A 9/11 Story (9/8/21)

Twenty years ago on September 11, 2001, at a little before 9:00am, a colleague (Dr. Karen Pollack) and I were at a professional conference on distance education in a Manhattan hotel on 5th Avenue. I was in an unused conference room preparing for the day. The folding doors to the room were half-way open when I heard a commotion outside and went to investigate. I saw a large group of people in an adjacent bar area, some pointing at the TV over the bar, others talking to each other about what they just saw and heard on the TV, all with distressed looks on their faces. On the TV was a special report that an airliner had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, soon followed by video of the tower with smoke venting from it near the top.

I found my colleague. We decided to walk to the east in order to look down 6th Avenue toward the Twin Towers two miles to the south. Many people on the street were doing the same, pointing and talking. We could see smoke rising, but did not have a view of either tower, so we walked back to the hotel. As we walked we each attempted to call home, but there was no cell phone reception.

Arriving back at the conference hotel, more bad news: another airliner had crashed into the South Tower and the discussion on the TV in the bar was shifting from accidental crashes to speculations about a terrorist attack (the North Towers was previously attacked in 1993). We continued to watch the TV news only to learn of the airliner crash into the Pentagon.

My colleagues and I had hotel rooms and a vehicle across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Initially, a lock-down of Manhattan was announced, but many of the people in the hotel doubted it would last very long given the large number of commuters who would be stranded in the city. We decided to walk west to the river to wait hopefully for the lock-down to be lifted and access to a ferry.

At the ferry docks outside of the Javits Center, we were two of thousands of people with the same idea. FBI officers in tactical gear and with automatic long-guns were enforcing the lock-down, but also organizing the crowd into lines that snaked back and forth as if they expected the lock-down to be lifted. The officers patrolled up and down the lines looking for anything suspicious, while those commuters with portable radios kept others informed of further developments - the collapse of each towers and an airliner crash in western Pennsylvania that appeared to be connected.

As I remember, we were in line about three hours before the lock-down was lifted and the ferries began to run, and another four or five hours before we were able to get on a ferry to cross to the New Jersey side. The ferry we caught did not go to the dock outside our hotel, but further north, so once on the Jersey side of the river we had a few miles walk south to the hotel, arriving as the sun was setting.

While we were in line, we were able to pick up a cell signal (probably from New Jersey) that we used to get messages back to our families that we were OK and would be heading back the next morning through a staff assistant (Nancy Thomas) at the Penn State World Campus where we both worked.

While the events in Manhattan on September 11, 2001 were chaotic and daunting to experience, looking back my colleague and I were never in significant danger. The danger was faced by the thousands of Americans, many of whom died, who were aboard the four airliners and in the Twin Towers, by the first responders who rushed into the fray on that day and later worked “the pile,” and by those who served in Afghanistan in subsequent years.

Photos Source: <https://www.history.com/news/september-11-attacks-photos>