Office workers today told how they fled a New York skyscraper after a helicopter crashed onto its roof killing the pilot.
Law firm boss Steven Gartner, who was in his 42nd-floor office, said he heard “a buzz and a bang and then the entire building shook”.
“People were anxious, for sure,” added Mr Gartner, co-chairman of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, who experienced the September 11 attacks on Manhattan’s Twin Towers in 2001.
Shauna Farrell, who was in a meeting on the 36th floor when the crash happened just before 2pm yesterday, said: “We heard a loud whizzing sound of a motor and then we heard a crash and actually felt the crash as well.” Fearing the worst, Ms Farrell and her colleagues decided to get out of the 54-storey building at 787 Seventh Avenue, near Times Square. “We ran down. I think we were the first floor to evacuate, because we felt it so quickly,” she told ABC News.
Other office workers had to wait up to 30 minutes to get down the crowded stairwell. “People from all floors were all trying to come down the staircases at the same time,” said Nathan Hutton, who works in the IT department of French bank BNP Paribas.
“We had no idea what had happened until we got to the first floor,” he said, adding that he could smell burning.
Lawyer Michaela Dudley said evacuating the building was “a really slow process”, adding: “We didn’t know what was happening so people were getting a bit panicky.”
Authorities said the helicopter was being used for executive travel. Its pilot, Tim McCormack, 58, died. The only person in the Agusta A109E, he had taken off from the 34th Street heliport in stormy weather 11 minutes before crash-landing onto the top of the 750ft-tall building, setting its roof on fire. Firefighters took about 30 minutes to douse the flames. Mr McCormack was the long-serving chief of the East Clinton volunteer fire service in Dutchess County, New York. In a tribute today, his fire station wrote that he was “a dedicated, highly professional and extremely well-trained firefighter”.
Speaking at the scene, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said: “If you are a New Yorker you have a level of PTSD from 9/11. As soon as you hear an aircraft hit a building, my mind goes where the mind of every New Yorker goes.”
The cause of the crash was being investigated. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney called on the Federal Aviation Administration to ban “non-essential” helicopter flights over Manhattan.
