John Abruzzo was at his computer when Flight 11 hit the North Tower.

The aircraft struck between the 93rd and 99th floors, well above the Port Authority offices on the 69th floor. Everyone at and above the impact zone was trapped, but the stairways below remained a possible escape route for thousands of people.

Abruzzo later described the impact in physical terms. The building seemed to have been punched. Paper fell outside his windows. He noticed the tower sway.

Those observations mattered because no one on the 69th floor had a complete view of what had happened. They did not have the later television replays, official timelines, or structural investigations. They had movement, sound, falling paper, and the behavior of the people around them.

Most occupants began leaving.

Abruzzo maneuvered his power chair into the hallway. By his account, only ten coworkers remained nearby. The rest of the office had already joined the evacuation.

The group found the EVAC+CHAIR.

Its presence was not accidental. It belonged to the safety improvements adopted after the 1993 bombing. Abruzzo’s earlier six-hour evacuation was precisely the kind of experience that had demonstrated why the building needed a lighter alternative to a power wheelchair.

It resembled a narrow folding seat attached to a lightweight metal frame. Wheels allowed it to move across a level surface. Tracks along the back could rest against stair edges and help control a descent.

Getting Abruzzo into it was only the beginning.

Transferring him meant leaving behind the wheelchair customized for his daily independence. There was no realistic way to bring that heavy chair down with them. The group had to trust a much smaller device designed for a single purpose: descent.

He later explained that the chair might have been demonstrated as a device one person could operate. On September 11, the group used two people in front and two behind. Others rotated into those positions as the work continued.

One member of the group could not help with the physical lifting and instead moved ahead to inspect conditions. That role became important when smoke blocked part of their planned route around the 40th floor. The group crossed the building and entered another stairwell.

Every change of direction demanded coordination.

At each landing, the chair had to be turned. The handlers shifted their grip, dragged or guided the frame around the tight corner, and lined it up with the next flight. The people behind them could not simply move at their normal pace. The people below had to make room.

The group did not race down all 69 floors in a single burst. They alternated positions and paused when necessary. Abruzzo and Michael Curci later recalled that they did not fully understand the scale of the attack during the early descent.

The lack of full information protected no one, but it shaped their pace and memory. They knew the tower had been hit and that leaving was necessary. They did not know the structure would collapse. They could not calculate how many minutes were safe to spend resting, changing handlers, or waiting for traffic in the stairwell.

Their StoryCorps conversation contains an unexpectedly ordinary detail: at one point, they stopped near a Snapple machine.

That detail does not make the emergency smaller. It shows how incomplete their information was.

The building was damaged, and they knew they had to leave. But they did not yet know that another aircraft would strike the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. They could not see that the two most recognizable buildings in Lower Manhattan were entering their final hour.

Inside the stairwell, the disaster was measured differently.

One flight.

One landing.

One turn.

Then another.

Firefighters were climbing upward as civilians moved down. Abruzzo later remembered seeing them carry axes, hoses, and hundreds of pounds of equipment. They were already exhausted.

Every encounter required the descending civilians to make space. The firefighters’ upward movement also told them that the emergency was still unfolding above. The two groups passed each other with opposite destinations and the same narrowing supply of time.

His coworkers continued in the opposite direction with the blue and yellow chair between them.

Above, the floors they had left were filling with smoke and confusion.

Below, the lobby was still far away.

The group could not know whether the chair would hold, whether the stairway would remain open, or whether their strength would last.

They only knew the next flight was in front of them.

Below the 69th floor, each completed flight reduced the physical distance to safety. It did not necessarily reduce the danger. Smoke, congestion, falling debris, and the condition of the lobby remained unknown until the group reached them.