Bill Forney ’96 can’t get the nightmarish images out of his head. They remind him of a catastrophe movie in which a war-torn landscape is littered with soot, debris, and dangling wires and clouds of smoke choke the atmosphere. But what was happening was all too real, and before the morning was gone, Forney would twice elude death as he descended from the towering inferno of the World Trade Center.

Two months after the September 11 terrorist attack, Forney continues to mentally replay his escape. “I am always going through the scenarios and how we got down,” Forney says. “I go through the whole thing every day, all day long. It is always going through my mind.”

On the day of terror, Forney was at work at 8:15 a.m. on the 85th floor of One World Trade Center. An employee of SMW Trading Company, he had just begun preparing reports for another day of trading at the New York Mercantile Exchange, which is five minutes away from his office. Forney is usually there by 9:15 a.m.

At 8:48 a.m., Forney was sitting in the center of the office with his back to the windows. He was stretching and sighing after having completed his reports, when suddenly a horrific explosion rumbled through the building. The air pressure dropped, and a high-pitch noise pierced the office. A ghostly wind shot into the room, whipping up papers and slamming doors shut.

Then the building started to yaw. The structure moved back and forth about 10 times, throwing Forney to the floor. “It scared me to the point that I thought I was going to die,” he recalls. “I remember looking up and asking myself, ‘When are the floors above us coming down?’”
After the swaying stopped, silence ensued. The workers began speculating that it was a bomb, but Forney’s boss spoke up and said he had seen a commercial jetliner crash into the building just two stories above them.

The 17 employees of SMW stood in shock. They didn’t know what to do, and many wanted to remain in the building. But Forney and his friend Rob decided it was time to leave, and the rest followed. Forney took his trading jacket and a bottle of water in case of fires and smoke. As he was leaving, he went to look for a missing co-worker named Marvin. Deciding to look for Marvin in the restroom, Forney entered a dark hallway where he saw three smoldering fires and debris. Marvin was nowhere in sight, which led Forney to believe that he had left the building before the attack.

Forney returned to his office and joined his co-workers as they walked down the stairwell. Several stories below, Forney and Rob each picked up a fire extinguisher and lugged them along as they kept up a slow, steady pace. On the 72th floor, the stairwell came to halt, people began coming back up the stairs, and they had to go into a hall to get to another exit. As they moved down the hallway, they had to step over debris, duck wires hanging from the ceiling, and skirt fires that had broken out in the wall. Forney covered his face and tried not to look. “I thought all it would take is one little spark and it would blow up in my face,” he says.

When they reached the 50th floor, they heard someone yell, “Move to the right!” A man with a bloody face and bandage on his head walked by followed by a woman who was hyperventilating.

“Everyone was calm, orderly, and supportive,” Forney says. “No one took advantage of the path they cleared. We felt there was no immediate danger. We didn’t know the severity of the situation.”

By the 49th floor, Forney was sweating profusely. He unbuttoned his shirt and left the fire extinguisher behind. He tried repeatedly to use his cellular phone, but to no avail. A few floors further down, Forney began to see firefighters heading up the stairs, and at the 30th floor, the firefighters had set up camp to tend to the injured.

At the 20th floor, Forney and Rob saw a middle-aged woman named Juliette, who was out of breath and struggling with the stairs. The two offered to help her. Rob, carrying her purse, led the way while Forney escorted her from behind. They proceeded at a snail’s pace, letting others who were moving more quickly pass them by.

After about an hour of maneuvering the stairwells, Forney and his group reached the lobby, but the unnerving sight of the outside world brought no reassurance. “On the ground you saw black, some metal objects, but a lot of stuff was smoldering,” Forney says. “I remember seeing a leg, but I didn’t see the body.”

Firefighters led the group to the escalators, which were broken, and down into the underground system of the World Trade Center. The normally active tunnels were abandoned, and the automatic sprinklers had created deep puddles of water. An eerie sense of danger, Forney recalls, permeated the place.

They continued walking slowly through the underground, turning a corner before stopping momentarily because Juliette wanted a drink. Suddenly, Forney heard a rumbling and thought it was water rushing through the tunnel. “It grew louder and I realized it was people running and screaming, yelling “Everybody run!” Forney took a few steps and heard someone else yell “Everybody dive!” Forney dove for a cubbyhole, curled up, closed his eyes, and prayed to God that he wouldn’t die. Two World Trade Center, the second building hit by a plane, was collapsing, only minutes after Forney had left the lobby.

“The blast was like a hurricane,” says Forney. “For the second time in an hour, I thought I was going to die. I figured something from above might fall down and severe me in two.”

When Forney opened his eyes, he couldn’t see through the darkness. He closed his eyes and opened them and still couldn’t see a thing. He called out for Juliette and Rob. She responded, but Rob had to clear his throat before he could utter a sound.

They saw a glimmer of light. It was a fireman with a floodlight. They formed a human chain and followed the firefighter for about 80 yards to a broken escalator that led them back up one level to the street.

The world was falling apart.

“Outside was a war zone,” Forney says. “It was a monochromatic landscape. It was like lint. Everything meshed into one color, gray. You could make out trees, but they were gray. You could make out the grounds, but they were covered with several inches of soot. The air was full of dust and ash.”

As they crossed a street, a photographer yelled, “Look for bodies under the cars!” Forney took a quick glance at the cars but could not see anything. The three continued trampling through the wreckage, and about three blocks from the point they exited the tunnels, a storeowner invited them into his place to rest. Juliette had lost her purse and wanted to return to retrieve it, but Rob and Forney convinced her otherwise. “I told her she should be happy to be alive,” Forney says. The two men each gave her $10, kissed her on the forehead, and proceeded home.

After walking for about 10 minutes, Forney heard a “horrifying gasp” from people on the sidewalks. He turned around and saw One World Trade Center, his building, go down, floor by floor. “It was surreal, unbelievable,” he says.

Forney continued walking and found a corner store with a pay phone. He called his father’s office in Houston, and his father in turn called Bill’s wife, Tobey ’93, who was in London for business. Tobey is chief operating officer and general counsel of TransactTools, a financial software company.

When Tobey heard the news of the terrorist attack, she says, she tried to remain hopeful that her husband was alive.

“I told myself a lot of lies to make myself believe that he was okay,” she explains. “It’s amazing what your mind can do. I became a zombie, and I don’t remember what I did between the time of the attack and the time I got the message. When I got the message, I collapsed and made a scene at the hotel. But everyone was happy for me.”

Now, months after the September attack, Forney says he is not suffering too terribly from posttraumatic stress disorder. He says that he doesn’t suffer from nightmares, and he can sleep at night. But the memories of the tragedy refuse to leave him. His senses, he says, are more heightened, and loud noises startle him. The burning smell also brings back the horror. “When I get out of the subway and I smell the burned buildings, my blood pressure goes up,” he admits. “My heart starts to beat faster. I have a little anxiety.”

But not enough to make him want to leave New York. Forney is intent on learning how to trade securities on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, and New York is one of the few cities that offers that opportunity. He continues to work with SMW, though instead of going to his office at the World Trade Center, he now goes directly to the Mercantile Exchange building. His wife is equally determined to stay.

“We want to get back to normal as quickly as possible,” Tobey says. “This is a great city, and we want to be here as long as we can.”

—David D. Medina