9/11: My Story

I wrote this a year ago on 9/11/2021. The 20th anniversary of 9/11 hit me more than I expected. Maybe it was the political landscape, maybe the ongoing COVID pandemic, maybe it’s the fact that we had just pulled out of Afghanistan after a 20 year senseless war. Most likely it’s all of these and more. I decided that I would spend that 9/11 in 2021 writing down my story and what I experienced on 9/11/2001. Fast forward to today, and I just returned from a work trip to New York City, where I spent days walking the streets where this all took place 21 years ago. This all hits differently after being there in person.

For the longest time, I felt like my story didn’t really matter. I wasn’t actually on Wall St. that day (although I worked there and was en route to Wall Street), I didn’t know anyone personally who died. But that doesn’t make my experience or my trauma any less real. Anyone alive then had a story. This is mine.

My First Job

I started my first job out of music conservatory in the fall of 2000 at JP Morgan (through a consulting company) on Wall Street. Our office was right at the intersection of Wall and Water. My wife, Felisa, was in graduate school at Rutgers, and we lived in our first apartment in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

My weekday routine was like clockwork. Every weekday, at 6:45 AM, Felisa drove me to the Jersey Ave. New Jersey Transit station where I would take the train to Penn Station, then the Red Line subway downtown to the Wall St. Station, and walk up Wall St. from William St. to Water St. I’d be at my desk eating a bagel I picked up from a sidewalk cart and reading my email every morning by 8:11. Like most Tri-State Area power commuters, I commuted with some of the same people every day and knew my routine down to the minute (like which door to stand near to exit closest to the stairs at my station). I still remember every detail of this commute even though it was over 20 years ago.

I also went through the Trade Center a lot. I would pretty frequently hop off the NJ Transit train at Newark and take the PATH train to the World Trade Center and take a longer walk across lower Manhattan after sitting for an hour on the train (especially when I would meet up with commuting friends who preferred the PATH train to the subway). The Sun Microsystems offices were in the trade center and I would go there for Java user groups after work. My friends and I would eat there. We were there all time.

9/11/2001

The morning of 9/11/2001 should have been my normal routine, but it wasn’t. I felt sick and tried to get an appointment to see my doctor. I couldn’t get through to my doctor and decided I felt good enough to go in late and I would see how my day went. Felisa argued I should stay home, but I didn’t want to use up my sick days, so I decided to go in anyway. All told, I was running about 90 minutes late. It’s so wild, 90 minutes flies by most days, but on that day, those 90 minutes changed the course of my life. On a normal day, I would have been at my desk when the first plane flew into the World Trade Center (my team was there), or I may have been in the PATH train under the World Trade Center if it was running late. I definitely would have been somewhere in lower Manhattan. But instead I was on the NJ Transit train on my way to Penn Station when the first plane flew into the North Tower. This was before smartphones and even texting, so at this point on the train, me and my fellow passengers had absolutely no idea what was happening like we would now.

In a strange coincidence, on 9/11/2001 I was reading a book called Underground by Haruki Murakami about the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. I remember reading this book and learning about what happened to the people in the Tokyo subway and how they really had no idea what was happening, for quite a while, while it was happening live. I remember reading this book and thinking… how could they possibly not know something was wrong? But in retrospect, there I was too, not knowing how wrong something was.

Just before 9AM, Felisa called to tell me she heard a plane flew into the World Trade Center. Others on the train started getting calls, but we assumed a small private plane had hit the building in an accident. This wasn’t a completely unreasonable assumption, there had been previous examples of small aircraft hitting buildings or crashing in urban areas. It’s odd, but it’s New York City. Odd things happen all the time!

This started to change when the train started to head East between Newark and New York just after Felisa called. We saw the smoke coming out of the towers. A lot of smoke. And it definitely seemed like a bigger thing than a small private plane. We also saw a lot of people standing outside, people standing in the street, in their backyards, parking lots, and on the roofs of warehouses and office buildings — completely entranced — staring at the smoke billowing out of the first tower like it was an enormous chimney. We had passed Newark at this point, so there was no getting off the train. The conductor came on and said they were hearing about some police activity happening in New York City, but we were still directed to go to Penn Station. Felisa kept trying to call and the calls were failing and dropping, but even in blips, I could hear panic in her voice and I knew something was definitely wrong. I decided I would just get on the first train out when I got to Penn Station. No point in messing around. I was already sick and late anyway.

When the doors opened at Penn Station it was total and complete chaos. I ran as fast as I could to the train that was about to depart. People were all running to it. We packed as many people as we could onto the train. It was even more than subway-at-rush-hour tight, packed with so many people no one could move. It was literally max-capacity. The doors closed and I was super relieved to be getting out of the city, whatever the hell was going on. But the train didn’t move. It just sat there. Now I was starting to get really nervous.

I later pieced together that the second plane hit the South Tower while I was on the train waiting to leave. But again, we still had absolutely no idea what was really happening. After we had been sitting on the tracks for what felt like eternity, the conductor came on and said the train was not going to be cleared to depart and we had to exit the train. They continued, saying that all of Penn Station was being evacuated and we needed to exit the train — and the building — once the doors opened.

When the doors opened it was now full blown panic in Penn Station. People were running in every direction. People were screaming, yelling, running into each other while running for exits. Luckily, I knew the station really well and made it quickly to the exit.

I remember everything incredibly clearly up until this point, but this next bit is blurry. It was substantially more chaotic outside the station. People were running every direction around Penn Station. There was a lot of screaming. There were a lot of helicopters flying overhead, and I heard fighter jets. I had been seeing police (which was fairly normal) but now I clearly saw a lot of military fatigues and camo, and automatic weapons were everywhere. There was a lot of screaming. It was total chaos.

A group was starting to coalesce going North on Broadway. It looked a little like a sand timer with everyone around heading North on Broadway. It was a river of people walking. I joined this group and started to head North and as we moved away from Penn Station, things started to settle down a bit. The cell network was completely down so I couldn’t get a hold of Felisa. I decided to stop and use a payphone, but still couldn’t get through. We discovered that calls outside of the Tri State area were getting through, but not calls within the Tri State area. I ended up getting in touch with my parents in Florida who called Felisa to let her know I was OK. I was also called my friend Jared who lived on the Upper West Side. Amazingly, the call worked, he was home and said I could shelter at his place, so I started walking towards his apartment.

This sounds unbelievable in retrospect, but we still didn’t really know what was happening.

As we got farther, away from midtown, things were settling down a bit more. We could see, smell and taste the smoke, even in midtown. After what felt like another eternity, I made it to my friend Jared’s apartment, and we walked to his brother’s apartment which was nearby. We’re both introverts, but we had this deep need to be around other friendly people in person. We knew history was being made and we knew we didn’t want to be alone. I was also trapped. All transit, bridges and tunnels were closed (except for people on foot). It was impossible for me to get out of the city and we had no idea how long we would be there.

So we stayed there all day watching the news. Me, Jared, his brother Ben and Ben’s girlfriend. That’s when I learned what was really happening. We watched in horror, live on television, what was happening just blocks away. We watched people jumping out of broken windows of the World Trade Center rather than being burned alive. Then we watched the towers fall live on television, all of us knowing what we were seeing was just blocks away. We were watching it on television, but we could still feel, hear, small, taste things in person. It was an incredible combination of sensations.

Jared, Ben and I are also all natives of Miami, Fl. We had been through hurricane Andrew together. We were not strangers to crises and national emergencies, but this was different. This was not natural. This was done by people on this planet to other people on this planet, intentionally. This was really different than hurricane Andrew.

I don’t remember eating that day, I don’t remember how late I got home. Someone on my team had arranged a car from a car service. Three people piled into the car and they dropped us off at the Metropark NJ Transit station where the others had parked. Felisa picked me up there. I remember being so incredibly happy to see Felisa that night, and we just stayed in bed for a really long time. I think it was a few days.

The Immediate Aftermath

All work for JP Morgan had to be done on site. There were no VPNs at the time approved for trading system development. There was no AWS, and no cloud providers in 2001. All of our source code, hardware, backups were all on site in our Wall Street office which we could not get to for any reason. The whole area was in complete lockdown. So we couldn’t work at all. I remember working for a few days in Felisa’s office at Rutgers, building some developer tools just to stay busy. Everyone all around was pretty out of it and we all just kept trying to do things that felt normal, but we were all in a kind of suspended animation.

The next few months

We could go back to the Wall St. office in person after a few weeks. It was such a complete and total mess. The PATH was gone, obviously, so everyone commuting to NYC from Jersey had to go through Penn Station. With the extra load, trains were always over capacity, crowded and slow. The red line subway stopped at Canal St. and I had to walk to Wall St. Every block there was a security checkpoint where they would check our IDs and reasons for being there. Lots of military with machine guns around. It would take me between 2.5 and 3 hours each way to commute at this point. I remember getting to my desk and just feeling completely spent and exhausted, before I did even a minute of work for the day (and also knowing I would have to do that same thing again in reverse to get home).

The whole area was toxic, physically and emotionally. There were lines of dump trucks carrying debris out of the city. There were bodies, coroner tents and search crews collecting body parts. I had a headache start when I went back to work that lasted every day, literally, for years. There was no discussion about air quality, no masks, no sensors with public data. We all knew we were breathing in the dust from burnt jet fuel, building parts, computers, and peoples dead bodies — everything that was in the World Trade Center at the time. It was awful and there was no acknowledgement for the physical toll it was taking. We all still had to get to work everyday and get our work done. That was it.

Several months later, I got a new job in Mid Town and I was incredibly happy to not be anywhere near Wall St. for a very long time. Then about a year and a half after that, I started a new job at Merrill Lynch and we worked out of the Jersey City office. I would commute frequently to our trading desk in the World Financial Center. The building my team was in at the time had these enormous skyscraper windows with incredible views of the city. The thing is, the views through those windows were of the pits from the towers. A perfect view of debris removal, still in full swing years later. The air was still terrible. I still had a headache.

My headache eventually went away when we moved out of the area in late 2006. We eventually moved to California. Then in 2018, during the Camp Fire here in California, my headache came back. It took me a while to make the connection, but now every time there is a fire in California, I get the same headache I had for years after 9/11/2001.