“ The last survivor found was Genelle Guzman, a thirty-one-year-old Port Authority clerk of Trinidadian origin, who had delayed with Buzzelli and the others on the sixty-fourth floor, but had gotten ahead in the descent, and was on the thirteenth floor when the building boomed and broke apart around her. She was with a friend named Rosa, and had stopped to adjust her shoe. She had put her hand on Rosa’s shoulder. As the building crumbled, she felt the shoulder pull away, as if Rosa were running up the staircase. She was hit, and felt the acceleration of collapse around her. All was darkness. When the roar stopped, she heard a couple of calls from a man who then grew silent. Her head was jammed under a load of debris, but eventually she worked it loose. She was in a dark cavity in the inner world of rubble. Her legs were pinned and crushed. She felt a dead man beside her. It turned out that he was a fireman, and that there was another one, also dead, lying nearby. For twenty-seven hours Guzman lay trapped and seriously injured. She spent some of that time bargaining for her soul, pleading with God to show her a miracle. Early the next afternoon she heard a search party, and when she yelled out, a voice answered. The voice said, “Do you see the light?” She did not. She took a piece of concrete and banged it against a broken stairway overhead—presumably the same structure that had saved her life. The searchers homed in on the noise. Guzman wedged her hand through a crack in the wall, and felt someone take it. A voice said, “I’ve got you,” and Guzman said, “Thank God.” She spent the next five weeks and New York’s Bellevue Hospital, undergoing reconstructive surgery on her right leg. She was the last person to emerge alive from the ruins.
The Atlantic | September 2002 | Excerpts from American Ground: Part Two | Langewiesche
This is the one thing from 9/11/01 that still gets me every single time I think about it. If you want a mostly unenlightening “where is she now” take, it’s here, but to think of someone literally surviving something so horrific somehow all on its own is legendary, it’s enough.
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