will be with me forever. But I can’t stay sad. I have to lift myself and other people up,” Genelle says. “I’m not going around scared. It’s the Holy Spirit in me. I have peace. I love people. I’m grateful. We have to live accord­ing to God’s will. I do his will and try to keep on a righteous path to inspire others.” She called her boyfriend, Roger, who told her to get out of there, but by then, the elevators had shut down, and they’d just been instructed to remain on their floor.

I wake up thankful every day,” says Genelle Guzman-McMillan, 19 years after her rescue from the rubble at Ground Zero. Genelle married Roger McMil­lan in November 2001. “He was by my side in the hospital each day,” she says. “When I got out, he proposed. Even though I was still on crutches, we went to City Hall.” A 110-story skyscraper made of concrete, glass and steel had collapsed on top of Genelle Guzman, yet she had come out of it with relatively minor injuries. Her survival was impossible. It strained belief. From the moment she was pulled from the rubble and into the sunlight on Sept. 12, Guzman had concluded that her salvation was simply, and literally, miraculous. And that belief served as a kind of guidestone for how she would live out the balance of her life. Supplies, including equipment for airway and vascular control, were obtained from neighboring hospitals. Throughout the afternoon, local merchants arrived to donate food. Despite this, few patients arrived for treatment, the earliest at about 5 p.m., and were not seriously injured, being limited to smoke inhalation. An announcement was made around 6–7 p.m. that a second shift of providers would cover the evening shift, and that an area was being set up for the day personnel to sleep. Soon after, when it was realized that few would have survived the collapse and be brought to the piers, many decided to leave and the area was closed down. Not all rumors hurriedly spread in the wake of a tragedy are exaggerations of the horror that was or vocalizations of fears of things potentially to come — some are expressions of hope.In "Ground Zero," we reported that two Port Authority police officers fell more than 80 floors and survived in the World Trade Center collapse. The Port Authority now believes that the officers reached the ground floor by foot before the towers fell.

From dawn we would be listening to jihad chants, until evening,” Fazazi said. “All day long, and no matter what you were doing — eating, putting on clothes — no [part of] life was accepted unless it was dedicated to jihad — to the death.” Feiden, Douglas. "Why is Ground Zero rebuilding taking so long? Mayor Bloomberg pins blame on Port Authority". New York Daily News . Retrieved November 28, 2012. My friend Rosa and others I knew had died in the collapse. I could have died too, but I was rescued, thanks to Paul. I wanted to thank him personally. When a news crew came to interview me about my ordeal, they reunited me with some members of the rescue crew who had pulled me out from the rubble. Paul wasn’t there, and I asked why he hadn’t come along with them. McCoy, Kevin & Donna Leinwand (September 13, 2001). "Digging into rubble yields bit of hope". USA Today. Flynn, Sean. The Fighting 69th: One Remarkable National Guard Unit's Journey from Ground Zero to Baghdad, Penguin Books, 2007

Portman agreed that same day to become a co-sponsor of the legislation, which extended benefits for victims and families for 75 more years. The measure was incorporated into the 2015 omnibus bill and passed into law two weeks later. It is a sin to sit with the kafir,” or infidel, she recalled him saying. “Everything from German culture is haram.” Forbidden. Genelle Guzman woke on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, in a terrible darkness, unable to move, feeling her 30-year-old body fading. Her head was wedged between broken slabs of concrete, and her legs were pinned beneath something she could not see. She had spent the long night flitting in and out of consciousness, but she was alert now, jarred awake by pain, and aware of the essential facts of the previous day: Her workplace, the World Trade Center’s North Tower, had collapsed, and she was buried alive. Ronie was the angry veteran,” she said. “He kept his cowboy hat on and his arms folded. He had a scowl on his face the whole time. My team would get together every morning and it would be, ‘What in the world do we do with that one?’ I just decided to give him a wide berth.”

I found myself missing my mom from a place deep inside. She would have known how to comfort me. What would she have done? Prayed. Mom would have prayed, not as a last resort but as the first. Closing my eyes, i focused hard on my prayer. Lord, I know you are there. I haven’t always trusted you. I blamed you. Now I am asking you to help me. That’s what Mom would have prayed for. He was completely white,” she said, remembering the moment years later. “I looked at him and I almost died. Yet, after his departure, she felt strangely relieved. It was almost exhilarating. Soon it occurred to Fazazi that she was free to leave the house, and to go wherever she wanted. And so for a solid month, she went everywhere.A severely swollen Genelle Guzman recovers in the hospital on Sept. 14, 2001, in New York.(Paul Chiasson/Pool/AP) The little ray of light faded. It was getting dark. Lord, be near me. Stay by my side. I talked to God the way Mom talked to him, as if he were right there with me and knew what it was like to be alone and afraid and hurting. Fi­nally I slept. The return of that faint ray of light told me it was morning. All feeling in my right leg was gone by then. Without food or water, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay alive much longer. Wallsten, Peter (April 8, 2007). "Giuliani foes plan to use 9/11 against him". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on November 5, 2012 . Retrieved September 28, 2010. Moments later, a rescue team pulled her from the destroyed remnants of the building, and she remained in the hospital for over a month. For a time, doctors believed they would have to amputate her leg, but they were able to save it after four surgeries. As her body healed, she began processing the events of that day, believing that her faith helped her through the traumatic ordeal. Besides assisting with recovery operations at Ground Zero, volunteer firefighters from Long Island and Westchester manned numerous firehouses throughout the city to assist with other fire and emergency calls.