Dornbirn man recalls surviving 9/11 attack

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, Dornbirn resident Elmar Eisele has recalled how he witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center at close range. ORF Vorarlberg reported that he was visiting New York and had planned to go to the complex that morning.

Four passenger planes were hijacked on September 11, 2001. Two were flown into the Twin Towers in Manhattan, where about 17,000 people were in the World Trade Center complex. A total of 2,977 people died in the attacks, including people in the towers, on the planes, at the Pentagon and on the ground. Hundreds of emergency workers were among the victims.

The attacks were carried out by 19 members of the Al-Qaida network. They led to wars, new security laws and a major expansion of surveillance, while also leaving deep social scars. For the Muslim community, the attacks became a profound turning point.

Watching the towers collapse

At 8.46am, when the first plane hit, Eisele was sitting in a café. He heard a bang and saw on television that an aircraft had struck one of the Twin Towers.

“At first I thought it was an accident,” he recalled. When a second plane hit the other tower, it quickly became clear that the crashes were deliberate.

Eisele paid his bill and walked towards the World Trade Center. As more police and emergency vehicles passed him, smoke rose over Manhattan. By the time he got closer, only one of the two towers was still standing.

“I was horrified. One tower was gone. It was gone,” Eisele said.

He stopped several hundred metres away. Then the second tower collapsed. Eisele remembered a huge bang, “like a detonation”, and said the building folded in on itself at unimaginable speed.

“In my eyes, mouth and lungs”

A dense cloud of dust spread through the streets of Lower Manhattan within moments. The dust contained asbestos and other toxic substances. Eisele was caught in it.

“In my eyes, in my mouth, in my lungs,” he said. For about 10 minutes, he could barely see.

New York remained in turmoil in the following days. Air traffic was suspended and Eisele was initially stranded in the city. People cried and shouted in his hotel, while many others simply wanted to get home.

“It was like being in a huge cemetery,” he recalled. Many people, he said, were functioning only in “survival mode”.