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Haunting words of woman trapped under 9/11 rubble for 27 hours before becoming the last person rescued
A woman, who was famously the last person to be rescued from under the rubble of the World Trade Center during 9/11, revealed the haunting details of her experience.
For 27 agonizing hours, Genelle Guzman lay trapped beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center, convinced she was going to die.
Genelle's fascinating rescue story
The 32-year-old Port Authority worker had been inside the 64th floor of the South Tower on September 11, 2001, when the second hijacked plane, American Airlines 175, crashed into the building.
While she would ultimately become the fifth and final person rescued alive from the rubble, as the hours passed with no sign of help, Guzman feared she had been forgotten.
"When I saw that it became dark and no one came and I am not hearing any noises nowhere around, I said I am not going to make it," she later recounted from her hospital bed at Bellevue Hospital.
Guzman had been working alongside colleagues when the first plane struck the North Tower.
An announcement initially told workers to remain inside their offices, but everything changed when the second aircraft hit their own building. Guzman and 14 colleagues immediately decided they had to evacuate.
Recounting the moment the building collapsed, Guzman said: "We fell to the ground. We were thrown together.”
Genelle's haunting words after becoming trapped under the rubble
Her head was trapped between two concrete pillars while rubble pinned her legs down. As darkness descended, Guzman began to believe that nobody would find her, coming to terms with her situation and her own mortality.
With the hours passing and no rescue in sight, her thoughts became increasingly bleak. "I am going die here. I am going to see myself slowly die here," she remembered thinking.
Thankfully, after hours of being buried, Guzman revealed how she could hear noises coming from somewhere beyond the layers of concrete and debris, as she shouted up to them.
Desperate to help the rescuers pinpoint her location, Guzman began banging one piece of concrete against another.
The noise helped the search team narrow down where she was trapped. Eventually, Guzman managed to push a hand through an opening in the rubble, before being pulled out.