As the sun began to come up over Manhattan, its rays spreading out like a golden fan across the hustle and bustle of the city, Vanessa Lawrence felt like the luckiest person alive. It was a beautiful sunrise – sunrise on the morning of September 11, 2001.
From her painting studio in an abandoned office on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, the 26-year-old Manchester-born art student had the best view in the city. Just 19 floors from the top of the tallest buildings in Manhattan, the Twin Towers, she was so high she felt like she was watching the growing crowds of office workers below from a cloud.
Little did she know her dream job was about to turn into something beyond anybody’s worst nightmare.
“I remember the morning of 9/11 very clearly,” recalls Vanessa, now aged 36. “I couldn’t wait to get up. I was painting sunrise over the New York skyline and had done so well the day before I couldn’t wait to get back to work.
“I was in my studio in the Twin Towers for 6am. The light was so amazing – it really was a beautiful Manhattan day – that I just didn’t want to stop painting.
“I tore myself away about 8.30am and nipped down to the lobby to get a juice. As I came back up I remember the elevator doors opening on the 91st floor. I literally put one foot out of the door and – bam – the whole building shook and I was blown across the corridor.”
Vanessa had no idea but that bang was Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, just two floors above her head. It was a moment that ignited a course of events that would change history forever.
At least 2,976 people, including 67 Britons, died in the towers that day, making Vanessa’s survival from the 91st floor – above which level there were no survivors in the 110-storey tower – even more remarkable. Yet this courageous and self-effacing woman has never shared her story, until this week.
Only now, a decade after the biggest terrorist attacks on American soil, has Vanessa finally spoken in full for the first time, as part of a documentary commemorating the tenth anniversary.
One of the most amazing survival stories to emerge from the towers, it is told exclusively in I Survived 9:11, produced and directed by Manchester filmmaker Rachael Smith for Spinningfields-based Nine Lives Media and screened on the BIO channel tomorrow night. The first documentary to focus entirely on the first-hand accounts of three British survivors including filmmaker Paul Berriff, who filmed the towers collapsing over his head, and lawyer Mark Oliver, who rescued three women during his own escape.
Vanessa, who has refused to speak to countless journalists about her traumatic experiences, says now was the right time.
“I’m feeling in a stronger place to talk about it now than I have done previously,” she says. “The anniversary seems like the right time to talk about my experiences and those of the others in the towers.”
Vanessa’s decision to tell her story now is symbolic of how far her life has moved on since that catastrophic day. Born in Manchester, she grew up in Cheshire and now works as a professional artist near Glasgow. She recently had her first baby, a son, with her partner Alan.
Meeting this engaging, warm and funny woman, with her infectious energy and positive outlook on life, it’s hard to imagine what she must have gone through.
“Things remind me every day,” she reveals. “I can still get emotional, even 10 years later.
“A strong wind still really scares me, I think something is going to collapse on me. The smell of burning, that takes me back.”
Although Vanessa says her memories play out “silent and in slow motion” in her head, her escape reads like a Hollywood movie. Trapped at the top of the North Tower (the first to be hit) she had to climb down over 1,729 fire escape steps before the building collapsed. “All I could think was I was a long way up and I had to get down,” she says. “I just went into auto-pilot. I remember a few times the procession of people would pause and that was scary because you’d feel trapped.
“I remember seeing firemen coming up and they were so brave. We were trapped in this stairwell, you couldn’t tell what was happening in the outside world at all.”
But reaching the ground floor did not mean reaching safety, as she recalls in graphic detail. Stepping outside as the South Tower collapsed, she was almost crushed to death in the cloud of falling rubble.
“Something made me look up and I saw this cloud coming down,” she recalls. “I just remember choking and trying as hard as I could to breathe. At one point I experienced quite a strange feeling of not being able to do it any more and thinking that was when I was going to die – until something kicked in. Survival instinct I guess.”
It was only later that morning, from the safety of a friend’s apartment, that Vanessa saw the full horror of what she had been through on TV. Neither she nor the New York police could believe she had survived to tell the tale. “I looked down afterwards and there was a tiny little scratch bleeding on my foot – that was all I had, one little scratch. Nobody could believe that somebody got out from that height.”
Traumatised by her escape, Vanessa left New York. Unable to return to her Staten Island home for two weeks after the attacks – as rescuers were using the ferry from Manhattan to transport rubble from Ground Zero for forensic examination – she found the smallest things could bring back panic attacks.
“It was horrible listening to the answerphone message my mum left – she couldn’t get hold of me and I didn’t manage to get through to her for hours.
“For weeks later even the slightest noise would leave me in an absolute mess. I remember collapsing in the street just because I heard a plane overhead. Ever since then I’ve been petrified of flying.”
Of the thousands who escaped that day, only a handful were British – and there are very few support networks. As well as flashbacks, one of the worst after effects has been ‘survivor’s guilt’. Vanessa is all too aware of the thousands that did not make it out of the Twin Towers alive that day. Including, tragically, another artist friend who was trapped on the floor above her.
“That was horrible, knowing he was trapped up there – you do go through this guilt of thinking why wasn’t it me? If I hadn’t nipped to get a drink, I would have been in my studio and seen the plane coming straight at me.”
Despite her fear of flying, Vanessa has since flown all over the world as an artist. Her vibrant landscapes, portraits and animal scenes displaying a fresh, life-affirming quality.
Yet there is one painting she still cannot get quite right – the cityscape she was painting on the morning of 9/11. Although her original canvas was destroyed in the towers, she has since finished a recreation.
“I’ve made a new version of the painting but in my eyes it’s never going to be as good as the original. I will probably have to redo it again and again.
“In some ways the experience of being up in that studio over-rides everything else. I can still remember going up to those windows on the 91st floor and pressing my nose against the glass, looking down at all these little cars, feeling above everything, even the Empire State Building. You felt like you were in the clouds.
“Although what happened to me on September 11 will never leave me, in some ways I think the whole experience of having that magical studio over-rides that. I still think I was just very lucky to be up there.”
I Survived 9:11 premieres on Bio (Sky 156, Virgin 242) at 8pm tomorrow.
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I am absolutely convinced that the United States Government are behind the carnage that happened on 9th September 2001.
It is not the conspiracy theories that have swayed my view but the poor official answers from the US Government. I have seen hundreds of hours of footage and lots of government people denying any wrong doing or cover-ups,(but they would say that wouldn't they ?).
As an educated person I always use critical analysis when reading the newspapers and watching TV news programmes. I always question their validity and wonder if they are portraying the real and full story.
I try to balance things by reading what other news agencies report around the world. I found that the incidents that happened on 9th September 2001 had too many unanswered and unsatisfactory explanations. I know what I saw that day, and no one, can tell me different no matter how hard they try.
The main questions for me that are poorly answered are:
1, Tower 7 collapsed in the same manner as the twin towers but no aircraft fuel was in that building.
2, Lack of wreckage for Flight 93, the press were there within minutes of the plane hitting the ground and were met my over 200 FBI agents. When the press asked where is the wreckage they had their cameras confiscated and sent away. Some hours later certain press was allowed to the site to be shown agents recovering the flight box recorder.
3, Flight 77 hitting the pentagon. This story has the biggest pitfalls from the US Government. The security footage from the nearby garage and hotel do not show a passenger jet hitting the Pentagon. There is a big flash, fire and smoke but no real debris on the lawn immediately afterwards. Eye witnesses have said they saw agents laying out debris on the lawn, why would they do this?
I could honestly list over a hundred more questions where I dont have a satisfactory answer.
There are too many people who simply refuse to question the US Government about this - WHY?
The answers provided are weak and hold no substance and they use poor and unfounded conspiracy theories to back up the poor excuses.
I conclude the United States of America has lied to the rest of the world about the events surrounding 9th September 2001.
If anyone is interested in this article and would like to hear some more awkward questions put to the US Government, see what Michael Moore has to say on the subject.
What a wonderful piece of news.
I was fortunate to have been on a course that day in the UK and knew nothing of the attacks until returning to the office by which time both towers had collapsed. I say fortunate because in today's modern communications I didn't have to see it live on CNN but whether you saw it live on TV or later on it can't compare at all to the sheer terror of those in the buildings, so I think Vanessa is very brave person being able to talk about it now. Please remember that 9/11 isn't just an attack on Americans, it was an attack on everyones freedom of which 372 non Americans died.
This story has been on here for over 14 hours, why has the MEN not published any comments? I sent mine 12 hours ago
Thoughts are with you Vanessa.
I have to hold my hand up and be honest; I could completely go along with the conspiracy theories. 9/11 for me was just like the day Diana Spencer died, my deep down gut feeling was that something was wrong about both these events. Things didn't sound right, feel right or smell right. Other events have passed by and I have had no inner feelings telling me 'Hang on, something’s not right here'. But with these events especially, well something deep inside me was convincing me some sort of evil had played its hand and had guided these huge tragedies into existence.
Let’s not be blind about these events, things like this have taken place before in history where government or the controlling heads of countries have stopped at nothing to keep power and design society in order for it to remain good for them and keep their hands on the controls to the rest of us.
In history this has usually and as we all know been done with the use of fear whether it was the threat of the atom bomb or the Spanish inquisition. Today is no different, get a little out of hand on the streets and the jack boots of those at the top will come down, either through the media or through propaganda or if necessary through using their agents to create situations that threaten the very structure of societies.
What I don’t quite get about 9/11 is the total and utter lack of security when events started to taking shape. Yes some underground group could indeed put together a plan to attack any country and yes you could without doubt expect a 3rd world country to be an all too easy target, they have few resources to feed their own, let alone provide security.
So surely the fact that some small group formulated a plan over a series of months to attack the USA has to be viewed as extremely if not totally impossible to believe. The most paranoid nation on the planet according to its accumulation of arms. Well you have to say if it was a man we were dealing with as an equivalent he would have been so hard to get to that any plan to attack him would have had to have had insider information at least on how to get to him. Someone would have had to have noticed something going on.
Surely a plan like this would have meant people asking some very private and personal questions about security on the day in question; surely to attack anything you need the facts about what to and what not to do, where and when and at what times. Surely you can’t just walk through every single firewall or security check and not get noticed, planning over so long and in order to board 4 No., yes 4 No. planes. I’m sorry you really expect me to believe the excuses.
No for me it’s not a conspiracy theory it is just not possible for me to believe that this small group of men got through everything they had to get through without hundreds of blind eye’s being turned.
That’s not a conspiracy theory in itself that’s just fact. So O.K. maybe one plane flown by a mad, suicide extremist could get past a few people not doing their jobs. But do people really expect the citizens of their country to really believe that a plan that would have to be so sophisticate it would have to be able to blind all of the security forces possessed by a country as security conscious as America. Remember American's fought amongst them for a while.
They don’t trust anyone from outside look how they guard the Mexican border think of Cuba.
The truth is everybody that the longer and harder you look at 9/11 the more your gut feelings ache and ache. Not out of just the pain for the victims but also for the dark, dark clouds of disbelief that tell you in the fact, that this sort of event on such a huge hideous scale, does not happen unless someone or some group on the inside paves the way for events like this to materialize.
People can say all they want about how the event unfolded, they can repeat and repeat that the whole thing was a series of blunders and coincidental events; they can make as many statements as they like about conspiracy theories. The fact remains that far too many mistakes happened all in sequence and at an identical time for the events of that horrible day to be the sole responsibility of a few men taking on a nation like America, no it has to be, has got to be an inside job no doubt no conspiracy.
Do you believe everything just fell right into place for these blokes?
I’m of course sorry for all those that were lost and I’m even more sorry for the families that remain, but I’m afraid that’s the way I see it.
For me it’s the day the truth came out about how those that rule us really feel about us
We as individuals are expendable that is fact just as all the soldiers they sent to fight for them they take as expendable.
Sorry to any servicemen out there, protecting the country is one thing attaching others under the fake flag of terrorism for oil or commodities is a completely different ball game.
To Vanessa
God saved you for something good.
You are blessed
I must admit all the conspiracy theories are rather far fetched but the US government bring it on them selves from their past exploits. just a quick look up on Vietnam Agent Orange just shows they are capable of attacks on their own troops.
I don't really believe the US physically damaged their own buildings i.e. explosives etc. But I find it hard to comprehend the US government knew nothing of the impending attack! There is even audio recordings of contact to the air force, in which they are very lacks and just say "lets wait it out and see what happens"