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Article summary by Gary Polson RBBI
Overland Park KS- Rachel Gifford was trapped in her Hilton Hotel room for 30 minutes after the Bright Field crash and escaped with only a tiny bruise on the inside of her right hand.
Gifford is a professional education manager at a Kansas City MO pharmaceutical company and was on a business trip to New Orleans. He and a colleague, Lori Martin were approaching the end of a two-day training seminar when she went to her room to grab her luggage and store it with the bell captain for checkout.
She decided to change her clothes. "I threw my shorts on the bed and went into the bathroom, and that's where I was when I heard the ship's horn," said Gifford who lives in Overland Park.
She thought the horn meant a ship might be in trouble, but had not idea it was about to crash through her wall. When Bright Field hit the mall her fifth-floor room shook. At first she thought a generator was causing the vibrations. Then the ceiling broke and fell on her and she thought she was in an earthquake.
"So I remembered to get to the door jamb," she said, "I slammed the door and stood against it....Everything started breaking."
Water pipers burst. Mirrors shattered and flew off the walls. With glass flying, she stood with her back against the door, hands over her face, in a flooding room with a broken floor slanting at a 20-degree angle toward the river below.
"Then I realized, 'Forget the door jamb; I have got to get out of here' ", she said.
The broken ceiling blocked the bathroom door. She was scared, but trying to think of the right thing to do. Meanwhile here colleague, Martin was in the conference center where the conference was being held. 'I saw all these people running like a stampede of animals, but I didn't know what was happening," Martin said.
Gifford said the because of her faith in God when was not scared of dying. "What scared me was that it would be a bad way to go and it was going to hurt," she said. "I asked God, 'Is this it?' and a feeling came that everything would be all right. Then I asked 'If it's all right could you please open the door?"
About 30 minutes later two fire fighters used an ax to open the wall between the bathroom and the hotel hallway. After she was pulled to safety and wrapped in a sheet, she ran five flights of stairs to the lobby.
Martin said Gifford was shaken but calm. She gave Gifford some clothes. Gifford said her purse, credit cards, luggage, and briefcase were lost in the river.
"My mother cried when she heard, and kept saying , 'I almost lost my daughter,' " Gifford said. "But I told her the key word is 'almost.' "
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