David Peter was just beginning his brown-bag lunch in a basement locker room with about 20 other maintenance workers when the lights flickered and the wall exploded in front of him.
Mr. Peter, a 25-year-old mechanic from Huntington, L.I., said the explosion wrecked a cinderblock wall and the metal lockers, hurling debris over him and his fellow workers, gashing faces and limbs.
"The wall blew," he said. "The wall just came right for us. Three rows of lockers fell on guys. Guys were screaming, yelling, panicking."
Mr. Peter was on the second level of the basement, adjacent to the parking garage where the police say the blast occurred. A second after the blast, where the wall had been there was only smoke and flame, he said.
"You couldn't even walk," he said. "Everything was on the floor. There was smoke and a hissing sound."
Unable to get past the fire, Mr. Peter and the other workers huddled in an elevator shaft exposed by the blast and called for help on a portable radio. Some were bleeding from wounds inflicted by the flying debris. All were unable to breathe.
Firefighters appeared in the din and smoke and began to beat back the fire. Mr. Peter and the others, who work for Ogden Allied Services, crawled along a wall behind the firefighters to a stair and climbed into the fresher air.
"I knew it was not going be the way I was going to die," Mr. Peter said later, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket, his face a sooty mess. "I just got one of those feelings."
Air and a Wisecrack
Outside several mobile clinics hurriedly set up on West Street, police officers and office workers who had just emerged from the building sometimes stopped to spit or throw up, their faces blackened by smoke and soot. Some were helped into collapsible wheelchairs that were set up beneath a pedestrian overpass -- a snow-swept emergency clinic providing solace but no shelter.
Helen Dunnigan, a 26-year-old auditor who was working on the 100th floor when the explosion hit, sat in her white-stockinged feet in the driving snow. She was shivering beneath a blanket and sobbing into a manicured but soot-smeared hand.
It had taken her more than an hour to walk flight by agonizing flight down and out of the building. A paramedic bent to wrap his arm around her shoulders in reassurance. "What can I do for you?" he coached. "You're going to be okay."
She brightened. Embarrassed, her voice quavering as she let a portable respirator fall away from her blackened nose and mouth, she took a deep breath, then found her own moment of New York humor. "Well, you could get me a cab." When he laughed and turned away, the sobs returned, the sense of how close she might have come to dying.
A Shadow From the Towers
Just blocks from the World Trade Center, neighborhood residents and passers-by tried to take in the information that a bomb might well have triggered the disaster. Julia Marquez, the 44-year-old owner of Julia's Lingerie at 165 Church Street, said she felt sad but still loved the city. Explaining that she is an immigrant from Spain, she said she would not leave. "We can't run away from it like little mice," she said. "It could happen anywhere. I'm European, and it could have happened in Europe. It goes with living in a big city."
Her husband, Harry Gindi, agreed, but with reservations. "All we want to do is live here in peace," he said. "And hopefully we want to die in peace."
Disaster Doesn't Reserve
At Windows on the World, the restaurant in the one of the tower's 107th floor, the lunch crowd was just starting to arrive when the lights went out and the emergency lights came on. Learning only that there was a fire in the building, diners were escorted calmly to the stairwells for the long walk down. No diners were hurt, but one woman in high heels complained of fatigue after the descent.
