The power failed, rendering the emergency communications system useless and the stairways dark. history, and nothing had gone the way it was supposed to go. It was the largest full-building evacuation in U.S. In the basement below, a Ryder truck full of eleven hundred pounds of explosives had left a crater five stories deep. She never imagined that a place could look so different. She thought that once she had made it out of her own private catastrophe, everything would be normal, bustling and bright. She was stunned by the darkness in the lobby and the emptiness outside. She did as he instructed, grabbing onto a rope and following it out through the lobby and out the doors. Zedeno could not see the face of the firefighter who pulled her out the smoke was too thick. It turned out the car had returned to the lobby level, and that's where they'd been all along. When they'd been in the elevator for about an hour, a firefighter managed to rip open the door and pull them out. The sounds were far away, and I was just hovering. I could see the people lying in the elevator. "Regardless of the outcome, I knew everything was going to be OK," she remembers.
It was around then that Zedeno was filled with a wave of peace, inexplicably. He started to cough and returned to the floor. You're going to inhale too much smoke," she told him. So Zedeno took charge of quieting him down. But before she could, the temp had started doing it for her. Just then, she thought she would lunge for the doors and start banging herself. She visualized rescue workers finding them dead inside the elevator later. "I remember thinking, 'We're going to be next,'" Zedeno says. "I'm burning up!" he yelled as he banged on the metal box around him. Then they heard a man screaming in the elevator next to them. But the more she tried to calm down, the harder her heart seemed to pound. Zedeno concentrated on keeping her breathing shallow and slow. Then one of the men calmly directed everyone to get low and cover their faces. A woman dropped to her knees and started praying, making Zedeno nervous. Smoke began to slowly coil in from below. Then it stopped for good, trapping her and five other people. When the bomb exploded, they heard a loud pop and the elevator stopped and began to descend. She had taken a new temporary worker to the food court to show him around, and they were on their way back to their desks.
On February 26, 1993, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center for the first time, Elia Zedeno was in an express elevator carrying a slice of Sbarro's pizza. Click here for more information on this book. 19, 2009— - The publisher provided the following excerpt of "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why" to ABC News.
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