By Gregg Bell
UW Director of Writing

SEATTLE - Amanda Cline lived the horrors the rest of us saw on television 10 years ago Sunday.

The 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks is also the 10th anniversary of Cline, a senior vaulter on the Huskies' gymnastics team, and her family escaping the World Trade Center before both towers collapsed.

"As time has gone on, it's gotten easier to deal with," she said Friday morning. "But it still feels like it was yesterday."

Cline sat down inside Alaska Airlines Arena after her rising team's latest voluntary, preseason workout to share her story with GoHuskies.com. It's one she has not told in its entirety before, not publicly anyway. Not even to her Huskies teammates, though they know she was there.

If she and her family hadn't slept in on Sept. 11, 2001, she may not be alive.

She was 11 years old, just starting sixth grade in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colo. Her family was on a fall vacation to New York City. They were all there: Her father Ed, who works in the computer industry; mother Deb, who works in retail sales; Ashlen, her older sister who was 13 then; brother Evan, who was six at the time; plus a family friend.

On 9-11-01, the Clines were staying in a hotel room about halfway up the 22-story Marriott World Trade Center hotel that connected the north and south towers.

"We had tickets that morning to go the top of the World Trade Center. Being my family, we all slept in," Cline said Friday, with a fateful chuckle.

"Thank goodness. Because we were sleeping and woke up to the first plane actually hitting."

Terrorists had highjacked American Airlines Flight 11, steered it down the Hudson River and slammed it into the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center, to which the Marriott was connected. The impact and explosion occurred at about 8:45 a.m.

The Clines' entire room shook, jolting them out of bed. 

"It just felt like a big earthquake," she said. "We were all just waking up going, `What's going on? We looked outside the window and saw debris falling and people looking like they'd been hit by things, lying around.

"So we turned on the TV and, I mean, it was instantly on TV. We had just gotten hit."

The family was instantly in panic mode, trying to simultaneously comprehend what was happening and plot how to stay safe.

Then ... "my mom made me brush my teeth -- random things," Cline said, laughing.

They were scrambling to dress in random clothes and get out when they felt another violent jolt and heard a second, terrorizing explosion. A second highjacked jet, United Flight 175, had exploded upon high-speed impact with the trade center's south tower at 9:03 a.m.

"When the second one hit, after that we were like, `OK, we need to get out of here,'" Cline said.

She and her family raced from their room with nothing more than what they were wearing, her parents' cameras and her mom's purse. All of their other possessions stayed behind in a room that minutes later would, like the rest of hotel and entire World Trade Center, disintegrate.

The hotel's elevators were already not an option. The first stairwell the Clines found was already blocked. They eventually found another, cleared stairwell. It led out a side access door on the west side of the World Trade Center complex, facing the nearby Hudson River.

Read the rest of the story on gohuskies.com