by Eric Ruark

Created on: January 07, 2009

Three people I knew died that day. Ethan, the one I knew best, was in the South Tower describing the events to his mother on his cell phone. The North Tower had been hit at 8:46 a.m. Ethan's office was near the top of the South Tower. No one knew that it was an attack, yet.

At first, people assumed that a stray jetliner had hit the building. It had happened before. An airplane hit the Empire State Building back in the 1950s, so there was no immediate concern. The managers of Ethan's building told everyone to stay put. Some people left. Some didn't. Ethan was one of the one's who stayed. He had a front row seat to a real TOWERING INFERNO drama. His phone went dead at 9:03 a.m.

I was uptown at Columbus Circle teaching a course on Integrated Marketing Communications at the New York Institute of Technology to a group of foreign exchange students from France and Spain. When we first heard the report, we thought that a piper cub or some-such small plane had hit the building, but when the TV cameras pointed south and the billowing smoke began to play across the screen, we all knew that something terrible had happened. When the second plane hit, we knew that we were under some kind of attack.

From my vantage point on the upper floor of the school building, I could see the trickle of humanity slowly form into a wave as people from the lower part of the city began to instinctively move away from the destruction and head towards the upper part of Manhattan Island.

School was cancelled. Mayor Giuliani declared a state of emergency and closed all the bridges and tunnels into and out of NYC. I lived in Connecticut. With the bridges and tunnels closed, there was no way for me to get home. I couldn't even call home to tell anyone that I was all right. The cell phone antennae for the region had been located on top of the World Trade Center Towers. To all intents and purposes, I was trapped in Manhattan.

Fortunately, I had friends in the City. I left the school and began walking south, against the flow of foot traffic, towards Greenwich Village. New York City in an emergency shut-down was one of the strangest sights I had ever seen. People came out of their office buildings and quietly began to walk home. There was no panic, no pushing, no shoving. The busses and subways stopped running. The north/south avenues were cleared of traffic to allow the emergency service vehicles quick access to the danger zone; and no traffic at all was allowed south of 14th Street.

The South Tower

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