September 11th

We didn't have the Chevy Nova then, so Linda was still driving me to work, and Thomas was still dictating the choice of music on the CD player. As we arrived at Dow Jones, the CD ended, and the radio cut in for a split second, just around 9am. Afterwards, we remember just hearing the words "South Tower of the World Trade Centre" which meant nothing to us out of context.

Inside Factiva, everything seemed normal, although it didn't seem as busy as usual. I bought coffee in the Snack Bar, and heard the first snatch of conversation about a plane flying into the World Trade Centre. From that point on, the events gained a surreal momentum. Initially, people were starved of information at a time when every small snippet was seized upon...

Ironically, we are an information company, yet no-one could get to web sites like CNN and in some cases the phones were beginning to jam. We still didn't have a clear idea of what was happening, and that contributed to the real sense of horror and paranoia.

Since the US news sites were jammed, I suggested logging onto Sky News from the UK, at which point we all saw the first unbelievable pictures. By now, people had open lines to home and loved ones, and rumours and unconfirmed news items were creating a real sense of panic. At one point we heard that 8 airliners had been hijacked. But it was the sobering reality of the confirmed news and images that really brought home the unbelievable enormity of what was happening. Two planes hitting the towers - and therefore no accident - the Pentagon hit - all air traffic over the continental US grounded...

We are a news organisation, so there had to be TV's somewhere in the building ? Clare Hart, Factiva's CEO, had her TV on, but somehow it seemed to be inappropriate to be watching TV over the big boss' shoulder. Some people went down to the gym to watch the screens over the treadmills, while I heard that the DJ Newswire desk in Building 1 had TV's. I walked over to join a large crowd watching three or four screens almost silently, eyes flicking back between the different channels, afraid to miss something, and unable to look away.

Before the buildings fell, people knew that this was going to affect both the nation and individuals in a very deep way. Peter Smith watched as the offices of Marsh, his biggest customer, burned on the top of the North Tower - he knew, as so many of our Sales people did, that he would be asking how many of his contacts had died in that building, which he and others had visited so often.

As we watched the images, standing motionless and powerless, others busied themselves around us. The DJ office manager was taking inventory of PC's and moving desks, knowing that she would be preparing space for the Wall Street Journal Foreign Desk, who were based in 5 WTC, and would soon be relocated to Princeton - if they had survived.

I called Mum at the apartment, and told her to put on the TV. She looked at the pictures in horror, and tried to pass on what she was hearing from CNN. I kept the phone line open for about 45 minutes, while Mum sobbed down the line. Then the buildings fell, along with the walls of people's inhibitions.

So many of the events and emotions that followed that day were evidenced in the unfolding moments. The overwhelming sensation was of shock, of course, but also immediate grief and sadness. Everyone had a tale to tell, of people they knew, of visits that were to be made, of near misses, or not. My colleague Monica was concerned about a family member who was a NY Firefighter - she later discovered he had perished. I had planned a meeting for that day at WH Mercer, part of Marsh and based on 90th floor of 1 WTC. It was cancelled a week earlier.

The work day finished before lunch (really it finished at 8.48am) and in a very real sense, nothing else seemed important any more. Whilst things would get back to some kind of normality, again this was an emotion which would persist to a lesser extent throughout the nation in the following days - the idea that something incredibly significant in the world had irrevocably changed in a split second that morning, and the world would never be the same again.

The aftermath of September 11th was in itself incredibly unique - TV channels with news programs that lasted a week, day and night - the benefit programs (on the Friday, a Hollywood celebrity telethon was shown simultaneously on 38 of our cable channels) - but the thing that sticks most in my mind was the flags. Everywhere, in cars, on clothes, in yards and windows, shops, peoples houses, everywhere you looked people were flying their flag - for a few days at half mast - and then proudly and unashamedly, in a way which we couldn't do in England without being accused of racism and jingoism. Ask yourself, if someone down your street had a flag pole with a Cross of St George flying, you might feel a bit proud, but you probably wouldn't want to meet the guy in a dark alley. Here EVERYONE had a flag, and the overwhelming sensation was of a nation united in grief and resolution. Funny - this country has a population of 250 million, covers millions of square miles, has three time zones and fifty different states and almost as many accents - yet compare this sense of unity with the animosity or indifference between the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh !

We visited Ground Zero in April - long after the twisted iron skeleton of the buildings had been cleared away (although not before the last body bag had been brought out) on the last day of the Tower of Light tribute. Two powerful searchlights beaming up into the night sky in a ghostly remembrance of the buildings, yet carrying their light onwards to the heavens in honour of the people who died. Actually, it wasn't that impressive - the lights were not as powerful as they looked on TV, and, while having to compete with the glow of Manhattan's night sky, they looked - well, feeble. Yet that wasn't really the point. On that last night, the thousand or so people who had gathered looked at the tens of thousands of tributes and tokens that had been left by the surely millions who'd visited the site over the previous seven months, and left St. Paul's Church looking like a rather sad christmas tree of mourning.

In the wake of September 11th, we've had Anthrax, a Homeland Security department, multiple long security checks at the airports, the return of comedy to television, the knighting of Rudi Guiliani (a truly great man) and a hundred tribute books with a thousand moving photos. What we haven't had is the wish to forget what happened that day, where we were, and how we felt.  And rightly so.

Comments

[Lee Rogers]

A very moving and poignant read. Well written as always Chris. Love Lee