HARLINGEN — With each passing year, Septembers stir different memories and feelings for Tom Canaday-Elliott, a survivor of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center.
Canaday-Elliott says when there’s news coverage and documentaries shown around each anniversary of 9/11, he sometimes feels able to watch and see what it is.
Other times, he decides not to because it was an event that he lived through.
He says some Septembers feel a bit more raw than others.
As this year marks the 20th anniversary of that tragic day, Canaday-Elliott says this is one of those years where what he experienced is at the forefront of his mind.
Canaday-Elliott is a Harlingen High School graduate and son of Bill Elliott, who worked with the Valley Baptist Medical Center and was a San Benito City Commissioner.
On Sept. 11, 2001, it had only been about five months since Canaday-Elliott and his husband moved to New York from California.
Canaday-Elliott’s office was in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on the 102nd floor.
“It was the second tower to be hit by a plane, but the first one that collapsed,” Canaday-Elliott said. “I was actually at my desk when the plane hit the first tower. It shook the building quite dramatically because you’re high up and it always swayed with the wind.”
Canaday-Elliott then saw papers flying past the windows and could feel the heat from the fire of the first tower.
“It was so intense. You could feel it through the windows of the tower we were in,” Canaday-Elliott said. “Some folks who worked on the same floor as me came through and told us that we had to get out of there so a lot of folks started heading downstairs through one of the firewalls.”
Canaday-Elliott and others began making their way down the building. Around the 70th floor, the group decided to go inside one of the offices because an announcement was being made.
“They said that an aircraft had crashed into the North Tower and that everything was OK and secured and folks could go back to their offices if they chose to and using the elevators was fine,” Canaday-Elliott recalled. “I chose not to, with a whole bunch of other people who I was with, which was a whole bunch of strangers at this point from different companies and floors.”
Canaday-Elliott and the others decided to leave so they went back into the firewall to continue making their way out of the building.
“I had only gone down one flight when the plane hit above us in our tower,” Canaday-Elliott said. “The intensity of the updraft from the explosion above us was quite dramatic.”
The group continued going downstairs while people from other floors below them also made their way to the bottom of the building.
“As we were going down, I remember seeing firemen heading up toward where the explosion was, not knowing that for most of those guys going up, they would not be coming out because of the collapse of tower two — the tower we were in,” Canaday-Elliott said.
When Canaday-Elliott got downstairs, he then exited the firewall in the lobby where the elevator banks were.
Smoke billows from the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001. In one of the most horrifying attacks ever against the United States, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center in a deadly series of blows that brought down the twin 110-story towers. (AP Photo/Gulnara Samoilova)
He remembers noticing that there were some sort of explosions that went through the elevator shafts because the security gates in front of the elevators were blown apart.
“We went down into the World Trade mall underneath. The subterranean mall is where we were being led to get out of the complex,” Canaday-Elliott said. “That was kind of a surreal thing because when we were walking through there all of the emergency lights were on at that point.”
Canaday-Elliott remembers everybody was walking in silence during that time.
“There was not a lot of talking because I think everyone was in shock and not knowing what was going on fully at that point,” he said. “I always vividly remember coffee cups having been dropped all over the place where people just dropped things and ran or left.”
After finally exiting the area, Canaday-Elliott remembers turning around across the street from the World Trade Center complex and seeing a crystal blue clear sky paired with gaping holes of fire and smoke coming out of both towers.
“It was surreal, like something out of a movie,” he said. “At that point, I decided I needed to get up to my husband’s office.”
Canaday-Elliott grabbed a subway train and made his way toward Park Avenue, not knowing that it was probably one of the last trains heading out of Downtown because while he was on the subway, his tower collapsed.
“When I got to his office, he was surprised to see me walk in because he had watched my building collapse,” Canaday-Elliott said as he began to shed tears. “I had called him before I left the building right before the plane hit my tower so he knew exactly where I was in the building and he knew exactly where that plane hit so he had no idea if I was still alive and if I had gotten out before the building collapsed.”
Canaday-Elliott remembers the smell of smoke and fire from Lower Manhattan that hung in the air for days.
“Every now and then you would find pieces of paper from an office building that were seen being blown over into Brooklyn where we lived,” Canaday-Elliott said. “Just random sheets of paper after both buildings had collapsed.”
The 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center is something Canaday-Elliott says he will never forget because it has become a part of him.
“It’s strange. It’s always there,” he said. “Twenty years later, you still remember everything that happened quite vividly, but maybe in little softer tones. It’s one of those things that never goes away.”
