9/11 (Reasearch)

IT was a beautiful September morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky as the usual throng of office workers poured onto the subways and streets of Manhattan for the start of another busy working day.

This particular morning Ian Robb was running late. He had been out the night before with a couple of work colleagues and slept through his alarm. “I’d got a taxi back home to New Jersey where I lived but the driver missed the exit so it was gone 1.30am before I got home.”

Normally he was up at six and would be sitting in his office on the 99th floor of the World Trade Center, where he worked as head of professional development for the international financial services firm Marsh and McLennan, by 7.30am. “I ran to the station but I’d missed my usual train and the next one,” he says.

But even though he was an hour late he still had time to admire the view as he took the short ferry ride across the River Hudson. “I vividly remember the sky was crystal blue, it certainly wasn’t a bad start to the day.”

He reached the vast concourse of the World Trade Center at about 8.40am. He just missed one lift by a split second. “Some people in the lift waved at me and I waved back,” he says.

He and six others got into another one but as the doors closed nothing could have prepared him for what happened next. “There was this tremendous noise, the whole lift started shaking and there was this awful whistling noise of air rushing down the sides.” They tried pressing the alarm bells but nothing happened. By this time the lift was full of smoke and dust and there was a growing sense of dread. They were trapped inside for more than hour before they were finally able to prise open the doors. “We had no idea what was going on, we didn’t know whether we’d gone up or down,” says Ian, a former Leeds Grammar School pupil.

As it turned out they’d barely moved an inch. They scrambled out to discover they were still on the ground floor. Firefighters told them a plane had slammed into the tower.

“The lobby of the World Trade Center was massive, it was about four stories high and as we ran up to the plaza level we noticed the windows were red with blood, although we didn’t realise what it was at the time.

“Outside it was like a battlefield, there were bits of bodies lying around, it was horrific. I heard this huge roar and when I looked up I could see an inferno at the top of the building where my offices had been.”

As Ian joined the terrified crowds running for the ferry the south tower collapsed. He tried calling his daughter, Alexis, who was living with him, but the mobile phone networks were dowm.

Once across the river he was among the thousands who crammed onto trains, desperate to get home. “We were all standing cheek by jowl and everyone was exchanging stories. Most people had seen the planes hit the towers and people jumping out of the burning buildings, whereas I’d been stuck in a lift so I was lucky in a way because I didn’t see all that.”