FEATURE
Escaping the North Tower
WWW.BENDSOURCE.COM / SEPTEMBER 9, 2021 / BEND’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
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On September 11, 2001, now-Bendite Chuck Allen had to scramble down more than 80 stories and run from plumes of smoke before the nightmare was over By Jack Harvel
Graphic warning: This story contains some graphic details of the carnage of the September 11 attacks.
W
hen Chuck Allen arrived for work on September 11, 2001, he made the arduous trip to his office in the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. It usually took about 10 minutes to get to his office after stepping in the front door, taking the elevators to the sky lobby on floor 78 and transferring to an elevator that had access to his office on the 83rd floor. Allen had started with the company, Lava Trading, eight months earlier, after spending 22 years working in the Middle East. When Allen got to his floor his company’s CEO was standing by the elevator, deciding between going to a financial conference at Windows on the World, on the 101st floor, or to visit with client Merrill Lynch. He made the life-saving decision to see the client. “Well, of course, if he had gone to the Windows on the World, he would have been killed. Nobody, nobody survived above the, probably above the 90th floor,” Allen said. “Then he said, ‘Look after the company while I’m gone,’ something along those lines, which I thought was kind of ironic, considering what happened.” Among the 18 coworkers Allen shared an office with, he was the only one who heard the plane before it hit the tower. In an instant, the impact shook the whole
building, people were knocked off their feet, light fixtures were hanging, the glass windows were cracked, with liquids trickling down from above, and Allen could smell fumes from fuel. He watched as debris from the higher floors fell, and, using the narrow window and the Hudson River as orientation points, saw the tower was swaying. “My first conscious thought is, ‘Oh, the building’s going over,’ because I could very visually see the swaying against the
workers in their office, but it eventually cleared and people moved into the hallway. Allen was the last one out, and wondered if he should check any offices, specifically a large office for General Telecom, but figured they had already evacuated. “The people at General Telecom had called down and actually reached a person at the Port Authority, who had told them stay where you are, emergency per-
“I suddenly kind of heard this background roar, rumbling and vibration, and it didn’t register right away, except what I did notice was odd is all these people were running towards me, I’m looking this way. They’re running towards me.” —Chuck Allen river line,” Allen said. “I couldn’t physically feel it, but you could see it.” Allen said he kept a relatively level head in the aftermath. During his 23 years in the Middle East he’d seen several acts of terror. “I had a friend killed in a hijacking. We lived right across the street from the American Embassy in Kuwait when it was bombed; our windows were all blown out,” he said. “You tend to have a more fatalistic attitude, I think, just having lived around that kind of violence.” A fire momentarily stranded the
sonnel will come up and escort you out,” Allen said. “They all died. Nobody ever escorted them out.” Allen joined his coworkers and made his way toward an infrequently used stairwell that mostly served as a smoking room for a group of day traders who worked on the floor. “We join the crowd. Now our floor, empty silence. Quiet. There’s no klaxons going off, no flashing lights, none of the stuff that’s supposed to happen when a big bad thing like this happens, just quiet.
We get into the stairwell; the stairwell is packed. And there were people also with injuries and burns being brought down from further above us. But the thing that really hit me when I hit the stairwell was the fumes,” Allen said. “That stairwell was so bad. I mean, I ran marathons and half marathons in those days; I was really, really fit, and I’m looking at all these people, I was thinking to myself, I’m not sure I can breathe this stuff very long.” The fumes seemed to dissipate. People in the stairwell attempted to call loved ones but couldn’t with the concrete and steel casing of the stairwell, an oversaturated cell network and the busted antennae that stood on top of the north tower. At about the 30th floor Allen saw firemen going the opposite direction. They eventually made it to Allen’s floor, evacuating two bankers who had stayed before moving even higher in the tower. “Some woman was on 89 and firemen got to her and got her out of there,” Allen said. “I cannot tell you—89 floors on a building like that going up is herculean. I mean, it’s just staggering. And of course, the firemen never got out themselves, but they got people out.” Allen’s group hit a dead end at the bottom of the stairwell. They backtracked to the sky lobby, transferred into a different stairwell and continued their descent. Finally, after over an hour in the stairwells they reach the mezzanine.
