BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — On this day 23 years ago, thousands of people lost their lives during the September 11 attacks.
Lisa Amatura was on the 78th floor of the North Tower for a meeting when the first plane hit.
"I was looking out the window admiring the Statue of Liberty," she said. "Not long after that, the first plane hit and it felt like it was a large explosion, maybe like a gas line or something."
Amatura climbed down the stairwell, only paying attention to the floor signs on the walls.
"Each floor was stamped with the number of what floor you were on," she said. "I just kind of made a mental note to just keep focusing on 78 and 77 and 76. We didn't realize until about the 50th floor that there was another plane."
Unbeknownst to Amatura, she was pregnant with her second child during the fight of her life.
"I didn't find out that I was pregnant with Francesca until September 13," she said.
She says she is lucky to be alive and is now a volunteer for the Tunnels to Towers Foundation which is dedicated to providing homes for veterans in honor of a firefighter who died during the 9/11 attacks.
A week after the attacks, Jim Volkosh and 48 other firefighters loaded into 8 ambulances to help the New York City Fire Department continue the cleanup.
"Some of the things that we saw were billboards that were just pasted with pictures of people who were missing, It was something that was moving without a doubt. It was something that we had never seen before and we had never dealt with," he said. "So the newness of it took a while to settle in and took a while for everybody to get focused on what our duties were gonna be."
Volkosh says he will never forget the damage of New York City.
"The sights of the pile and the smoldering debris and every once in a while they would bring a body up through an ambulance with no lights on," he said. "It was something that you had to pretty much shut off everything that was around you and focus on what our task at hand is."
Volkosh hopes everyone remembers those lives lost and first responders.
"We can't let people forget about it," he said.
