You look to the right, this is the building, 51 stories high. you can just make out the top of it now. there s no obvious damage to the building or smoke coming off of it. that may be because it is just such a cloudy day right now. i want to jump in here. there s a gentleman here who was at work when all of this happened. and i want to chat with him quickly. when it happened to five minutes after 2:00. it took a half hour to get from the 29th floor down to the ground floor. there were just too many people. it was too crowded, and everybody was trying to get off on all the floors at the same time. sir, when this incident happened, what did you feel? what did you hear? you could feel the building shake, and you could actually hear the alarms when they went off. the alarms went off. security came in. told us everybody, get out of the building now. do not take the elevators. walk down the stairs.
Pads at the river level, in fact those pads go out over the rive river. they couldn t get to either of those places and had to land right away. the question is, why? was it weather? was it about mechanics? it could have been. fox five new york has a live report. let s listen. the 29th floor of 787, seventh avenue. they said they heard a noise and they felt the ground shaking and they weren t sure what was going on and shortly after someone told him to cut their belongings. he said people were actually relatively calm and everyone was checking their phones and saw that there d been some kind of helicopter incidents but they didn t see any damage or anything like that. he said the evacuation was calm. people have been waiting in the rain and awaiting further direction. i spoke to someone who works on the other side of that building on sixth avenue, he said his
Banker, he moved here in january and he said it basically felt like a rumble, almost felt like an earthquake, and that was a lot of confusion for several minutes because they didn t know exactly what was going on. he said it took about ten minutes for emergency responders to actually come inside the building and notify everyone to evacuate, and then he was telling us the elevators were shutdown, and he say on the 29th floor. and he had to basically hoof it down the stairs with everyone evacuated. and shortly after that there was just chaos here in midtown manhattan is as all the surrounding buildings were evacuated. just a minute ago we saw a stretcher being pulled out but no one on it, but still a very active situation. more and more responders seem to be arriving on the scene, but this is busy part of manhattan. there are a lot of tourists
Floors of people all on the stairs trying to leave at the same time. things were kind of congested. and there was smoke in the staircase you said. we were on like 1:35 was when i was in the staircase. i wanted to see how long would it take me if i had to get down from the 29th floor down to the first floor. it took me three minutes. today it was like a half-hour. it took until six minutes after 2:00 before i could get down to the lobby because everybody was all trying to get down at the same time. and that s when people got a little bit agitated and a little bit nervous. all right, you can see in the bottom corner of your screen, i m going to actually ask the controller to put that up. we re getting ready to hear from the nypd. we re going to be hearing from the commissioner o neil we re
Security came in and basically told us, everyone just grab what you can and leave the floor. we have had an incident. about two minutes after that we hear the alarms go off. we hear we hear sirens go off. everyone is trying to leave the floor on the 29th floor. and then we hear across the loudspeaker there seems to have been an incident. everyone please evacuate the building. when you heard that, what went through your mind? at that point everyone was scared enough because as soon as kevin that we all know says get out, then we know it s serious, time to get out. as soon as we got into the staircase like you do have to understand, like everybody on all the floors got the they all got the same announcement at the same time. so it s like you ve got 29, 30