Plane hits South Tower as the North burns

Genelle Guzman gripped her desk, abruptly halting her morning gossip session with a colleague in mid-sentence. She was in her office on the 64th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York at 8.46am on September 11, 2001. Almost 30 storeys above her, hijackers had just slammed the Boeing 767 of American Airlines Flight 11 into the side of the building at 440mph. It was the start of the nightmare that changed history during which Genelle would be recorded as the last survivor pulled from the rubble. “I couldn’t work out what on earth had happened. I couldn’t see any fire or smoke,” she tells the Daily Express this week. Then her colleague and best friend Rosa Gonzalez walked towards her, ashen-faced. “I think a plane hit the building. That’s what people are saying,” she said.

At the 13th floor she tookoff her shoes that were rubbing her – and then the building imploded

Rosa and Genelle, 30 at the time, were secretaries for the Port Authority that oversees transport and security in lower Manhattan. Genelle had moved to New York from her native Trinidad two years earlier seeking better opportunities and she liked her job. She rushed into a conference room with colleagues and turned on the television to shocking pictures of their building spewing flames and debris. “It just blew my mind,” she recalls. She phoned her fiancé Roger McMillan who worked for a mailing company in an office nearby and they agreed to meet outside. But in a decision that she came to regret she and around 15 colleagues stayed in the office for over an hour, dithering about whether it was safer to stay or go.

With her windows facing east she never saw the South Tower take the impact of the second plane and collapse shortly after. But with smoke seeping in and no signs of rescuers, just after 10am her group decided to get out. “I held hands with Rosa as we went down the stairs,” she says. As they plodded down dozens of flights of stairs Genelle felt confident. At the 13th floor she paused to take off her shoes that were rubbing her – and then the building imploded. “Suddenly I started to overbalance and everything was shaking violently,” she says. Rosa slipped her hand from Genelle’s. “I screamed ‘Rosa!’

In my last glimpse of her she was just wide- eyed with shock,” Genelle says. Walls burst inwards and she was thrown to her knees, concrete pelting down on her. “My life flashed before me, in a split second I saw Roger, I saw my daughter Kimberley and my nice home. The pounding of the chunks was like a beating but far worse was the agony in my heart of knowing this was the end. I saw death.” Then everything went black. When Genelle tried to open her eyes they were stinging with dust. “I remember thinking: ‘Am I dead? But I’m in too much pain to be dead.’"

All she could move was her left arm and pain was shooting through her. She was lying on her side, her head pinned fast between two pieces of concrete, her right hand stuck under her and a steel beam crushing her legs. She recalls yelling: “Help! Get me out. Is there anybody there?” She was met with the silence that she would endure for the next 23 hours. Genelle tried moving the rubble. She tried wrenching her head. Nothing budged. Under her legs she felt softness. “It was a dead body.” At first she was relieved to be alive. Despite her injuries, she dozed. But as hours went by she panicked that she was in for a long, slow death. “The wreckage felt like my tomb,” she says.

At first she was hot, then shivering cold. She prayed, pleading and railing against God but she was thankful she could breathe and didn’t suffer from claustrophobia. She waited. What seemed like an eternity later – just after 9am on September 12 – she heard the faint sound of police and fire sirens. She screamed. “Oh God this has to be it!” Her left hand was sticking up above her through a gap and suddenly a hand was wrapping itself in hers. “I’m down here,” she shouted. “Can you see me? Please help me.” The hand squeezed hers and a warm, male voice said: “I’ve got you. My name’s Paul and you’re going to be OK.”