hen the bomb went off at 12:18 p.m., Friday Feb. 26, 1993, Bill Specht was having lunch – a tuna fish sandwich.

Specht, then a bond salesman, remembers every detail of the day vividly. It was stormy, and there was ice all over. The two guys behind him in the cafeteria of Cantor Fitzgerald – a firm occupying the 104th to 106^th floors of the 110-story World Trade Center Tower were having steaks.

The men saw a flash and felt the building shudder, but they were not alarmed. They thought it was an electrical short. They were still calm – some even joking – when they were ushered into the stairwell and began walking down. No one realized a bomb had gone off.

"We just lined up. People starting talking," Specht recalls.

	Bill Specht said he and others trapped in the World Trade Center in the hours after the bombing did not know the explosion had anything to do with a terrorist attack.

Then, a thick smoke filled the hallways, and "people got a little agitated," he says. Pregnant women and the disabled were carried or helped down the winding stairwells. A few people who could not make it down went to the roof where they were airlifted from the building.

The emergency lights were on in the stairwell until the 64^th floor. Then everything went dark, and "it got very, very bad," he says.

More people jammed in from the lower floors, more smoke rose from below, more people cried, wheezed, vomited.

"When the lights went out, that’s when you started to feel that sense of panic that maybe you wouldn’t get out," Specht recalls.

"We made a human chain, and you put your arm on the shoulder of the guy in front of you," he says, remembering how he used a scarf to keep some of the smoke out of his lungs. "I had a guy from the mailroom in back of me. I grabbed him, and I said, ‘Jeff just hold on to my shoulder and don’t let go until we get down.’"

The human chain went slower and slower. At about the 22^nd floor, the firemen started coming up. They were able to break the windows to eliminate some of the smoke.

The descent took two and a half hours and by the time Specht got down hundreds of people flooded the mezzanine level.

Jeff, the guy from the mailroom, kept holding on to Specht.

"He was still hanging on for 10 minutes after we were out on the mezzanine. I probably walked 50 feet and it dawned on me that he was holding on. I said, ‘Jeff, you can let go, you’re safe.’"

Despite counseling they received following the bombing, some people were unable to return to work at the World Trade Center complex.

Specht took the ferry to Hoboken and went to a local bar to have a beer and "clean myself up."The ferry ride may have been the saddest of his career, Specht says. He travelled with several of the guys who had been working near the basement of the building when the bomb went off.

"Some of their co-workers in a fireroom across the way from them had been killed," Specht said.

Specht resumed working with a few files he and others were permitted to retrieve a few days after the bombing. Four months later he returned to work on the 105^th floor.

Others did not. At least 40 to 50 of the 1,000 people employed in Specht’s office were psychologically unable to return to work at the World Trade Center.

Counseling stations were set up, but "some went to counseling and never came back," Specht says.

"The one thing that came out of it is that security has been tightened not just in the trade center, but in a lot of offices all over," Specht says. "Hopefully it’s going to work."