FDNY breaks window at One World Trade Center building ||Exclusive video

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Workers on dangling World Trade Center scaffolding
Phew! Window Washers Safe After Rescue at World Trade Center
RESCUED: FDNY breaks window at One World Trade Center building to save 2 window washers after scaffold cable snaps 69 stories high.
The workers trapped on the platform dangling 69 floors up on the World Trade Center have been rescued.
A cable on the scaffolding apparently broke around 1 p.m., according to Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building.
Rescuers could be seen dropping cables to workers and the fire department tweeted a photograph of rescuers inside the building looking at the dangling platform. At one point, another scaffold was inched down the same side of the building.
The opening cut into the thick glass was roughly 6 feet tall, even with rescuers’ heads as they stood at the precipice. The two workers were brought through it at about 2:15 p.m.
People on the ground had been moved back in case glass began flying. Office workers and construction workers streamed onto a nearby street, their necks craned upward to watch the scaffold as it is waved in the wind. Dozens of emergency vehicles lined the street.
Carol Thomas and Lisa Cogliano, who both work for an insurance company, were returning to their nearby office from a meeting.
“Oh God, I don’t want to know what he is feeling,” said Thomas. “I can’t imagine.”
“It’s horrific,” said Cogliano. “Hopefully, they find a way to get him out.”
The silvery skyscraper, which rose from the ashes of the Sept. 11, 2001, reopened just last week to 175 employees of the magazine publishing giant Conde Nast. About 3,000 more Conde Nast employees are expected to move in by early next year, eventually occupying 25 floors of the $3.9 billion tower.
Steps away from the new tower are two memorial fountains built on the footprints of the decimated twin towers, a reminder of the more than 2,700 people who died in the terrorist attack.
Two window-washers were trapped for an hour Wednesday on a scaffold dangling high off the face of 1 World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western hemisphere. Fire crews cut through a window 68 stories up and gently pulled them inside to safety.

The workers were on their way to the top of the tower when one of the motorized cables supporting the scaffold snapped or came loose, fire officials told WNBC. Video showed the scaffold dangling almost vertically off the building.

Full coverage from NBC New York

The workers were in harnesses and secure while they were trapped, fire officials said. After crews cut a rough rectangle in the glass, they attached an extra harness to each man and gingerly pulled them in. The men have been washing windows for 14 and five years, WNBC reported.

“They’re a lot older now than they were two hours ago,” Thomas Von Essen, a former New York fire commissioner, told the station on air.

The first office tenants moved into the tower last week, more than 13 years after the original World Trade Center was destroyed. The new tower stands 1,776 feet and 104 stories and cost almost $4 billion to build.