The reporters story about the man in the elevator
"I want to translate to you a story that another man told me. He was near the building. He was on the lobby level near the shopping area, the promonade. The elevator doors, he said to me, blew open and when the doors opened there was a man on fire inside that elevator."
"It was like something out of a Bruce Willis Diehard movie.
Both stair cases, the backside was completely blown away
There was no access, we couldn't get to them and finally one of the fire dept. teams found them."
The Tris McCall Report
November 28, 2003
Like the Twin Towers, WTC7 was a steel-framed building. It was connected to the rest of the complex by a walkway that arched over the street -- cast your mind back to the way Vesey used to be, and I'm sure you'll remember what that looked like. From our vantage point atop the palisade, we could see the top stories of the trapezoidal structure peeking out between the skyscrapers of Battery Park City.
On September 11, 2001, we watched the skyline from the terrace at the hi-vue. We saw the ball of flame from the South Tower impact and the huge expanding cloud of black smoke from the burning upper stories of Buildings One and Two. With brief interruptions, starting at 8:45 AM, we were out on the terrace all day that day. I've noticed that certain news agencies have been slippery with the timeline, but I had both a wall clock (set to the TV) and the computer clock in the room we were standing in, so nobody's going to tell me my timeline is incorrect. The South Tower fell at 9:58 A.M.
The collapse further confused an already chaotic picture, but at no point was it unclear what was going on. The residue -- almost entirely white powder -- seemed surprisingly discrete, and it wasn't hard to follow its billowing contours. Readily acknowledging that I was almost entirely out of my head with horror at the time, I'm still unwilling to discount my empirical experience. Just before the fall of the North Tower, we saw a large explosion coming from the street-level area around World Trade Center 7. I remember thinking that it looked distinctly like a bomb had been detonated underneath the city, and, of course, that's exactly what I thought had occurred.
