There are so many stories of both survival and tragedy that come from the attack on the World Trade Center. One of the most incredible, though, is the story of Josephine Harris.
In short, a group of firefighters and cops happened to find Harris on the 22nd floor of the North Tower, too exhausted to continue down the stairwell in the middle of the building, per USA Today (via The Herald). Of course, they took her with them, carrying her the entire way, but as the group began to approach the bottom floor, the tower shook, and a hurricane-like gust of wind rushed down the stairwell. The shaking and wind was the North Tower collapsing, but somehow, Harris and 13 of the others who were carrying her had somehow survived, and with only minor injuries. Not everyone survived the collapse, to be fair, but those 14 were all situated between the lobby and sixth floor, which just so happened to be especially sound, structurally speaking. The large, open atrium at the center of the bottom six floors was perfectly empty, and the reinforced base of the seventh floor proved strong enough to force any debris to fall into that empty space. Or, as one of the firefighters later explained it, the North Tower “peeled away like a banana” (via The New York Times).
In the years following, Harris and the firefighters remained close, debating who had saved who. Was she alive only because of them, or had they survived because they paused to do so?
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