story1545.xml

story1545.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-08-29

I live in Westfield, NJ and take a daily bus into Port Authority Bus Terminal. Every day on the bus I would look at the Manhattan skyline before taking the long turn into the Lincoln Tunnel. That particular morning, I know I had my eyes closed. Although I am big Jets fan, I watched some of the Giants-Broncos game the night before on Monday Night Football. I was napping on the bus when we entered the tunnel about 8:35 AM. I rarely wear a watch and the first thing I do upon entering PA is to look up at the big clocks and see what time it is. I recall that the time that day was 8:46 AM (time the first plane hit). I walked out into the street (a beautiful sunny day) and walked a few blocks to my office. Since I am in the media business, we have CNN on in the lobby at all times. I saw the WTC with a big hole in it on TV and wondered if a small plane had hit it. The pilot must have a stroke or seizure and lost control. My thoughts went back to hearing about a plane once hitting the Empire State Buidling. I suggested to the receptionist that we switch to local NY coverage and I switched the channel. As each employee came into work they were greeted with a "did you see what happened to the WTC". I immediately called my wife and told her to turn on the TV. That was the last phone call I was able to make as the phone lines in NYC became extremely tied up. As my office watched, the 2nd plane hit. This was no longer an accident! I walked over to 5th Ave. and 39th street and you could see everyone on 5th Ave. looking down the street (about 3 miles) at both WTC Towers burning. It was at this point that I thought one of them was starting to lean. Could it topple over? We went back to the office and seconds later, the first tower collapsed. I went back to my desk and began getting e-mails from friends and relatives. I told them to call my wife. She had already gone up to my sons school to organize everyone to say the holy rosary. The word on the news was that NYC was being closed. No way in and no way out. Being in Times Square area, I thought we might be a target. Eventually, we hard that Penn Station was opening up in the afternoon. By this time bomb scares were being called in all over the city. NYC had turned into a war-zone! I managed to get a train back to NJ at 2 PM. A few of the passengers wore looks on their faces like theyhad seen hell and the dust and grime on their clothes indicated that they were a lot closer to the scene than I was. I got home and was greeted by my wife and kids. Each person that got off the train had someone waiting for them with a warm embrace. After watching more of the coverage by myself on TV I decided to take the kids to apark down the block. You could smell the burning jet fuel in the air. Turns out I only knew of 2 people that died that day in the towers. One guy from Cantor was the catcher on my little league team when I was 12 years old and one guy was a husband of a former co-worker. It was his first day on the job at work. To this day, I have not gone near the site, but I still see the skyline every morning and see the obvious void in downtown where the towers once stood proudly.