Sept. 14, 2001: An Escape From One of the Twin Towers

Looking back 20 years, my contribution to Buffalo News 9/11 coverage was this survivor story. One of the morning show radio deejays (if I remember correctly, it was Larry Norton on 97 Rock) read it in its entirety over the air.

Sept. 14, 2001

WNY Woman Tells of Her Nightmare
Courtney Timms had just arrived in her office on the 77th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower on Tuesday morning. She was closing the window blinds when it happened.
"All of a sudden, I saw all of this stuff flying in front of my window," she said Thursday evening from her parents' home in Kenmore. "Then I looked down at the ground and saw people sprinting away like ants."
Timms, 24, a client support representative for Baseline Financial, a software company serving the financial community, said she knew immediately she had to get out.
"I got my wallet and my flip-flops," she said. "I knew I could run faster in my flip-flops. I left my bag and my cell phone – I didn't know I wouldn't be coming back – and I went to the 78th floor where the elevators are."
The elevators, however, were "complete chaos," she said. She and her colleagues decided to go down the stairs, which weren't much better. By the time they descended 10 or 15 floors, the stairwell was jammed with people trying to escape.
Then, she said, an announcement came over the building's public address system.
"It said: 'Please remain where you are. The building is secure,'" she recounted. She didn't believe it, but others apparently did. The congestion cleared up for a while, she said.
"Then we got down to about the 42nd floor, and I got tossed to the wall. I couldn't even grab the handrail because it was moving below me," she said. "I thought: 'This is it. (I'm not) going to see the light of day.' But I just kept going."
She said she doesn't remember much about the rest of her descent, except that the stairwell became crowded again in the 20s. "It was horrific," she said.
"We finally came out on the second floor," she said. "I looked out onto the plaza and saw World Trade One. It was like a battle zone. We went down one escalator and up another escalator and out the east side.
A firefighter said, 'Don't look up,' but I looked up and saw there was fire. I saw everyone hurt and bleeding. I ran."
Timms, who has been training for the upcoming Dublin Marathon, said she ran as far as SoHo. Long lines of people stretched from every pay phone. It was an hour before she could call her parents to tell them she was all right.
Then she had to find a way to get home to her apartment in Hoboken, N.J.
"There was a seven-hour wait for a ferry," she said. "We went over to the Lincoln Tunnel and a policeman said, 'Go over and pay off somebody and ask if they'll give you a ride.' This guy I work with and I, we ended up in the back of a Jeep.
"He wanted nothing. We were one of the first through the tunnel after it opened.
"The guy who was driving said: 'This is the thing. There's a reason, there's a season, there's a lifetime to figure out why things are. I don't know why you're with me coming out of this tunnel, but here you are and you've got bigger things in store for you.'"
Timms, a 1996 graduate of Sacred Heart Academy who earned her degree in international business and marketing from Rochester Institute of Technology last year, said she has been working for Baseline Financial since last fall.
She said her company occupied the 77th and 78th floors of the South Tower. Of the 195 employees, she said, only four are unaccounted for.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Courtney is now Courtney Timms Maloney and, according to her LinkedIn page, she's senior managing director for listings and corporate platforms at Nasdaq. After nearly 20 years in the New York City area, she's been living and working back here since 2019. One of her Sacred Heart classmates won a teaching award for a lesson on 9/11 based on Courtney's experiences.

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