The world watched in horror as planes hit the World Trade Center on Sept.11, 2001. Olga Fierro of suburban Berwyn was in Tower 1 when the first plane crashed into it and she barely escaped when Tower 2 came crashing down.
“I was sitting right across the street looking up at the towers, both on fire, when all of a sudden I just saw that dust, that ring form and just a noise that I can’t even explain and just started running,” Fierro said.
Fierro said it was her first trip to New York and it was for a business trip. She said after the building collapsed, she was covered in dust and eventually made her way to the Brooklyn Bridge. She said a resident of New York provided her shelter.
NBC 5 accompanied Fierro on a return trip to New York in 2002.
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The twentieth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is Saturday. Fierro said she’ll never forget the sacrifices made by the firefighters.
“I get a little bit emotional around this time every year, cause it’s hard not to think about those firefighters that lost their lives,” Fierro said. “I think a lot of those faces are just engrained in my mind because I looked in their faces so hard just to see what kind of trouble we were really in. So knowing they were going up as we were going out, I knew they perished.”
Fierro still lives in the Chicago area. Her children are now grown. She said her son is getting married Saturday.
