Here's a partial summary of my account of the morning of September 11, 2001, including an email that I sent from my Manhattan apartment that afternoon. I post this, or an expanded version of it, every year on this date.
______________________________
The
morning of September 11, 2001 began like most other mornings for me at the
time. I woke at 6:30 am and spent 32
minutes riding my exercise bicycle in my living room on East 18th Street in Manhattan while watching
TV. I then showered and got ready for
work at AIG’s downtown offices. Every
morning, just before leaving my apartment, I’d rip a page off my
horoscope-of-the-day calendar to see what the stars were predicting for
me. This routine was attributable to my
mother, who passed away in 1993. She
used to put a horoscope-of-the-day calendar into my Christmas stocking every
year starting in about 1980. After my
mother died, my sister Maria continued the tradition. My guess is that I had read my daily
horoscope almost every morning for 21 consecutive years.
That
day, something very strange happened even before I left my apartment. I was about to rip off September 10th’s page
to read the new day’s prediction when I said to myself, for no discernible
reason, “The world is different now, I’m not going to read horoscopes anymore,
I don’t believe in them.” With that
thought, I unceremoniously threw the entire calendar into the garbage. This was the first time in 21 years that I
knowingly refused to read my daily horoscope.
Outside
on Third Avenue
I flagged a cab and headed south to my office at AIG in the financial district,
in keeping with my routine. I want to
emphasize here that I don’t claim to have ESP or any special ability to see the
future, but there was an unusual aspect to my commute. Riding down Third Avenue (which turns into
Bowery Street in lower Manhattan), there was a point in Chinatown, called
Chatham Square, where the Twin Towers would become visible from the cab after
being obscured earlier by buildings. In
my mind’s eye, I would regularly imagine the Towers exploding from a high floor
just as I entered Chatham Square. I didn’t know what would cause an explosion
and I certainly never thought that a plane would be responsible. Nonetheless, I was envisioning a large
eruption of gray and black smoke. This
vision was the only reason that I knew the name of Chatham Square (whose sign was rather
obscured): I felt strongly that someday it would be an important detail and I
took special note of it. Over the
previous three years, whenever I’d arrive in Chatham Square to see the Towers unharmed
I would literally breathe a sigh of relief.
Even on September 11, 2001 I had that (false) sense of security upon
seeing them intact.
My
next significant memory of that morning occurred shortly before 9 am. My home phone service had inexplicably been
malfunctioning for a few days and I finally got around to calling Verizon. I was dialing customer service when a
colleague, Jason Brown, entered my office to tell me that he heard on the radio
that a plane had hit one of the World
Trade Center
Towers. I looked out my office window and saw dense clouds
of paper fluttering high across the sky towards Brooklyn. It reminded me of the many ticker tape
parades that I had seen along lower Broadway after a championship season or
during a world dignitary’s visit. But I
knew there was no parade that day.
Something was wrong.
A
bunch of us went downstairs to get a better look. Standing on the sidewalk in front of 175
Water Street with an ever-growing crowd of upward-looking gawkers (much like
the throngs in a 1950s science fiction film watching descending UFOs on a city
street), I remember thinking, or perhaps hoping, that helicopters with fire
hoses would show up…of course, they didn’t.
Mesmerized,
a colleague, John Feniello, shook his head and said, “That fire is going to
burn for days.” Of course, he had no
idea, nor did I, that the fire would burn not for mere days but for months –
but not high in the sky, rather much lower, among the ruins of the Towers. But it seemed logical at the time; it was the
only thing that we could believe.
When
the second plane hit the South
Tower, any doubts I had
that this was a terrorist attack were immediately erased. We knew the country was under attack. Shrill screams could be heard and genuine
panic started to set in, even though the worst was yet to come. Security guards announced that our building
was closing for the day and told everyone to leave the area immediately. Much of the crowd started heading toward the
ferries that were gathering at the foot of Wall Street. Others started walking uptown toward subways
or buses that might, or might not, be in service. People also began walking across several
bridges to escape the city.
It
was a horror movie coming to life.
But
I couldn’t leave, not at first anyway. I
wanted to watch the firefighters battling the blazes. There’s no rational explanation, but I didn’t
want to move until I knew that the situation was under control.
After
a while of just staring up at the Towers, I heard a deep rumbling, like
gigantic concrete bowling pins colliding.
The noise didn’t last long, maybe five seconds at most. Before I knew what was happening, the South Tower
slipped down out of my sight. It just
disappeared…like a high-rise house of cards, its base kicked out from under it
by an angry child. Moments later, the
three-story building in front of us stood taller than the 110-story tower in
the distance that had just been compressed back into its foundation. It was the sickest feeling, one that I don’t
think I can quite explain. I saw it and
I heard it and I felt it but I still can’t believe it. The Twin Towers
seemed like the 100-year-old oak trees in your front yard: they couldn’t be
moved or bent. If anything, they
held up the sky. They anchored lower Manhattan and provided a
sense of direction for every New Yorker who’d ever lost his bearings.
The
collapse and disintegration of the South
Tower seared my
brain. I sincerely hope that I never see
anything as stomach-churning again.
People around me started screaming and crying. Everyone on the sidewalk knew someone who was
in the Towers – a relative, a friend or a business acquaintance. Some people
threw down briefcases and started running.
I kept staring in shock. At that
instant, I think everyone on the sidewalk knew that we had just witnessed the
death of an unimaginable number of people.
It occurred to me almost instantly that even the most battle-hardened
soldiers never see so many people killed in a single instant. The aircrews who dropped the atomic bombs in
World War II were not five blocks away at ground level when their payloads did
their dirty work. And five blocks was
relatively far in a sense; hundreds of firefighters, police officers, emergency
medical technicians and other heroes were right on site. One firefighter later described the scene in
this way: “Everything was on fire, everything you saw was burning. It was what I imagine Hell to be like.”
Quickly,
certainly more quickly than I’d have imagined, a thick white cloud of smoke
came rolling at us. It was a five-story-tall
fog and it was moving fast. For a few
seconds I froze. The bright September
sky was being obscured. Then a guy not
ten feet away from me breathlessly shouted “Run…ground smoke…it could kill us!”
I
suddenly realized that there might have been deadly chemicals in the
plane. There was no rational basis for
this belief; but then again, nobody knew anything for sure at that point. The frenzy spread instantly: people dropped
briefcases and bags and started running, screaming, just trying to get away
from the smoke as quickly as possible. I
remember thinking, “Those bastards, they might get me too, this could be how I
die…” The fear of death was real and it was everywhere.
About
two or three hundred of us ran straight toward the East
River, only a block away, and then north past the South Street
Seaport. I’ve since heard that some
people actually jumped into the river to avoid the smoke but I didn’t see
that. As we ran up the closed FDR
Expressway the dense white fallout followed us.
We formed a seemingly endless herd of stampeding business suits. Burning smells and the piercing screams of
emergency vehicles joined to assault our senses. It was a war zone, although until that moment
I don’t think that I had ever actually thought to imagine one. The word that describes it best and one which
I’ve never truly experienced before: Bedlam.
I
was alternately running and walking with four coworkers as we headed to my
apartment about two miles away on 18th
Street. A
friend from San Francisco who was in town on business, in the lobby of the
North Tower when the first plane hit, had – by some unbelievable stroke of good
luck – noticed me amidst all the confusion and joined our group. When we were about halfway up the FDR, a guy
who had been listening to a hand-held radio via earphone yelled out “The second
tower just fell.” People gasped but we
all just kept running. A few looked
back.
When
we got to my apartment, I wanted to tell the outside world the names of those
who were safe. However, I still had a
dead home phone and cell phone service was, at best, sporadic. Fortunately, my computer’s internet
connection was working so I sat down and composed a message to everyone in my
e-mail address book. To this day, many
years later, I have not re-read that e-mail because I know that it will bring
back many painful memories. But, I later
learned, it was forwarded around the globe to those interested in first-hand
accounts of the events in New York
City on that dark day.
My friend’s wife, who is an elementary school teacher, said that she
used it in her classes as an example of a first-person account of September
11th. Here is that note:
______________________
From: LG727@aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 12:58 PM
To: Larry.Goanos@aig.com
Bcc: Everyone in my address book
Subject: The Surreal Events of Today
I am shaking like
a leaf in a windstorm as I type this. I cannot believe the events of
today, as I'm sure you can't. I was in my office at 8:50 this morning when a
colleague came in and said
that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade
Center and papers were
flying everywhere. I looked out the window of my office and saw a ticker-tape-parade
type stream of papers flittering across the sky. After a few short
minutes and various reports, some erroneous, a group of us descended in the
elevator to the ground floor of our building, where we exited and looked to the
left a bit where we saw Two World Trade Center, five blocks away, ablaze from
the top third of the building. It was unreal. The black smoke and
red flames framed against a clear blue sky.
The crowd on the sidewalk grew exponentially until we were standing
shoulder-to-shoulder, at least 300 people staring upwards. One of my colleagues
had just been in the lobby of One World Trade when the plane hit. He said smoke
immediately came shooting down the elevator shafts and filled the lobby as
people exited in terror. Pandemonium. He ran back to our
building, covered with soot, where he stood with us to watch in horror. We
all stood around gaping at the flames, not aware of any possible danger to us.
I sat and thought about how many people I know in those two towers who have
no doubt perished. I'm aware of at least seven people from my subsidiary
of AIG who were in one tower on a high floor. We do a lot of
business with Aon, an insurance broker on the top three or four floors of Two World
Trade Center.
As I type this, emergency vehicles are swirling by on the street outside
my apartment on 18th Street.
The massive cloud where the WTC used to stand is visible out my living
room window.
As we watched the flames, after about twenty minutes, all of a sudden World Trade
Center Tower
One, which we could only see above the 40th floor or so ,collapsed before our
eyes. It was the sickest, most surreal, most stomach-churning thing that
I have ever seen in my life. My nerves became electrified, in a bad way,
and I felt almost like I would collapse as well. Other people did. People
started crying and getting hysterical, obviously because they knew people in
WTC One and/or know any of the many, many police and firemen and rescue workers
who were in and around the building trying to extinguish the fire and save
lives. I just heard the mayor on the radio and he said he can't even get
a rough estimate of how many firemen and police and EMTs died in the two WTC
Tower collapses, he just said the number would be very large, staggering.
This whole day is unfathomable.
As I type this I continue to shake. I think about all the people who I
know in those two towers and I can feel tears well up. There will be far too
many funerals to attend. Many bodies, I'm sure, will never be identified.
It is unbelievable. At least 50 to 100 people I know died today.
Can you imagine that? Unless you're in a war, which I think we will
be soon, that doesn't
happen. Many of you too, if not all, are in a similar situation, maybe
you know even more who passed. Hopefully many of our friends and
acquaintances were away on business or vacation, or running late. Our
lives are changed forever and I don't think I'm being dramatic in saying that.
A few seconds after WTC One collapsed, a large, probably five-story high plume of
white smoke erupted, far denser than any fog I'd seen living in San Francisco.
All of a sudden, someone yelled "ground smoke, run, it can kill us!"
and people began panicking, although, I must say it was a controlled panic if
there can be such a thing. Hundreds of people began running, although not
trampling each other, actually helping each other to some extent.
Although one friend of mine asked a car service to give him a ride to Westchester (the car was empty but for the driver) and he
said, "Sure, $2,000." I'll let that statement stand as its own
condemnation of mankind, or at least one (hopefully small) segment of mankind.
As we walked/ran up the East Side under the
FDR, past the South Street
Seaport, the white cloud of deep dust/soot/whatever, followed us intently. It was moving at a good pace and, I must say,
I feared for my life briefly, either from dying of smoke inhalation or being
trampled. I don't think I was
alone in that feeling, it was very, very scary, and my words don't do it
justice. We continued running and walking up the East
Side, myself and four co-workers. All of a sudden I heard
someone say "Larry Goanos!" I looked and it was Fran Higgins, a
friend from San Fransisco who's brother-in-law, John Doyle, works with me at
AIG. He was scheduled to be in a meeting at Two WTC at 9 am and was
running late, it took him an extra hour to get in from his sister's house in Westchester and he was in the lobby when the first plane
hit. He ran outside and saw debris falling and three people actually jumping
off high floors in order to kill themselves via the impact rather than await
being burned by the intense flames. Reports are that many other people
jumped as well. Fran didn't know where to go so I invited him to join me
in the trek to my apartment about two miles north. He had two heavy bags but
lumbered on. His father narrowly missed the bombing at WTC in 1992. Two
bullets dodged by his family at the WTC.
Cell phones weren't working. People were screaming out names. It was sick
(to re-use a phrase again and again; it is, sadly, the most appropriate.) The
FDR expressway was closed. People were running everywhere, keeping an eye
on the large cloud following us. Some were ready to jump into the East River to escape the smoke if need be. As we
got about six or eight blocks up the FDR someone who had an earphone of a radio
in their ear reported that WTC 2 had just collapsed as well. The whole
thing was the sickest, most twisted, surreal, screwed up thing that I had ever
heard or imagined.
Eventually we made our way to my friend Jim Riely's place on East 22nd Street. As fate would have it,
my phone had gone out of service last night and I was going to call Verizon to
fix it this morning. My cell was working only in spots because of the
great strain on the system. At Jim's we found Jim, Dan O'Connell, Colleen
Dempsey (Doreen, Jim's wife, works uptown and ,I'm sure, is safe) and Chris
Doyle, Jim's partner. Because a lot of you know a lot of these people,
here are the names of people who I know are safe beside those above (a lot of
phones are down but my internet cable connection is working, at least for now):
Dennis Gustafson, Rose Mosca, Peter Wessel, John Feniello, Sandy Nalewajk, Kirk
Raslowsky and Jennifer Raslowsky and their young daughter Alexandra (who they
were just about to drop off in day care at the WTC when the first plane hit;
they made it our office in tears, clothes askew, Kirk had just thrown down his
briefcase, grabbed his wife and daughter, and ran) John Iannotti, Ray DeCarlo,
Greg Flood, Mike
Mitrovic, Kris Moor, John Doyle, Susan Eagan, Gail Mazarolle, Dawn Paolino.
If you know any of their families and don't know if they've been contacted,
please call them if your phone works.
Many more are safe, I'm sure, it was just hard to get a gauge with all the smoke
and pandemonium. There are now six of us in my apartment watching CNN.
I stopped and picked up more bottled water on the way here because people were
saying there are rumors of chemical warfare and possible contamination in the
water (probably not true but why take a chance.) Things seem to be calming
down a bit now (I've been taking a break between typing to let others send
e-mails) but I'm sure our lives will never be the same. The tranquility
of life in America
has been shattered, we have been dragged into the trenches with the rest of the
world. Our soil is no longer sacred, protected ground. Anyway, the people who I've mentioned are all
safe, as am I. God bless America
and God bless us all.
_____________________
Excerpted from "Claims Made and Reported: A Journey Through D&O, E&O and Other Professional Lines of Insurance," 2008; Soho Publishing, New York 376 Pages (
www.sixthandspringbooks.com)
This was the view from the third row of the bus on the way out of Amsterdam at 6:30 am. Roads were already jammed. Next stop Heidelberg, Germany. Check back soon for pictures from that fine city! 
