69 floors: the 9/11 evacuation that proves preparedness works
John Abruzzo, a quadriplegic accountant, was carried down 69 floors of the North Tower on 9/11 and survived. Eight years earlier, without a chair, the same descent nearly killed him. The difference is the whole point.
John Abruzzo is alive because of a decision his employer made after a near-miss. A quadriplegic Port Authority accountant, he was on the 69th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower on September 11, 2001. Colleagues placed him in a stairway evacuation chair and took turns carrying him down all 69 floors in about ninety minutes; he got out before the tower fell. In the 1993 bombing, before those chairs were staged, the same man's evacuation took roughly six hours and nearly cost him his life. That contrast — six hours versus ninety minutes, tragedy versus survival — is the clearest proof there is that preparedness for the people who can't take the stairs actually works.
What happened to John Abruzzo on 9/11?
Abruzzo, a C5-6 quadriplegic who used a power wheelchair, worked as an accountant for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the 69th floor of the North Tower. When the plane struck far above him, the elevators were gone and the only way down was 69 flights of stairs.
His colleagues brought out an evacuation chair — a sled-type stair-descent device — secured him into it, and carried him down, rotating three or four people at a time. According to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the descent took about an hour and a half, and they left the building minutes before it collapsed. Abruzzo survived with smoke inhalation. His actual chair is now in the Memorial Museum's collection.
Why did the same building nearly kill him eight years earlier?
In the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the power and stairwell lighting failed, and Abruzzo — with no evacuation chair available — was carried down in his heavy electric wheelchair and then transferred to a stretcher. That evacuation took roughly six hours.
The Port Authority learned from it. In the years after 1993, it purchased evacuation chairs and staged them for employees with disabilities. That single preparedness decision is why, in 2001, the descent that had taken six hours took ninety minutes — and why Abruzzo made it out.
What does this teach any high-rise?
Three things made the difference, and none of them are exotic. There was equipment staged where it was needed. There were people willing and able to use it. And there was, implicitly, a plan — a shared understanding that when the elevators are gone, this is how we get our colleague down.
Every high-rise office, tower, and campus has occupants who can't self-evacuate a stairwell: employees, visitors, contractors, someone with a broken leg on the day of the fire. The Abruzzo story is the answer to the question skeptics ask — does this really work? It worked, on the worst day, in the tallest building. The only variable is whether the equipment and the plan are there before the alarm.
- ›Stage the equipment where it's needed — a chair in a locked cabinet on the ground floor helps no one on the 40th.
- ›Assign and rotate assistants; the Abruzzo descent worked because several trained people took turns, not because one hero did it alone.
- ›Write the plan down and share it, so on the day, no one is improvising who moves whom.
- ›Practice it. A device nobody has touched is a liability, not a capability.
- ›Treat disability egress as everyone's plan, not a special case — the person who needs it may be an able-bodied colleague who's injured that morning.
Questions professionals ask
An evacuation chair is a lightweight, stair-rated device that lets one or more operators bring a person who can't use stairs down a stairwell under control, without lifting. Modern chairs use a self-braking track so the operator guides the descent rather than carrying the full weight; powered models can go up as well as down.
The Port Authority had staged 100-plus evacuation chairs after the 1993 bombing, and multiple mobility-impaired occupants were assisted down on 9/11. John Abruzzo's rescue is the best-documented, independently confirmed by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum; broader rescue totals largely trace to the chair manufacturer and should be treated as vendor-reported.
It depends on the number of floors and the team, but the contrast in Abruzzo's own case is instructive: roughly six hours down in a wheelchair-and-stretcher improvisation in 1993, versus about ninety minutes down 69 floors in a purpose-built evacuation chair in 2001.
We publish these case studies for one reason: so the next facility doesn't repeat them. Everything here is drawn from primary investigations and public records, told with respect for the people involved. Last updated August 4, 2026.
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