch heels on.

They lined us up in groups of 10, and then they told us, 'We're going to open this door, and you're going to walk into a wall of water. You're in the subway level of the World Trade Center.' And I thought, 'Oh my God, we're underneath the building.'

We walked out that door and we were immediately drenched. A fireman met us with a flashlight on his helmet. He said, 'Put your hand on the person in front of you.' They had us walk across the subway tracks, and it was very dark, as you could imagine. No light. And as your eyes got adjusted to the darkness you could see these huge pieces of concrete from the walls and the ceiling lying on the tracks around you, and they weaved us through this mess. 

They brought us up a ramp and a fireman stood by the door, and he said, 'When I open this door you will be in the main section of the World Trade Center—you will be in the lobby area. When I open this door, I want you all to run and to run for your life.'

I can't even tell you what I was feeling at that time. We ran across that lobby area—the area I had just come up through not long before—and it looked like some type of scene from a horror film or something. There were firemen trying to help people lying, covered with blood—trying to revive people. You saw EMT's, you saw policemen—it was a total chaotic scene. The elevator shafts were open, on fire.  All you could see was smoke and pieces of the lobby area already crashed down, and they're screaming at us, 'Run! Don't stop—run!' 

And we ran and came out the other side of the building at the doors to the street. There were two firetrucks across the street, and a lot of cop cars and ambulances. And the firemen were screaming, 'Run! Run!'  And I thought, you're screaming for us to run and you're standing there. They knew what was going to happen and we didn't.

We came out on the street and it was unbelievable—firetrucks, people screaming, people crying. And then the next thing you know was that horrible sound, that horrible rumble—and it was the building coming down. That thing came down and it was just—the dust and the debris. The noise was so loud that it wiped out every noise on the street. 

It became totally quiet. It was like you were caught up in a white out snowstorm. I couldn't see my glasses; I couldn't even see my hands.  And I'm crying and I'm screaming because all I kept thinking is, 'You didn't get out of that building. You died.' Because it was so quiet and it was so white. And there was just silence.

And I was crying and I heard this woman's voice saying, 'Reach out your hand.' And I did. And I did not know what I was reaching out to. But I put my hand out, and I felt someone else's hand wrap around mine."

With the woman's help, Judy Colfer eventually reached the Brooklyn Bridge. There, she was picked up by a cab driver who took her into his home, where she stayed during the next two chaotic days.