‘We’re getting out of here’; Manchester man was among those who escaped North Tower on 9/11
MANCHESTER, N.H. —
More than 2,700 people died when the Twin Towers collapsed in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but Manchester’s Jeff Benjamin was one of the people who were able to make it out of the buildings.
Benjamin was in the North Tower, the first building to be hit.
“I’m watching, I looked up, and right before the plane hit the building, I could see into the cockpit,” he said. “I could make out people in the cockpit.”
For 25 years, that moment has stuck with Benjamin.
“I can remember hearing engines from the jet plane,” he said. “You could hear the engines.”
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Benjamin was on the 83rd floor of the North Tower at the World Trade Center. He was 39 years old, working for Swiss Re America, an insurance company with an office in Manchester.
“I had been conducting an audit of a client on the 83rd floor of the North Tower,” he said. “I had gone down for about a month prior.”
That Tuesday, he and his colleagues followed their usual routine.
“You know, ‘What a beautiful day,’ or so I thought,” Benjamin said. “My one colleague says, ‘Look at that.’ And we looked out to the right, and we could see it was an American Airlines jet. You could see silver. You could make out the insignia.”
American Airlines Flight 11 was traveling nearly 500 mph right toward them.
“We heard what sounded like a gunshot. Just a loud bang,” Benjamin said. “And we all immediately went down, fell to the floor.”
The plane crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., leaving hundreds of people trapped above the impact zone just floors above Benjamin.
“We ran out of the conference room and turned to our right, and we could look out through a glass door to the office, and I can remember seeing a fireball,” he said.
Benjamin called 911.
“I said, ‘We need somebody to rescue us!’ And they confirmed that they knew where we were,” Benjamin said. “There would be people sent to rescue us.”
He could see evidence of the damage that had been done to the tower above.
“You could see debris raining down,” he said. “You could see other objects. And at one point, I believe I saw a jumper.”
Benjamin and his colleagues talked about making a run for a stairwell. That’s when they saw a flash from outside at 9:03 a.m., when United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower.
Benjamin’s group knew they had to escape.
“We’re heading in the right direction, and there was an explosion,” he said.
The blast sent the Swiss Re team back to their office, and everything became quiet.
“I think that’s when everyone was in a reflection that, we’re really not going to get out of here,” Benjamin said.
With his wife and two young children back home in New Hampshire, Benjamin wondered if he would ever see them again.
“I didn’t want to believe that, certainly,” he said. “And I don’t think I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to get out of the building.”
He said reality was sinking in, and hope was fading.
“We looked out, as we were at our lowest moment. It was getting smokier in the office, and I saw a flashlight through the smoke,” he said.
Standing there was a fire captain, someone Benjamin describes as a guardian angel. The firefighter led the group to a stairwell leading to the 78th floor sky lobby.
“We’re walking across that lobby, and we were stepping over bodies,” Benjamin said.
The group found their way down to the lower floors, but they weren’t in the clear yet.
“And then I heard this sound that sounded like a freight train, this rumbling sound,” Benjamin said. “And there was a fireman right next to me. And I looked at him and I said, ‘What’s that?'”
It was 9:59 a.m., and the South Tower was collapsing.
“All of a sudden, there was a rush of debris coming up, and we had to get out of the stairwell,” Benjamin said.
Benjamin had been split up from his coworkers, and it was just him and his client. Ten minutes later, the debris was starting to settle.
“So, I grabbed my client. ‘Fred,’ I said. ‘Come on, Fred. We’re getting out of here,'” Benjamin said.
The two continued down to the ground floor.
“There was one policeman outside,” Benjamin said. “And so, we walked right through a blown-out window, talked to the policeman and said, ‘Well, where do we go?'”
Benjamin was directed toward the Hudson River. On his way out were sights he said he’ll never forget.
“It was like we came out into a war zone,” he said. “We’re trying to talk to the firemen, and at that point, we found out that the South Tower had collapsed, and all of their colleagues, their comrades were dead.”
Benjamin and his client found their way to the Hudson and jumped on a ferry to Hoboken, New Jersey, to escape. He turned to look back one last time.
“You could hear the building coming down floor by floor,” he said. “It was just a pancake. It was just ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.’ Each floor reverberated as the building was coming down.”
It was 10:28 a.m., and the North Tower was collapsing.
Benjamin and his client made it to Union Station. Benjamin was able to get a message to his family that he was safe. The next day, he made his way back home to New Hampshire.
“I was dropped off right at the time the kids were getting off of the school bus, and the kids were running up from the school bus, and it was a very emotional moment for me,” he said. “It certainly puts everything in perspective and what’s truly important in life.”
He said he just told his children that he loved them.
Twenty-five years later, Benjamin still has items from that day, including his key card, his trip itinerary and a New York City Fire Department hat.
“These are my heroes, the Fire Department in New York and the Police Department in New York,” he said. “I mean, those were heroes. Those are people that, frankly, saved our lives.”
Now 64, Benjamin has built a large, blended family. He said 9/11 taught him that family matters most.
“I don’t think it defines me, other than it changed my life,” he said. “It changed how I felt about certain things. And it made me more focused on what’s truly important.”