South Jersey 9/11 survivor still wonders why he lived

These days, Lou Giaccardo works in a 10th-floor office. That's plenty high enough for him.

Giaccardo, a call-center manager and father of two from Haddon Township, was on the 87th floor of the South Tower at New York's World Trade Center when it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

Ten years later, he still marvels at how fate played out that grim day, when 2,752 people were killed in the destruction of the trade center's 110-story twin towers.

It was the other tower that a jetliner struck first, at 8:46 a.m. Most people in his South Tower stayed put. Indeed, as late as 8:55 a.m. the public-address system advised workers to stay at their desks - as a safety precaution, to avoid flaming debris across the way.

"How could anyone see in the crystal ball," Giaccardo asks, "that another plane was coming?"

The smell of aviation fuel filled the air. Trying to be calm, he struggled against the urge to flee - until a respected older man yelled: "We've got to get out of here."

That broke his hesitation, Giaccardo said. "That's when I yelled, 'We've got to get off the floor!' "

Employees of his firm, Corporation Service Co., began to stream to the elevator.

Two men in the lunchroom - foreigners - didn't seem to understand what was going on, Giaccardo recalled. He had to practically slap their coffee cups away and nudge them toward the door.

On the way out, Giaccardo said, he looked over at the glass-front offices of the other major employer on the floor, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. "I saw two women walking with folders like nothing was happening."

Months later, as a post-9/11 guest on The Montel Williams Show, he would meet a woman who had been in that tax office. Also a program guest, she recalled that employees there had been told to hold tight - until it was too late.

"I got my purse," Giaccardo recalled her saying, "and I told them, 'You can fire me, but I'm leaving.' "

The tax department lost 40 people on 9/11. But all of Corporation Service's 114 workers escaped.

After riding the elevator to the 75th floor with coworkers, Giaccardo said, he exited into a lobby swarming with people. Larger elevators to the street were so overcrowded that he chose not to squeeze in, but to try the stairs.

He figured getting to the street would take him 15 minutes, maybe a half hour. In all likelihood, he thought, the emergency would be confined to the other tower and he'd end up back at work. He imagined his coworkers, already at their terminals, laughing at him as he tail-ended it through the door.

At 9:03 a.m., he was in the stairwell when a second hijacked jetliner crashed into the South Tower, not far below his company's office. The Corporation Service workers would have been hit, or trapped, if they hadn't fled early.

At 9:59 a.m., more than an hour after the attack began, the South Tower was the first to fall. It seemed to implode slowly, at first, like a sand castle under a wave.

Giaccardo, 45, who coaches Little League and lives in a pleasant house on a pleasant block in a pleasant South Jersey town, remains haunted by much of what happened 10 years ago.

But nothing haunts him so much as the fact that more people didn't get out. Almost everyone below the impact zone had a chance, he said.

"Numerous people died above me, but there were also numerous people who died below me. I went through an anger stage as I heard that people died on the 57th floor, or this floor or that floor. I'm, like, 'Why didn't you get out?' "

On the 75th floor, Giaccardo pulled open the stairway door and began a long, slow descent - floor to landing, landing to floor, back and forth 150 times.

"The steps were packed, and that's the first time I felt fear."

A former track and cross-country athlete at Audubon High School, Giaccardo was younger and more fit than many in the crowd. He willed himself to be steady.

"My legs were giving out on me. They were like spaghetti."

The exodus was calm at first. A few people were even flip and cynical. Giaccardo recalled two women joking that just as in 1993, when terrorists first tried to blow up the World Trade Center, they'd go down, do some shopping, and return in time for lunch.

Over the years, studying published timelines of the disaster, Giaccardo has tried to figure out what floor he was near when the second plane hit. He guesses he was between the 55th and 64th.

His foot had just touched a floor level when "blam! There was a thunderous noise." The impact knocked him against a wall.

Then came the reverberation, rolling down from above. It seemed to hit bottom, bounce up, and go down again.

In the stairwell, people did not know what was happening. Giaccardo thought maybe the air-conditioning units on the roof had exploded from the heat of the North Tower's fire.

Now some people started to panic.

The flow of people entering the stairwell turned from a garden hose into gusher. That slowed the descent of people above, and caused some to have claustrophobia.

Giaccardo heard someone yell, "Don't jump." He turned and saw a man trying to throw his leg over the railing. He grabbed him and pulled him back.

"The guy said, 'I'm scared.' I said, 'I'm scared, too.'

"I think he just needed someone to tell him that - that it was OK to be afraid."

But even then, a man was walking up the steps. "He was like my grandfather. Short tie. He said, 'I've got time. I've got to go back to work.' "

Ever more slowly, Giaccardo worked his way down to the main lobby. Now he could look out and glimpse what was unfolding. He could see a courtyard where he and his boss had eaten lunch the day before. A familiar statue appeared "mangled." The air was "all gray, with whitish things floating around."

Once out, Giaccardo was tempted to look for coworkers. But everywhere, confusion reigned. He decided to walk north, away from the danger zone. He was a few blocks away when the South Tower collapsed.

He walked and he walked, and he did not turn back.

He got to Penn Station and found a NJ Transit train running.

And that night, unlike so many others, he made it all the way home.

For a long time afterward, Giaccardo said, many people treated him like a hero.

He was puzzled by that. All he had really done was survive. But after 9/11, Americans needed to feel good about something. Perhaps he represented hope.

He gave speeches, appeared on talk shows.

One time, he was introduced to Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, then the Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia. The cardinal looked at him wide-eyed. "God spared you for a reason," he said.

Giaccardo, raised a Catholic, does believe God has a plan, but he doesn't know what that is.

He has tried to be a better father, he said, and to help people in need.

The strain of 9/11 took its toll. He had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and was in treatment for a time. He believes the stress was a factor in the breakup of his marriage, he said.

He also had flashbacks.

"One time I was watching a sci-fi movie on TV," he said, "and there was this spaceship that was blowing up. All of a sudden, my leg started shaking real, real fast.

"I looked at the TV, and the ship was tilting. And all the people in space suits were wearing street clothes, and it became the floor of the World Trade Center that I worked on."

The image lasted just a moment. "I just kind of shook my head, and it went away."

Giaccardo hasn't been back to ground zero in years - he worries it would be too emotional - but he plans to attend dedication ceremonies for a memorial there Sunday. He and some former coworkers are planning a "mini-reunion."

After 9/11, he was transferred to his company's office in Delaware. He now works for a different company and takes a PATCO train each morning from Westmont to Center City.

He wishes he could provide a moral for his own tale. He can't. If you are lucky, he said, life goes on.

"I just appreciate people more, especially the ones closest to me."