The Day of Terror
Witnesses, Survivors Share Their First-Person Accounts

Hear Margaret Palca's account of the World Trade Center attack.

Listen as NPR's Debbie Elliott interviews Michael Benfante who saved a wheelchair-bound woman from 1 World Trade Center.

Witnesses on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue react with horror as they watch the crash early Tuesday morning. Photo: © Associated Press

Tuesday at 8:48 a.m. ET, the usual morning rush hour in New York's Lower Manhattan turned into unimaginable terror for tens of thousands of commuters and workers starting the day at their offices. From nearby streets and inside the World Trade Center's twin towers, the attack produced numerous first-person accounts of mayhem and acts of heroism.

Here are two harrowing tales. One comes from an eyewitness across from the Trade Center at the time of the first jetliner crash. Another is from a survivor who escaped 1 WTC while helping a woman in a wheelchair descend 68 floors.

'I Turned Around and the World Trade Center Was Burning'

When American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the Trade Center's North Tower Tuesday morning, Margaret Palca was in a department store across the street. A short time later, she was on the phone to her brother, NPR's Joe Palca, with a chilling first-person account.

Margaret says she was in a cashier's line when someone burst into the department story "shouting, 'Something happened downstairs, there's a gun, there's a bomb.' Nobody knew which way to go." The store went dark, she says, and "We all started to get very frightened."

When Margaret emerged from the building, she says, "There was debris all over the street -- and I turned around and the World Trade Center was burning. It was a huge hole in the middle of the building, the upper middle of the building. And it was in flames. And people were standing there watching. It was horrendous."

Exclusively on NPR.org, hear Margaret's unedited account, from her phone conversation with her brother Joe.


'We were carrying her down, 68 stories down the stairs.'

Thirty-six-year-old Michael Benfante, the New York branch manager for the telecom firm Network Plus, was in his office on the 81st floor of 1 WTC, attending a morning meeting and having his coffee when the disaster struck.

Benfante says that the whole building started shaking and that he could see flames out the window. Shortly after the first attack, he herded everyone to the stairs and started the 81-flight descent.

On his way down the stairs, he spotted several women on the 68th floor, one of whom was using a wheelchair. Benfante says he and one of his co-workers helped move her to an emergency wheelchair. "We got the woman out of that chair and into the other chair and we started carrying her out," he recalls. "We got to the stairwell and we were carrying her down, 68 stories down the stairs."

It took more than an hour to get to the ground floor, he says. After he got the woman outside and to an ambulance, he looked up and saw that the second tower had disappeared. It had been hit by the second hijacked jetliner and collapsed during his long trip down the stairwell.