'The Whole World Felt This Moment'

Kimberly Allan was on her way to the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, when she ran into a girlfriend out with her newborn baby. Chatting with the friend for a few minutes, she missed her train.

Tardy, she escaped certain death that spread across the whole American Express travel department on the 97th floor, as well as the danger at other AMEX offices on the 79th floor of the North Tower, where Ms. Allan, now a full-time Southampton resident and former Village Board member, was slated to give opening remarks at training sessions. She’d been going there all month from her main office on Vesey Street.

Looking back 20 years later, Ms. Allan’s focus falls on the aftermath — “acts of bravery, kindness and emotional support that I will never forget.”

“We saw this crazy-colored lime green fire truck heading down the West Side the next day,” she remembers. “The crew had driven all night from upper Maine to help. The guy yelled out the window asking for directions with his Maine accent, and someone brought him food and water — and then hugged him.”

People came from far away to help, she recalled, adding, “Many died afterward or are suffering today from diseases due to the toxic particulates. … Many threw themselves into this situation knowing it would be at an enormous cost.”

Confronted with trauma, she said, “your body has this ‘fight or flight’ instinct — and mine was fight.”

On September 12, she hadn’t slept and walked to a tiny Gristedes market in her Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side. “And I ran into somebody,” she said, “believe it or not, who worked at American Express, too. It was such a bizarre coincidence.

“I see my co-worker and I asked her, ‘What are you doing here?’” The colleague lived in Lower Manhattan but had come up to stay with friends.

“A lot of people were uprooted from their neighborhoods,” Ms. Allan related. Her displaced co-worker was trying to amass supplies for people toiling with the rescue effort. “On the next day, people thought they could still find people.

“She told me, ‘We need gloves, water, dog food, jock itch spray, socks, whatever packaged food you could just grab and eat.’”

Ms. Allan went to the superintendent of her building, then every apartment in the building, then to neighboring buildings and, she recalled, “People just opened up their doors and they gave me everything.”

She remembered going to the apartment of “this really rich guy.” He opened a closet and started handing over gloves — “$400 and $500 gloves you get at these fancy places. People just gave us everything.”

With the help of her building superintendent, two New York University students who were staying in the building, and others, the volunteers filled two taxicabs with supplies.

The two loaded cabs — “one driver was from Haiti, so I got to practice my really bad French” — drove down to the Armory. “They drove us down, helped us unload everything and wouldn’t take any money,” she said.

It was getting dark. “It took us so long to get everything, and there was this military truck, and they pulled back a curtain and I saw them offloading AK-47s, machine guns,” she said. “Then, a guy shows up from ‘The Pile’ — that’s what they called it — and he sees the supplies and goes, ‘Awesome!’ He took off his shoes and changed his socks — he was so happy — and he took a whole thing of water and disappeared.”

A couple of days later, they still needed supplies at the site, and Ms. Allan recounted, “These young people came up asking, ‘What can we do? What can we get?’ We didn’t have any paper, so this man would write something on a sticky note and put it on their chests and say, ‘Go get this,’ and they’d run and go get it.”

Three or four days later, Ms. Allan recalled receiving a call from a colleague at the firm’s operating center in North Carolina. “He asked me if I was okay, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ and he breaks down crying. … I had reached a point where I couldn’t cry anymore, and I ended up consoling this guy.

“I realized a lot of people, remotely, they saw all these horrifying images up close, in a way those of us who were there didn’t.”

People on the ground took in pieces of the scene while people around the world watching news coverage saw the entire attack, a fuller picture of devastation, of tragedy.

“The whole world felt this moment,” she said.