CTV's Christina Lopes talks to Stanley Praimnath and Brian Clark one year after they miraculously escaped the burning towers of the World Trade Center.

Close to 3,000 people perished in New York City's World Trade Center. Most of the casualties were those working on the upper floors, their escape cut off by the planes' paths. But in the south tower, two strangers made what can only be called a miraculous descent.

Thousands make the pilgrimage to Ground Zero each day but few have emotional wounds as deep as Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath. They both worked in the World Trade Center and by all accounts, should "never" have survived.

Brian Clark

"Our offices [were] on the 84th floor of the south tower and my personal offices are on the north wall," says Clark, a Canadian and head of the EuroBrokers brokerage firm. He was in his office at 8:46 a.m. when the first plane slammed into the north tower.

Three floors down, Stanley Praimnath was at his desk. "I saw fireballs coming down," he remembers. "I didn't understand what was going on."

Praimnath left his floor immediately, but when he and his co-workers arrived in the main lobby, a building security guard told them that Tower Two was secure and they were safe to return to work.

Stanley Praimnath

"Now, something was wrong with this picture," says Praimnath. " So, I turned to the young lady with me and I (said), 'Phyllis, why don't you take the rest of the day off.' So she's happy, she's gone out the door, but all of my co-workers are looking at me like, 'Stan, what are you doing? We still have a job to do.' They're holding the elevator door for me -- the president, the CEO, the head of Human Resources -- all these good folks were there. So I walk back in."

Stan took the elevator back up to the 81st floor, arriving shortly after 9 a.m.

Meanwhile, Clark and his co-workers had started to evacuate, but returned to their floor when an all-clear was sounded over the building's PA system.

That's when it happened.

"I saw this giant airplane," Praimnath says. "I saw it coming towards me at eye-level ... and I'm frozen. I drop the phone and I screamed and I don't know why but I said: 'Lord. I can't do this - you take over!' and I just dove under my desk."

That desk would save Praimnath's life. United Airlines Flight 175 veered, then slammed into the south tower, straight into Praimnath and Clark's floors.

"It was in those 10 seconds that I thought it was over," he says. "That was the only time during the day that I truly was terrified."

The building swayed, then righted itself.

As authorities evacuated the towers and nearby streets, Clark, the fire warden for his floor, grabbed his flashlight and lead a group of seven co-workers to the centre core of the building where the stairwells were located.

They had descended three floors when "we encountered a heavy-set woman coming up the stairs from below. She was with a co-worker. 'Stop, stop!', she said. 'You've got to go up. There's fire and smoke below us. We've just come off a floor in flames', and she wouldn't let us by her."

"As this debate started about go up, go down, I heard this banging and someone calling ...'Help, help, is anybody there? I'm buried."

It was Stanley Praimnath -- the only person on his floor to survive the plane's impact.

"My thought was, why did everybody leave me to die?" says Praimnath. "Why is somebody not coming to rescue me? And I'm crying and I'm hiding under my desk."

Clark followed Praimnath's pleas for help. The door to the 81st floor had been blown off the wall enough for Clark to push the drywall back and slip through. "I saw my comrades, whom I had come down with, beginning to turn around and go up the stairs rather than down."

That was the last he would see of them. His co-workers would perish trying to escape to the roof.

Trapped behind a wall of debris, Praimnath caught a glimpse of the plane's wreckage and thought his time was running out. But he could see the beam of Clark's flashlight and struggled to make his way toward it, yelling as he crawled.

Clark finally located Praimnath's hand when he punched it through a large piece of wall. Clark cleared away as much debris as he could but that large section of dry wall remained between them. Praimnath would have to jump over it.

"Brian said 'jump - you have to jump over,'" says Praimnath. So he did.

They exchanged names, and in that moment, Praimnath remembers, that "(Clark) took his left hand and my right hand just like this, and he rubbed them together -- both hands were bleeding -- and he said, 'From today you are my blood brother.'"

By then thousands had already fled the towers. The two men made their way to the stairwell together. Now they had a choice to make: up or down? "We got back to the stairs and there really wasn't a decision," says Clark. "We just tipped over the edge and started down. I think in my mind I wanted to test what was below."

Twenty minutes later they joined the crowds outside the building.

It was at New York's Holy Trinity Church, located just a few blocks away from the towers, that the two men sought sanctuary. Their stay would be brief.

"We turned a corner and went up a little hill behind the church," says Clark. "And Stanley stopped and grabbed onto the railing and we looked through the trees ... and we could see the smoke up high where we had been. And Stanley, with maybe some premonition said, 'you know, I think that tower could come down.' And I protested saying no way. And I really didn't finish the sentence when, 'boom, boom, boom,' we saw the building just start to slither down."

The two stood staring in disbelief as the tower collapsed on itself.

"And then, suddenly," says Clark, "up over the church came this wave -- this tsunami of dust and white ash and debris -- and that's when we realized we had to run."

They ran for their lives and were able to duck into the lobby of a building up the street where they waited out the destructive dust cloud. When they left the building through the back door 40 minutes later, they were separated in the sea of people trying to escape lower Manhattan.

One year later

Praimnath is back at church, his own, leading Sunday worship service. One year later, he travels to churches around the world to tell his story.

Life is fairly normal, but many questions remain for him. "I ask myself many, many times, Lord why me? I may never know the reason but I think my Lord is not ready to take me home yet."

The ordeal of that day continues to haunt him. "I would go to bed at night and I would get up claustrophobic, I would hyperventilate. I was fearful of going back into tall buildings," he says. "I was even more fearful of going into a tunnel or an elevator. And every time there is a plane zooming over my head, I have to watch that plane go by and make sure its not turning back for me."

He tried therapy, went to a counsellor three times but then stopped, turning instead to God. "I know deep down in my heart all is not well," he says, "but every time I have gone to church and shared this testimony, I feel as if there's a burden lifted up."

Brian Clark's burden is to provide for the families of those who were lost. Sixty-one of his co-workers were killed that day. Clark manages the company's relief fund. Requests from victims' families pour in daily, everything from medical bills to tuition invoices. But so too, the generosity. "We've raised in U.S. dollars, a little over $3.2 million." says Clark.

Helping others has helped him overcome the horrors of that day. He's back at work in another Manhattan office building, not far from the World Trade Center site. "People come to work everyday to grow the business," he says." But we know also that we're also supporting the families that we've lost."

For his wife, Dianne, it hasn't been easy. Like many wives and husbands that day, she watched the towers fall live on television and quietly said good-bye to her husband. Since then, whenever Clark leaves home she worries that he may not return.

"I've had a few difficulties with coming to terms with what happened," she says. "It hasn't been, just wake up one morning and say everything is okay. I've struggled with it. I don't have this always positive idea that things are going to fine, and we're going to come out of this in great shape."

"I am constantly amazed that Brian came home, in one piece, with a little puncture wound on his wrist ... and I think to myself, how amazing is that? When all around me I see people that didn't actually come out of it the way Brian did. And to me that's amazing but it's also a comment on our vulnerability."

As for the hijackers and the Taliban, Clark says he cannot understand the logic behind the attacks, which he calls senseless. "We have much to learn about other societies, other religions, and other cultures and other ways of viewing life, but this isn't the way we must accept a lesson in humility."

More than anything, returning to the site of the Twin Towers reminds Clark of the friends he's lost. "The anger I have is outweighed by the sadness I feel and the senselessness of what happened," he says.

For Praimnath, the gap in the skyline brings a sense of deep loss for the city he loves. "When I came back the first time, " he says, "I was lost. I was looking for that landmark, I was looking for that building that I used to love, that I worked in so long. And I just felt that void deep down inside. This is not the New York City I know. The skyline has changed ... the World Trade Center used to be my guide."

But revisiting that day, and the site, also makes it clear how lucky these two strangers were to get out alive. Until the end, each will humbly credit the other for saving his life.

"Had he not rescued me, I would not have been here," says Praimnath. "And when he says I saved his life? No."

"His voice pulled me out of the darkness of the 81st floor," says Clark, "and there I went, and we're here today. It's all very strange and I'm grateful."

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