A huge cloud of ash came whipping around the corner of a building in Lower Manhattan, swallowing first the daylight and then her. When the dust cloud had her in its suffocating grip, it lifted her off the ground and threw her down, where she lay until fear compelled her once more to her feet and darkness engulfed her once again.
"At this point I laid down and I started saying my prayers," said the woman, an emergency medical technician named Renae O'Carroll who was responding to the attack at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, when she became lost in a perilous hail of debris. She saw "big bolts of fire, fire balls" and then a bright light she accepted as a beacon of the afterlife. "I said to myself at the moment: 'I guess this is the light, I guess this is my time.' I felt it was opening up and it was my time to go."
"I was getting ready to die," recalled Ms. O'Carroll, who had been loading a patient into her ambulance at Church and Vesey Streets when she was caught in the north tower's collapse. "And that's when I put my head to the left to see what the light was, and I felt glass. What happened to me was just a miracle. The glass door opened up. It was a door. It was opened up, and it felt like someone put their hands under me, just pulled me, picked me up and pulled me."
Ms. O'Carroll's experience is but one story among thousands that played out in the city that day - in varying degrees of horror, heroism, detachment and poignancy - and her odyssey, recorded by the Fire Department one mild fall day at her Brooklyn station five weeks after the attacks, is neither explosive in its heroics nor unduly gruesome in its details. Yet her oral history, among the hundreds that the city of New York released Friday along with dispatchers' tapes and phone logs of 9/11, is incredible all the same for its mix of modesty, luck and candidness about seemingly small steps at surviving an ordeal that others could bring themselves to recount only in the briefest of terms.
When Ms. O'Carroll found the glass door and pushed through it, she tumbled down some stairs and landed in what she said appeared to be a basement.
"The first thing I saw when I got up was a bucket of mop water," she said. "I needed to clean my eyes out. I took and I put the mop water in my face. I felt, whatever's in this water, if that didn't kill me, this isn't going to."
"I felt that I was still dying," she said. "I felt around; I could see only a half a foot in front of me," she said. "I saw something that said 'men.' It was a men's room. I couldn't get the door open. It had a padlock, just like this station door. I couldn't open it up.
"There was one that said ladies' room across there, and I started saying: 'God, how am I going to get in here? You brought me in this far. You're going to let me die down here?' I started questioning him. 'Why didn't you let me die with everybody else up there? Why bring me down here?'"
Suddenly remembering the only combination that came to mind - 3-2-5, the code for the padlock at her Brooklyn station - she pressed it and, remarkably, the padlock opened to what she would later learn was the restroom of a subway station boiler room.
"When I got inside of there, there was water. I turned the water on, and I washed my face. I cleared my airway out. I made myself vomit to get the stuff out of me."
Still, the water pressure from the faucet was just a trickle. "So what I did, I went and kneeled down over the toilet. I figured if upstairs didn't kill me, the toilet water is not going to kill me either.
"I kneeled on it and I put my hand on the flush and I let the water go down. As it was coming up, I washed my eyes out, and I was able to see around me. I looked around and saw that I was in a bathroom that it had vents up there and that there was no smoke in there.
"I wet paper towels and put it around the door. I was exhausted at this point. I lie down. I found out later on when I lie down and I went - I don't know if I lost consciousness or what. I went to sleep. I found out later that's when the other building fell."
Later, she said, "they told me I was missing seven or eight hours. I don't know. I was asleep. I was asleep. I was asleep a long time."
When she woke up, she nervously checked the padlock combination to make sure she had not dreamed it and that she could get back inside. She propped the door open. When she went exploring to find a way out, she laid toilet paper behind her.
"A trail of bread crumbs?" asked the interviewer.
"Yeah, I did," Ms. O'Carroll replied. "I made a trail to find out where - so I could get back there, because that was a safe haven for me. There was no smoke or anything."
She could not remember how she got there. She had lost her radio, her cellphone, and was breathing with difficulty. She found a stairway that led to an office three flights up, but the door was locked. She went down the stairs to the bathroom and fell asleep again.
When she woke up for the second time, she was determined to make her way out. She retraced her steps and made it to the street, where she found chaos with people running and screaming.
"A police lady grabbed my hand, and she dragged me," Ms. O'Carroll recalled. "I said: 'Help me. I can't really breathe.' She was crying and everything like that. We were pretty much holding each other up."
The police woman, whose name Ms. O'Carroll did not know, flagged down an ambulance and put Ms. O'Carroll in the back.
"I said: 'Please come with me.' I grabbed her hand," Ms. O'Carroll recalled. "She said: 'I can't, I have to stay. I have to stay and help people.' She couldn't breathe herself.
"I wish I could see her again one day, a little small thing."
The ambulance moved through Lower Manhattan, picking up two more victims - a man and an elderly woman - as it made its way to Beekman Downtown Hospital. Ms. O'Carroll found a pediatric breathing mask for the other patients to share, and they lay on the floor of the ambulance and prayed until they arrived at the hospital.
"I took a shower there," she said. "I cleaned up. They gave me a towel."
" The only thing I had left of mine was my boots," she said.
"Someone brought me from there back to Brooklyn, and the whole station, everyone from all three tours was there. When I came, they were clapping, and we all cried. It was just beautiful.
"But I'm glad that I was there and they weren't because it might have turned out differently."
"It wasn't my time to go," she said. "That's all it is."
"I went back down there two weeks later to help out at the morgue, because it was really bothering me," she said. "I had to go back down there, because I felt I ran away the first time.
"I was in the morgue 22 hours. Twenty-two hours. I had to get back there and face whatever it was."
From The New York Times on the Web (c) The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission
