On September 11, 2001, the world watched from the outside as the shocking attacks on the World Trade Center unfolded.
Below are the stories of three survivors of the World Trade Center attacks, who share their harrowing accounts of escaping the towers and how their lives were reshaped by the tragedy of 9/11. For some, it is the first time they’ve spoken publicly about the events.
David Lim Port Authority Police Officer David Lim’s partner at the World Trade Center was a yellow Labrador retriever named Sirius. They were members of the K-9 unit responsible for sniffing out explosives, which was how terrorists first struck the towers in 1993. Lim loved his job, and he loved his dog.
“In our department, you get to bring the dog home with you, and then the dog becomes a family member,” says Lim. “I could have retired with 20 years on the job, but if you retire too early, they keep the dog. So I was planning to wait until 25 years on the job, and then Sirius will be old enough to retire and I can take Sirius, too.”
When the first plane struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, Lim and Sirius were on the basement level of the South Tower screening trucks. When Lim felt the building shake, he worried that it was another bombing. He told Sirius, “One may have gotten by us. I have to go up and help people. You stay right here and I’ll come back and get you.”
Lim was the first uniformed officer to arrive in the lobby of the North Tower as panicked workers started streaming down the stairs. While directing people to the exits, Lim watched with horror as people began falling from the tower into in the plaza outside. Realizing the situ-ation must be far worse upstairs, he started climbing.
By about 9:59 a.m., Lim was on the 44th floor when the South Tower—badly damaged and burning from the impact of the second plane—collapsed in a violent implosion. The shockwave blew out the windows on the North Tower and knocked Lim to the ground. Getting back to his feet, Lim realized that the clock was ticking. It was only a matter of time before the North Tower fell, too. He rushed to get as many people out as he could.
On the sixth floor, Lim came across an older woman named Josephine collapsed in the stairwell from exhaustion. Lim picked Josephine up, and they slowly made their way down the stairs with help from some firefighters. Lim says that Josephine was his “guardian angel.” If he hadn’t stopped to help her, he would have been directly outside the North Tower when it collapsed.
As it was, Lim was seemingly in a worse place—still inside the B stairwell of the North Tower—when it crumbled and fell.
“The sound of an onrushing locomotive is the best description I can give,” Lim says. “It was terrifying, horrifying, and my last thoughts were that of my family. I was like, I hope they would think good of me, that I was just doing my job when I died. Because I had no illusions that I was going to live through this.”
Against extraordinary odds, Lim survived the collapse, protected in a pocket of debris. Sirius wasn’t as lucky. He was the only K-9 killed in the World Trade Center attacks. When his remains were recovered from the wreckage of the South Tower, Sirius was given a full honor guard as befitting a fallen police officer.
Lim retired from the police force in 2014. Today, he volunteers as a 9/11 Day Ambassador, sharing his story and saluting the quiet heroism of the firefighters and first responders who ran toward danger on September 11.
David Kravette Global financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald occupied floors 101 through 105 in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. On September 11, 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees were killed after they were trapped above the crash zone of the first hijacked plane. If not for a fluke occurrence, David Kravette would have been among them, too.
Kravette grew up in Jericho, Long Island, and remembers when the World Trade Center towers were first getting built in the ’60s. “They kind of symbolized New York,” Kravette says. “They symbolized finance and big business in New York, and they dwarfed the Empire State Building.”
Kravette was a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald and worked long hours with a close-knit team on the 105th floor.
“Because we were so high in the tower, we never really left the building, because it was a solid 10-minute commute down to the lobby,” he says. “So the firm provided us with kitchens where they served us free meals: breakfast, lunch, and if you were there late, dinner.”
That’s why it was so strange that Kravette wasn’t on the 105th floor when the first plane struck the North Tower at 8:46 am. Instead, he was in the lobby. Kravette was meeting with clients that day, and one of them had forgotten to bring an ID to show to security. Kravette could have sent down his assistant, but she was several months pregnant, so he made the long trip down to the lobby himself.
“I looked over at the visitor’s desk and I saw my client standing there and I yelled across to those guys, ‘Which one of you clowns forgot your ID?’” Kravette said, recalling the events on camera for the first time 102 Minutes Inside the Towers. “And not a moment later, there was this horrible screeching sound coming from the center of the tower.”
Just then, a massive fireball exploded out of the elevator bank in the lobby. It was flaming jet fuel that raced down the elevator shaft from more than 90 floors above. The lobby explosion killed dozens of people instantly and badly burned many more. If Kravette was 20 feet closer to the elevators, he says, he would have been dead, too.
In the weeks after the attacks, Kravette attended multiple funerals every day for his fallen friends and colleagues, including his assistant.
Harry Waizer Harry Waizer knows that he’s one of the lucky ones. Like David Kravette, Waizer worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. On a normal day, Kravette would have already been at his desk on the 104th floor of the North Tower by 8:46 a.m., when the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center. But that morning, Kravette was running a few minutes late, because he randomly stopped in the lobby for a cup of orange juice.
When American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower, Waizer was in an elevator. It was one of the “local” elevators that serviced the highest floors of the skyscraper. The hijacked plane, which destroyed floors 93 through 99, must have barely missed Waizer’s elevator, which began to plummet downward after the violent jolt of the impact.
As the elevator fell, a fountain of sparks shot through a crack in the door and set the floor of the elevator ablaze. Waizer remembers beating back the flames with his briefcase and screaming, “You can’t have me now!” All he could think of was his wife and three young children at home and how much he wanted to see them again.
The plummeting elevator stopped with a lurch as the emergency brakes activated. Just when Waizer thought he was in the clear, a red-hot fireball shot through a crack in the elevator door. It was a plume of jet fuel from the crash site above. Waizer took the fireball of fuel directly to his face.
“I must have had my mouth open because it actually went down my throat and into my lungs,” Waizer says. “I’ve worn glasses since I was about 8 years old, and the glasses have to be the reason that my eyes were not damaged.” With severe burns covering 30 percent of his body, Waizer pried open the elevator doors and made it to a stairwell, where he began the agonizing descent down 78 flights of stairs. Waizer knew he was injured, but didn’t understand the severity of his burns until he saw the looks on people’s faces as he passed them in the stairwell. “I vividly remember one woman,” Waizer says. “Her jaw dropped, and her mouth was just open.”
The last thing Waizer remembers after getting out of the North Tower was being rushed to the hospital and asking the nurses to call his wife and tell her he’s OK. “I woke up roughly seven weeks later,” he says.
Waizer stayed in the hospital for five months and underwent multiple skin graft surgeries and grueling physical therapy to recover from his extensive injuries. In addition to the physical wounds, Waizer says that he faced deep psychological trauma.
When the 9/11 Commission was assembled to investigate the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, Waizer was the first person to testify at the Commission’s opening hearing.
“I am one of the handful of lucky ones,” Waizer told the Commission on March 31, 2003. “Just blocks away from here lay the unrecovered remains of many friends and colleagues, some dear friends. They can no longer speak for themselves, and I am left with the unchosen, unhappy task of trying to speak for them. I have no rage about what happened, only a deep sadness for the many innocent, lives lost and the loved ones who lost so much that day.”