A Loud
Boom
I don’t remember which came
first, the shudder of the building or the loud sound. They probably
came at the same time.
I don’t remember how long it
took before someone ran into the word processing center where I
worked and told us that a plane had hit one of the World Trade
Center towers. It seemed like seconds but was probably at least a
minute or two.
In whatever the order,
there was a loud boom; our building shook, and then there was
quiet. My coworkers and I looked at one another.
I remember saying, “What was
that?” Someone else asked, “Was that thunder?” What it had sounded
like to me was as if a huge, metal trash dumpster had been dropped
onto the 24th floor above me. That would have explained the
reverberations of the building I had felt, but I knew there was no
construction going on up there. Had something possibly
exploded?
Someone ran into the center and
told us that a secretary, who had just come to work, was
hysterical, saying that a plane had hit one of the towers and that
it was like a war zone out there. One of our phones rang, and it
was our supervisor, calling from home. She screamed to the person
who answered something about seeing it on TV and for us to, “Get
out of the building!”
What? My initial reaction
was to go downstairs and see what was going on—more out of
curiosity than alarm. I went to the elevator bank, along with a few
other people who had the same idea. As we descended, though I
didn’t consciously think it through, I know I assumed a light plane
had smashed into the tower. I imagined a small hole in the
building, with the back end of a plane sticking out. Our
conversation, as we headed down from the 23rd floor, was tinged
with nervousness, but not fear. When the elevator doors opened to
our lobby, I took a quick right and walked through a side revolving
door.
As I passed through that
door and out onto the street, three things went through my mind.
The secretary was right; it did look like a war zone. It also
looked like a movie set…for a disaster film. And it was like going
through the door in The Wizard of Oz, walking out into a world that
was unlike anything that I could ever have possibly
imagined.