When a plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Thomas Wayne Whipple wasn’t too concerned about having to evacuate, figuring he’d be able to come back to his office in the north tower later in the day.
“That happened when I was on the 44th floor, and I didn’t realize it was that bad,” Whipple said while pointing to a picture of the plane crashing into the north tower just hours before its collapse.
Whipple, 67, an ASU alumnus and president of the Tempe chapter of the Family History Society of Arizona, recalled his escape Monday night at the genealogy group’s meeting at Pyle Adult Recreation Center in Tempe.
Whipple, who worked as executive director of the New York Society of Security Analysts, was at his desk when the plane crashed above him. He remembered he heard a loud thump and jumped out of his chair as it was slammed back toward the windows.
Unsure of what happened, Whipple saw debris falling outside from above. A coworker informed him that the plane hit the building; it veered upward toward a higher floor at the last minute. Despite the commotion, Whipple said he didn’t panic.
“I thought I shouldn’t be concerned,” Whipple said. “We all remembered that the Empire State Building was hit by a plane and it was still standing.”
With no instruction from the building’s announcement system, it wasn’t until he received a call from his sister in Arizona saying the building was on fire that Whipple considered evacuating.
After everyone else on the floor left one by one, Whipple and two remaining coworkers proceeded down the stairwell together, which was filled with smoke.
On the journey down the stairwell, Whipple said firefighters were climbing up.
“We thought they wouldn’t be coming up here if there were any danger,” Whipple said. “That’s why there was no real panic on the stairwell when we were descending.”
Whipple then learned from a man with a BlackBerry that the crash was a terrorist attack.
On the lower floors, Whipple had to start wading through water as it dripped from above. But it wasn’t until he exited the stairwell onto the mezzanine above the lobby that Whipple said a sense of danger overcame him.
He heard screaming police officers and emergency workers giving orders to keep moving and not to use cell phones. He then saw the outdoor Austin J. Tobin Plaza and gasped at the destruction.
Among the debris were dead bodies, Whipple said, eliciting gasps from the audience at the Pyle center.
“All you saw were these bodies stacked up in front of you,” Whipple said. “[I] still have these images of these people that are really cut in half and chopped up.”
As Whipple climbed up through immobile escalators to get outside, he noticed that the windows were stained with blood.
The shock continued outside, when he found out that the other tower had also been hit.
“I still see those two towers burning above me … like candles on a birthday cake,” Whipple said.
After crossing Broadway, Whipple turned to see the northeast corner of the south tower tremble and implode, with one floor falling on the next. Then, a crowd of people came running down the road “like crowds running from collapsed bleachers during a soccer match,” Whipple said.
“Down it went, pancaked, one [floor] after another,” Whipple said. “These buildings were built for eternity. They weren’t supposed to come down so easily.”
Then, a huge gray cloud came barreling at him, and he managed to squeeze into a police facility near City Hall just in time to wait out the panic.
Although it was hours before he could contact his family, his wife, Karen Whipple, 66, reassured family members that her husband was fine.
“I had a feeling that everything was OK,” she said. “I received 56 phone calls that day.”
Whipple was raised in Prescott and received a bachelor’s degree in business-finance 1963 and an MBA in 1964 from ASU. In the summer of 2003, he retired and returned to Arizona and currently resides in Ahwatukee.
Seven years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Whipple still reflects that the day could’ve ended much differently.
“I probably would’ve waited it out [in the tower] if someone stayed with me,” Whipple said.
Reach the reporter at scott.huscher@asu.edu.
