story10622.xml

story10622.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-05-26

I worked in a building that had a corner kitchen that faced Manhattan. At the time, the twin towers were the only part of the city that we could see from our office. I was sitting at my desk when my co-worker in the cubicle behind mine said "Oh my God, a plane just hit the World Trade Center." He was reading on CNN.com. He came to my cubicle and we looked and read the article together, this was at 8:50. At that moment, my mother called from California (as I am a native Californian.) She was exercising and watching tv before going to work and called to tell me what was going on. She wanted to know where my husband was and if any of my husband's family worked in the buildings. I said I didn't know and I needed to call my husband. I would call her back...........I was about one month pregnant at the time and emotional enough, I just started crying while trying to visualize and conceptualize what was going on in that building. No one knew at that time what kind of plane hit. I saw my supervisor and I said, A plane hit the WTC, and he thought I was joking. We all went back to the kitchen and watched the building burning, already a trail of smoke heading out to the Atlantic.

I couldn't reach my husband, about that time is when all of the phone lines started to jam. He was going to Jersey and sometimes he would go around the tip of Manhattan to the Holland tunnel -- which made me nervous. At my desk, my mom gets through and is crying and says another plane hit. At that time I hear people in the office screaming that they saw the explosion. About 10 minutes later, they excused all of us. Those of us that lived in the city, myself included, were lucky to leave when we did, as the city limits were closed off about 1/2 hour later and I would have been stranded on Long Island for three days.

My husband was ok, his family was ok, and anyone we knew personally was ok. My supervisor's uncle was FDNY and was killed and several friends and other relatives of our friends were also killed.

The events I remember so clearly were the smells that drifted into our apartment in the following days, being locked in our house for several days, the absence of air traffic (we lived very close to La Guardia), the sounds of sirens, and funeral processions. Guillani was at a funeral by my house for one of the fire chiefs and all surrounding intersections were blocked off - these little things just kept pounding into our head how our everday lives were affected. I felt so helpless sitting in my apartment watching supporters, candlelight vigils in Manhattan and we couldn't be there - the center of the world's eye and it was only 6 miles away (we lived in Queens.)

I could make phone calls in and around NYC and the general east coast but it was difficult for my mom to call me from the west coast. Several of her co-workers had children working in Manhattan that her friends could not get a hold of so she would ask me to call these people and check on them. I was calling people I didn't know, really just checking to see if they were alive. I called one girl that normally worked on the 98th floor of the WTC. She luckily was late that day.

When my husband and I moved to California to be closer to my family the following January, I thanked God that I was there that day. What an experience to see, smell, and hear what I heard. A moment in time I reflect on often, sometimes daily, those people I shared the office with will be in my hearts forever and that city will be the most wonderful place in my memory.