NYC-Miracle in the Twin Towers
As two hijacked planes were heading on a collision course with the World Trade Towers, one woman was prayerfully making her way to her desk on the 61st floor. It was an ordinary New York morning, and then tragedy struck. An announcement said she should stay, but a silent voice told Dawn Robinson it was time to leave.
“Every morning I make it a habit while I'm getting ready to pray, ‘God, please help me through the day. This is the day that you have made. I'm going to rejoice and be glad in it.’ And daily that's what I do to get prepared to go to work. And even that morning as I walked to the 61st floor, I rounded the corner and I said, ‘I thank you for a good day. This is going to be a good day,’” said Dawn Robinson.
It was shortly after that the first plane hit the World Trade Center. There was confusion and Dawn Robinson went to a lower floor with some friends to see what was going on. They were told that everything was okay and to go back their office.
“So I went toward my office, went to the elevator and halfway to the elevator, something stopped me. And it wasn't, I wasn't trying to decide, ‘Am I going to go up to my floor?’ I just knew in an instant that I needed to get out. I felt immediate claustrophobia. I never experienced that before. But it was an awareness I never felt before and it was immediate. It wasn't, ‘Maybe I shouldn't go up.’ I knew right then I had to get out of there no matter what the cost. I had to get out. And I know for a fact that was the Holy Spirit that spoke to me right then,” Dawn said.
“So I turned around and I saw some of the people that I worked with and I said, we have to leave now. Now. We have to go. So we found the stairwell and I would estimate probably 75 percent of the people stayed because they did exactly what they were told to do. They either stayed and went to the cafeteria or they were trying to get back up to their floors. I don't know if the elevators were working at that point. We left. So I don't know what the rest of the people did, but I just know they stayed right there as they were told to do,” she said.
“But something inside of me told me, ‘Go no matter what the cost. Get out of here.’ So we started running down the stairwell, and you have to remember, there we thousands of people that ended up running down that same stairwell by the time, you know, we were actually going. And I think, I'm not sure, but I think we were on the 44nd floor when it hit our building. At this point, we still didn't have the comprehension that, you know, planes were hitting our buildings. At this point, in fact, somebody said, oh, I think it's terrorists. We all started laughing because we thought, there's no way it's terrorists,” she continued.
“So we started running down and I think it was on the 42nd floor or so that it hit us and it knocked us up against the walls. And at that point, people were screaming and then hysteria broke out. There was smoke covering us. There was water coming down. So some of us were yelling, just go! Go fast! Because you're scared to death, you know you're up 40 flights and it's going to take a long time to get down 40 flights of stairs with thousands of people joining you,” she explained. “So, anyway, I held on to the banister. I'm 49, so I made sure I had something to hang on to so I wouldn't be knocked over. I just tried to remain focused and I held on to that all the way down. It was a circle of stairs.”
“And I just kept praying very loudly, ‘God, please protect us. Jesus, be with us.’ When we got to the second level, that's also the street level, we found some doors that we could get out of. Debris was just constantly falling on top of us once we got outside. It was like you were running, literally running from the fire that you saw behind you. And then the same sound [of an explosion] I had heard up in my office was what I was hearing again. And I thought that we were just constantly being bombed because you couldn't look up and see, and you couldn't see your hand in front of you face,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes.
But Dawn pointed out that God clearly intended to take care of her.
“I feel like I have a whole new chance at life now. Had God not stopped me and put that urgency inside of me, I wouldn't have been here today because our floor was on fire and the second plane hit our floor, is what we were told. So I wouldn't have ever made it had I not felt that,” she said.