Robin Klemm was inside the World Trade Center when the first plane hit seven years ago today — she ran for her life in high heels

Robin Klemm had nightmares almost every night for weeks after 9/11, and most were about falling, complete with the awful sensation of vertigo.

Klemm was in the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. Although she escaped to the streets of New York City, she witnessed hundreds of people jump from the Twin Towers rather than be burned alive near the top of the skyscrapers.

“I saw people jumping, people dying before my eyes, and I couldn’t do anything about it,” Klemm said. “They jumped by themselves. They jumped in groups. They jumped holding hands.”

It took her months to break out of an emotional numbness that followed, and from being startled by the smell of smoke or the sight of airplanes streaking through a blue sky.

“I was a fully functioning person; I just had this additional aspect to my life,” Klemm said.

She now lives across the country in quiet Corvallis, where she’s the director of the Austin Family Business Program. But every year, Sept. 11 brings back horrible memories and feelings of kinship with the victims.

“The thing you go back to the most is the people who have died,” Klemm said. “I walked away and continued to live my life, and other people couldn’t.”

The terrorist attack came on a Tuesday morning. Klemm was then the president of the Philadelphia Council for Business Economics. She was at the World Trade Center to attend a conference at the Marriott Hotel. The event was held in a second-floor ballroom connecting the two towers.

“There was a loud but still-muffled boom,” Klemm said, reading from a diary account she wrote months after the fateful day. The 400 or so people in attendance began to evacuate almost immediately, although there was confusion on where to go because smoke and falling debris was blocking some exit routes.

Out on the street, she dodged abandoned cars as she fled from the building, running in high heels, pulling a muscle in her leg.

She still didn’t know then what was happening, and she looked up to see smoke pouring out of the damaged top of the North Tower.

“Someone said it was a plane. I dismissed this because it was a warm, clear day,” Klemm read from her diary. A large, dark object fell from the side of the tower. It was a body.

Moments later, Klemm heard a loud noise above. She was almost paralyzed at an incomprehensible sight: a United Airlines commercial jetliner, ramming into the South Tower.

“As debris rained down on the street below, I was running for my life ... ,” Klemm said, reading from the diary.

Survivors had gathered at Battery Park, a few blocks away. Klemm called her husband on a cell phone to let him know she was safe. She turned back to look at the two towers and saw many people jumping, and couldn’t bear to watch anymore. “Everybody didn’t jump at once. It was over a period of time.”

When the South Tower collapsed, Klemm hiked her skirt up to her hips and scrambled from the cloud of smoke and debris that billowed down the canyon-esque New York streets. She jumped hedges, concrete barriers and construction fences, but the cloud engulfed her, covering her in dust.

Thankfully, she was still clutching a cloth napkin that was in her lap during the breakfast meeting, and she covered her mouth and nose with it.

From Chinatown, she saw the North Tower collapse. The only way to get around town was to walk, and Klemm walked to Penn Station, miles away, to try to get a train home.

“All I wanted to do was to walk away. To keep walking until I was away,” Klemm said. “I think I walked eight miles that day. … There really was the feeling of, ‘How many more planes are coming in?’ ”

At Penn Station, none of the trains were running.

Eventually, Klemm was able to catch a ferry to New Jersey. On arriving at Hoboken, those who survived the attack were asked to leave the ferry first, and directed to an area where firemen dressed in hazardous material suits would give them a fire-hose shower.

“Someone yelled, ‘Bomb. Bomb,’ ” and the survivors scattered, Klemm said. After calming down, she returned to be hosed down because she was afraid of having been dosed with a biological weapon.

When she finally returned home, she watched television accounts of the day, but had to have her son holding her. The news was too intense, condensing the devastation and showing it from every angle.

Klemm, like many survivors of the attacks, returned to work the next day. “It was the feeling, ‘I’ll be damned the terrorists are going to get the best of me.’ That’s the way everybody else felt.”

For Klemm, 9/11 made her want to break out of a rut, to start exploring the world. Her co-workers from Philadelphia who were there that day also have different jobs in different states, she said.

Klemm doesn’t think much about another terrorist attack on American soil.

“I know it will happen again. This is the reality of the world we live in. But I’m not afraid of that.”

Kyle Odegard covers Oregon State University. He can be contacted at kyle.odegard@lee.net or 758-9523.