POCATELLO — Four faces are seared in Laura Soldati’s mind from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when she heard a boom and then pried herself free of an elevator stuck on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
It’s been 20 years since Soldati — a 1996 Pocatello High School graduate who moved back to the Gate City about five years ago — found herself in the bullseye of Ground Zero during the New York City terrorist attack that changed history.
While people throughout the world sat glued to their televisions watching footage of a hijacked commercial airliner striking the North Tower, Soldati was working to regain her composure and escape from the upper quadrant of that failing skyscraper. She encountered remarkable bravery and heroism with each step she took toward safety.
Soldati was 23 at the time of the attacks, working as a receptionist for Marsh & McLennan, an insurance agency with offices on floors 96 through 100 of the North Tower.
During her morning elevator ride to meet her supervisor on the 96th floor, Soldati encountered the first face that still lives vividly in her memory.
“I can still see what she was wearing. Yes, I do think of her,” Soldati said. “She was this absolutely stunning African American woman wearing this beautiful turquoise, linen dress. She had just stepped out and she was holding a Tupperware container with a sandwich in it.”
As the woman exited to the 91st floor and the doors closed, Soldati stood alone in the elevator and made a mental note to put her own lunch in the refrigerator.
Then — at 8:46 a.m. — she heard a sonorous, quaking thump, followed by the frantic voices of people outside of the elevator shouting for friends.
“It’s a sound you really can’t describe. You just have to experience it,” Soldati said.
The elevator rattled and froze. After a moment of panic, Soldati thought to force the doors open and stepped onto the landing.
“It was still on the landing. That’s ultimately what saved me,” she said. “If I had stalled between floors, I wouldn’t have been able to get out.”
The 91st floor was smoky — Soldati later learned that American Airlines Flight 11 made impact with floors 93 through 99 of the North Tower.
A gentleman handed her a damp towel to place over her mouth before she joined the continuous flow of people starting the long walk down the stairwell. Nobody pushed; the evacuation began oddly calm and orderly.
She remembers someone had a radio on as the crowd descended, trying to figure out what had happened. Many tenured workers who recalled being evacuated from their offices following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing muttered “not again.”
“The further down the stairwell we got, people would join us with head gashes or helping to carry people out,” Soldati said. “As far as panicking, oddly no. I think people were panicking outside the building, not inside.”
Near the 80th floor, she encountered some New York City firefighters who were walking against the grain, heading upstairs toward harm’s way.
Some people in the stairwell were unfit and had a hard time keeping pace. A man in a nice suit carried a young woman who had fainted on his shoulders.
She reached the concourse level — a shopping mall with eateries and storefronts — to find gushing water and shattered glass in every direction. The prior calm of the evacuees began to break. In the concourse, she saw the second face that’s become etched in her mind.
He was a security guard who liked to tease the new workers — tall, blonde and good-natured. Every morning, he checked Soldati into the building, ready with a joke and a grin. At that moment, however, he was a different person, laser focused on getting people out of a building that he would never leave himself.
“There was a sense of urgency about him I don’t think I’d ever seen in a human being,” Soldati said.
She emerged outside into a crowd of people who were “absolutely petrified.”
“I definitely know I was in shock by the time I exited the building. I knew this was life or death,” Soldati said.
Moments after she exited the World Trade Center, the South Tower — which was struck nine minutes after the North Tower, also by an airliner hijacked by the Islamic terrorist organization Al-Qaida — toppled in 10 seconds after burning for 56 minutes. More than 800 people inside and surrounding the building perished.
As she strode away, Soldati never turned to look behind her when she heard the skyscraper fall. Dust and debris covered her back.
She was swept up in a briskly moving crowd, with little control over her direction. It led her into the marble lobby of a nearby building.
In that panic-stricken moment, she encountered her third unforgettable person. She was face to face with a woman who was about her same height and they locked eyes for roughly 30 seconds. Soldati believes they communicated a message of comfort and support to one another without speaking a word.
“She was reading me to make sure I was OK and I was reading her,” Soldati said.
Then the stranger left, along with most of the crowd, heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Soldati chose to venture toward Chinatown.
Debris was still fluttering in the air from the collapse of the South Tower when the North Tower fell at 10:28 a.m. after burning for 102 minutes. More than 1,600 people in and around the building were killed.
“You heard this insane rumbling and with each rumble there were these huge clouds of debris that just flooded the downtown,” she said.
Upon arriving at Chinatown, a group of women who were speaking Mandarin approached her to dust her off. They led her to a Catholic church, where they took her upstairs in the rectory. Near the top of the stairwell, she was greeted by a Catholic nun and tripped, falling into the open arms of a priest.
Sometime between 10:30 a.m. and 11 a.m., the nun encouraged her to call her family.
Back in Pocatello, her parents feared the worst. The temp agency that employed Soldati had put out a field alert asking if anyone had heard from a list of employees who remained unaccounted, including Soldati. National media outlets got wind of the alert and had been contacting her folks seeking interviews.
Her parents were being consoled by friends when her call went through.
“My dad was just so relieved. I’d never heard that kind of relief before,” Soldati said.
She never made it to the 96th floor that morning to see the fourth face on her list. His name was Steve Morello, her supervisor.
“He didn’t make it. He was the sweetest guy ever,” she said.
Soldati doesn’t talk about Sept. 11 often. She’s never told many of her friends how close she came to being one of the victims of the attacks.
Just as that day changed the world, it’s had a lasting impact on Soldati.
“I think I hadn’t realized until I got older how much it impacted me,” said Soldati, who now runs a public relations agency that works mostly with East Coast clients.
On the positive side, she’s come to have complete trust in herself. But she’s also dealt with survivor’s guilt, as well as the feeling that she hasn’t always lived up to her full potential.
“The conflict I’ve experienced in my life is this really bad thing happened, but there were so many amazing things that happened that day — people helping people, strangers helping strangers, real empathy,” Soldati said.