U. alum survived two attacks on Trade Center

When she arrived at work on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Penn alumna Lolita Jackson had no reason to think that her day would be anything out of the ordinary.

The Tuesday morning staff meeting convened on time, complete with coffee and donuts, and the day began at Morgan Stanley, where Jackson, a 1989 Engineering graduate, works as a vice president.

But the windowed conference room on the 70th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center had a clear view of the explosion that came at 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines flight 11 collided with the North Tower.

"I was looking out the window when the first plane hit the first tower," Jackson said. "We couldn't see the plane, but suddenly fire shot out of the building and papers were strewn all around."

"The conference room was left in complete silence until someone said, 'Time to go.'"

Jackson and her colleagues gathered their things and headed towards the exits. But as foreign as the scene of a terrorist attack would seem to be, it was strangely familiar to her.

Jackson and many of her colleagues had been similarly evacuated during the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Eight years earlier, the towers had been cleared when a large bomb made from the explosive chemical nitrourea was detonated in a parking garage below the Center.

On the afternoon of Feb. 26, 1993, Jackson was sitting in her office when that bomb went off.

"We thought it was a generator," Jackson said. "A relative called me and told me that a bomb had gone off in the garage. But at that point, I knew I was going to be able to get out since I knew what was happening."

Back in 1993, getting out of the building was more of an ordeal than would be expected. The flights of stairs from her office at that time on the 72nd floor of the South Tower were ill-equipped for a mass evacuation.

According to Jackson, there was no emergency broadcast system in the towers at the time, no lights in the stairwells and no fluorescent paint marking the many stairs.

"The smoke from the bomb started to fill up the elevator shafts and onto the the floors," she said. "We couldn't see anything. The phones went out, it was hot and dark, and we had no audio to guide us."

It took Jackson and her fellow evacuees over two and a half hours to make it down the stairs. Additionally, the handicapped or those in physical distress from shock or smoke were left without much aid either.

But despite the trauma, the attack in 1993 left only six dead.

"Most people did not have any physical impact," Jackson declared. "In an odd way, the attack in 1993 really saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Those of us who were there then knew that [in 2001] we just had to get out."

So, last Sept. 11, Jackson and her co-workers grabbed their belongings and a few supplies and headed down the elevators to the 44th floor at 9 a.m., where the audio instructions -- part of the emergency system implemented after the 1993 attack -- had directed them.

"We were on the skylobby for about three minutes when all of a sudden the building moved seven feet over," Jackson explained. "That was the only time all day that I really thought I would die. It felt like the building was just going to fall over."

As Jackson would soon learn, the building had moved because the second plane had crashed into it.

"When the building righted itself, we had no idea we had been hit by a plane. But we knew we had to get out of there."

Jackson and the rest gathered themselves together -- many of whom had been knocked down from the impact -- and headed for the stairs.

"We all just let the momentum take us," she said. "I didn't think we were running at the time, but we must have been because we made it down the 44 flights of stairs in 11 minutes."

"Towards the end, a lot of people were getting tired, so around the 15th floor I suggested that we all count down the flights like it was New Year's Eve."

Jackson and her peers made it to the South Tower's mezzanine level, where the rubble that surrounded them was left askew, but Jackson said that she was fortunate enough to have missed the body parts thrown about in the disarray of the towers.

"We got through the concourse about 9:25 a.m. and stood about a block away," she described. "Everybody was looking at the towers, which were just aflame with the explosions and debris."

"It was like looking at Armaggedon. It was horrible, but it was a strangely beautiful site. It was so surreal, we couldn't believe that it was happening."

Jackson made it back to her Manhattan home before the subway system had shut down, and before her former office fell to the New York City street.

Beyond a week of post-traumatic stress, Jackson said that "the most immediate impact and effect was the loss of a friend."

Her coworker and officemate had delayed his exit to call his wife and never made it out of the building.

"The scariest part of it all was that I almost went with him," she said. "It made me realize that it was pure happenstance, pure chance whether you got out of there or not."

Beyond grief for lost loved ones, Jackson said, dealing with the material losses of the attacks was a struggle. Suddenly, she no longer had an office and her files and belongings from nearly 10 years at Morgan Stanley were gone forever.

"We had to deal with the immediacy of it, we had to get through it -- we didn't have a choice," Jackson said.

Admittedly, Jackson said that she was probably doing much better than a lot of other survivors, but she attributes that to to many things.

Jackson was one of the first to be interviewed after the attacks by The Associated Press, and she gave 10 media interviews in the four days that followed.

"I had to deal with it over and over, tell it again and again. It was sort of a catharsis," she said.

But Jackson's fortunate escape left her with a lot of existential questions.

"I just wondered why I had made it when others hadn't," she said. "My religion helped me a lot. I realized that if God left me here, I gotta keep going and finish what I started."

A year later, Jackson says that her life has also been positively affected. She discovered the strong solidarity of her friends, and she feels that her life has been reaffirmed in some way.

Despite the unfortunate occurrences, Jackson said that she does not live in fear.

"There's not much more they can do to me," she explained. "Your time here is not guaranteed, and you have to enjoy it."

Now, she lives her life doing what she'd like, taking advantage of every opportunity, and enjoying her time here.

"You can't live in fear," she said. "We live in fearful times, but you have to live your life. So, live it to the fullest."

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