WESTFIELD, N.J. -- Mike Hingson made it down 78 floors of the World Trade Center's north tower last week after a plane crashed into it, but he said he was not scared.

His best friend, Roselle, was at his side.

Roselle is a 3 1/2-year-old yellow Labrador guide dog. Hingson, 51, has been blind since birth.

"I felt it more than heard it," the Westfield resident told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Thursday's editions. "Then the building kind of went this way and that way. We were very much concerned the building was going to tip over." He and a colleague at Quantum ATL, Dave Frank, rounded up six employees of another company there for a meeting, and pointed them toward the stairs. Hingson grabbed his briefcase, and he, Frank and Roselle headed down the stairs.

He said he remained calm by drawing on his earthquake experience as a former resident of Palmdale, Calif., a town right on the San Andreas Fault.

He knew not to take the elevator, even though an express one would have gotten him to the ground floor in 46 seconds under normal conditions.

"We started down the stairs," he said. "Roselle did a good job. She stayed focused. We stayed to the side (of the staircase). We smelled a lot of jet fuel on the way down. Twenty-six thousand pounds of jet fuel is a lot of jet fuel. Some people had a lot of problems breathing."

He said no one screamed in the stairwells.

"Everybody was orderly," he said. "It wasn't like some giant fireball was rushing at us."

It took a half hour to walk down to the ground floor. He didn't hear the second plane strike the other tower.

"There was no way to hear it," he said. "You're in the bowels of the World Trade Center. And it hit on the other side of the (south tower)."

Once they were outside, Frank told Hingson both towers were on fire.

"We heard this rumble. Dave said there was a huge cloud," he said. "It was clear the (south tower) was coming down. We ran. We were engulfed in this black cloud, like you see when a volcano erupts. The sun was blacked out. We were covered in dust; I could feel it in my lungs. I coughed it up."

He soon heard the north tower collapse.

"You heard it, oh yeah, you heard it," he said. "It was like a train coming straight at you. You knew it was a building, you just didn't know which way it was going."

They walked north for about 10 minutes, when Hingson called his wife Karen on his cell phone. He said simply, "It's me."

After stopping for a rest and a bowl of soup, they got a ride to an apartment of a friend of Frank's.

Around 4 p.m., Hingson went to Penn Station and caught a train back to New Jersey. By 7 they were finally safely back home.

"She never hesitated," Hingson said proudly as the dog lay by his feet. "She never panicked."

This article is from the N.J. News