Nancy Seliga was the manager of One World Trade Center when terrorists struck bringing down both Twin Towers. She was in the building about to start a staff meeting when the first plane hit.
Seliga, now a resident of Monroe, and her coworkers sensed it was a plane that shook the building, but thought it was an accident. They climbed down 21 flights of stairs when they were ordered out of the building and told to run, not to look back or up. A block-and-a-half away, she looked up, saw the flames and people jumping.
“I suffer from terrible survivor guilt 11 years later,” Seliga told MidHudsonNews.com. “There were 16 people in my department that died that day. My department was the department responsible for operating and maintaining the trade center so a lot of these guys went above and beyond to make sure people got out.”
Seliga still has difficulty coping with the tragedy.
“It’s very hard to get your arms around it. Sometimes it’s like surreal and sometimes it’s like it happened in another life and sometimes it’s like it happened yesterday,” she said.
Until weeks before, Seliga’s office was on the 88th floor until it was moved to the 21st. The 89th floor is where the inferno began.
At the same time as she was working at the World Trade Center, her husband, Chuck Seliga was the general manager of Stewart Airport at Newburgh where a number of planes bound for New York airports were diverted immediately after the attacks.
