This was supposed to be a book on what transpired on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River during and after the attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Include a variety of photos and personal journal accounts from that period as well.
A year after the second attack on the World Trade Center, Phyllis Colon could not go back to work.
As an employee for the Port Authority, she was on the 65th floor of the North Tower when the first plane struck. Unlike 75 of her fellow PA workers, she survived.
She didn’t need her boss or anyone else to tell her that the total loss of PA suffered that day remained unequalled for a single day by any single department in U.S. history.
Few horrors equaled that morning in her memory as when at 8:48 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, the whole building began to shake – shake so violently in face that some witness near to the event mistook the event for an earthquake.
Debris fell outside the window. Many people on her floor rushed to the elevators only to discover these no longer worked. They then faced the grim task of descending 65 floors via the stairs.
They had not gone far when smoke billowed down the stairwell from the floors above. To remedy this, people around her clutched handkerchiefs around their mouths, struggling to breathe. Other people, good Samaritans, handed out wet napkins.
Not long later, dirty water tricked down the stairs soaking their feet and telling the fleeing masses of survivors that fire fighters and sprinkler systems battled the blaze high above their heads.
In the confusion, some peered down at the water still not making sense of what went on.
On the 65th flood which Colon and the others had abandoned, a fire fighter radioed to his commander some unsettling news. The floor had collapsed due to the extreme heat.
No one yet realized that this would within a short time cause the concrete blocks upon which each floor was built to begin falling down on the one below in a chain reaction that would cause the inevitable collapse of the tower.
“Dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks at my place of employment has taken its toll not only on me but the rest of the world,” Colon recalled a year after the event.
The Port Authority counted 84 people among the dead including Executive Director Neil Levin, as a result the attacks. More 700 staff members required counseling later. Some like Colon just could not get over the memory to go back to work a year later.
Nancy Perez and Arlene Babakitis, Colon’s fellow workers at the PA, had not survived. Babakitis, according to her missing persons poster was last seen on the 25th flood, but according to her sister, Karen Reoch – who investigated the situation later, Babakitis may have made it to the ground level only to have the building collapse on top of her.
“There were conflicting reports,” Reoch said.
Babakitis and Perez apparently came down from the PA offices together. One report said they were seen on the 25th flood, another on the 20th, a third had them spotted on ground level.
Perez, who lived in Union City, had been in the World Trade Center during the 1993 attack. Friends said she never recovered from the fear of the earlier attack. Following the 1993 attack, she appealed for a transfer to the Jersey City offices where she remained for a long time. A recent promotion, however, had sent her back to New York.
Reoch said Perez and Babakitis were close friends, and Babakitis had moved to New Jersey only just prior to the attack on the recommendation of Perez.
Babakitis grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where most of her family lived until after 9/11. She worked for the PA for more than 30 years. Her last position dealt with bridges and tunnels, although she also help coordinate the East Pass program.
Reoch searched for her sister for weeks after the attack, putting up posters everywhere within eye sight of the towers. She did not give up hope in finding her sister, and if there was a vacant place she could put up a poster she did, on the off chance someone might have seen her somewhere and could report it.
Reoch started looking even before the smoke of the falling building had blown away, walking to every possible place in the city where her sister might have gone.
A year later, when it was clear her sister was among the dead, Reoch is bitter, holding the airport and other authorities accountable, saying they simply failed to do their job.
“The terrorists didn’t just get on those places. They had to pass through security and if security had been adequate, none of this would have happened,” she said.
Frank Sasso, Hoboken’s health officer, had not fully recovered his health when the terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
Although he prided himself with working out every day, he was unprepared for the series of disasters that led him to the edge of death early in 2001, from which only emergency surgery had saved him. This was the result of an infection caused by previous surgery.
He was still recuperating when news reached him on the morning of Sept. 11 and he was expected to handle the flood of refugees due to return to the Hoboken, Weehawken and Jersey City piers by ferry and other vessels.
For duty in helping to handle mercury contamination and other issues in Hoboken, Sasso had become one of the most highly honored health officers in the state. But he knew the minute he saw the first smoldering tower of the World Trade Center that he was going to be faced his greatest challenge.
He did not, in fact, know the half of it as he moved to set up the command center from which he would direct operations – which would draw upon the resources of Hoboken, the county, the state, and ultimately the nation.
“We knew that thousands of people would be coming back across the Hudson River,” he said, “and we knew we had to be ready for them when they did.”
Because Sasso had worked previously with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New Jersey State Police, he was one of the few men in the state, and certainly, the only man in Hudson County considered an expert on weapons of mass destruction.
“Once I learned that this was a terrorists’ attack, I knew there was a possibility that we could be facing chemical or biological contamination,” he said.
Weak as he was, Sasso began calling for the equipment he needed to decontaminate people coming from the area of the Twin Towers.
“This meant people had to be washed down as soon as they god off the boat,” he said.
M3eanwhile, others who belonged to the Hudson Regional Health Commission swarmed into the reception areas along the water from with air monitors, checking the air quality. Even if there was no biological weapons or chemical agents in the attack, health officers knew that the burning and eventually collapsing Twin Towers poses a risk.
Sasso, who later received even more accolades for his activities on the water front, remembers his struggling to find strength for the 48 hours that followed in the aftermath of the attack.
He and his staff handled about 10,000 people on the waterfront, and this included 2,200 medical triages and 469 patients send to area hospitals.
“And I’m proud to say that not one life was lost,” he said.
Vincent Mazzaro, coordinator for the Secaucus Office of Emergency Management Office, first encountered Lt. Robert Circi of the Port Authority police in early 2001.
Circi was in charge of the county’s OEM radio communication system, and an order that came down from the federal government required each state and county OEM office to install a back up communication system commonly called RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service) to make certain that if all official communication systems go down, local OEM could still reach out. RACES had existed since 1952 as part of the all Volunteer Communication Reserve within the U.S. government for times of extraordinary need.
“We got the order back in 1999,” Mazzaro said. “If every other radio system goes down due to some emergency, this would allow us to talk to people, figuring that there will still be private citizens out there with Citizen Band radios.
The RACES system was made up of certified by unpaid officials like Circi – who had some official capacity in government but also had a deep personal commitment to amateur radio communication.
Mazzaro said the FEMA required RACES to be installed so that in the event of an emergency, officials could still make contact with hospitals, the state and other emergency services.
“While we had a RACES system in Secaucus a long time ago, we let it lapse,” Mazzaro said. “We had a lot of the equipment we needed, but until the order came from Washington, we didn’t use it for anything.”
Circi, also a member of the Jersey Coastal Emergency Services Monitoring Team, was a huge amateur radio fan, and in what spare time he had, between his job at the port authority and his work on EMS, he talked to people around the world. He was the co-founder of the Jersey City Radio Club which was later named after him.
“The county decided to set up a RACES system in Secaucus because we already had a fully functional communication center here,” Mazzaro said.
The town had converted its museum to a complete communication center and it had seen service during two train crashes during the late 1990.
“Bob volunteered to set up our system and helped fill in the missing pieces,” Mazzaro said. “He was responsible for putting us back on the air.”
Although born and raised in North Bergen and station at the Jersey City Port Authority facilities, Circi lived in Nutley and made his way to Secaucus on Evenings and weekends for the project that took months to complete.
“He would call us up at odd times for him to meet him down at our place,” Mazzaro said.
Bob Kickey, formerly a deputy director of the county OEM, remembered working side by side with Circi to install the wiring and the antenna.
“Bob was afraid of heights,” Kickey said. “And we would joke about which one of us would go up on the roof to install the antenna. He was a great guy.”
Kickey worked with Circi over the summer of 2001 to get the project done by the fall.
“He would call me on a Saturday evening and ask if I was ready to go to work,” Kickey said. “Bob, I’d say, it’s Saturday night.”
But Circi seemed to sense an urgency no one else did, pushing himself to get the project done for some yet unimagined future event.
This went on for months as the county and state geared up for a disaster test scheduled for Sept. 18, 2001. No one really expected the RACES system to figure prominently in this test. Indeed for the most part the RACES system was expected to remain largely unused.
But it got used on Sept. 11, 2001.
“We had to use it to contact the state when all the other system went down. No one in the county could contact the state at that time, but we could. I kept saying, `Oh, boy, if only Bob could see this. Wouldn’t Bob be proud?’”
It wasn’t until later that they learned that Circi was among those listed as missing when the North Tower went down.
Jerry Cala, director of the Jersey City Office of Emergency Management, had a couple of things on his mind when he arrived at his office early on Sept. 11, 2001.
He wanted to check the city’s communications systems in preparation for a potential winter storm disaster and a mock county-wide communications drill scheduled for the following week that was supposed to simulate a terrorist’s attack.
Under federal law, each state, county and municipality had to maintain and office of emergency management to coordinate responses to disasters, whether this was due to natural causes or human-generated hostility.
Although OEM was a product of the 1970s, it was activated by President Bill Clinton in a direct response to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Some of its staff at the time of the 2001 attack even had roots that went back to the Civil Defense era, whose function largely expired with the end of the Cold War.
In its new role under Clinton, the OEM had to develop a disaster plan that outlined what each part of the community would do in case of a massive emergency and this plan detailed what each organization in the community would play in such a situation, what resources were available, what body – such as police or fire – might do in a given situation.
One important detail was how well these OEMs could interact with the Port Authority and its various components – and the test planned for a week after 9/11 was designed to see how well these groups could communicate in the event of a disaster.
Congress, of course, saw the OEM has a valuable tool, and so in 1996, authorized these bodies to also deal with potential threats from weapons of mass destruction – the details of which emerged in the 1998 Federal Response Plan.
Hudson County, however, did not get a practical test of its operations until the year 2000, when the OEM took the lead in coordinating the July 4 Operation Sal International Naval Review. This event drew millions of tourists to the waterfront to view the thousand of ships. And it created the conditions the OEM needed to understand massive movement of people and the potential problems it might face in the event of a disaster.
“This was the first time that we had dealt with anything of this scale county wide,” said Frank Pizzuta, a former Weehawken fire official who served as the county’s OEM director on 9/11.
OP/Sail went off well enough, but a review of OEM showed some potential serious communication problems. While Hudson County OEM officials had common radio frequencies on which to communicate with each other, many towns with volunteer staffs and limited budgets lacked the same equipment. During the year prior to the terrorist attack, the county equipped itself with the necessary radios and repeaters, needing only to test the system to determine if they had succeeded.
This test was scheduled for September 18, 2001 in Secaucus.
“This was to be a functional exercise that went through everything, made all the phone calls, but did not send the units to the locations,” Pizzuta said.
As fate would have it, OEM and the Port Authority had also scheduled a full blown exercise for early 2002 that would simulate another terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, one similar to the events that took place in 1993.
All these plans, of course, ended at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, when the first plane struck the North Tower.
“I was sitting at my desk drinking office and reading the paper when one of the first department training instructors informed me that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center,” Cala recalled later in a statement for this book. “Immediately, we rushed into the street and could clearly see the smoke billowing from one of the two towers. We then went back into the office and put on the telephone and watched the rest in horror.”
Cala met with firefighters to determine how best to fight the fire.
At this point, the second plane struck the second town and I ordered my staff to activate the Jersey City and Hudson county Emergency Operations Center,” he said.
According to Pizzuta, who shared the Summer Avenue office in Jersey City with Cala, the Hudson County OEM operations center, was activated at 8:55 a.m. and a state of emergency in Hudson County was declared five minutes later.
“Within minutes all 12 phones because to ring continuously,” Cala said. “Also radio transmissions from the police and fire departments echoing the phone calls in asking for assistance at the Jersey City water front. Thousands of people were evacuating lower Manhattan and were arriving on the shores of Jersey City and Hoboken.”
All OEM personnel were notified and the OEM phones and faxes installed in Secaucus for the following week’s test where switched back to the Summit Avenue office. Pizzuta said staffing was arranged for 24 hour coverage at the Summit Avenue location.
“We then got in touch with the state and told them we had set up the office and we began notifying the local municipalities,” he said. “We were told to expect a large number of injuries.”
One of Cala’s chief tasks was to provide medical assistance, he said. Doctors were brought in and triage centers set up. The main center was located at Liberty State Park which the state took over.
“Any watercraft available was being utilized,” Cala said. “Ferries, fireboats, tug boats, private boats, even barges. We were deluged with calls for ambulances when we ran out of ambulances, we provided buses to transport injured victims and stranded commuters. At one point, we even commandeered a NJ Transit bus.”
In the first two hours, Jersey City and other points along the Gold Coast of Hudson County continued to receive injured and stranded commuters.
“Many of the people who came here had no way to return home,” Cala said. “Shelters were set up in four high schools along the Hudson County coast. Hundreds of commuters, residents and even tourists were houses for several days in our shelters. We provided them with cots, blankets and food.”
AT one point, an entire New York City nursery school was transported to Jersey City and houses at a local school until the parents of the kids could pick them up.
In order to prevent grid lock, Jersey City Mayor Glenn Cunningham called a city state of emergency that allowed OEM to shut down many of the streets leading downtown to the waterfront.
“Jersey City had mobilized its police and fire departments and were prepared to dispatch all available umbers to New York City,” Cala said. “But the decision was made to keep most of the police and fire department personnel in Jersey City. There was still information being circulated that other planes were in the air and Jersey City forces would be needed in the event of another strike in this area or to back up New York City if another area of the city was attacked.”
Throughout Hudson County, equipment and volunteers got ready if a call came across the Hudson River for help. The Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford became a staging area with the old Giants Stadium surrounded by a sea of emergency vehicles.
Pizzuta had public workers standing by for fuel transportation with a fleet of almost 1,000 vehicles.
According to Jeff Welz director of the North Hudson Regional Fire Department, Hudson County put 20 fire engines and ladders at New York City’s disposal. Two engines and a ladder truck were sent but never used.
Jersey City also provided a truck designed to refill Scott Pack Units – a devise that allows fire fighters to breathe while inside a burning building.
Welz said 300 ambulances were stationed inside Hudson County with 200 of these at Liberty State Park. Some of these, Cala said, came from as far away as Pennsylvania. Thirty ambulances were also station at each of the ferry terminals.
At one point, Hudson County had problems communication with officials from New York City.
“So the decision was made to send a group of police officers to Ground Zero by boat to obtain information,” Cala said. “The group relayed information and requests for equipment and supplies back to Jersey City.”
Over the next 24 to 36 hours, Jersey City became the life line to New York City as supplies passed through it bound for those working to recover victims at Ground Zero. These supplies came from everywhere, not just from around Hudson County, but from around the state and in the weeks that followed, from around the nation.
New York City rescue operations made numerous requests for respirators, dust masks, flash lights, batteries, small hand tools, empty five gallon pales, drinking water, ice, supports drinks, food, and not an insignificant item – body bags.
In the early hours, OEM made calls to every area store, brought the items to the staging area and then shuttled them over on boats and barges to New York City.
“Hundreds of truck loads of supplies became to arrive at the Hudson Street staging area as well as thousands of volunteers,” Cala said. “The area resembled a refugee camp where people were sleeping in make shift tents and eating food supplied by vendors.”
For Dr. Robert Lahita – called “Dr. Bob” by his friends, Sept. 11, 2001 began as many days did, with a drive from his home in Ridgewood New Jersey to his office on 66th Street in Manhattan.
Lahita wore a host of hats, including the one he intended to put on that morning as director of rheumatology and immunology at St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Yet the hat that proved the most important that day was the one he did not know he would be as the part time director of emergency services at Jersey City Medical Center. Thus as the head for medical operations for the Hudson River water front in Hudson County, he played a key role if an emergency should occur.
He was rarely without his truck full of supplies that included oxygen, medical kits, bandages, gloves and triage tags. Indeed, he was among the key people who had responded to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. He seemed prepared for anything.
On 9/11, however, he thought largely of the patients he had waiting on the New York side of the Hudson River and grew concerned about the backup forming at the Lincoln tunnel. As with most things, he had a back up plan for that, and steered his vehicle to Jersey City where he knew he could park and take the PATH to New York
He was not the kind of man to let small or large obstacles discourage him.
Thinking back later, he realized how differently things might have turned out if he had pressed on with hid rive into Manhattan.
“If I had entered the Lincoln tunnel that morning and parked the car at the hospital, I would have driven directly to the scene and been killed or at least seriously injured,” he recalled in a memoir written for a volume called “Death Takes command.
Fate, however, drew him through the PATH tubes to 33 rd Street where he changed to the New York subway for the rest of the trip.
He arrived at Lexington Avenue at 8:50 a.m. – two minutes after the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center eighty something blocks south of where he was.
“As I emerged from the subway I heard the blare of sirens and looked to see a high rise fire engine followed by an ambulance from the Hatzolah Ambulance Corps. I would have paid no attention to the vehicles except to hear the speaker in the ambulance say that there was a huge high rise fire.”
The emergency crew pleaded with pedestrians and drivers to make way.
“Clear the streets,” they yelled.
Lahita later learned that all of the firemen from that unit and perhaps some of the EMTs had been killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center later.
Once he reached his office, he learned from his staff that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Like many people, he assumed it was an accident, and that it must have been a small plane. But the TV soon dispelled both notions when to his horror, he saw images of a second plan striking the south tower.
He grabbed his jacket and ran out, rushing back towards the subway thinking to recover his truck in New Jersey.
The whole subway ride he felt anxious.
The other passengers seemed unaware of the attack or presumed it was a relatively minor matter. They also likely believed that the slowness of the subway was due to some unrelated police investigation.
At 33 rd Street, he sprinted for the PATH, hoping that the disaster had not yet suspended PATH service to New Jersey.
His train went directly to Journal Square where he finally got a glimpse of the two smoldering towers in lower Manhattan. For many of his fellow passengers, this was the first sight any had had of the attack.
Some stood with mouths open in shock. He didn’t stop. He hurried to his truck and tried to reach emergency services across the river. The airwaves were strangely silent. He drove towards the Holland Tunnel, but was soon directed by Port Authority police to the York Street pier. Already streets of Jersey City were clogged and getting through the traffic was hard even using his siren.
So caught up with the thought that he might not be able to reach the injured, he barely considered the historic significance of the falling towers.
He kept on his mission to reach the pier in time to receive the flotilla of vessels he was certain would be bringing injured to the Jersey side of the Hudson River.
Two paramedics from the Jersey City Medical Center were on the scene when he got there, laying out the injured onto makeshift cots. The south tower collapsed as Lahita pulled up to the pier.
Broken hips, fractured legs, cuts, exposed bones, were among the injuries he encountered. Some people were unconscious. Most were in shock. Some of the firefighters who had seen the worst of the disaster openly wept.
While other triage centers in places like Union City and Secaucus so only a few patients that day, Lahita’s site was overwhelmed. He was in constant need of stretchers and people to help him. He soon drafted bystanders to his cause. If one said he knew CPR, Lahita put him to work at some medical chore.
“Others brought bandages, ripped off the wall of a neighboring building,” he said.
Others brought wheeled office chairs to use as wheel chairs in order to transport the injured from the pier to waiting vehicles.
His tame used everything they could as splints and other needed items.
Eventually more EMTs arrived to transport the injured to area hospitals.
‘There were hundreds of injured, but at the time it seemed like thousands,” he said. “I was told that we saw and treated 1,500 people, and 300 in the first three hours.”
This did not include the pets residents of Manhattan brought with them, for which Lahita had to call animal control.
Later he would make his way to Hoboken, and eventually to Ground Zero where he saw firefighters covered in dust and a landscape littered with body parts.
Most of the victims of Sept. 11, however, found treatment on the New York side of the Hudson, although in total more than 170 hospitals were involved with the rescue effort.
Hoboken, Weehawken, and Jersey City triage centers were manned by hundreds of local doctors. County Office of Emergency Management used school buses provided by the Hudson County Improvement Authority to transport people away from the waterfront. The Weehawken ferry terminal alone saw more than 60,000 people pass through it, fleeing the disaster. The triage center at Liberty State Park treated more than 5,200 people.
Although the ferries have been credited with transporting the majority of people across the Hudson to the Jersey side, emergency personal drafted barges, fishing boats, cruise ships even local cruise boats to get people out.
Reporters of possible chemical contamination forced firefighters and others to wash down most of those fleeing Manhattan. This report, however, may have been the result of odd scents some reported smelling when fleeing the disaster area, most attributing this later to a natural gas leak at the World Trade Center site.
Besides broken bones and broken hearts, people suffered from asthma attacks, smoke inhalation and a number of heart ailment. But of all those admitted to area hospitals on the Jersey side, none died
The newspaper reporters showed up at the cemetery three days after the World Trade Center disaster. Jack Cavanaugh, who ran operations there, hadn't a clue as to why they had come. But found them with cameras bushwhacking him as he came out of the office, clicking shudders and fire flashes like the first shot in President Bush's proposed global war against terrorists.
They demanded to know if it was true he had prevented an old veteran from putting an American flag on the grave of his brother, and when Jack informed them that church policy limited flags to the month from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July, the real barrage started.
"They actually called me a communist," he told me, reacting to the account, which appeared in the newspaper the following day.
The newspapers had also left out some of his statements, which he had given to bolster his side of the argument -- such as the policy of military cemeteries to restrict the display of flags even more acutely and the lack of respect for the flag that the practice of putting them on the grave entailed.
"When we took up operations here, we found flags so tattered and discolored, they didn't look American any more," he said. "I told the papers that, but they didn't print any of it. They just accused me of being un-American."
Jack, a member of the American Legion, served in the Army during the Vietnam era. He went to college in the late 1960s to become an advertising person, then found himself a victim of the recession in the early 1970s.
"I took up grave digging until I could find other work," he said. "I never left."
The job led to a career as he advanced in the profession until he managed the graveyard. Born in Long Island, Jack grew up in Fort Lee, and commuted to school in Manhattan, but consideredhimself a Jersey boy, and seemed puzzled by the attacks on his patriotism.
"I'm just following the rules," he said. "The same rules the military follows. So how can anyone call me a communist?"
The reverberations of the World Trade Center disaster pass out from Manhattan with a rippling effect. Part of it is the instant access media provided, giving the world an intimacy many disasters of the past lacked. But a large part is also the human chain reaction resulting from the spread of people over the last few decades, people settling along the main highway corridors and commuting great distances to and from Manhattan. Many of these people carried their first-hand accounts back from the event.
In some ways, the pain of the disaster seems more acute here as I drive west, as if a delayed reacted created by the wake of the attack has not finished with these souls. We near ground zero saw it all from the initial crash, flame and smoldering, through the second strike and final collapse of each tower. We lived with the days of smoldering, the smoke plumes seeming to replace the towers, standing as high if not as straight at the original buildings. For a time, it seemed as if they were still there.
Close up, we gradually saw those columns of smoke collapse, a slow motion replay of the glass and concrete version, and we got to see the vacancy of that space, growing as gradually used to the lack of towers in our lives.
Out here, the image of the attack and its aftermath come in fits and starts. They have no gradual getting use to things. They cannot step outside their doors and stare across the river to study the latest development. While the TV has ceased to broadcast the endless repetition of the disaster itself, it is that image that remains most vivid in the minds of the people I encounter, store clerks asking me about the site when they discover the point of my origin.
The TV sets show no more smoke-filled skylines. Yet they show no skylines free of smoke either, instead panning in for close up shots of the wreckage, sites largely invisible to us who stand staring across the river from Pier A in Hoboken.
To people out here, we present contradictions of terms. While we assure them that life has largely gone back to an unsettled normal, they live with the media portrayals of body parts and moaning loved ones, of FBI raids and war reports, of presidential promises for justice and refusals to cooperate from leaders of Afghanistan.
During the first 48 hours, they received nearly non-stop reports, but now get only brief headline flashes, leaving them with only the highlights of the aftermath, not the reality.
The 1950s vision of an enemy attack was misleading, presuming that the most damage to America would be closest to Ground Zero. Strangely, the opposite is true. While we get on with our lives on the rim of the crater, people well beyond the range of the blast still live with the fear and consequences, shuddering with each new ripple of reports.
A year after the second attack on the World Trade Center, Phyllis Colon could not go back to work.
As an employee for the Port Authority, she was on the 65th floor of the North Tower when the first plane struck. Unlike 75 of her fellow PA workers, she survived.
She didn’t need her boss or anyone else to tell her that the total loss of PA suffered that day remained unequalled for a single day by any single department in U.S. history.
Few horrors equaled that morning in her memory as when at 8:48 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, the whole building began to shake – shake so violently in face that some witness near to the event mistook the event for an earthquake.
Debris fell outside the window. Many people on her floor rushed to the elevators only to discover these no longer worked. They then faced the grim task of descending 65 floors via the stairs.
They had not gone far when smoke billowed down the stairwell from the floors above. To remedy this, people around her clutched handkerchiefs around their mouths, struggling to breathe. Other people, good Samaritans, handed out wet napkins.
Not long later, dirty water tricked down the stairs soaking their feet and telling the fleeing masses of survivors that fire fighters and sprinkler systems battled the blaze high above their heads.
In the confusion, some peered down at the water still not making sense of what went on.
On the 65th flood which Colon and the others had abandoned, a fire fighter radioed to his commander some unsettling news. The floor had collapsed due to the extreme heat.
No one yet realized that this would within a short time cause the concrete blocks upon which each floor was built to begin falling down on the one below in a chain reaction that would cause the inevitable collapse of the tower.
“Dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks at my place of employment has taken its toll not only on me but the rest of the world,” Colon recalled a year after the event.
The Port Authority counted 84 people among the dead including Executive Director Neil Levin, as a result the attacks. More 700 staff members required counseling later. Some like Colon just could not get over the memory to go back to work a year later.
Nancy Perez and Arlene Babakitis, Colon’s fellow workers at the PA, had not survived. Babakitis, according to her missing persons poster was last seen on the 25th flood, but according to her sister, Karen Reoch – who investigated the situation later, Babakitis may have made it to the ground level only to have the building collapse on top of her.
“There were conflicting reports,” Reoch said.
Babakitis and Perez apparently came down from the PA offices together. One report said they were seen on the 25th flood, another on the 20th, a third had them spotted on ground level.
Perez, who lived in Union City, had been in the World Trade Center during the 1993 attack. Friends said she never recovered from the fear of the earlier attack. Following the 1993 attack, she appealed for a transfer to the Jersey City offices where she remained for a long time. A recent promotion, however, had sent her back to New York.
Reoch said Perez and Babakitis were close friends, and Babakitis had moved to New Jersey only just prior to the attack on the recommendation of Perez.
Babakitis grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where most of her family lived until after 9/11. She worked for the PA for more than 30 years. Her last position dealt with bridges and tunnels, although she also help coordinate the East Pass program.
Reoch searched for her sister for weeks after the attack, putting up posters everywhere within eye sight of the towers. She did not give up hope in finding her sister, and if there was a vacant place she could put up a poster she did, on the off chance someone might have seen her somewhere and could report it.
Reoch started looking even before the smoke of the falling building had blown away, walking to every possible place in the city where her sister might have gone.
A year later, when it was clear her sister was among the dead, Reoch is bitter, holding the airport and other authorities accountable, saying they simply failed to do their job.
“The terrorists didn’t just get on those places. They had to pass through security and if security had been adequate, none of this would have happened,” she said.
