On September 1, 2001, Joy Milan went to her office on the 31st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
“I had just come back from vacation that day and dropped my bags off in my office on the 31st floor, went into my boss's office to greet him,” she recalled to LA’s Morning News’ Vicky Moore and Mike Simpson. “He happened to have an external office facing a window. So as I was literally in there greeting him in the morning, just, you know, starting to just begin to tell him about my vacation…boom.”
It’s a sound she compared to “a file cabinet falling over, but 500 times louder. “
“Our building shook, the lights flickered, it felt like an earthquake,” she said. “So I personally thought a bomb had gone off in the top of our building because behind him. I saw showering debris because of the direction of the explosion came flowing toward us on the South Tower. So behind him, I saw all of that flaming debris starting to swirl around. So that's where my panic hit. So loud sounds I associate with that and I'm still not over it.”
Milan, who was four months pregnant at the time, was able to escape.
“The first thing I do is, you know, obviously grab my stuff and start to head toward the stairwell,” she said. “We get down; I eventually made it out obviously before the building fell.”
Milan and her husband eventually moved to Southern California, but years later, she returned to New York City to when both her daughters decided to attend NYU.
“It's part of the healing process and it was hard to let them go back,” she said. “We've traveled there many times since. So they're comfortable with New York, but I did have to just sort of mentally let go and just, you know, know that God would take care of her and that she would be ok and everything. Obviously, she is ok, but it was a part of my own healing process to say it's okay to live in New York. I hadn't been ready to do that, but I couldn't hold her back.”
Milan said she continues to share her story at church every few years and that she’s grateful she made it out alive.
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