By rssfeeds-admin 
Over the years, countless stories of loss, survival, resilience, and hope have been heard. But few have heard the story of Erik Ronningen, who is believed to be the last person to escape the South Tower alive, seconds before it collapsed.
Ronningen was on the 71st floor of the North Tower the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. It was supposed to be a special day as he was awaiting a promotion.
“I’d been a consultant for five years, and this morning at 9 a.m. I was meeting with the executive director, who is the equivalent of a president of a corporation, and the director of security, to become an employee with all the benefits that entails, and that was today!” he said. “It was a good day for me, and the time is 8:46, and the tower just exploded above my head.”
Ronningen was about 20 floors below the impact zone, where American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.
“My immediate thought was that an airliner had somehow, inexplicably, flown into the top of the tower,” he said.
When he was asked if he thought that, Ronningen confirmed that it was. He said that he just finished a cup of coffee when he heard yelling.
“I thought that, I did, and from all around the floor, which was about one ace of floors, there was yelling for everybody to evacuate the towers. Now I had just finished a 20-ounce cup of coffee,” Ronningen said. “I knew it was going to be a long day, so I took care of business, came back to my desk, and there was only one person left, a consultant, Whitney, and Whitney suggested: Let’s do a walk around before we go down the stairs.”
Before leaving, they made sure everyone on their floor was safe, then joined a crowd making a slow, hour-long descent down 71 flights of stairs.
They had struggled through fumes from jet fuel and stepped aside for firefighters who were making their way up.
Once they were outside, Ronningen was headed to the South Tower, which was struck just 16 minutes later.
He was trying to help a friend at the security command center, but debris, flooded floors, and damage made it impossible.
“As I’m walking through that lobby, I could hear a low, throated, groaning, grinding, moaning sound somewhere within the bowels of the tower. I was too exhausted to consider what it was,” he said. “I left the South Tower, walked to the mall, we up the escalator, which wasn’t working of course, walked up and exited on Church Street on the east side of the towers and discovered thousands of people gawking up at the towers.”
A little voice in his head told him to move east, just before the South Tower collapsed.
“For just an instant, there was a little fear – in that same instant I said, ‘Where can you run to escape the quarter-mile-high building falling down on you?’ And I was totally at peace, and I just watched it come down,” Ronningen said. “At the same time, those thousands of people went into a panic, into a stampede, and for some reason I knew I didn’t want to get caught in a stampede.”
While he was trying to reach a friend’s apartment, he learned that the north tower, where his office was, had also fallen. He said that’s when someone yelled out of their apartment windows, “Did you know the North Tower came down?”
He says he lost a lot of friends that day, including his best friend.
“I lost over four dozen. My best friend, plus a lot of friends and colleagues. Yes, their names are repeated every Sept. 11 down at the World Trade Center Site,” Ronningen said.
He said that documenting his story and those of other survivors in his book “From the Inside Out” has been therapeutic.
“It was an interesting day, and these are all the wrong adjectives, but I call it a fascinating day. It’s not a day I would have signed up for Brian, but it’s a day that, having survived it and the opportunities it has given me, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” he said.
Now, Ronningen travels the country sharing his experience with everyone, including those in the Central Valley. He will be the keynote speaker at Thursday’s remembrance ceremony at the California 9/11 Memorial in Clovis.
The ceremony begins at 8:30 a.m.
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