Secrets of the UnderworldTom Canavan was a securities specialist working in the North Tower on 9/11 who survived the collapse of the Twin Towers. He shares his story of what happened that day and how he escaped the rubble and even tried to walk to his home in upstate New York.
Approche Production.
Welcome to Secrets of the Underworld.
I am Neil the Muscle comments.
And in this episode, I speak to Tom Canavan, survivor of the nine eleven terrorist attacks.
And it hit behind us. When the plane hit, we jumped up again when they started bringing down people from upstairs that were burnt. Horrible. If your thing just came in and I was just placed it to the ground, she was there and then she wasn't. I heard noises around me and things started hitting around me, which it was people jumping, and I was starting to get hit. I was hit with a leg. Thanks for coming on, Tom, You're welcome.
My question before we get into the nitty gritty, I just want to know about you as a person before we know, like living in New York and your family growing up, and then we'll.
Get into how you got your job in the Twin Towers, if that's all right.
Well, I'm from New York City originally, I'm born in New York City, Manhattan. When I was a baby, we lived in the Times Square area Hell's Kitchen, so I'm a Hell's Kitchen kid forty second Street, so kind of when you grow up in the city, you know your block is everything. Ye you fight with guys on the block over from you, but then if someone else picks on you, it's sort of like a brother thing. Then it's your two blocks against whoever is coming into your neighborhood at the time, you know, And that's been being a kid, a teenager. You sort of mine your own business. You don't people, you don't look people in the eye, but you're always aware of your environment around you. So that was I grew up there, and then when I was a teenager, we moved to one of the suburbs and Queens it's actually not a suburb, it's one of the five boroughs, but it was called Sunnyside, Queens very very Irish. I'm kind of in you know, Irish, you know, Irish, Irish bar every block and Sunnyside is only about nine blocks long and is at lee the twenty five bars on those nine blocks. So so again, growing up in you know, in the city, you you you become hardened to certain things, but you also become aware of what's going on around you. And as a kid, history has always been my favorite subject. And one of the things that I loved about history that I always read were sort of a disaster, the Titanic, the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire. It always fascinated me, and I think I realized earlier that I'm reading this because people survived it and they got to tell the story. Otherwise no one would really know some of you know, some of the true things that go on. Of course, they're not being any internet. Everything was rumors back then. Now people just make up anything they want put it on the internet, you know. So, and as far as working in the building, I had been doing banking. It was First Union Bank at the time, was just turning into Wakobia Bank, and we had moved into the trade center. Now my second job that I had for twenty years, I was a project manager for commercial movies. So I had done a lot of jobs in the trade center. I also knew that when your company made money, you moved up in the building. When your company wasn't doing as well, you were moving to the lower flows. So because I had done a lot of work in the building, I knew where the elevators were, I knew where all the staircases were. And it just by happenstance, the company I was working for, we moved from down there Wall Street into the trade center of May of that year Memorial than weekend. So I was only on the forty seventh floor. I wasn't you know, only about not even halfway up in the North Tower. But that's how I ended up working there. But again I had knowledge of the building of the you know, of the interior of the building in the parking lot, and I sort of knew my way around the place.
Okay, So now now we know that you've you've gone in there, talk me through the day before.
A normal day at the tower for you, just a normal day, all right.
Well, for my normal day, I would get up at about five o'clock in the morning. I lived. I was living ninety miles away at the time in the Lower Hudson Valley Fishkill, New York. So I would catch I would drive to the train station, catch the Metro North, take that train to Grand Central, hop on the subway. So it was about a two and a half hour ride each way, so about five hours a day I was traveling. Because of my job. I was doing what was pretty new at the time on Wall Street. It was Euroclear, it was called we were dealing with Europe mainly Cardiff. We were going to through Cardiff and Wales, so because the market opened earlier, instead of a nine o'clock start for my area, we had an eight o'clock start here, being with a time difference you know, over in England. So that was my day. I would get to the office between probably around seven point thirty to eight o'clock. On the nice days, I would when I got out of subway, i'd walk across the plaza. If it was crappy weather, i'd stay underground because you never had to leave the World Trade Center, you know. The mall in there had one hundred stores in it. You could do all your Christmas shopping. There were doctors, there were dentists everything. There was a post office in there. You know. You never had to leave the place if you didn't want to come outside. But so so i'd get there. Sometimes it was if I was really early, a little early, i'd have coffee outside on the plaza and then go upstairs to work, which was a kind of normal thing for a lot of people who worked in the trade center. But because of the markets, I had to be in by eight o'clock instead of nine o'clock.
With the morning of the nine to eleven and when it all the chargity happened. Do you ever have you ever like, do you ever get suspicious or any to like, you know, like feel things differently when it happened later on?
Did you ever feel that way?
No, not at all. In fact, in the morning, coming in, I slept on the train because everybody sleeps on the train coming in. Everybody usually drinks on the way home, on the train going home. But no, it was. It was a normal day. I mean, it was what they used to call Indian summer. Now now it's called like global warming, I guess, but you know, it was September. It was beautiful out, no clouds, it was still warm. The summer was just about over. So I had, you know, a light jacket. But it was to me, it was just a normal day. It was a Tuesday. Every Tuesday. There was an Amish market that was out on the plaza, which I used to find funny because I used to think, well, they're Amish, But how did they get here? And I see trucks, like, but money's money, you know, But no, it was. It was just come in, go upstairs and start work. Nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, just just a Tuesday.
Tell me if you can't remember fifteen minutes before it all happened.
So At I was in my boss's office at the time. So we had the forty seventh floor of one World Trade, which is the North Tower, and our office was on the west side of the building, so we faced the Hudson River in New Jersey on the other side. So in the southwest corner in my boss's office, you'd be able to see the Statue of Liberty, New York Harver. You could see the bridge, the Barrizonal Bridge, plus all the Jersey Liberty State Park everything and Ellis Island. So her office, of course had the corner, and we were in there because we were on a meeting call with Our home office was in Charlotte, North Carolina, so that's where we were on a meeting with those At about eight thirty quarter to nine was the meeting, so we were all shoved in that off. There were about eight of us in that and the first plane hit at eight forty, so it hit my building, but it hit on the up. It hit them around the ninety second floor, so I was about halfway up to where it hit and it hit behind us when a lot of the debris went straight through the building. So as we were looking in south when the plane hit, we jumped up because the building actually rocks where you're almost thrown off your feet, and it sort of wobbled three times and then it righted itself. But I could see south stuff falling, panes of glass, concrete, things that don't register at the time, but when you think about it later, pieces of airplane like you see like seatbelt buckles or a seat. You know, there wasn't that much left of it, but yeah, So I went over by the window that faced south. I looked down the Married Hotel, which was twenty four floors, was attached to the south tower, and I could see the roof of that was on fire that were causing the street on fire. And my first thought was it was like a gas explosion of something, because you know, nobody envisions an airliner hitting your building. Yeah, you know in down in Manhattan. When it hit, we, like I said, we jumped up. We wobble back and forth. I went at it to the main office to see what was going on with the people out there. They were starting smoke starting to come in under some of the doorways that we had two doorways in our office that led two staircases out of the building. But another thing about growing up in New York City is when you learn with the fire departments. As a kid, when I when we called the cops, sometimes they didn't show up. When you called an ambulance, sometimes it didn't show up. But when someone rang that fire alarm, they were coming. So you have the utmost confidence in the New York City Fire Department. And I could see some of their rigs pulling up outside the building. So as people were panicked, starting to get a little nervous, I was telling them I'd fire apartments here, We're okay, it's above us, we can get out below some of the smoke coming in. I took my jacket from my desk and I shoved it under the door so the smoke wouldn't come in, and I took the back of my hand I was tapping it against the doorknob because heat conducts through the metal, and if the doorknob is hot, you do not open that door. That means it's fire on the other side of the door. But the smoke was coming in, it was like, all right, let's get our stuff together, let's get out again. We didn't. We didn't know the magnitude of, you know, what was going on upstairs. And because we worked in a bank, we had a lot of securities out that you just can't run out and leave. You know, they're worth a lot of money, and we had we actually had a vault on the floor with a little moat that you needed a bridge. It was like forty seven tons suspended in on our floor. So a lot of our employees were taking their bonds and stuff off their desk, putting it in their lock boxes and bringing into the vault. At which time I said, all right, you guys, do that. I went out into the hallway. We had the electronic eyes at the time you swipe your card to get in and out of the floor. I asked someone to hold the door open for me so I could get back in. We had a satellite office around the other side of the building, and each building, each floor was one acre. It was two hundred feet each side. So I ran to the satellite office. I know we had three girls working in there. I wanted to see if they were okay. When I got there, there was nobody in there. It turns out one was off that day. One was bringing her kid to first day of school, which was September eleventh that year, So that saved a lot of people from being in the building because first day of school, what a parents do, They bring their kids to school. So she wasn't in, and the third girl that was in there, as soon as the plane hit took off, smartest one out of everyone, she was out of there on her way out. So I went back to my office. Then people were putting wet rags over their faces, and on the way there, I passed one of the staircases. I opened the door. It was just a massive people coming down the steps. So by the time I got back to my office, I told everybody, we're getting out of here. Let's go. We went to that doorway, but by then it was so crowded you couldn't get in the staircase. But since I knew it that was stairwell C stairwell B, I knew it was in the center of the building, so I ran to stairwell B. There was like nobody in there. So by the time I got back, though we had sixty people working with us, they were about thirty left. The other thirty had squeezed into the staircase. I said, come on, come with me, there's an empty staircase, and then we proceeded down in stairwell B. It started to get crowded, though.
You know by this time Tom is panic stations going like dramatically or He's all still kind of like what's going on.
There's no panic. There was never a panic for when the plane hit again. You know, ignorance is bliss. We had no idea what was going on upstairs. It was sort of like being out for a walk with a lot of people. Everyone was very courteous coming down the steps. It was everybody was helping each other. There was no smoke in the stairwells because after the nineteen ninety three attack, the stairwells were reconfigured and air was pumped into them. The lighting was changed. There were fluorescent strips, so all the lights were on. Everybody was just walking down, helping each other. We got down into the twenties and then they they stopped us. There were some firefighters coming up, so we had to go single file on the steps on the right side. They were carrying, some of them seventy pounds of equipment. They estimated it took about a minute to walk one floor and they were going up ninety two floors, so it was gonna take them about an hour and a half to walk up there. And that was the before the start to even put out the fire, which at that time they believed they can do. Yeah, we didn't know also on the way down that the South Tower had been hit. We were in the staircase with all the noise in the footsteps and people talking. We really didn't, you know. Notice I didn't find out till much later the day anyway, But they stopped us. The fire department came up. We were passing up some of their equipment. Some of us were breaking into the vending machines, taking out some of the bottles of water and juice and giving it to the firefighters. I remember I took a bottle of water I poured over a firefighter's head. He was sitting sweating, and to which he yelled at me, you know, I'm kidding. You know you're trying to drown me. I'm not. You know, what are you doing? Go ahead, just get out, Just get out, they kept saying. And we got down to the teens at that point, and then they stopped us again. But they started bringing down people from upstairs that were burnt horrible, like yeah, they were even blinking. They just came down. There wasn't a sound and it got very quiet. I can see one lady, she must have had a cross on her chest. It was the indentation of it. The metal burnt into her chest. Some of the people the skin was peeled back, and I think at that point we started to realize, you know, something a little more important, bigger was going on than we knew upstairs. And once they got them past us, it was like, all right, let's start, get a move on a little faster. My staircase b you had the plaza level, which was on the street level, you had which also known as a mezzanine, and then you had the lower level, which was where them all was with the stores the concourse, and our staircase emptied out onto the concourse. So when we came out of the elevators, out of the steps the elevators that were down there, all the doors were blown off. The lobby of of the trade center at one time was beautiful white marble. A lot of the marble was on the floor cracked, and the walls were scorched or blackened by the elevators. There were piles of rags in front of the elevators, just smoking. And I remember asking some of the firefighters there, like I stopped and I'm looking at them, you know what is that? And they were just saying, just go down the concourse Headford Krispy Kreme Donuts because if you worked in the trades, said, everybody knew where Krispy Kreme was. They didn't want people going in the street with all the debris falling, people jumping. You know. Another thing we didn't know at the time. And as we started to exit out there onto the concourse level, all of the doors had been shattered. They had big, huge revolving doors, and it was that safety glass that you see in bus stops, a sort of half plastic and half glass where it doesn't really shatter, but it gets very slippery. And all of the sprinklers were on. So I was last in line of the forty people I was with. When we got to the front doors, now we were forty feet down. We were about four stories down at that point in the mall. I heard a noise behind me. There was an elderly couple coming through. They were sort of sliding around. They had some bags, and I told the people I was with keep going to where they want us to go. I'll catch up with you. And I turned around and went back inside. I helped the people through the doors, and I turned to catch up. I got maybe ten feet out, and all of a sudden I heard this rumble and felt like this heat pushing pushing down in a wind and a thumping noise. And one of the women with me that I had come down the whole way. Her name was Antonett Duger. She was maybe twenty feet in front of me, and she turned and stopped and looked at me, and I just looked at her, like, what's that noise? But it was getting faster and faster. I mean, I can't even describe a thousand locomotives coming down. And I yelled at her to get in a doorway, like they tell you to do an earthquakes, it's the most stable. I didn't even think I got that out of my mouth when all of a sudden, everything just came in and I was just plasted to the ground. She was there and then she wasn't. I don't know if I was knocked unconscious, but a peace fell like a tent leaned to and it hit the top of my head, knocked me down and buried me. So again, I don't know if I was knocked out, but my first thought was, wow, I'm dead. I mean it was I didn't hear anything, I couldn't see anything. And then it was like, wow, that wasn't too bad. I didn't feel anything if I'm dead, you know. But then I was thinking my son was turning three on September seventeenth, and my wife was pregnant with my daughter at the time, so I was like, okay, I'm not dead. I could taste grit in my teeth and sand, and by then there were little fires all over the place. But I couldn't really move. You couldn't. I couldn't even get on my knees. That's how compact it was. I felt concrete above my head and I fell for the edge and I said, all right, so the ceiling probably fell in. I'm gonna crawl out on top, and then I'm gonna follow everyone out because no matter what happens to you, your brain never catches up. I even think to this day, all the things that happened, it hasn't caught up. Yet, and I started moving and somebody grabbed my ankle and I said, who's that because I couldn't see who it was, and they said, I'm a security guard. If we stay here, they'll find us. And I said to him, if you stay here, you're either gonna suffocate or you're gonna burn to death. I said, I got a birthday party to plan, and I have to see my daughter be born. I'm out of here. And I started just crawling and then the gentleman came behind me. We tunneled up just over I don't remember any furniture glass. I remember his concrete rebar. Every now and then like muffled voices if someone wants to throw a blanket over you and throw you in a closet and shut the door. And that's sort of the only thing I heard at that point. And they askedimate about twenty minutes of digging. It would seemed like ten seconds for me. Yeah, but I felt some air and I stuck my hand through. I was out in the center of the plaza and I said to the guy, we're in the street. I said, I don't know how, but you know, And I couldn't fit through the rebody get out at that point, and I said to him. Now I could see him. He was thinner and older than me, and I said, I'll push you out. See if you can move some stuff so I could get out. And I did that and I waited. I didn't see anything, and then I stuck my head out. I'm getting like a prairie dog that you see they stick the head out of a hole. And he was walking away and I was like, yo, I can't get out, and he just kept saying, come on, come on. And I noticed at that point he had like his shoes must have got knocked off somewhere. He had no shoes on, and he sort of left me. And as I was watching, a whole bunch of things fell and big puff of smoke, and the next thing I know, he was gone. So now I figured, okay, I need to get out. I squeezed through the hole. I was scraped from the top of my head to my feet and now I'm standing on a beam and I could feel my shoes starting to melt into the beam like on a hot day, if you're ever walking on tar, you feel that give. And I'm sort of shuffling my feet and I'm wet from the sprinklers being on, and I'm all glooey from all the concrete dust and powder which is wet stuck to me. And I'm glancing up and I see my tower still there, and okay, it didn't dawn on me. What happened was the South tower had fallen on top of us while we were on the ground on the way out. That's what it had hit us. And as I started shuffling my feet, I knew I couldn't go the way he went because I could see some of the parking levels, so I knew the plaza had collapsed in. But then I heard noises around me and things started hitting around me, which it was people jumping, and one of the things I got I was starting to get hit. I was hit with a leg someone jumped and I guess when they hit whatever they hit. The leke came just across hit me off the shoulder. If I didn't see it out of my peripheral it would have taken my head off. But then it was like, okay, I can't stand here. And then I remember there was a staircase on Vesey Street on the north side, so I worked my way over to there, where there were escalators going down to the street and what's called the Survivor staircase. If you ever come down to the nine eleven Memorial, it's still here. You could look it up out there. It was a way off the plaza that I was protected overhead, which a lot of people were able to use to get off. And there were two workers there and they looked like they've seen a ghost. When I emerged, I had no idea what I looked like. I didn't know I was hurt. You know, Adrenaline is a great thing. My arms were like cannonballs. I was moving things that I could tendem Me couldn't move on a good day, you know. And they said, all right, head down to the street. When I got up to the corner of of VESSI and church people start interviewing me that I don't know if you've seen on the internet the interviews with me in the street. Again, I didn't know I was hurt. And at that point an FBI agent came along and he grabbed my arm and he said, we can't stand here, we need to move. We were only a block from the North Tower, and we got maybe half a block away, and then the North Tower started to come down. So some of the video I see, I'm looking back up. The last thing I remember happening was three people just hold hands and jump jump as the building was coming down, and they just broke apart. They look like if you took a rag doll through it in the air. So I got up against the building put sort of put one arm over my head. Two of the things that you know on TV. In the video, you see the plane hit the building. What you don't see is you know it's an inch high on your TV set. In real life, the hole in that building was a sixth story hole. If you could pick a six story building and putting in, you could plug it into that hole. The other thing was the smoke that you see that comes up the streets, sort of like if you were ever at the beach and the tide comes in. You see the wave and it hits you. You don't see the drift wood, the shells, anything else that's in that wave. Well, in that smoke, you don't see the desks, the file cabinets, the chairs, the telephones, the people, the file cabinets, the copy machines. You don't see anything that would be in one hundred and ten story building. All you see the smoke, but all that stuff is in there and somehow, you know. I got knocked around a few things, but I made it up by city Hall, where police officers grabbed me. They asked me, you know where you're going. I said I had enough today, I was going home. They said where do you live. I told him Fishkill, New York and he said that's like upstate. I said ninety miles and they said how are you getting there? I said, I'm walking, you know, total shock, and they said you need to come with us. So they grabbed me. They put me in an ambulance. I went up to Beth Israel Hospital. When we got there, I was the only one there. They had doctors, nurses, gurneys in the street and they took me out. They said, well, he's critical, and I was, who's you know? Critical? I'm fine, I'm fine. So they brought me in. I didn't realize I had fractured my skull. I got burnt, pretty good cuts, bruises, I had a little fractured bone, just my nose here. But they brought me in. They cut my clothes off. I had to go through two tanks of oxygen because of all the smoke, to call them monoxide, to call them dioxide, the open wounds with god knows what chemicals, asbestos, everything else. And as they were stitching and stapling my head up, I was watching the TV seeing the towers come down, and I kept saying, like, what happened? And they were like, you were there, But I was like, you know, I have no recollection that this happening at the time. And then they hooked me up. They left me alone in the room, at which time I was like, all right, I've had enough. I'm not a good patient at the hospitals. And I sat up, I pulled the tubes out, I went out in the hole. I went into a dirty scrub bin and I put dirty scrubs on and I put them on and I walked out of the hospital. Wow, I don't remember ever signing anything. I remember lines there, people giving blood and I walked about thirty five blocks up to Grant Central Station. In between I used the phone. Back back in the day they had the payphones. I was able to get on the phone to my mother in law back home was watching my son. She got touch with my wife who worked in Midtown on the West Side, and I got to meet her in Grand Central station, right under the clock where do you ever see some of the Disney movies? They always have that clocke in there Madagascar? Yeah, And I ended up going home on the train. I remember people looking at me like I was a freak because I still had all bandages. I had dirty, bloody scrubs on, melted shoes and a shirt from a clothing bin that was too small. It was white with gray pinstripes venues and came halfway down my arms. I couldn't button the top the bottom, and I looked like I probably was a homeless guy again into a fight and lost.
But so what was actually when did they actually hate it?
So when it hit me when I got home and I started watching the TV, and people started calling the house because they're my name being you know, Thomas Cannavan. There was a gentleman killed here named Sean Thomas Canavan. So my parents listening to this, they live upstate, They live on the other side of the river in Monticello, New York, and they had seen what was happening. They got in the car to come down to see because they seen me on TV. But when they first heard the names of people that were missing. They you sort of block out the Sean, but then they hear the Thomas Canavan part. So they tried to get to the city. They weren't allowed. They would turn back. Nobody was allowed in Manhattan. But that night watching TV and then people that I work with calling the house saying, you know, we saw you on TV. You know, we saw the interview. Are you okay? And I was like, while I'm home, you know, And still at that point, the adrenaline was still like pumping. But I started watching the TV because if I survived, some of the people in front of me, maybe they're out, you know, maybe something happened. I'll see them on TV. Maybe they survived too. We did lose four Antonette being one of them. I don't believe they ever found anything of three of them. The fourth person, I think they found a little piece of her jaw bone in their recovery. But uh, yeah, what was it?
What was it that you know, you know, when you were trapped, Like I know that you said that you wanted to get home for the birthday and all like that, But did you ever feel that this is it, You're not getting out or did did you always have confidence you were going.
To get out.
No, it wasn't. I don't think the thought of I know I'm getting out or I'm not getting out ever came into my head. It was just keep going. One thing. One of the other things you learned being in New Yorker is unless you know, it's not the first guy that's knocked down, it's the last guy that standing that he's the winner. And you just I don't know if it's ingrained at this point, but you just keep going. You put your head down and you do what you have to do. Rather than being an active thing, I was more reactive because if I was going one way and I couldn't go that way, I had to adjust. Things falling, I had to adjust. So I was very reactive to what was going on around me. And again your mind goes blank, Well mind it anyway. It was more just keep going, you know the direction you're going. I didn't know I was going up at the time, but when I was outside the building, I said, okay, I'm outside the building. I didn't know what was going on with the other building. You know, I didn't know I'm going to get hit with a bunch of stuff. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't think you were when you go on instinct or whatever it is, that you can plan for anything, because I mean, it still doesn't register, like how does this happen? This is two thousand and one and New York City, like this is you know, this is happening here? Like how how is this going on? You know, it was so out of the ordinary where I fear today that something happens like this, where a building gets hit, people are not going to be orderly leaving. The first thing they're going to think of is a collapse, and they're going to be rushing and more people are going to get hurt or killed or trampled. You know. But up until then, it had never happened, so you know, you had nothing to go by. The only thing I had to go by was reading as a kid history that history is told by survivors. Yeah, and okay, I'm out. So now I can tell people, you know, what happened to me. I can relate to people because you know, got all the stuff out there on the internet. There's so many of these conspiracy theories, you know, and listen, two planes got hit by two you know, two buildings got hit by two planes here and people were murdered here. That that's to me, that's the very base thing, you know. As far as everything else, there's stuff I don't know, but there are things I know. I know what happened. I mean, you know, I'm here me on the internet, I have people saying it's fake, it's a I you know there. I don't believe there was AI in two thousand and one. First off, you know that people could do that. I've learned to live with that. You know, the conspiracy theory people whatever, you know, I can't change their minds.
You know what you know when you you you finally got out and you say, because you were so far down in the building, what was the what was the noise actually like when you were on street level?
Was it like intense? Was it like just screaming? Was it not like nothing?
It was if you've ever been in a snowstorm, in a blizzard, like when it snows in New York, it's very quiet. Everything is muffled. There's a lot of a lot of cars in the street. When I got out of the buildings, everything was white from all the ash. It looks like it had snowed, but the sun was out as I'm walking up the street. I think it was so soon after the collapse that there was nobody yelling in the street. There was no not that I recall anyway. The first thing that I recall hearing after my buildings started coming down was the doors of ambulances slamming shut and taking the ambulance taking off as people were trying to get out of you know, they were picking up people from the first collapse. Now there's a second collapse, and there were people trying to get out of there. I don't remember anyone screaming. I don't none of that at all. Some of the videos that I'm in, you know, there is sound and as I'm walking up the street, you really don't hear anything. You know, I have a firefighter telling the guy their ambulance is up up further or you know, I remember cursing someone's going to pay for this, and you know, blah blah blah, not really proper non cussing words, but you know, and giving an ur rah and my thumbs up again and not knowing you know what I look like. I mean, you've seen the pictures, so they're not pretty, but.
How did you deal with the trauma?
After you sleep for about three hours. For about the first ten years, three or four hours, you deal with the trauma much. I've come to deal with it much like getting old, which is it sucks to get old, but it's better than the alternative of not getting old. You have to adapt to things. You have to. You know. One of the biggest things between survivor groups is you get it. We call it. You get it. You understand what it's like. You don't. You can't convince people who think they know what it's like. Same thing with military guys. They can communicate on a different level than regular people. Things they've seen, things they've done. You can't make people understand it if they weren't there. And the other thing is people say we'll get over it. You don't. You don't really get over it. You learn to deal with it and you and you move on again. It's putting your head down. I don't know, being a New Yorker from just too stupid or too stubborn to give up. But you just put your head down and keep going. Because when you don't do that, then then there's trouble. You have to face it. To me, you had. I faced it head on. I threw myself into talking, joining a survivor group called Strength to Strength, and it we deal with terrorism around the world. We have survivors from all over the world, Boston Marathon in Oklahoma City and Brussels and UH seven seven in in London, and we we can relate people who need help more than I do. I think I can handle it a lot better than a lot of people did. I don't know why. Maybe it's my upbringing of where I was again, the environment I was I was raised in. But they like to hear someone tell them, you know what, I went through this too, and look at me. And the best thing you can do is you're gonna get through it, and you're gonna turn it around and you're gonna help someone else. Because it's the way the world is right now. You know, every couple of weeks, something else happens and it's just not the trauma of terrorism. It's you know, it could be other you know, school shootings or mess shootings or anything like that that you know, people get affected. Everyone is different and everybody has a different way to deal with it, and you find your way. But when you can relate to other people. It becomes a little I don't want to say easier, but it becomes a little like, Okay, there is a light at the end of that tunnel. If this person can do it, I can do it.
Wow.
How long did it take you to go back to a building, like to step inside a building again.
I came back down to ground zero three days later because in my mind, I said, if if I don't go back now, I may never want to go back again. That's that's just me being That's just me being in New Yorker. That's like, no, this is my city. You're not taking this away from me. I love I love this place. Plus I couldn't really get in. I mean, I was all had the bandage on my head and everything else, and I was pretty you know, two black eyes. I was pretty beat up. But it was like, no, I need to go there because people I've lost people. I don't like the thought of leaving anybody behind, being alive or dead missing. To me, the family is like torn you want you can never give up that hope if they're missing. But if if you do have something definitive with closure, there there is a way that you can deal with it better than never not knowing what actually happened. You, you know, that nagging thing in the back of your mind. May be they're somewhere, Maybe they were knocked out and brought over to Jerry. Maybe they have amnesia. So to me, it was I need to come here. I need to see for myself what's still here.
How did the field say in the building's not there anymore? How did that feel.
It? It was kind of looking at it and saying, wow, it's a lot smaller than I thought, Like the buildings were closer than I thought they were. There was so much going on construction and you know, hoses to keep the dust down from everything, and they were removing things. The smell in the air, you know, they had to say. They were told tell everybody it's okay. We knew it wasn't okay. If you ever touch old coins, you get that that smell and that that taste on your hand, like a coppery which is like a blood smell. It was all over down here. You couldn't get away from the smoke. You couldn't get away. But I needed to come back here. Yeah, to me, it was part of I need to see it. I need to know what really happened because again your brain, you know, like how do you imagine two buildings collapsing in planes hitting and then a third building burning out completely and collapsing, and that was fifty four stories building seven, Like that would have been the biggest news on a day if it wasn't for you know, two one hundred and ten story buildings, and then seeing the hotel basically cut in half, and like marveling, like I don't know to this day, like how did I get out of here? You know what I mean, Like it's I don't know how what why? You know? Everyone tells me, oh, you're here for a reason. I always say, don't. I don't need that pressure. Don't put that pressure on me, you know. But I got to see my daughter be born. I got to see my son's third birthday plan. You know. I was very lucky that that's the only way I could look at it. People make a left instead of a right. You know, two seconds later I'm not where I'm where I am. Second later that thing crushes me. Two seconds later, I'm behind me. Maybe I don't I never get out, So I mean, it's it's always a double edged sword. Survivor's guilt but you have to just go on. I mean again, the alternative is what. I'm not going to jump off a bridge. I'm not to me. You know, people with mental problems that think of suicide, I've never thought of that. That to me, that from personally, that's my coward's way out, Like why would I do that to my family? A stigmatism for my kids, like growing up all your farmer killed, Like I would never do that to other people in my family. I just couldn't, you know. And then to this day, my biggest fear is I slip and I bang my head on the toilet and I die. And I'm like, I got out of nine to eleven and here I am, say, find me my pants down on a bandom floor. You know, like the indignity of that, you know. So that's that's the kind of thoughts that run through your mind at this point.
You know, how long did how long did it take you to go into a like into a a building again, like did.
You wake in a building like a store?
Resident? Yeah? I went In fact, working for the moving company that I was, I worked right across the street. The buildings or the floors were propped up by two by fours. There was no electricity in it. There were body parts in it, but we were contracted to go in and remove people's laptops, so we had to go through the building taking laptops off desks because everybody thought they'd be back to work the next day, you know. So I got to see the side. I got to see what was here and smell it, and to this day, I have no fear of buildings. I fly all the time with the group I'm a part of, you know. I've been to Manchester for their memorial service. I've been to London. I've been to you know, Oklahoma City for the past twenty five years. Almost we go every year. So this wasn't my time. That's the only thing, the only way I could deal with it like that, I think, I don't want to say it made me stronger here, but it made me think about things other than worrying about dying. Like I don't wear a wristwatch. My watch hangs in the museum. It stopped a couple of minutes after the plane hit. I must have banged it somewhere and it was covered in blood, you know, and concrete powder, and it's for years. The second hand would take the twelve and then go back and then finally, you know, the battery died and it hangs in the museum. I have not worn a wristwatch since that day. You know, if I need time, I got it on my phone. But it's sort of like, why am I in a rush to do anything anymore? Like this is to me, this is gravy. This is the cherry on the Sunday for me, I'm like, I'm here. You know what am I going to ask for? I've hit the lottery? You know, one in a million. I went to work like a billion people do across this planet. Every day. They get up and go to work. By the end of the day, I'm one of nineteen people on the planet that experienced something. They were only nineteen of us that so by being buried under it, like, how do you go from being one in a billion to one of nineteen in the history of the world. You know, it's kind of overwhelming if you think about it that way. But again, you just put your head down, you go on. You try to help people that need help. That's the only thing I can think of.
You know, do you still have nightmares? Do you still have flashbacks?
It was never a nightmare. It was sort of like a movie that plays over in your head, Okay, every night, over and over, and the question comes up, why didn't you leave right away? You should have known better. Why didn't you go in that first stairway. Why didn't you? Why didn't you do this? Why did you do this? Why didn't you? So that's what I went through for years and years. There's not a day that doesn't go by that I don't think of this place. Because right now i'm actually doing this interview. I'm on the plaza right next to the pool where my building stood. Okay, there's not a day that goes by because I'm going to see a plane flying about my head every day. So when I know they're low, I'll put my head down and I'll say, I'm not gonna look. I'm not gonna look. I'm not gonna look. And then I find myself looking at it and I'm like, damn. There are certain noises there. If I walk by a construction site, you get that concrete powder smell. It'll it'll jaw you back. There are certain songs that I remember hearing the days after nine to eleven that when I hear that song it becomes very like, oh, it brings me back to you know, where I was, what I was doing there. There is the one thing that I've seen that the only thing that makes me tear up really is in the super Bowl in February of two thousand and two. But wise I had a commercial. They've only played it once and it's the horses. They come to New York and they bring the wagon and they stop over in Jersey City and you see the skyline. There's no there's no towers there and the whole is bow and even now as I think about it, I'm like, but I'm not going to lose it here. But that's the only thing that Mike gets to me, you know, get chokes me up a little seeing those forces. But I don't know, it's a weird thing. I guess, I don't know.
How's how's your health now?
Well? I picked up a cancer about two years ago that's related to here. It's a skin cancer. It's treatable, but it's not curable. So when I need to get something done, they cut, they get the melon baller out and they'll take out what they need to do. My lungs probably about eighty percent, which is good. But you know, I am getting older, so you know, I'll be sixty six in March, so it's like, maybe that's the natural progression, but otherwise I'm gonna go on doing what I'm doing. Retired four years from I retired from the nine eleven memorial itself. Well, I had the privilege to work and take care of the pools, take care of the grounds. When people come here and they see the pictures, I always tell them, do you notice something about the pictures of the people? And some people get it. They're smiling. So I tell people come through the museum, you could cry all you want, because we have tissues, plenty of tissues. You can wipe your face. But when you get out of here and you go on that street, you smile, You take a deep breath, and you live your life. And when people see, like everyone knows how everyone died here, You see it on the video, you see it on TV. What you don't know till you come here is we showed you how people live their lives on those pictures. And it's much more important to be remembered how you lived than how you died. Go let people take your picture, because when you're gone, you want someone to open up a photo album and they see you dancing at your kid's wedding, or holding your child, or running a marathon, playing soccer, and they're gonna smile. It's not your name on a stone or a piece of wood, a picture of you living your life, not being buried under a stone. Much much more important to be remembered that way.
That's correct.
Well, I just want to I just want to say I'm so privileged to have you come on my podcast and talk and share your story with me, because, as I said, when I seen the article, and I've seen a few articles when I researched you, I wanted you on the podcast to share this story with Australia, with all my listeners, and I'm grateful for that.
Tom Well, thank you, and a big shout out to Christie who did all the legwork for this.
Thank you for Christy.
I'm a dinosaur when it comes to all this technology stuff. Like, to me, a phone is still someone to talk to someone on. You know, I don't have the thumbs of a twelve year old to communicate all the time. Christie's the best. She's gonna help me actually write a book. It's been a you know, it's been a while. I made a lot of friends, and hopefully there is you know, a movie in the works, which was supposed to be out by the twentieth, but COVID shut everything down, hopefully by the twenty fifth, but I still hear that it's still too recent, you know, twenty five years I think is a good amount of time. Yeah, people need to know the story because it's estimated one third of the world wasn't even alive at this time, like twenty three years ago, you know, and even not just survivors, but family members who come here every year for the event. There's less and less because you know, people pass away, people move. The twenty fifth will be the next big one.
I'm gratefully you came on. I had to share your story. Tom and I will keep in touch. That's one hundred percent
