“Mark said, ‘Mom, this is Mark Bingham’. He gave me his last name he was so rattled,” says Alice Hoglan, whose son called her from on board United Airlines Flight 93 shortly before it crashed outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “I told him I loved him, and the phone went dead.”
“I know we’re going to die,” said Thomas Burnett, a passenger also on Flight 93, to his wife over the phone shortly before the jet crashed. “I love you honey”.
On the morning after the terrorist attacks, New Yorkers are waking up to the reality of the disaster as stories of those who perished continue to come in. Meanwhile, many people worldwide wait desperately by the phone for word from their loved ones, all the while clinging to the stories of those who somehow managed to survive.
One PR professional in New York managed to escape from her office on the 99th floor of the World Trade Center. Early on Tuesday morning she had been working at her desk when “flames suddenly came toward the window,” she says. The opposite tower had been struck. Workers in her office fled to the stairs and began descending. When they reached the 72nd floor, they were told the building had been secured and they could return to their stations. But fearing for her life, she and many others ignored the announcement and continued down the many flights of stairs that led to safety. Before she reached the ground floor, she felt the building shake. The second plane had struck and the last vestiges of calm vanished. Late in the afternoon on Monday, speaking to friends and relatives across the US, she was still in tears. The fate of some of her co-workers remains a mystery.
Another worker in the building, Bill Heitman, was able to describe the scene as he fled from the burning tower. And while he passed a pack of brave firefighters as he made a desperate attempt to escape, he faced a torturous realisation: “That’s what’s got to be most upsetting,” he says. “The firemen and people in the building. ‘Cause I know they didn’t make it. I know they didn’t make it.”
Stories of those who narrowly avoided disaster are numerous. “I was talking to her late Monday night,” reports one New Yorker of a conversation with a close friend who worked in the World Trade Center. “I couldn’t get in touch with her on Tuesday and frantically called her parents. They said she had overslept. She’s normally at her desk at 8:30am. As she was coming out of the subway on the way to work, she saw the first plane hit. Unbelievable.”
The scene she likely witnessed was one of total chaos. “It was complete pandemonium,” says one Wall Street analyst unfortunate enough to be in the area that morning. “People were crying, screaming, running. At that instant, I turned back toward the North Tower, and two, three seconds later I saw the whole top of the building start to fall. I lost track of the person I was with… It was completely terrifying.”
“I could smell the smoke when I got out of the subway,” reports another Manhattanite who works downtown. “I got into the office and saw it on TV... I called my friend in DC and she had just gotten to work. We talked for a minute and then they heard something about the Pentagon and their office was evacuated. My boss told me if I could get home I should. So I left. The subways were closed so I walked home. It was insane. No one knew what was going on. People were just running. It was literally like a scene out of a movie.”
Later in the day, with the cellphone network still down, there were reportedly queues of ten people at every public phone. “The supermarkets were packed,” says one New York resident. “No one knew what was going on or what to expect.”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
