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2002-03-20

Recollections of Personal Experiences on September 11, 2001
J. Samuel Walker
Historian, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
March 15, 2002

I began the morning of September 11, 2002 in Davidson, NC. It was the third day of a research trip I had undertaken to conduct oral histories and collect documents relating to a book I was writing on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident of 1979. After doing an extensive interview in Knoxville, TN on September 9 and 10, I had driven in my rental car to Davidson to visit my son, a student at Davidson College. I awoke early on the morning of September 11 because I was driving to Aiken, SC to conduct another oral history and then to Atlanta to do research at the Jimmy Carter Library. My plan was to make it to Aiken by lunch time and then to Atlanta in time to see a baseball game between the Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies, for which I had purchased a ticket some weeks earlier. I looked forward to seeing the game because I had a great seat and the two teams were competing for a berth in the playoffs.
The morning started off routinely enough. As soon as I got on I-77 north of Charlotte at about 7 a.m. to head for Aiken, I hit a huge traffic jam. I felt right at home; I live in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and this was just like my daily commute on the beltway. When I finally made it through Charlotte, conditions improved greatly. As I drove south through and beyond Columbia, SC, I found little traffic, and to my annoyance, no radio stations that I cared to listen to. So I turned off the radio and cruised silently through sparsely populated south-central South Carolina. When I got bored enough, I decided to try to radio again to see I could find something that interested me.
As soon as I turned on the radio and heard the tone of the announcer?s voice I knew that something was dreadfully wrong. A woman (I think) was announcing that President Bush had been informed and had left the school he was visiting in Florida. Informed of what, I wondered? I soon found out when the station switched to reporters in New York who were describing the attacks on the World Trade Center. Information was sparse at that point, but it seemed clear that planes had deliberately crashed into the towers. Within a short time (I have no clear recollection of the exact times), I listened with horror to the live account of the collapse of the first tower. As I tried to assimilate this information, the station switched to the news from Washington. The sequence of events is vague in my mind?I might have heard about the attack on the Pentagon first. But the anxiety and incredulity I felt are still very vivid. With heart racing, I tried to call my wife, who works in downtown Washington, from a gas station, but of course I could not get through.
So here I was in the middle of nowhere, worried and helpless, with nothing to do but drive on. As I neared Aiken at about 11 a.m., I called John Austin, the subject of my oral history. We agreed to go ahead with our plans, and I drove to his house in the lovely and, at that point starkly serene, town of Aiken. From his house I was able to get through to my wife, who had had a long but uneventful trip home on the subway. She had also talked to our children and other members of my family. At that point I felt reassured about the safety of my family. The horror of the events was still difficult to fathom, however, especially after seeing films of the attacks on the towers for the first time on John?s television.
John, his wife Paula, and I had lunch at a restaurant in Aiken. We talked about Three Mile Island, which had taken on somewhat less urgency in my mind over the previous couple of hours. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant and welcome interlude, and I learned some things that were useful additions to the research for my book. Then I hit the road (namely I-20) for Atlanta. Once again, I traveled though lightly populated regions, and to my frustration, sometimes had trouble finding radio stations that carried news about the attacks. I did learn, however, that the Braves? game would not be played. This came as a relief because I wasn?t sure that I wanted to sit in a crowded stadium that evening, even in a great seat. Perhaps especially in a great seat.
I spent the evening of Sept. 11 watching televison in my hotel room. I wasn?t at all certain that the Carter Library would be open the next day and I was increasingly uncertain that I would be able to fly home from Atlanta on Sept. 13, as I had planned. The following morning Atlanta seemed amazingly normal, which was a source of considerable comfort. The Carter Library opened on schedule, and the staff, who did not realize that I was on an extended trip, was surprised to see me. They had assumed that I was coming from home and would be unable to fly to Atlanta. It was not, to put it mildly, a busy day at the Library?I was the only researcher in the reading room. The service I received from the staff archivists exceeded even their usual high standards, and I found documents on Three Mile Island that were of interest and value.
As I watched the news in my room that evening, the impact of the attacks hit close to home. The television networks ran streamers that listed the names and home towns of the victims, and I was unpleasantly jolted to see that the list included a family from my home town of University Park, Maryland. University Park is a small and close-knit community, and although I did not know the family personally, it was shocking to see their names. Charles Falkenberg, his wife Leslie Whittington, and their daughters Zoe, 8, and Dana, 3, were aboard the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. Whittington was a professor at Georgetown University, and she and her family were on their way to Australia as a part of a sabbatical leave. They had taken off from Dulles airport for what was surely a much-anticipated adventure on the other side of the world. They got only as far as the Pentagon, and the thought that haunted me was that I hoped those two little girls did not understand what was happening. The thought that angered me was that the terrorists boarded the plane with that family, and other families, fully intending to murder them.
On the evening of Sept. 12, it was still uncertain when the Atlanta airport, like all other airports, would re-open. I decided it was better to drive home than to wait to see if the airport would be open in the morning. I called Avis, from whom I rented my car, to explain my situation. To the company?s credit, the Avis representative told me without hesitation that this was a national emergency and I was welcome to drop off my car any place that was convenient. The following morning I left my hotel at 6 a.m., and drove for twelve hours to my office in Rockville, Maryland. It was a source of considerable relief to find that the 18-story building in which I worked was still standing.
Davidson, NC