YOU’RE ON THE 87th FLOOR, AND SOMETHING’S TERRIBLY WRONG
BY ADAM MAYBLUM
Adam Mayblum enjoyed the storms that rumbled off the Atlantic. As they lashed his windows and strafed the steel beams, Adam would scoff: You think that’s power? I’m on the 87th floor of the World Trade Center. That’s power.
During the worst storms, the cords on his window shades would appear to sway a few inches, but it was an illusion. They actually hung straight, held steady by gravity. It was the tower that swayed, to absorb the weather.
When Adam felt the first rumble Tuesday morning, he glanced at the cords. They were oscillating like a pendulum, 3 feet in either direction.
He shot from his desk, turning his back on breakfast and e-mails to face the Statue of Liberty. Outside, pieces of paper fluttered through the air, “gently,” he would say later, “on a breeze.” He looked down at the tiny people staring up at him from 876 feet below and offered them a New York retort:
“What’re you looking at?”
They were looking at terrorists ripping apart the World Trade Center.
It was 8:45 a.m., and American Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles, had just torn into the north side of Adam’s building, the trade center’s north tower. At 9:03, United Flight 175 would strike the south tower. At 9:50 a.m., the south tower would collapse. The north tower would follow at 10:28.
Adam Mayblum would find out all that much later …………………….