Paul Berriff’s archive report on Myles Donnelly puts the Enniskillen man on the 79th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower just before the building was struck. Donnelly left his office with his boss after the tower shook at 8.45am, and he was outside minutes before a Boeing 757 smashed into the floor where he had been working.
The report, republished from the September 13, 2001 edition of The Impartial Reporter, follows a local man whose family in Enniskillen learned he was safe only through his calls home. John later said Donnelly phoned three times during Tuesday, with the first call coming minutes after the crash.
South Tower on Tuesday morning
Donnelly was in his office on the 79th floor of the South Tower on Tuesday morning when he felt the building shake at 8.45am. The lift had immediately stopped working, and he left with his boss. Minutes later, outside the building, he saw the effect of the second plane as it cannoned straight into the 79th floor where his office was situated.
The sequence is stark because it moves in minutes, not hours. Donnelly was inside, then out, then watching the floor he had just left become the impact point. He later ran to his father-in-law’s business, four blocks away, to be with Kirsten and check on his baby.
Enniskillen hears from Myles Donnelly
Back in Enniskillen, Michael and John initially knew nothing of the attacks unfolding across the Atlantic. John said: “When Myles phoned, that was the first we heard of anything happening.”
John also said: “The first time he phoned was just minutes after the crash and he seemed in good enough form”. On the second call, John said, “The second time he was in shock, and the third time he phoned he was just paralysed.”
Those calls are the only direct bridge the report gives between the South Tower and Enniskillen. They show Donnelly moving from survival to family contact while the scale of the attacks was still dawning on the people he had just called.
The luck Myles Donnelly described
John said Donnelly phoned home three times during Tuesday and “He really felt that it was just luck”. That is the complication at the centre of the story: the report places him in one of the tower’s most exposed floors, yet he was able to get out before the plane hit, without explaining what inside the building gave him those minutes.
What the report does establish is that the lift had stopped working, the tower had shaken, and Donnelly left with his boss before the impact. For readers in Enniskillen, that leaves a clear ending and a harder question in the middle of the story: why he was able to walk out when he did.
