William Rodriguez

"I Work in building 1, the one that got hit the first time. I was in the basement, which is a --unclear-- for the maintenance company. We hear like a big rumble, not like an impact, like a rumble, like something uh like --unclear--, all of a sudden, we hear another rumble and a guy comes running, running into our office and all his skin was off his body. All his skin, we went crazy, we started screaming, we told him to get out. We took everyone out of the office outside to the loading dock area. And then I went back in, and when I went back in. And when I went back in, I saw people, I heard people that were stuck on an elevator, a freight elevator, because all the elevators went down. And water was going in and they were probably getting drowned. And we get a couple of pipes and open the elevator and we got the people out. I went back up and I saw one of the officers from the Port Authority Police, I've been working there for twenty years, so I knew him very well. My routine on the World Trade Center is in charge of the stair case, and there was no elevator service, I have the master key for all the stair cases. So I went up with the police officers and a group of firemen. As we went up, there was a lot of people coming down, and while we got- it was very difficult to get up.

We heard, when we were on the 33rd, I'm sorry, the 23rd floor because we stopped there with the fire department because the equipment was very heavy and they were breathing very hard, they took a break, cause they couldn't continue going up, so they wanted to take a break. And we have a person in a wheel chair that we were gonna bring down on a gurney and a lady who was having trouble with a heart attack. And um, some of the guys that were breathing hard and we went a couple of floors up while they were putting the person on the gurney, got up to the 39th floor and we heard on the radio that the 63rd floor collapsed."