Monday, September 11, 2006

Memories of a Bleak Week in Manhattan

Here are a few notes I took on September 12, 2001. The only changes here are to make some of the fragments into full sentences and to clarify references that would be obscure to non-New Yorkers.

A group of families meeting in the Pierre Hotel to discuss 900-1000 employees missing, with nametags, “Scott Behrens looking for Jane Cananda…” A 30-year old woman found herself late for work to World Trade Center #2 coming to my church office in tears, “Everyone in my office is gone, and there’s no office. What do I do? How do I pray?” A church member on the phone in Chicago, doing business with a colleague in WTC 1, suddenly hears this: “There’s fire all around. I don’t know what’s happening. Here’s my home number, call my wife and tell her I love her.” Then the phone goes dead. I’ll never forget looking down 5th Avenue at 9:30am, in front of the Disney store, across from Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, as the World Trade Center smoked in the distance. Then at 10:15, only seeing smoke…
The scale of yesterday’s terrorist attack is immense. Reverberations throughout the city.

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