My September 11 Story

September 10, 2004 by
Filed under: Current Affairs, Life 

Tomorrow marks three years after September 11, 2001. I think perhaps it’s time to write down my personal story. (Thanks to Michele who prompted me with her article on the subject.) It’s not exciting – I didn’t know anyone hurt or killed – but it was traumatizing to me just the same.

I grew up in Northern New Jersey – Tenafly to be exact, 15 minutes north of the George Washington Bridge. I lived there from 1977 when my family moved from Missouri until I moved out of the area a few years after college in 1993. I currently live in Hamilton, NJ outside Trenton.

One of the first things that my parents did in the years immediately following the move to NJ was to take us to all of the NYC tourist attractions. We went to the Statue of Liberty – before the torch replacement but when you could only go up to the crown. We went to South Street Seaport shortly after it opened. We went to Radio City and actually saw a movie there before the show. We went to the top of the Empire State Building.

We also made at least one trip to the top of the World Trade Center. I’m afraid of heights, and I very clearly remember standing on the top of the tower (the one that was open to tourists – I can’t remember which) grasping the railing with white knuckles and being amazed at the strength of the winds. I also remember sitting at the windows of the observation floor below and looking straight down with my head pressing on the glass. At the time it was no big deal – I’d done similar things at the St. Louis Arch many times. Once I started working, I can remember going to meetings for work and at least one job interview that took me to the PATH station below the WTC, and past the buildings as I walked to my appointment. I may have had a meeting IN the WTC at one point with the Port Authority – I’m a little fuzzy on that. All of that was before I moved south in 1993.

I also made MANY trips up and down the NJ Turnpike from exit 18 to exit 9 or 7A. I went to college at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ and after college my (future) wife settled in Hamilton 3 years before I joined her. I also had a job that had me taking the turnpike for weeks at a time to go to client locations. On the Western spur, there are a few spots (mainly between 15W and 16W) where you can see the NJ apartment buildings with the tallest buildings of the NYC skyline beyond them, unless it was cloudy.

The morning of September 11 was a normal day for me. It was a sunny Tuesday in central NJ, and I drove to my job in Langhorne, PA. My brother, a police officer in Maryland, was also on the road on the way to Baltimore/Washington International (BWI) to fly to a training class. My wife drove the 3 miles to her job as well.

I usually arrived at work at about 8am. This day was no exception. The time between 8am and 9am was usually quiet for me – I tended to do a little web surfing before I got down to business for the day. I think I had a standing weekly Tuesday 10am meeting to attend.

At about 8:45am, I got a Breaking News e-mail from CNN. The e-mail said that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I immediately turned my web browser to the CNN website and saw the picture of a blackened smoking tower. At the time, I remember thinking – “It must just be a small plane that got lost.” That was the last successful news website page load that day – volume crushed the news sites and I never was able to load another news page that day.

After a few minutes, a co-worker came and suggested that we check the TV in the conference room. We did business with HSN at the time, and we had installed DirecTV receivers in the main conference room and the President’s conference room. I headed into the room and attempted to tune in CNN – apparently we hadn’t paid for the package that included CNN. I was able to get FOX News, and we saw the smoke pouring out of the 2nd tower – both towers had now been hit. We started getting reports of the plane hitting the Pentagon about this time.

After a few minutes of shock, I left the room and headed back to my desk to call people. I managed to send an e-mail (e-mail was still moving normally) to my wife to tell her about it. I then tried calling her on the phone. The lines were jammed. Every call came back with “All Circuits are Busy”. After repeated calling using the Redial button and all 3 lines on the phone PLUS my cell phone, I got a call through to my wife. I then started calling my brother. About 20 minutes later, I reached his wife at their home in Maryland. She had heard from him – his plane was at the gate at the time of the first attack and they had been unloaded when the 2nd plane hit. He later reported to me that there had been a bomb scare at ther terminal. He had started running when he saw the security guards running. It turned out to be nothing, and he made his way home and then more or less immediately on duty.

I then tried to call my family to assure them that my brother was OK. My sister was living near my office, and I reached her asleep almost immediately. She woke up and turned on the TV and then I hung up to call others. My father is the superintendent of schools for a regional high school in a Jersey Shore town with a ferry to Manhattan. (They lost a bunch of residents that day – a bedroom community for NYC.) It took me 30 minutes calling his direct line before I got through. One call connected, only to hear someone at that end dialing out. I got his secretary and told her that my brother was OK – her answer: “Good. He’s been frantic.” I later learned that there was chaos at the school as kids tried to call their parents; parents tried to call their kids; and some parents showed up at the school to either show their kids that they were OK or to pull them out of the building. I’m not 100% sure, but I think they lost a few parents that day.

I never did reach my mother. I left a message on her answering machine. I then left a message on a neighbor’s answering machine asking them to drive over and tell her that my brother was OK. She later got through to me at home and told me that she’d been working at her over-50 community’s center putting advertisements into the cable TV info channel and didn’t even know what was going on.

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At this point, it was around 10am. I went back to the conference room which was now completely full of people. Everyone was shell-shocked. At this point, the towers were still standing and smoking and the attack of the Pentagon was just being shown on TV. A few people were upset and had left the room crying. Shortly after that, the first tower collapsed. A loud, disbelieving gasp came out of everyone in the room. We began hearing reports of another plane down in Pennsylvania.

After the second tower collapsed, our company chose to close. We had stopped telemarketing at about 9:15am after some angry reactions from the people that we called. The senior management team walked around the building telling us that we were closing the building. The e-mail went out a few minutes later – apparently we had employees with family working in the WTC. At the time, the news was predicting casualties of as many as 30,000 people. I high-tailed it out of the building and got on the road home.

I tuned my car radio to Newsradio 88 – WCBS 880 out of NYC. They were providing continuous coverage and were still on the air – most NYC TV stations had been knocked off the air when the towers fell. My route took me up Route 1 to I-95 in Pennsylvania – across the Scudders Falls bridge, and the on I-95 to I-295 in Hamilton. The speed limit at the time was 55 and everybody drove 60-65. I was doing 75-80 in the right lane. There must have been some kind of local police chief’s meeting at the State Police barracks in Ewing, NJ. As I climbed the hill in NJ from the bridge (still doing 75-80) I was passed by no less than a dozen police cars doing 100 in the left lane with many different department names on the side. By common consent, the left lane was kept empty by the few drivers on the road to allow the police to use it. Nobody was driving below 70 MPH.

I made 3 stops on the way home. My first stop was to top off my gas tank. My second stop was at the bank to withdraw a small chunk of cash (maybe $1000 or so) in case of emergencies. My last stop was at the grocery store for staples – the usual bread, milk, etc. At the time, it wasn’t clear that the attacks would stop for the day – it seemed that they could continue for the day, two days, or forever.

I finally got home about 11:30am. Although it may seem to be a cliche, my first action was to put the flag up on the porch. Before 9/11, very few of the neighbors had flagpoles or brackets on their houses. My wife later told me that it was very comforting to see the flag flying on our house. That flag flew every day that it didn’t rain or snow until it started to fade and unravel at the end about 2 years later – I still have it and will keep it forever.

I called my wife when I got home to confirm that I had arrived safely, and to try to talk her into leaving. About mid-afternoon I finally managed to get her to leave and come home. Her company never did officially close – they just allowed everyone who was upset to leave at about noon.

My mother called during the afternoon and told me where she had been. At some point, I talked to my brother as well. I spent the rest of the day glued to the TV watching CNN. I saw the same clips of the planes hitting the buildings, the building falling, and dust-covered NYC all day long. I couldn’t break away from the TV for a minute – expecting that something bad would continue to happen. I even wheeled the TV upstairs into the bathroom.

In the evening, along with many, I lit 4 candles and put them on the front steps. Two on the top step on the right, one on the middle step on the left, and one on the bottom step in the middle. I repeat that ritual with the flag flying on the porch and the porch lights out every September 11.

In the days that followed, I did all of the usual ceremonies. At work on the 12th, we observed the national prayer by allowing everyone to go to a local church. A year later, we held a ceremony at the flagpoles outside at 8:47am on the 11th. I was kept busy in September of 2001 in a small way with the disaster – I was responsible for locating every order that was recently shipped to southern Manhattan and holding all shipments that might be headed that way. We sent letters to the best address that we had on file offering to hold/cancel/replace the order as required. We eventually discovered 30 shipments that had gone to the WTC in the few days before 9/11.

About 6 weeks later, we had our own local incident – my mail was delivered directly from the now-famous Trenton Main Post Office – where the anthrax letters originated. We were afraid of our mail for a few months – always opening unfamiliar mail outside and always washing hands after handling mail.

To this day, it’s hard to look at NYC as I drive up the turnpike for one reason or another. The hole in the skyline is still missing. I look forward to the day that the Freedom Tower is finished and the skyline patched (though never completely healed).

That’s my story of 9/11/2001. It’s not very exciting and I wasn’t directly affected by the events. However, to this day I am still somewhat on alert. My TV is always tuned to CNN when I shut it off so that I will see whatever might be happening when I turn it on again – hopefully not in a hurry.

Comments

One Comment on My September 11 Story

  1. 9/11 « No Longer "Not Your Grandfather's CPA" on Sat, 11th Sep 2010 5:53 pm
  2. […] http://marktime.org/?p=345 (Written as an eye-witness account, three years after the fact.) […]

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