PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) \u2014 Anne Koster escaped the 81st floor of the North Tower 25 years ago, barefoot and afraid.<\/p>\n
She walked out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; she now says she didn’t think she would make it out alive.<\/p>\n
“I called my dad, and I said, ‘What are you doing?'” Koster told 8 On Your Side. “He said, ‘I’m cooking Mommy breakfast.’ I said, ‘Get dressed; get her out of the house. I don’t want her watching TV. A plane hit the building. Get her out of the house,'” Anne Koster said.<\/p>\n
Anne clearly recalled calling her parents after seeing an airplane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the very building she was working in that fateful September morning.<\/p>\n
She never imagined she’d next be running for her life with her co-workers, who were screaming instructions, making split-second decisions that ensured her survival.<\/p>\n
“‘Get down, get down, get out of here! Get out! This building is going to go. The building’s going to go.’ He grabbed my hand, and we ran across the street at that point, which is when Tower One came down,” Koster said.<\/p>\n
Those screams, that terror, something she carries with her 25 years after the most devastating terrorist attack in American history.<\/p>\n
“I had a pair of sandals, and a lot of women were kicking shoes off so they could walk faster. So I just joined suit,” Koster said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
An unimaginable evacuation, barefoot. Koster still has the shoes her friends got for her after she made it out of Ground Zero.<\/p>\n
There are other moments seared in her memory too: the smell of gasoline and the darkness in that long descent down 81 flights of stairs.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The hijacked plane crashed about a dozen floors above her workplace; Anne was one of the lucky ones who made it out.<\/p>\n
“On that particular day, I lost 15 very good friends,” Koster said. One of them was Susan, who tried to escape the north tower with her.<\/p>\n
“She never made it out. They found her body on Christmas Day of 2001,” Koster said.<\/p>\n
After the towers fell, it took Anne 12 hours to get home from Lower Manhattan to Staten Island.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t like to start walking until a little after nine, and I didn’t get home till 9 o’clock that night,” Koster said.<\/p>\n
The first person to meet her at the door was her husband, Dale. “He said, ‘I thought I was going to lose you,'” Koster said.<\/p>\n
8 On Your Side asked Koster if she thought she’d make it out alive; she said she didn’t.<\/p>\n
Koster has carried the date, September 11th, with her every day since; she now dedicates her time to organizations like Tunnels to Towers and yearly 9\/11 remembrances in the Tampa Bay area.<\/p>\n
Despite a quarter century passing, that doesn’t mean the pain goes away.<\/p>\n
Koster said she wants younger generations to learn about what happened at the World Trade Center. “It’s up to people like me to let the kids know what happened and how it happened.”<\/p>\n