Sunday, August 28, 2011
9/11 memories and emotions have not faded
Ten years ago, Postmedia News reporter Douglas Quan was living in New York City when two hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade enter towers. He spent the next several months filing reports on the city's recovery. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Quan revisited some of the New Yorkers he interviewed and found others who experienced the attack first-hand to talk about their recollections of that day and how it changed their lives.
NEW YORK — The way Brian Clark remembers it, the moment of impact from the second plane was like a double explosion — "a loud boom, boom."
In an instant, the building torqued, the floor buckled, and the walls ripped at jagged angles. Lights, speakers and air-conditioning ducts dropped from the ceiling. Chalky, throat-burning dust filled the air.
Then, for about five seconds, the building seemed to sway toward the Hudson River.
Clark, a Toronto native and then-executive vice-president of Euro Brokers on the 84th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center, braced himself.
"The thought went through my mind. We're going to fall over."
For many New Yorkers who experienced first-hand the terror of two hijacked planes slamming into both towers of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, toppling both and killing nearly 3,000, the memories and emotions of that day have not faded.
As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, several New Yorkers — Canadians and Americans — agreed to share with Postmedia News their recollections of that day and how it changed their lives.
Among them: a rookie firefighter who lost several of his colleagues, a city sanitation worker who spent months clearing debris out of "The Hole," a college student who lost his father — his "best friend,"— and Clark, a businessman whose instincts saved not only his life but that of a stranger.
***
They all remember the weather: blue-skied and sunny.
Kristen Frederickson, an Indiana native and art history instructor, had just dropped off her five-year-old daughter, Avery, at P.S. 234.
At 8:46 a.m., she was standing on the corner of Greenwich and Chambers talking to another mother, when an "incredible noise" drowned out their conversation.
It was American Airlines Flight 11 screaming overhead, heading straight for the World Trade Center's north tower a few blocks away.
"We both shouted that it would bank, that there was room," she said.
But it didn't.
Clark was sitting at his desk in the south tower when his peripheral vision glimpsed a swirl of flames just outside his window. Then he saw singed papers fluttering through the air.
In those initial moments, his reaction wasn't panic but more a sense of wonderment. Did a welder just hit a gas line up above?
Within minutes, television news reports suggested a small plane, possibly a Cessna, had crashed into the north tower.
But Clark and his colleagues looked out their windows and saw the "ring of fire" around the upper — roughly 93rd to 99th — floors of the other tower and knew something bigger than a Cessna had just sliced into that building.
His colleagues reported some people were jumping out of windows. Clark couldn't bear to look.
An announcement on the public-address system said people in the south tower were not in danger and could return to their desks. But most of the 250 people in Euro Brokers' offices that morning evacuated anyway.
Clark was among the 50 or so who stayed behind. After the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, he had volunteered to be part of his
office's fire-safety team. He called his wife to tell her that he was OK.
***
At the University of Delaware, student Geoff Robson was awakened by his then-girlfriend. She was crying.
"Is your dad at the World Trade Center today?" she asked.
"Yeah, what's going on?"
She couldn't get any more words out. She turned on the TV.
Geoff saw the gaping hole in the side of the north tower and the huge plumes of smoke. He immediately called his mother.
Geoff's father, Donald Robson, a Toronto native and diehard Blue Jays fan, was a partner in the Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage firm on the 103rd floor of the north tower. The two had spoken just three days earlier when Donald called to wish his son a happy birthday.
"He and I used to speak on the phone a couple of times a week," the younger Robson said. "He was my best friend."
A couple of blocks south of the World Trade Center in Battery Park City, trial lawyer Ann Schofield Baker, also a Toronto native, was in her 26th-floor apartment waiting for a delivery of antique furniture when the first plane hit.
Because her apartment faces away from the World Trade Center, she couldn't see what happened, but she felt it.
"I felt the whole building shake and this incredible noise. It kind of sounded like — if you have ever heard a garbage truck bang into something in an alley. Really, really loud."
Initial TV news reports described it as a small plane, so Schofield Baker didn't think much of it. But she kept her TV tuned in to the Today Show.
Minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., she happened to be watching when United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower around the 78th
floor, unleashing a massive fireball.
Her reaction was instant.
"We were under attack."
****
Inside the Euro Brokers office on the 84th floor, Clark, who had been talking to a colleague on the trading floor, braced himself in a football player's stance as he felt the building tilt to one side and then return to vertical.
"Whether it really happened or not, I don't know, but it felt like a six-to eight-foot swing. And for those 10 seconds I was terrified."
He quickly whipped out the flashlight he'd put in his pocket earlier and led a small group of co-workers through the gag-inducing dust and debris for one of the stairwells.
Frederickson, who had rushed back to her daughter's school after the first plane hit, was standing in the school's lobby with other parents when the second plane hit.
"We ran home holding our children so they could not see the flaming buildings."
Fire crews streamed into lower Manhattan from all over the city. Among them was rookie firefighter Jimmy Ahrens, a New York native who had just one month to go in his probationary period.
Ahrens was stationed at Ladder Co. 7, Engine Co. 16 on East 29th Street in the Kips Bay neighbourhood. But on this day, he was attending a training class in Queens.
The firefighters got wind of trouble at the World Trade Center, and turned on the television just as the second plane hit the south tower.
"We all just took off," he said.
***
When Clark and his small group of co-workers from Euro Brokers reached the 81st floor, they encountered a heavyset woman and man struggling to go up the stairwell.
No way you'll make it by going down, she told them. Too much fire and smoke. The only way to go is up.
While they debated what to do, Clark was distracted by a faint scream.
"Help, is anyone there?" the voice said. "I'm buried."
The voice belonged to Stanley Praimnath, an executive of Fuji Bank, who worked on the 81st floor.
Moments earlier, Praimnath had seen United 175 heading straight for the building and dove under his desk for cover just as the plane slammed into the building a few floors below him.
Praimnath, temporarily deafened from the explosive impact, crawled across four office departments looking for a way out.
He saw the flicker from Clark's flashlight through the haze.
Clark grabbed co-worker Ron DiFrancesco, a Hamilton, Ont., native, and they headed toward the voice, pushing sideways through cracked drywall and debris.
As they did, the other members of the group decided to follow the heavyset woman's advice and go up instead of down.
Clark would never see them again.
The smoke was so thick, DiFrancesco stopped to catch his breath. He tried using the gym bag he was carrying to filter the air, but it didn't help. He retreated back to the stairwell and escaped on his own.
Somehow, Clark found himself in a bubble of fresh air and pushed forward.
"Can you see my hand?" Praimnath yelled out. Clark shone his flashlight down and onto his face.
"Hallelujah, I've been saved!" Praimnath screamed.
Praimnath then asked a question that caught Clark off guard. "One thing, I've got to know. Do you believe in Jesus Christ?"
Stammering a bit, Clark said: "Uh, I go to church every Sunday." A pretty "pathetic" answer, Clark says now with a chuckle.
There was no time to waste. Clark bent down and heaved Praimnath up and over a collapsed wall.
Still in a state of delirious relief, Praimnath gave Clark a big kiss on the cheek. He told Clark he always wanted a brother and then declared:
"You'll be my brother."
Clark, who had a puncture wound on his right palm, noticed Praimnath had suffered a similar injury to his left palm. He grabbed that hand and smooshed their palms together.
"We'll be blood brothers," Clark said.
***
Back on the 81st-floor landing, Clark shone his flashlight down the staircase to see if it was safe to descend. There was smoke and lots of debris, but no flames. The pair decided to keep going down.
On the 68th floor, they encountered Jose Marrero, one of Clark's co-workers, and another volunteer on the office's fire safety team, coming up the stairs. Marrero was carrying a walkie-talkie.
"Jose, where are you going?" Clark asked him.
Marrero said he could hear another one of their co-workers, Dave Vera, on the walkie- talkie calling for help upstairs.
"Dave's a big boy. He can get out," Clark said. "No, I'll be OK," Marrero said, continuing up the stairs. It was the last time Clark would see Marrero alive.
When the pair reached ground level, a fireman told them if they went out the doors they'd have to "go for it" because debris was falling
from above.
They made a run for it.
One-and-a-half blocks later, they stopped at a deli where they were given food and water.
As they headed to nearby Trinity Church for shelter, Praimnath turned around and looked up at the burning tower from which they had just escaped.
That tower could come down, he said.
Clark dismissed the suggestion. It's a steel structure. It won't.
Just at that moment — 9:59 a.m. — the south tower began its thunderous collapse.
They ran into the lobby of a nearby building as a giant cloud of dust reached them.
***
The dust cloud enveloped trial lawyer Schofield Baker's Battery Park City apartment building two blocks away.
Everything went dark.
"I could feel the building shaking. The smell was very acrid. It smelled like wet cement. I truly had no idea what it was," she said.
"It just truly never entered my consciousness it could be one of the towers falling."
Several minutes passed before she snuck a peek outside. All of lower Manhattan was covered in grey dust.
Schofield Baker quickly packed a few things in a bag and left her apartment. But a neighbour convinced her it was unsafe to go out. So she followed him back into his apartment, which faces the World Trade Center.
Looking out his windows, it dawned on her. She was staring at one tower when she should be seeing two.
Then she noticed the antenna atop the north tower begin to shift.
At 10:28 a.m., the second tower collapsed.
The two rushed across the hallway back to her apartment. Everything went dark again.
At that moment, Ahrens, the rookie firefighter, and his colleagues arrived on the scene in a commandeered city bus.
They, too, were hit by the wall of dust, and ducked into a store.
"You thought it was the end of the world," Ahrens said. "It was utter chaos down there."
Crew members tried to put out fires that had engulfed some of the smaller buildings near the collapsed towers but everyone had to be pulled back because of concerns other buildings might fall.
"It was overwhelming. Who in their wildest dreams thought something like that would happen?" Ahrens said.
No question, he recalled, that day "made me grow up quicker than I wanted to."
***
Several hours later, a volunteer firefighter told Schofield Baker and her neighbours there was a gas leak and buildings in the area could blow up.
With wet rags covering their mouths, they were quickly escorted out of the building, past flaming debris and airplane parts, to waiting rescue boats.
Cellphone service was a mess, agonizing for family members trying to get in touch with loved ones.
Robson, the University of Delaware student, had still had no luck
getting through to his father.
But as he scrambled to make his way home to Manhasset, New York — first taking a train, then hitching rides — he remained "100 per cent"
confident his father was fine. After all, Donald Robson had managed to walk down 102 floors during the '93 bombing.
"He was going to come home somehow because he had done it before."
***
At Ground Zero, the monumental task of clearing the debris began.
Senior city sanitation worker John Signorello, a native New Yorker, hardly recognized lower Manhattan as he reported for duty from his home on Staten Island.
The only people on the dust-covered streets were soldiers, emergency workers and construction crews.
"It was complete silence. It was pitch black. And all they had up was lights run from generators. It was such an eerie feeling," he said.
Signorello was assigned to help clear debris along West Side Highway with his front-end loader.
But where to begin?
"We went down there with equipment that normally we consider big and it did nothing" against the huge piles of smoldering, twisted steel, he said.
"You were there to help and those first couple of days you felt helpless."
Rookie firefighter Ahrens felt pretty helpless too.
For several days, he and his colleagues worked "the pile" in a
frustrating search for survivors.
Families of missing firefighters came by the firehouse in search of
answers — but there was little Ahrens and his colleagues could offer
them.
***
Eventually, hope dimmed of finding any survivors in the rubble, and families and employers began to take stock of their losses.
Ahrens lost nine co-workers from the East 29th Street firehouse.
Clark, one of only four people working above the south tower's 80th floor to survive, learned 61 Euro Brokers employees had died.
Robson, the college student, refused to give up hope about his dad. He scoured online listings of names of people who were in hospital.
He found a "Donald Robinson" in a hospital in New Jersey. That's got to be him, he told himself. They just have his name wrong.
But it wasn't.
Eventually, a family friend came over and said it was probably time to make plans for "the next step."
"That was a tough pill to swallow, I remember. Because you're holding on to hope and that was kind of taking the next step towards
acceptance and I don't think I was prepared for it. I don't think anyone is ever prepared for that."
Robson did take comfort in one fact.
During their last phone conversation a few days earlier, "my last words to him were, 'I love you, Dad.' And his were, 'I love you, Geoff.'
"I had 22 good years with the guy."
***
After the debris from the West Side Highway was cleared, Signorello was assigned to haul debris away from Ground Zero with a dump truck.
As he sat idling waiting for his next load, he often had a first-hand view — sometimes several times a day — of bodies being pulled from the rubble.
Each time, workers followed the same routine.
Everyone would stop what they were doing. It would go silent. The body would be placed on a stretcher and covered with an American flag. As it was being walked out, everyone would line up and salute.
"Everyone got the same respect."
The images weighed heavily on Signorello. So did the smell from the site, a "heavy, burnt" smell that even crept into Signorello's sleep, waking him.
"I couldn't get rid of that smellfor a long time."
Signorello's wife, Linda, saw something change in her husband.
"He doesn't discuss a lot of things and he doesn't show a lot of emotion. But you live with someone everyday you know it, you know the
look on their face, where their head is at. It's not there. It's thinking about something else."
***
Deserved or not, New York City sometimes has a reputation of being a little gruff.
But after 9/11, the city's residents came together like they had never done before.
All along West Side Highway, the route Signorello often drove in his dump truck, citizens waved "thank you" signs.
Companies flew in families of victims, putting them up in hotels as they waded through their affairs.
The Canadian Association of New York helped organize a huge event called "Canada Loves New York" attended by thousands, including former prime minister Jean Chretien, and held at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan.
As Afghanistan, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden dominated front pages of newspapers and the U.S. launched a military offensive in that country, residents in the West Village rallied behind Abdul Nusraty, the longtime owner of an Afghan import store.
Nusraty, who moved to the U.S. with his family just prior to the Soviet occupation in 1979, did not have an easy go of it in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
A man in his early 20s walked into his store, accusing him of being a terrorist.
"I tell him, 'How you know?' I say, 'Terrorists make you hush. I make you hush right now, get out!' "
He said the man ran out of the store.
Frederickson was among those who came in to Nusraty's store to show their support.
She bought a pink and lavender a hat — or colah — for her five-year-old daughter, Avery, who took the hat to class for show-and-tell.
***
Ten years later, any feelings of anger these people may once have held are not evident.
Now retired, Clark, the Euro Brokers executive, says 9/11 taught him to live for today.
"I've been blessed that the gift I've been given is that I don't dwell on the past, I don't worry about the future. It leaves me with the present. I live everyday in the present. I appreciate every moment."
Same holds true for Robson.
He works as an associate at CB Richard Ellis in Manhattan, but he also volunteers on the board of Tuesday's Children, a non-profit set up to provide mentoring, scholarships and other support for children of 9/11 victims.
"There are a lot of kids who were still in the womb when they lost their father or were babies," Robson said. "These children are still in need of guidance. It's not just money, even. It's volunteering time, taking them to a ball game, being a role model."
That doesn't mean some survivors don't still suffer a bit of anxiety.
When the presidential plane, Air Force One, did several low-flying manoeuvres over lower Manhattan a few years ago as part of a photo-op, it brought back all of the panic, lawyer Schofield Baker said.
It kept swooping and turning around, "like it was picking a target," she said. "So stupid."
Now living in London, England, Frederickson, says she still is anxious about leaving her daughter Avery, now 15, at school.
"Even now," she said via email, "I am much happier when she gets home each day."
Signorello, the sanitation worker, surprised his daughter recently when he became emotional recalling his 9/11 experience.
"I actually just fell apart. She went silent. I don't think she knew the way I felt until then," he said. "It was not something I would show. You try not to show that side, you try to keep the macho side up, but it just didn't work."
The images of bodies being pulled out of the rubble, body parts on the street, the fear and panic on people's faces, "it's something you never forget."
***
Everyone has different plans for how they will mark Sept. 11 this year.
Some will park themselves in front of TV and listen to the roll call of the names of each victim.
Frederickson, as she always does, will have a phone conversation with the other mother she was standing with when the first plane hit.
"We just speak to say we remember," she said.
Firefighter Ahrens, now a captain, will do what he's done every year. He'll go down and listen to the FDNY pipes and drums band play at Ground Zero and watch as the city lights up the night sky with two vertical beams of bluish-white light, a tribute to those whose lives were lost.
Following a tradition he started several years ago, Robson will start his day with a long jog through Central Park and have a conversation in his head with his dad.
"By the end of that run I'm at a place of peace with regard to everything that's happened," he said.
He'll then go to church. And then go to the Jets game — because that's what his dad would want him to do.
And Clark?
He has accepted an invitation to attend church services at Bethel Assembly of God in Queens with Stanley Praimnath, the man he helped escape from the south tower.
His blood brother.
Dquan@postmedia.com
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A moving tribute to those who survived and those we lost that day. Thank you.
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