I looked out my window and all I saw was this huge fireball coming at me.

I thought: "Im getting out of here." So I grabbed my purse and started screaming: “Fire, fire, get out. There’s a fire, let’s go.”

I headed for the stairs and walked down to 78. But there were also elevators running and one happened to open in front of myself and a couple of my co-workers so we jumped in.

We got down to the ground lobby, ran into a couple of other people we knew. And the cops were directing that we couldn’t go out onto Church Street. So we had to go through the mall and we popped out, I think, on Broadway.

We lost 186 people, including eight from my department - one of my closest friends, my mentor, my boss, my boss’s boss’s boss. We lost a lot of people.

Complete chaos

A few of them I actually saw on 78 and they just did get off in time. A couple just didn’t leave. They either listened to the announcement, or a few actually said: “Well I’m just going to wait it out.”

And obviously, they couldn’t wait it out.

So we go onto Broadway and it was complete chaos and debris. There were papers flying all over the place. My cell phone wasn’t working, my friend’s cell phone wasn’t working.

We were heading down towards some of our colleagues' offices, but then one of the people I was with said: “My sister - I have to get to my sister.”

So we switched course and went down – her sister worked on Water Street.

By this time we were about a block away when the other plane hit. And then somebody, I distinctly remember somebody saying: “A missile just hit the trade center, I saw a missile hit.”

And I just remember looking at him like he was crazy.