Lew Gray saw the fireball from the second plane striking the World Trade Center and twice made his way through debris from the falling towers that “turned day into night” on September 11, 2001.
The Kew Gardens Hills resident was working at 61 Broadway, four blocks south of the World Trade Center, as an investigative auditor for the NY State Moreland Commission. Created by Governor George Pataki, the commission investigated the high cost of building public schools in New York City.
Gray’s first indication that something was wrong came while he was riding the 3 subway train to work. An announcement said the train would not be stopping at Chambers Street “because of an incident at the World Trade Center.”
Something similar had happened before, so Gray did not think much of it. He got off at Wall Street, “where everybody was looking up.” Papers were “flying down” from above. Gray picked up several. They were singed purchase orders.
As Gray walked down Broadway, he saw and heard the second plane flying low at an incredible speed. He did not turn in time to see it strike the South Tower.
“I saw the fireball afterwards.”
People began running down Wall Street, away from the Towers. Gray ran with them as “small pieces of debris” fell around them.
He made his way about a block to his office “to talk with his friends and workmates about what’s going on.” He called his wife, Beth, who had recently given birth to their first child, a daughter. They now have five children.
The call woke Beth. Gray asked her to turn on the television and tell him more about what was happening.
“I was just in shock,” Beth recalled.
Gray was on the phone with his wife and a childhood friend from Boston when his office building suddenly shook like an earthquake. An announcement over the building’s emergency loudspeaker instructed everyone to go down to the lobby.
Gray looked out a hallway window.
“It went from day to night.”
He ended his phone calls and began walking down from his office on the 12th floor. The stairwell was jammed with people. By the time he reached the 6th floor, he could see “smoke and soot coming up into the stairwell.”
“It was also starting to get choky, like all the stuff started to make people cough and eyes tear.”
Gray, a recent Ba’al Teshuvah, was wearing Tzitzis. Struggling to breathe, he pulled the Tzitzis over his face. It helped.
“When we got to the 5th floor, we saw it was ridiculous. It was not really good at all.”
The workers found another stairwell that looked better. “It wasn’t clear, but it wasn’t like you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.”
When they reached the lobby and looked through the large windows, there was “almost complete darkness.”
“There was smoke pouring out of the subway stop.”
Then a female police officer came staggering through the building’s back door.
“She was covered with soot. Small remnants of a building were on her, and she was dazed. She was saying, ‘I can’t find my partner. I can’t find my partner.’”
Several women from the office building took the officer into the bathroom to clean her and check for injuries.
“I never knew what happened to her,” Gray said.
A female co-worker had heard that the Brooklyn Bridge was the best way out of Manhattan, so they started walking toward it. But the air was still thick with smoke and debris.
“It wasn’t really cleared yet, and so I started choking again and coughing.”
Gray could barely open his eyes and could hardly breathe. He turned back toward his office building.
Then the ground began shaking again.
“It was the second building coming down.”
Gray looked up Broadway and saw a massive cloud of debris and smoke racing toward him.
“I saw the huge cloud of debris and smoke rapidly coming toward me on Broadway, which made me run very fast to my office building door.”
He made it inside. A police officer began screaming, “Everybody, get down to the floor! Get down to the floor! Don’t look at the windows. The building is coming down. The building is coming down.”
Gray thought the building might be coming down on top of them.
“At that point, I thought maybe that was it.”
He ran toward the marble doors by the elevators, jumping over someone’s vomit.
“The cop was saying, ‘Put your head down.’ I put my head down, and I actually said Shema at that point.”
The building did not come down.
Once the immediate danger had passed, Gray asked a police officer for the fastest way out of Manhattan. The officer suggested the Staten Island Ferry, just a few blocks away.
“The ferry is running. It’s bringing in emergency workers and first responders, and it’s taking out civilians,” the officer told him.
Gray headed toward the terminal. The streets were covered with “maybe four inches of soot and dust.”
“Like sand, but much more fine powder.”
The air was still hazy.
Gray desperately wanted to contact his wife and let her know he was alive. Cellphones were not working because the antenna at the World Trade Center had been knocked out. At the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, there was a single pay phone.
A parole officer Gray had met on the ferry lent him the change to make the call. Gray waited about 20 minutes in line before finally reaching Beth around noon.
For Beth, hearing his voice brought tremendous relief, mixed with sadness for those who were still missing or had not survived.
A friend and co-worker of Beth’s who lived on Staten Island picked Gray up, and he stayed there overnight. The next day, the friend drove him to Howard Beach, where Beth was waiting.
“It was very, very emotional. I was so happy to see her. I thought at one point I’d never see either her or my daughter again, or anyone for that matter.”
The experience stayed with Gray long after he returned home. He had nightmares “for quite a while,” and the sound of planes after 9/11 made him “cringe.” He could not bring himself to fly again until taking a short test flight to Baltimore in 2007.
Even last week, he dreamed that he was “in a building that was falling down, and it was collapsing on other buildings, and I was in it.”
But the day also left him with a lasting appreciation for the life he nearly lost.
“I was very happy to be alive, grateful to Hashem, and it gave me a new enhanced appreciation of life.”
