A Sacramento man escaped the World Trade Center on 9/11. What he saw still brings tears

The Abridged version:

• Richard Hannaford escaped from the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower on Sept. 11, 2001, after also surviving the 1993 bombing.
• Twenty-five years later, memories of the people and firefighters he passed in the stairwell still bring immediate tears.
• Now living in South Natomas, Hannaford marks every 9/11 by turning horror into honor.

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Each year on 9/11, Richard Hannaford spends the day in Sacramento but lives it three hours ahead on “New York time,” a way of connecting him to a day that time cannot erase.

Hannaford is one of the volunteers who builds a makeshift memorial each year at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Locks Drive in West Sacramento. Volunteers began placing 2,977 flags in the ground earlier this week. Each flag represents a person killed in the terrorist attacks 25 years ago at the World Trade Center in New York City.

In the center of the memorial stands replicas of the twin towers and tributes to the firefighters, police officers and emergency workers who died.  Also standing in the middle of the memorial is Richard Hannaford, paying tribute to a day that took him to his knees.  

“The damnedest thing, or the most remote, stupid little thing, all of a sudden will trigger a memory or a flashback,” Hannaford said. “Some little aspect of the day. I just never know when that’s going to come.”

Hannaford narrowly escaped the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He knows he came miraculously close to becoming another symbolic flag like the ones that surround him at the memorial honoring so many of his friends that were killed that day.

“It doesn’t hit me the way it did in the early years, when you were just absolutely inconsolable,” Hannaford said. “But there’s a visible impact. It hits me, and I can’t stop it.”

Hannaford says he no longer tries to hide the tears and the pain.

“I learned early on that there’s nothing I can do about that,” he said. “I can try to hold it back. It’s just going to come out somewhere else and come out worse.”

‘Tower One is on fire’

Sept. 11, 2001, began as a beautiful morning in New York City.

“It was one of those quintessential fall days in the Northeast,” Hannaford said. “It’s not just something people say. It really was that beautiful.”

Hannaford arrived at work at about 7 a.m. He was 45 years old at the time and worked as a corporate bond broker for Euro Brokers on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower.

He sometimes rode the subway directly into the complex. On other mornings, he got off early and walked across the plaza.

“Every time I did that, I would look up and think to myself, ‘How cool is it to work in some of the tallest buildings on the planet?’”

Hannaford was on the telephone with a customer when two coworkers who had been standing near a corner of the building ran back toward the desks.

“They came back and said, ‘Tower One is on fire,’” he recalled.

No one on Hannaford’s floor knew it was an airplane that had been hijacked and flown into Tower One, the north tower. Hannaford worked in that tower until May 2001, moving to the south tower just four months before 9/11. His former office was on the 104th floor.

“I immediately dialed one of my buddies over there, and that phone just went dead,” he said. “I thought, ‘What is going on here?’ I tried one other phone number. Same thing. I thought, ‘Well, this is just not good.’”

Hannaford said people around him began trying to decide what to do. Some started leaving. Others remained at their desks or gathered near the exits for information from the Port Authority.

“I turned around and told the guys, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but maybe we ought to get out of here,’” Hannaford said. “‘I’m leaving.’”

Escaping for the second time

Hannaford had been inside the World Trade Center when it was bombed in 1993.

At the time, he worked on the 104th floor of the north tower. Hannaford vividly recalls the stairwell evacuation was slow, crowded and dark.

“That was the thing that was in the back of my mind the whole time coming down on Sept. 11,” he said. “I was afraid we would get jammed up in the stairwell and something horrible would happen.”

On 9/11, Hannaford said walking down the stairs initially moved quickly.

As Hannaford and a small group descended, announcements over the building’s intercom system told employees they were safe inside the building.

“’It’s okay. Please go back to your desk,’” Hannaford remembers hearing.

Having escaped once before, he had no intention of turning around.

“Every time I heard it, I thought to myself, ‘No. I’m just not going to do that.’”

Hannaford was between the 41st and 42nd floors when United Airlines Flight 175 struck the south tower.

“I learned a couple of things,” Hannaford said. “I learned what it felt like to be in an earthquake, despite being from California, and what jet fuel smells like.”

Hannaford said the building swayed and moved beneath them.

“We were just yelling, ‘Let’s get moving fast. Let’s just keep moving. We’ll be just fine,’” he recalled. “I just kept saying, ‘Keep one foot in front of the other as quickly as we can. We get out of here, and we’ll be safe.’”

Around the 20th floor, they began passing firefighters climbing toward the fire, a vision that breaks Hanniford into tears.

“I can still see every one of their faces right now as clearly as I did then,” Hannaford said.

‘Things I can’t unsee or unhear’

When Hannaford reached the ground, he walked out of the south tower into a changed world.

“It was very eerie,” he said. “It was very quiet, but then it was really, really loud.”

Hannaford said he immediately knew people were falling from the towers.

“There are things that I can’t unsee or unhear,” Hannaford said. “Among those things are people falling from the sky. I saw a couple holding hands.”

He and a coworker were frozen in place and looking up at the north tower. Hannaford said his mind was filled with the people he knew who were up there.

“I was just saying prayers,” he said. “There were 230 people up there, at least. Thirty of them I knew well.”

That’s when a New York City police officer approached and told them they had to move now — and fast.

“He said, ‘Excuse me, sir, you’re going to have to leave. This is not safe,’” Hannaford recalled.

Hannaford and his friend started walking away from the towers for about 10 minutes.

By the time they reached the area around City Hall, the south tower collapsed. They ran for about a half-mile and ducked inside a restaurant in Little Italy, where people were gathered around a TV.

Until then, Hannaford still had not fully understood what had happened — that hijackers had flown planes filled with passengers into the towers. One of the planes sliced through Hannaford’s office on the 84th floor.

“We had no idea what happened to our building,” he said. “We had no idea what happened to our world.”

On TV, he saw the antenna on top of the north tower begin to shake.

“I thought to myself, ‘I can’t believe this tower is going to fall down,’” he said. “And it did. And so did I.”

Hannaford said he collapsed to his knees.

“I didn’t pass out,” Hannaford said. “I just completely lost it.”

When he was finally able to use a telephone, he called his wife.

“I just told her that I was alive,” he said. “‘I’m alive. Please let everybody know, and I’ll see you when I get home.’”

Learning how to live again

Survival did not end when Hannaford walked out of the south tower.

“For a few years after Sept. 11, I was in therapy,” he said. “I saw a therapist once a week. That was more help to me than I realized at the time, and I mean it was extremely helpful.”

He also relied on his community, friends and family.

“I was lucky enough to have a very supportive network,” he said. “Finding things to do and people to see, just keeping myself busy.”

In the days after the attack, Hannaford often drove toward Robert Moses Beach on Long Island.

“I couldn’t even get that far without having to pull over because I was crying so hard I couldn’t see,” he said.

When he reached the beach, he sat and watched the waves.

“I got a lot of my solace at the beach,” he said. “I would sit on the beach and just watch the waves coming in one after another.”

Hannaford also returned to Lower Manhattan where Euro Brokers had another office on Water Street.

“I walked by the remains of my workplace every day,” he said. “I would get as close as I could, not expecting to see anything, not knowing quite what I’d see.”

Hannaford said 9/11 clarified something he had always known but had never experienced with such force.

“Tomorrow was not promised,” he said. “You really do have to enjoy every day. You don’t know when your last day is going to be, and it can be just like that.”

Finding purpose in telling the story

Hannaford moved from New York to South Natomas in 2013 and quickly became involved with Troopathon, a Sacramento nonprofit that sends care packages to deployed military members.

The boxes contain coffee, snacks, personal care products and other supplies. But Hannaford says some of the most meaningful items are the handwritten messages tucked inside.

“It’s not just the Girl Scout cookies. It’s not just the coffee. It’s not just the sundry items,” he said. “The bigger thing is the letters from kids, from parents, from people, from anybody who wants to send one. They’re in each and every one of those boxes.”

Hannaford says the work gives him a way to honor those killed on 9/11.

“I know that everybody I lost that day, and all the people who were killed that day, would have an appreciation for supporting our troops,” he said.

He began speaking to American Legion posts, Rotary clubs and other community groups throughout the Sacramento region. He estimates he has publicly shared his 9/11 story with groups of people more than 100 times.

“Every time I tell it, it hurts but it helps, and it has a little less steam,” Hannaford said. “I guess that’s part of my therapy.”

At one of the talks, a man encouraged Hannaford to let the audience help carry what happened.

“He said, ‘Give it to us, let us help you, let us take some of this trauma,’ and let me tell you, that stayed with me,” Hannaford said.

“I don’t mind telling it because I think it’s one of those things we just can’t forget,” he said. “Look at how it changed our world.”

Beyond his wildest dreams

Now 70, Hannaford does not define his life by what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, but instead on what has happened since.

He survived the sudden death of his first wife, Louise, 10 years after the terror attacks. He found love again, remarried and built a new life in Sacramento.

“I discovered that, despite what I felt, I was actually pretty resilient,” he said.

Asked what he would tell the man he was on the morning of Sept. 11, before the airplanes, the stairwell and the losses that would follow: “Despite the circumstances, you’re going to be OK,” he said. “No matter what.”

Hannaford has one more message for his younger self — a message he wants to share with others, too.

“Life is going to be beyond your wildest dreams,” Hannaford said. “I can absolutely say that with conviction and from my heart.”