Life and death in the stairs of the World Trade Center
Ciara Linnane was one of the fortunate ones to escape the burning World Trade Center before its twin towers collapsed following the Al-Qaeda plane attacks.
AFP correspondent Michel Moutot interviewed her a few days later.
NEW YORK, September 15, 2001 (AFP) - Scrambling down 52 flights of stairs to escape the World Trade Center inferno, Ciara Linnane looked into the eyes of the first firefighters going up and saw they knew they were going to their deaths.
Linnane, working with AFP's financial news affiliate AFX, ran from her office in the center's north tower with two colleagues seconds after a hijacked commercial airliner hit the upper part of the building Tuesday morning.
"Around the 25th floor, the firemen began to come up. Those great big guys, big red Irish faces. They were carrying all that gear," she said in an interview.
The firefighters told the fleeing office workers: "You're OK, you're doing very well. Keep going down, you can get out, when you get to the lobby, just follow the directions," Linnane said. "They really calmed us down, they were lovely."
"They looked terrified, so frightened. Jesus Christ! You could see the fear in their eyes, they looked really grim and frightened."
Linnane said she saw 40 or 50 firefighters, some fanning out into corridors in the doomed building, some going higher up the stairs.
"They all made eye contact with me, a lot of them were saying: 'You're OK, you're doing fine.'
"One of them stopped, looked straight into my face, and said: 'OK, you're doing really well. Make sure that everybody just keeps going, stay on the right, go as fast as you can. You will be able to go out, don't look back, just go'," she said
- They 'looked so scared' -
"When you think about the reality of us walking downstairs to get out of the building, to live, and those guys going upstairs to their death!" she said.
"They are more than heroes. They should have a day of mourning just for those firemen: a special day for them, and then a day for everyone else."
About 300 firefighters are missing, buried beneath the thousands of tonnes of rubble, all that remains of the 110-storey towers which collapsed with sudden, terrifying speed an hour after they were hit.
"I knew the building was going to collapse, I just kept saying, 'Thank you, thank you', and I kept thinking: 'Please don't do this, please turn back, come down with us.' But I didn't say a word, of course. They looked so scared.
"I can't help thinking that they knew. I could read it in their eyes," Linnane said.
Four days after the bloodiest act of terrorism in history, Linnane, 38, lights her cigarette with a trembling hand, and jumps at the sound of sirens nearby or fighter jets flying over Manhattan.
She had been at work early Tuesday for almost two hours and was talking on the phone to her headquarters in London when the plane slammed into the tower at 8:45 am, about 45 storeys above her.
"All of a sudden there was this amazing noise. There were two bangs. It was not that loud, it was more the impact: the building shook," she said.
"We had no idea, we thought it was a bomb. We looked at each other, Laura started to scream and Rudy said: 'Quick, to the stairs!'
"We left everything, we didn't take our bags. Debris was falling and there was smoke."
People leaving other offices were calm, Linnane said. Among them were a few who had been through the 1993 bombing of the Center and who said, "We know the procedure, we just have to go down and to go out."
Linnane's colleague Laura took off her high-heeled shoes.
"Around the 30th floor, it was totally blocked, we had to wait for 15 minutes," Linnane said.
- Building 'going to collapse' -
"At that point, somebody said that he had seen on CNN that it was a plane, and of course we presumed it was an accident. We were talking about it.
"I thought: there is no way we're going to survive, the building is going to fall down. The shock was so terrible that I was sure it was going to collapse."
People walked down in a steady stream, she said. There was no room to run.
As they made their way down, 18 minutes after the plane hit the north tower another hijacked airliner slammed into the south tower.
"We didn't hear the second plane," Linnane said. "If we had known that, we would have gone mad!"
As they reached the bottom 10 floors, the stairs suddenly became clear and they were able to run.
"When we came out, the emergency services were all around: ambulances, fire brigades, people everywhere, injured people. We turned back to look at the building and we thought: how the hell did we get out of that alive?!"