A warning for listeners. This podcast features original audio from 9-11 plus recreations of the day.

We feel it's important history to hear, but it can also be disturbing.

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For those in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, September 11th, there's one haunting image almost everyone mentions besides the burning buildings, the hospitals, the empty hospitals. In the minutes and hours after the attack, hospitals across the New York area readyed themselves. They were preparing to receive and treat massive casualties from the attack, converting cafeterias and surgical wards into overflow ERs and triage areas.

All of the doctors, nurses and administrators made the same instant calculation. The large scale destruction would surely result in thousands or even tens of thousands of injuries. And it wasn't just in New York. I was embossed in on 9-11, a reporter for my college newspaper. And I remember hearing rumors all afternoon about how the local hospitals were ready to receive injured patients from New York, which would be surely overrun with the grievous injuries and

trauma cases. I spoke with my editors about going out to Hanscombe Air Force Base where the injured were supposed to start arriving. Up and down the east coast, it would be all hands on deck. But in the end, there was no need. Throughout the day, some did seek treatment, Manhattan residents and first responders, but the arriving patients only ever amounted to a trickle, not the feared flood.

Outside the hospitals, it became a haunting scene, rows of stretchers, lines of doctors and nurses, all waiting anxiously, desperately for patients who never came.

The truth was that considering the scope of the devastation, there just weren't that many injuries, at least not serious ones.

The collapse of the Twin Towers was a unique, grievous, destructive event. You either lived or died. And as the frantic rescue efforts began that afternoon at the site first called the pile, rescuers thought there wasn't anybody to save. But they were wrong.

There were, in the end, 18 people rescued from the collapse, just 18. Almost all of them were with FDNY Captain Jay Jonas of Ladder 6.

Jonas and his team had climbed the North Tower stairwell B to help evacuate people trapped by the attack. You originally heard from him in the first episode of the series.

We never did make it out of the building, which is something that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around.

And of those 18 survivors, only two were pulled from underneath the towers. They were port authority police department officer Will Hemeno and his sergeant John McLaughlin.

Today, Jonas and Hemeno will tell us about the most horrific moment of their lives, and what they learned about themselves when the worst thing that they could ever imagine actually happened.

I'm Garrett Graff, a journalist, historian, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Only Plane in the Sky.

I've spent much of the last two decades studying and reporting on 9-11 and how it changed our world.

But today, on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, it's clear that many people still don't know the full story.

From long-lead and goat rodeo, this is Long Shadow, a podcast about the enduring mysteries and lingering questions of 9-11.

On today's episode, we're going to do something a little different.

We're going to hear the most hopeful stories I've heard from amid the tragedy and rubble of 9-11.

The stories of two people who had the World Trade Center fall on top of them and how they stood back up.

After and why firefighter Jay Jonas knew it in his gut, the building that he was in, the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was about to collapse.

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