I remember that day so vividly and with such clarity. We were living in the New York metro area in a New Jersey commuter suburb, 18 miles west of Manhatten. Many, many people in our township took the NJ Transit trains to ‘the City’ to work, lots of them downtown in the Wall St financial district and the WTC. That morning I took my son to school (the school day begins earlier than in the UK) and the sky was brilliantly blue.
My husband’s office was in Times Square where he worked for the Reuters news agency (now Thomson Reuters) but that morning he had to meet clients for Goldman Sachs at the World Trade Center and they were all going to the Reuters main technical centre in Long Island.
I was getting ready to go the the local Newcomer’s Club meeting as I was the membership secretary and was in the shower when the phone rang. It was my husband. He was in a limo with his clients and he said “Quick, turn the TV on....the car radio isn’t working and we can see a lot of smoke coming out of the World Trade Center...can you find out what’s going on”?
The radio (station WOR 710AM) was on in the bedroom and the radio jock said ‘we’re getting reports that a plane has crashed into one of the twin towers...it’s probably one of those small planes which take tourists on leisure flights around the city’...then another guy at the station said...’we’re getting reports from our chopper that there is a big hole in the building...that was no small plane’. (Helicopters fly around the city and major highways to report on traffic and to get to the scene of breaking news quickly). I turned on the small TV in our bedroom and was shocked to see the size of the hole. I told my husband and he terminated the call.
The radio jock was also an amateur pilot and said “on such a clear day I know that a pilot can see the twin towers from 50 miles away. This can’t possibly be an air traffic control mistake, it sounds like it could be something deliberate’. Then someone on the radio or TV - I had both turned on - said that it was thought to be a Boeing 767. I’ve been a passenger on those planes and was aware of just how large they are.
I went down to the kitchen to get the car keys and put the radio on for a few seconds....to hear the radio jock cry out in alarm as the second plane hit the South tower. I remember driving in a state of shock to my meeting - which was promptly cancelled but some of the women whom had arrived had no idea what had been happening. One woman fainted when she heard as her husband was working at the WTC and she couldn’t get in touch with him. Someone had put a TV on and we saw the first tower collapse.
I drove home but I was shaking. The radio was reporting that air space was closed, all flights were being grounded and international flights not allowed into the US, but that 8 flights seemed to be missing as they were not responding to air traffic control. Our cell phones weren’t working but our landline was; there was a message on our answerphone from the house parent at my daughter’s boarding school in England (we relocated from the Far East to the US when she was 16 so she went to boarding school for sixth form). My daughter was hysterical as she thought her dad had been killed (a few weeks earlier she had gone up to the viewing gallery on the roof on one of the towers with her dad). Also messages from friends in Singapore and France. Then I put the TV on to see the North tower fall.
I then had a call from the school to collect my son as they were closing. I walked with a neighbour whose husband worked for the British firm ‘Eurobrokers’ on the 84th floor of the South tower and she was worried as she hadn’t heard from him. My son said that all the kids thought that the teachers just wanted to watch TV. Many children had parents working in the city of course. By the time I got home we had lost a number of TV channels as they were transmitted from the huge antennas on the roof of the WTC.
The trains had pretty much stopped. My husband called and had seen one of the towers collapse. The Goldman Sachs guys were trying to get to their Disaster Recovery Centre and my spouse was trying to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get back to his office in Times Square against the hordes of people escaping the city. Eventually he made it back to the office and all the huge screens in Times Square were showing the events unfold in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania. He was told that his office (a tower block, 3 Times Square which also had BBC TV studios) was being evacuated as it and the area was considered a potential terrorist target.
Meanwhile I was just glued to the TV. Manhatten was shut down, the mass transit was suspended into and out of the city and my husband was trying to find a way to get across the Hudson River. He didn’t get home until about 8.30pm. I remember President Bush addressing the nation. I took our dog for a walk at 10pm and the police had put chalk marks on the tyres of the few cars left at the train station, 2 blocks from our house. One train arrived and one person got off. He was discombobulated and asked me where the Short Hills Mall was it was the only place he could think of to get his wife to pick him up. It was at the far end of town, not walkable from the station, so we went back to my house and I drove him there.
Sleep was impossible. By the next morning there were posters up in our neighbourhood with photos of people who were missing. I bought a copy of the New York Times (and still have it, a piece of history). Collections were being made in our town for T shirts, food and drinks for the rescue crews and for dog food for the cadaver dogs. My husband volunteered to spend a day downtown handing out drinks etc. but there was very little for him to do as it was a recovery effort and not a rescue one.
He discovered that his boss was sick on 9/11 and was supposed to have gone to the Risk Waters conference at the Windows on the World restaurant floors (102nd and 103rd). He sent a guy - who had the same name - to replace him at the conference. He perished.
My neighbour who worked for Eurobrokers was aware that something had happened in the North tower, but wasn’t sure what was going on. The fire alarms went off on his floor (84th of South tower) and he didn’t feel comfortable and decided to leave. It took him well over an hour to get down the stairs....meanwhile an announcement came over the tannoy that it was a false alarm and that personnel could return to their desks. He said that almost all the Japanese colleagues from his floor returned upstairs. He chose not to. It turned out that the terrorist piloting the second plane ‘strafed’ (tilted) the wings to create more impact and the 84th floor was hit. The woman at the Newcomer’s Club meeting eventually heard that her (British) husband survived. Sadly in the next town over a British guy working at the WTC - I think his name was Ian Thompson or Thomson - perished.
Another British expat family resident in neighbouring Chatham, New Jersey, also suffered a personal tragedy. The husband (sorry I’ve forgotten his name) was killed at the WTC. The wife and young children discovered that they would have to be deported back to the UK; they had filed for Green Cards but were still awaiting approval and were therefore still on visas. The visas are terminated when the main visa holder dies. The wife and children wanted to stay in the US; they were very involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the congregation were very supportive; they arranged meetings with the State Senator and other government officials and were given special dispensation to remain in the USA.
For many weeks afterwards the single bell would ring at the Roman Catholic Church 2 blocks behind my house. There were dozens of funeral and memorial services.....empty coffins as there were few intact bodies. The posters on the lamp posts and telegraph poles became tatty. If I was driving on the Interstate 78 near Newark airport or to go to IKEA I kept looking for the twin towers which were no longer there.....but for months afterwards there was smoke rising from the rubble.
I also remember the twin blue laser lights pointing into the sky every 9/11 afterwards. Our town put up plaques at Millburn and Short Hills train stations (as did all the towns on the train lines) with the names of the deceased, for ‘those that rode the rails that morning and did not return’ (or very similar words). Also a tree. Every 9/11 an American flag is placed next to the flag, with flowers, candles and a small pile of stones for the Jewish dead.