Don (Parente) noticed that the doors of elevators number 6 and 7 had been blown out."
"As we got to the third floor of the B stairway, we forced open an elevator door which was burnt on all three sides. The only thing that was remaining was the hoistway door. "
"The same thing happened to the elevators in the main lobby. They were basically blown out."
"There was elevator doors ajar. There were elevator doors missing. I could see an elevator car twisted in the shaft."
"A. I didn’t recognize it as bodies. I don’t know if my mind didn’t see it.
Q. Burned?
A. Burned.
Q. Near the elevators?"
"Before we got in, all the elevators were crashed down in the lobby, and we were going to the stairwell. See all the elevators were crashed down, big slabs of marble on the floor, all the ceiling tiles of the dropped ceiling was falling down, wires hanging. You see wires and stuff hanging inside the elevator shafts, because the doors were blown right off the elevators."
"In the center of these two elevator shafts would be the elevators that go to the lower floors. They were blown off the hinges. That’s where the service [freight] elevator was also. …They were blown off the hinges, and you could see the shafts."
"I noticed that some of the elevators had been blown out of their shafts. They came down and crashed out of the shaft. They were buckled, and I had noticed that there were people still in the elevators."
"At the end of this elevator lobby, there was – it just looked to me like something had exploded. I don’t remember how I heard it or who said it, but someone said I think it was an elevator – when the plane hit, it severed the elevator cable and it came all the way down and crashed. I don’t know a hundred percent if that’s what happened, but it looked to me like that could have been true. It looked like something had fallen down, hit, and exploded out. I mean the whole area around it was maybe 25, 30 feet of really severe damage."
"I remember thinking, I looked at the elevators and I still wasn’t feeling good about them, because the damage that I spoke about was more severe or at least up close I got to see it. There were pieces of marble, like ornamental marble I guess, on the walls that were maybe 2 foot by 3 foot pieces, maybe even a little bigger, that had split and cracked and some had actually fallen." [This person seems more impressed by the damage to the marble than the supposedly melted elevator shaft/doors.]
"Some of the doors – they were silver colored elevator doors and they were almost like hanging out of plumb. They just didn’t look right."
"Some of the elevators were on fire. Signs of smoke and fire damage were visible at some elevators. Many of the elevator doors were missing."
