On Sept. 11, 2001, I was a US Secret Service senior supervisor/special agent assigned to our New York Field Office located in Building #7 of the New York City World Trade Center (WTC) complex.

On that day, I was following my daily routine coming into the office around 6am to jog along the Hudson River. It was a beautiful, cloudless, crystal blue day with a gentle wind blowing. As I ran back toward the World Trade Center complex, I remember remarking to myself how beautiful the twin towers looked and even thought how lucky we had been that nothing had happened to us considering all the conflicts popping up around the globe.

I guess I was reflecting on the first World Trade Center bombing on Feb. 26, 1993, that seriously damaged our New York Field Office. At the time, our office was in WTC#6. I had responded to New York City from Washington, DC, following the explosion with equipment and other personnel to assist the office with recovery operations. Several of our agents had been injured in that attack.

I got back to the office after my run and was coming out of the shower when the building shook and the lights flickered. A few seconds later an announcement over the speaker system alerted us that there had been a massive explosion in WTC#1 and we were to immediately evacuate the building.

I quickly got dressed and went to my office to get phones and radios to help coordinate our evacuation/relocation. I remember looking up from my 10th floor window at WTC#1 to see a huge hole in the north side of the building boiling out with fire. I immediately left my building and moved onto the plaza toward the New York City Mayor’s emergency command post that was forming up on the street below WTC#1 to serve as the USSS police and fire liaison. I am a licensed and practicing paramedic with many years of incident command experience.

Simultaneously, other USSS agents were moving toward the lobby of WTC#1 to assist with evacuation and care of the injured. All of our agents are medically trained to the first responder level or higher. As I was moving closer to the command post, something caught my attention and I suddenly stopped, narrowly missing being crushed by a person who had jumped from one of the fire floors high above.

Tragically, this unknown person impacted the ground directly in front of me. That was the first of five times that day, where I should have been dead or seriously injured. It etched an enduring impression in my memory —  the sight of fellow human beings raining out of the sky as they had courageously made a final, very intimate decision driven by searing fire. They, like us, all came to work that Tuesday morning following our normal routines, instantly immersed in this horrible conflagration without any warning or sense of direction or outcome.

I was with the Mayor, NYPD and FDNY commissioners when the second plane struck WTC#2 from the south side. Debris launched at us as if it was shot out of a cannon. Command personnel had been gathering on the street just north of the WTC#2. We later learned that one of the engines from the plane that struck WTC#2 flew over the top of us and embedded itself into the street two blocks behind where we were standing.

Up until the second plane had hit, we were still trying to confirm that the explosion high up on WTC#1 was caused by a plane as the early reporting was very chaotic. But now with the second hit, we knew that it was a plane and that we were under attack.

There were now two major incident scenes that instantly overwhelmed on-scene resources and these inadvertently influenced the separation of the police and fire commands. Much of our ability to communicate and coordinate by radio went down with the collapse of WTC#1, where many of the city’s emergency communications antennas were located.

I had a team of agents with me and moved to a new location east of the WTC complex, where the NYPD command post was being re-established and resources assembled. Without warning, I remember hearing a loud growling rumble followed by screams to run.  “Get cover,” several agents yelled.

I dove under a fire truck, just as the ground and air around me erupted with a force and pressure that I had never, ever experienced. Instantly, everything went black, and the air was so hot and thick that I had to put my face into the armpit of my jacket to breathe.

I eventually climbed out from underneath the truck to an eerie silence and entered a surreal environment that was unrecognizable due to the heavy cloud of dust, smoke and debris in the air. Small fires had started on the street from the plane’s fuel that began to set cars and trucks on fire. People started emerging from the cloud covered with grey soot, all wearing a death mask that was void of any expression.

I accounted for and re-assembled my team of agents and started to move toward the WTC plaza to assist with finding and evacuating the injured when we heard the unnatural sound of metal bending. At the same time, fighter jets were making low passes over the area. We were on the east side with the wind blowing the smoke and fire over the top of us. We had no idea at this point that WTC#2 had totally collapsed. We couldn’t see anything except the top of the radio tower on WTC#1 through all the smoke.

Moments later, there were shouts that Tower #1 was coming down. “Run for cover!”

I took refuge behind a corner of the post office building and again was hit by a tremendous force of energy and pressure as I crouched for cover. Again, everything blacked out and breathing the air felt like inhaling concrete. As the dust slowly settled, a wall of fire surrounded the WTC complex as more jet fuel ignited everything in sight that could burn.

We could see people on the other side of the flames blocked as they were trying to get out of the complex. My crew and I commandeered an old FDNY fire engine that was already connected to a fire hydrant and quickly stretched out hose lines. From my limited fire training, I figured out how to get water pumping through the hoses and we soon were tamping down the flames so people could get out. It was another point in the day marked by the realization that there were no firemen visible anywhere, there was no screaming, just the sound of things burning and exploding on the street.

No One To Call For Help

I lost about three hours that day, where I don’t recall what happened or what I was doing. We came across a firefighter, a building maintenance technician and a civilian, who were all severely injured. There was no one to call for help, so we loaded them into an abandoned ambulance that had all its windows blown out and thankfully had the keys still in the ignition.

It was the first time that day that I put my hands on an injured person. I had wanted to preserve my ability to remain situationally aware and command my team. However, the severity of injuries to these individuals demanded that I jump in and initiate resuscitative efforts for them to have any chance of survival.

An off-duty Port Authority police officer became my driver and a couple of my agents helped me attend to the injured. I remember that we drove south toward Battery Park and the wind was blowing dust and debris through our windowless ambulance as we were working on our patients. Our police officer driver had heard that Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan was a staging area for ferries transporting the injured to the New Jersey side of the river. As we arrived at the ferry terminal, we were met by scores of people in clean uniforms, who had a look of shock on their faces as we emerged dust laden and bloody from the back of this windowless ambulance. Later, I got involved in several other rescues, but it soon became apparent sometime late that afternoon that we were not finding any more people alive.

I eventually left the WTC complex late in the evening after our 49-story office building (WTC#7) had collapsed from the fire that ate away at its base when WTC#1 fell into its lower floors. I learned that I was initially reported as missing and knew that I needed to make it home to see my family. I walked through the door of my home around midnight, wearing oversized sweats given to me after being de-conned.

The look on the faces of my wife, daughter and son told me that they had suffered severe emotional pain throughout the day wondering if I had survived, as they had already learned about the loss of other neighbors around us. My wife told me that my eyes were beet red as I was wrestling with a cough that would ultimately persist for another three months. We all hugged and cried. I sat down to watch the TV replay of what happened, realizing for the first time that day that the two towers had totally collapsed. It was a sobering recognition that my team and I were so close that we could not see what had unfolded around us, but miraculously not close enough to get swallowed up by death that stole almost 3,000 innocent and vulnerable lives that day.