Genelle Guzman McMillan had only been in New York City for two years after leaving her native Trinidad and was working on the 64th floor of Tower 1 in the World Trade Center as an administrative temp for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, twenty years ago.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m., when a jet hijacked jet hit the top floors of her 110-story building, she felt the impact.
After feeling the North Tower continue to shake Guzman McMillan, now 50, later learned another hijacked jet hit the second tower next door. She remembers deciding with a coworker named Rosa to walk down the building’s staircase.
McMillan walked down the stairs in her heels until she got to the 13th floor, where she stopped to remove her shoes. That was the exact moment the tower collapsed.
“Everything just went boom,” she recalls. “Everything was crumbling and was just coming on top of me.”
Guzman McMillan would be buried deep in that rubble for more than a day.
“I felt like I was there forever,” she says. “I just thought I was dreaming. I just figured this has to be a dream. This is not happening. And I didn’t know if anybody was going to find me. I just laid there,” she explained.
“I heard everything what was going on. I heard someone cry out for help in a very faint voice. I would hear the trucks and the walkie talkies going off,” Guzman McMillan revealed.
“But I couldn’t call out for some reason,” she says. “Dust in my mouth, my nose. I was just laying there. Just didn’t know what to do, what to say.”
The woman said prayer helped keep her calm throughout her ordeal.
“But then I decided to pray. I just knew that I wanted to live because I wanted to see my daughter, Kimberly. She was 12 at the time. I just keep begging and praying, just asking God to show me a miracle,” she explained.
Guzman McMillan spent 27 hours in lost the rubble before being rescued. Her right leg was crushed, her head swollen, and face burned and was hospitalized for over a month, and doctors at one point considered amputating her leg, but a fourth surgery saved it. But she now has a permanent limp.
“I was given a new life,” Guzman MacMillan said. She is now a supervisor for the Port Authority at LaGuardia airport. “I know that God has a bigger plan for me and I just try to do what is right. And encourage people in order to try to move forward despite the adversity in life. My faith is just growing stronger and stronger.”
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