When the North Tower collapsed on September 11, 2001, Genelle Guzman-McMillan was still inside.
She had been working on the 64th floor of the World Trade Center when the first plane struck. Genelle and her coworkers began the long descent down the emergency stairs. Floor after floor, they kept moving. By the time they reached the lower levels, they had been walking for nearly an hour.
Then the building began to come down.
Genelle remembered holding hands with a coworker. There was a deafening roar, the floor seemed to disappear, and everything went black.
When she regained consciousness, she could not move. Concrete and twisted steel surrounded her. Her leg was pinned. Her head was trapped between pieces of debris. Somewhere above her was the enormous wreckage of a 110-story skyscraper.
Hours passed.
She called out, but no one answered. Fires burned in the ruins. Rescue workers searched an unstable mountain of steel while Genelle remained buried beneath it, unable to know whether anyone was coming.
Night fell. Then morning came.
Genelle prayed. She thought about her daughter. She promised God that if she survived, she would change her life.
Then, after roughly 27 hours beneath the rubble, she heard something.
Rescuers had found her.
On September 12, Genelle was carried from Ground Zero alive. Of the thousands trapped when the towers collapsed, only a small number were pulled alive from the debris.
Genelle Guzman-McMillan was the last.
For nearly 27 hours, the ruins had hidden one more survivor. And beneath all that steel, dust and devastation, she had kept breathing.
#archaeohistories
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