9-11 CONNECTIONS: Survivor narrowly escapes Building One

T&D, Oct. 6, 2001

Bleeding and fearful, a Bamberg County employee’s sister fled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center’s Building One just before it collapsed on Sept. 11.

Vonnie Barker shared her story with selected second- and third-graders at Felton Laboratory School on the South Carolina State University campus in Orangeburg.

“I learned to appreciate every day — every day — and everybody in my life,” said Barker, whose sister is Sharon Hammond, the director of the Bamberg County 911 emergency phone service.

Barker worked in an office on the 86th floor of Building One as a graphics designer for the Port Authority of New York, which owned the World Trade Center.

On Sept. 11, Barker arrived at 8 a.m. and was routinely working at her computer 45 minutes later when a hijacked airliner struck the 88th to 90th floors of the 110-story structure.

“My boss saw the side of the plane that hit the building. … We thought it was an accident, that the plane had misjudged.” Years ago, an airplane accidentally crashed into the Empire State Building nearby.

Barker and her boss were the only people in her office. The rest had not yet arrived as they were not scheduled to report until 9 a.m.

“It was the worst sound in the whole wide world,” Barker told the children. “We knew something horrible had happened.” She said it sounded like “an earthquake, magnified … the building cracking … it shook, everything fell. … The ceiling and walls came crumbling down. … There was a big hole in the floor.

“… I was screaming and crying. I said, ‘Boss, we’ve got to get out of here.”

The only exit was blocked by debris, so “the boss and I had to dig a way out.” But when they got to the door and opened it, the corridor “was completely filled with smoke. We couldn’t see.” Barker said they didn’t want to assume the floor was still there.

They returned to the office, where Barker ditched her high-heeled shoes for some more practical loafers and packed the contents of her purse in a backpack to free her arms.

“We made some phone calls,” she added. “I called my sister-in-law and told her to tell my daughter that I love her.”

They ventured back into the corridor and found they could see much better by then, so they joined the mass of humanity desperately descending stairway after stairway toward safety.

For Barker, who had worked in the building for 10 years, it was the second time she had been forced to flee the building following a terror attack. The first time was the 1993 bomb blast in the parking garage.

Back then, workers had to find their way down in relative darkness. Due to improvements made since then, the stairwells were lighted, but the mood was somber.

“We were very, very afraid. We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Barker said. “There were times we were stuck on that stairwell and couldn’t move.”

She spent what she estimated was an hour and a half in the stairwell but added, “You don’t know time when you’re afraid, when you’re running from danger.”

She kept her faith. “In case you think you’re in a situation you cannot get out of, with God, you can,” she said.

Barker emphasized to her audience of children that the adults followed the instructions they learned during the fire drills they practiced as children.

“They could save your life,” she said.

“We did what we had to do. No stopping, no looking and no talking. Everybody was very orderly. Everybody was helping everybody else. We would let all of the injured people” pass ahead of them.

“We first saw the firemen on the 24th floor,” she said. “They were exhausted” but determined to keep climbing.

“When we reached the ground floor, we thought we were OK. Everybody was hugging and kissing each other,” Barker said. They were within sight of the main entrance, but still inside the building.

“Then Building Two fell. And when it did, it caused an explosion in my building. This big cloud of smoke came at us like it was chasing us. Then there was another explosion.

“I was blown one place and my boss was blown another,” said Barker, who was blown out of her shoes and was injured. “I prayed real hard. I thought I had died. I really did.”

“Someone had a flashlight and they called out, ‘Come to the light. I’ll get you out.’ I heard somebody say, ‘Form a human chain.’ You could barely see. All you could see was this little bit of light.

“I was tired, hurt, wet and scared,” she said “It took every bit of strength I had to go toward that light.”

Upon emerging from the building, she was offered medical aid, but refused it, not realizing how injured she was. “I just wanted to go home,” she explained.

She fears her would-be benefactors perished when Building One collapsed later.

“They were, like, right up under the building,” she explained.

Barker straggled up the block and encountered television reporters seeking an interview. Later she found out that a lot of her friends and family knew she was all right by watching her being interviewed on TV.

Finally she got into an ambulance and was whisked off to a hospital, where she got 40 stitches and spent half a day.

“My personal close friends all lived, but I knew a few of the people who died,” she said. Her employer, the Port Authority, lost about 61 employees.

Even before she began working there, “that building was a focal point for me. I could look out of the window of my home in Brooklyn and see the twin towers,” Barker said.

“They knocked New York’s two front teeth out. It’s never going to be the same again,” said Barker, who hopes that the World Trade Center will never be forgotten.

Should it be rebuilt? “No!” she replied adamantly. “No way! It’s a red flag for some people. It will always be — always be — a target.” She hopes new, smaller buildings will be erected on the site, with a memorial there, too.

New York has changed since Sept. 11, most notably “the strong presence of military in any major venue,” she said. Broadway and Times Square are still far from normal.

Barker said she was overwhelmed by the phone calls of friends, family and well-wishers in the days after the attack. “You never know how many people care for you” until a time like this, she said. And since the incident, she says her family has been understandably “clinging.”

Barker came to South Carolina to “relax and recuperate and convalesce” for a week. When she returns to New York, she says she will be “ready and able to go back to work” — in a three-story office building in New Jersey, that is. She vowed never to work in a high-rise again.

Barker said the government’s response to the attacks makes her feel “safer” but she still has concerns. “Two of those terrorists lived just 20 blocks away from me” in Brooklyn, she said with a shudder.

The incident has changed Barker’s life in many ways.

“There are a lot of things I can’t do any more because I’m afraid,” she admitted. “It’s hard for me to even drive by tall buildings. Unknown sounds, people that look suspicious, even working at a computer can set off a panic attack. That wasn’t me before, and now I feel like I’m going to be running for the rest of my life.”