By Erin Schulte
Erin Schulte, 26, is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal interactive, where she covers the stock market. She is a 1998 graduate of the journalism college. This story, which ran in the Lincoln Journal Star in the week following the attack on the World Trade Center towers, originated as an e-mail message to family and friends.
When I got a new job working for The Wall Street Journal in 1999, I worried that I would miss the excitement of my general-assignment reporting job in Arkansas, where I had covered natural disasters of every stripe, plane crashes and, of course President Clinton.
On Sept. 11, unfortunately, I came much too close to the biggest news story in the world.
The Wall Street Journal offices are in the World Financial Center, just a few hundred feet and directly across the street from the World Trade Center. From the windows near my eleventh-floor desk, I had an unimpeded view of the once-imposing Twin Towers.
Tuesday, Sept. 11, I stepped off the subway at the World Trade Center stop about half an hour before the first plane hit. I walked through the basement mall of the World Trade Center, noticing the 50 percent off sale at Victoria’s Secret and passing my pharmacy and the place I sometimes buy sushi. Silly things to think about now.
I threw my bag at my desk and was chatting with a co-worker. All of a sudden we heard a loud rumbling overhead. We looked at each other, confused. Jets often fly over, but this one rumbled the floor and rattled the windows. Then I heard what sounded like a sonic boom. I ducked next to the window to get a better view of the sky, and the first tower exploded in flames. We thought it was another bomb, like the 1993 attack. I grabbed my bag, which contained gym clothes, my cell phone, an apple and a bottle of water (all of which would come in handy later) to run out the door, and my editor said, “Sit down and write the early market story to include the explosion!”
I sat.
The fire-safety director came on the intercom to tell us to stay in the building, that there was no danger. Most were glued to CNN, which told us it had been an airplane, not a bomb. We foolishly thought it must have been a small commercial plane whose pilot fell asleep or lost control. We couldn’t fathom that someone would intentionally fly into the building, but looking back we know it would take a determined effort to actually hit the slim, silver target at that angle. Everyone was nervous.
Then I heard more rumbling and another boom. The second tower was aflame. I thought perhaps the plane had blown up and caught the other tower on fire. At this time, the safety director shouted to evacuate. Everyone ran for the stairs. I grabbed my bag, a notebook and a pen.
Outside, I found two co-workers. We decided we’d get started reporting, as we didn’t know the worst was definitely ahead of us. We still were not thinking clearly enough to realize that it was a terrorist attack and not some freak accident. I had no idea until more than an hour later that the Pentagon also had been hit.
There were huge chunks of metal flying out of the buildings. Then I saw the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in my life: People were flinging themselves from the top of the towers, which are more than 100 stories high.
Men still had their briefcases strapped over their shoulders; women’s purses trailed behind them. They looked to be the size of little worry dolls. I cannot erase the image from my head of one man’s twisting body, in a black suit and tie, falling and hitting a building on the way down. Some struggled as they fell, and others were limp.
Before, it had seemed surreal and everyone assumed the workers could escape the towers down the stairs. But now, women were screaming and crying and falling on the ground. People were running backwards in horror toward the Hudson River.
There were body parts on the ground, some near airplane seats and identifiable as human, in a parking lot. Hands and feet. Two of my co-workers (but thankfully not I) saw a woman’s decapitated head.
Police pushed the crowds toward the water. At this point I desperately wanted to find my co-workers, as I was sickened and on the verge of panicking. I ran down the promenade by the Hudson River, toward the Statue of Liberty, with the crowd.
Paramedics were propping up the injured on the promenade’s park benches. I saw a man who had had part of his head sheared off by falling metal. I got about three blocks away and found three of my editors. They were far enough away that they hadn’t seen the body parts or the people jumping and falling from the top of the towers. I told them what I had seen, and they sent me to an editors’ nearby apartment to call our office in Brussels and give them a firsthand account.
We went into the apartment, and I called my mother in South Dakota. Then I called Brussels. Mom had been frantic as I hadn’t been able to get through on a cell phone earlier to tell my family I was alive. All the lines had been blocked. Later I found out that people trapped in the rubble of the towers were calling their families from cell phones, but rescuers hadn’t yet found them.
A few very long minutes passed, and we were huddled in the living room trying to figure out where to go. A third frightening rumble filled our heads. The apartment’s picture window faces the towers, and we watched the first tower collapse only a few blocks away. Metal and glass shot outward, floor by floor, crushing toward the ground.
A huge, billowing wall of ash and smoke rushed through the street, pushing twisted metal and fiery paper in front of it. A horde of people sprinted ahead of it, dropping packages and running out of their shoes. Later, an acquaintance told me his wife and his seven-week-old baby were in this crowd; two men toppled the baby carriage and dumped the baby on the ground. (Both wife and baby are safe now.)
After a few seconds, we realized the cloud of debris wasn’t going to stop before it reached us. We thought it would blow out the windows and sprinted for the inside of the building, tumbling down the stairs to the basement.
All of Battery Park, the residential area there, is built on a landfill — made from the earth dug out to build the World Trade Center. I felt very far from safe in the basement as they were warning that the entire area might collapse into the river.
People came running in from outside to the basement we were crouched in, and a girl told me that the whoosh of debris and flames had forced people to jump over the barriers into the Hudson to get away from it. I met a Texas man, Jeff, who had been staying in the Marriott at the World Trade Center. He was covered in the thick white soot. He hadn’t been able to get in touch with his family and knew no one in New York. Since I didn’t want to stay there for fear that the towers would come down on our building and flatten all the upper floors on top of us, we ran upstairs to quickly use the phone. He called his family and started sobbing; he had seen bodies fall all around him while fleeing the hotel.
The smoke was so thick outside we couldn’t see for about half an hour. No one knew what to do, where it would be safe to go. Then security knocked on the door and told us they were evacuating lower Manhattan. We were hustled outside and herded onto a police boat to New Jersey. People held dogs, suitcases, parrots. They left us on a pier in Jersey City.
We walked to a park where they handed out hunks of bread and processed cheese. I felt like a refugee. Still, I was so grateful that I was one of the ones lucky enough to be offered something to eat, though my roiling stomach wouldn’t have accepted a thing.
We went to a nearby apartment building and watched the news; we also spent hours on the phone talking to our friends and families. Later, work called and told us they needed us at the Dow Jones corporate campus near Princeton, N.J., where I am still working. I couldn’t get back to my home in Brooklyn.
A day after the attack, I sent out an e-mail to friends and family describing the events. The e-mail apparently was circulated far and wide, and I’ve received letters from many people I don’t know — in Arkansas, in Oregon, in Iowa, in Nebraska, in Oklahoma City, in Great Britain, Australia, and in Austria — saying they are praying for New York.
New York says: Thank you.