‘…like cattle pounding down the stairs.’

My mom’s work friend, Rob Bujan, worked as director of operations at a behavioral heath insurance company, MHN, in the Trump Building on 40 Wall Street, about three blocks from the World Trade Center.
“I was on a conference call with our Dallas office we heard there was a plane that hit the tower,” Bujan said.
At the time, it was reported that the plane was a small commuter jet.
“Next thing we know, there was another report of a plane that hit the other tower.”
He helped gather staff into the lobby of the office where the elevators were and waited for word of what to do next.
“When the first tower fell, you could feel our building shake, the sky gets dark, and there were millions of pieces of paper in the air, like a blizzard of snow,” Bujan said.
He was told to go to the stairs to evacuate the building.
“You could hear the floor above us in the stair wells, like cattle pounding down the stairs.”
The stairs filled with acrid smoke by then.
“Now for those who know me, my biggest phobia is claustrophobia…” Bujan said.
The people on the stairs were not going anywhere, and it was hard to breath with the smokey stairwell, and the sheer amount of people stuck there. Bujan, his boss and the staff find out that because of the falling of the South Tower so close to them, the sidewalk had been jolted out of place and was blocking the exit door.
“I am in full panic mode,” he said. “I find a bathroom and lock myself into a stall …my boss finds me and literally pulls me out of the bathroom, and we go to the traders’ floor.”
Bujan said he tried to get ahold of his loved ones over the phone, but the satellites were overloaded.
“They have TVs in the traders’ floor, so we watch the second tower fall on CNN, and then feel the boom and shake in our building,” Bujan said. “It is surreal, that just happened on TV and we just felt it.”
He described that he couldn’t see anything outside of the building’s windows because of the smoke.
He told me how his boss grabs him and his small staff and they find another emergency exit.
“We are joined by a managing director of the trading firm… who takes his suit jacket off and rips it up and gives it to us to cover our mouths.”
The stairwell was wall to wall with smoke and people.
“We finally exit out to Wall Street, and the first thing I remember thinking is that this must be a dream,” Bujan said during our interview.
The streets were covered in at least a foot of ash and debris.
“There were taxis abandoned on the street,” he described, painting an apocalyptic image that I’ve only ever seen in movies.
It was hard to walk through the street because of the rubble. Bujan spoke about how the police were putting people on boats to evacuate the island. He took a ferry across to New Jersey.
“We find a seat and that’s when it hits us. We are looking at downtown Manhattan and there is just a plume of smoke surrounding it. People are on the boat, some are crying, some are passed out, but we all look like we’d gone to war.”
Everyone on the ferry was covered in black and grey ash.
When the floors that the plane hit on the first tower were announced, Bujan learned some of his friends who worked in the building died that day.
Bujan told me how the events of 9/11 caused him to move upstate, because of how unsafe he felt in the city.
“It’s a moment in time I can never forget, but I hope I’ll never have to experience anything like it again.”
When I asked him about how he feels the world has changed, he replied sarcastically, “well, traveling by plane is so much more fun now.”