Horror at the World Trade Center:
An Eyewitness Account

construction.com September 12, 2001

By Judy Schriener

On Sept. 11, Craig Trykowski, a laborer for Henegan Construction Co. in New York City for the past two years, was working with 75 tradespersons and colleagues on interior construction for Lehman Brothers on the 34th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He had been working at the WTC for a little over three months. "The job was going well," he says. It was a few minutes before 9:00 a.m.

"I was trying to clear the area of sheetrock and other stuff and just as I was filling the dumpster, the whole building shook. It swayed back and forth. We saw debris flying and then there was an explosion," he says. "I thought at first it was an earthquake."

What Trykowski and the thousands of other people working in the building didn't yet know was that an American Airlines jet, Flight 11, which left from Boston for Los Angeles, had been hijacked, diverted to New York and driven into the tower. It would eventually cause the collapse of the building a little more than two hours later,

"We hit the stairwell; it was a mass panic." They headed down the stairs under seemingly normal conditions but when they got to about the 20th floor, a strong gas smell hit them and by the 17th floor the water pipes had broken and people were tripping on the stairs. "We didn't know what the gas smell was; I told people to put their hands over their mouths," he says. "When we got down was when we saw the smoke. All the glass was blown out in the building."

Firefighters were there to help evacuate and rescue the tenants. "The sad part was that as we finally left, the first group of firemen were going up. They're all gone now," says Trykowski.

Trykowski, along with two electricians and two carpenters, made it safely to the street. "We saw the top of the building as it came tumbling down," he says. "We almost didn't make it out of the building."

They followed a Port Authority policeman to safety, across the street to nearby Liberty Park. By then the second plane, United Airlines flight 175, also out of Boston and headed to Los Angeles, had hit the south tower. The horror was unspeakable. "I saw 15 people jump out of windows," says Trykowski. "It was so sickening because it looked like they were dummies thrown out the windows. You could almost hear their faint screams. I stood in one spot and couldn't move."

After Trykowski made his way to Varick Street, he turned around and saw the north tower collapse. "You could see the [smoke] ruffling--you knew it was coming down." It went down with "a thundering roar."

Still shaken late in the afternoon of this horrific day, Trykowski says, "Needless to say, I don't plan on working in any more highrises."

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