PEF
Region 5 member Lucille Brocato was there. The hotel where she was staying
was just four blocks away from the World Trade Center. She was in the hotel
elevator when the first plane hit.“When the doors opened, it was pandemonium. I saw people with blood on their heads. There were renovations going on in the hotel, and I thought there was an accident in the lobby. I saw a car with the trunk completely missing. I thought it must have been full of explosives. Then I heard someone talking on a cell phone say a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
“The ash was falling down just like snow. Huge things were falling from the sky. You were in the middle of chaos and you didn’t know what to think. All you could hear were sirens,” Brocato said.
Eight years have passed and this disability analyst said initially she was afraid to go back to Manhattan. But now she thinks an attack could happen anywhere.
“I think the city is back to normal. I don’t think anything affects the native New Yorker,” Brocato said.
Four hours away from the site, Christine Fadden was working in the open heart intensive care unit at Syracuse Hospital.
“Sept.
11 is something you never forget,” Fadden said. “It’s like time stood still.
All the TVs were on, but we couldn’t focus because we had critically ill
patients. One of the nurses was in total horror as her father and brother
were in Manhattan just blocks away. She fell to the floor and put her head
in her hands. We were worried about her. Fortunately, her father and brother
were not killed.“It’s still beyond belief all these years later. I wanted to go there and help. They needed volunteers so bad. Even though we live four hours from the city, it was like it happened next door. You wanted to be connected. My way was sending food and clothing in the relief effort. You just think about it and it all floods back.”
Gina Baake, a parole officer at Wyoming Correctional Facility in western New York, said she was 19 and in school.
“I had an early class that day. When I got out, everyone realized what had happened. Then the full impact of it came. I think it changed everyone’s life in certain ways. It made people more aware of their surroundings and it formed a global community in the after effects.”
Willie
Tabb, a corrections counselor in PEF Region 7, said it was the day before
his birthday and he was visiting his father and watching the “Today” show on
TV.“It was shocking,” Tabb said. “When the first plane hit, I thought it was a freak accident. When the second plane hit, I just knew everything would become different. One of the results I noticed was how the government was sending out a lot of wrong messages and was playing on everyone’s fear and ignorance. I’m generally a happy person, but Sept. 11 has made me a little more cynical and jaded.”
Joy
Fletcher, a nurse at Downstate Medical Center, had just come home from the
night shift and was called back to work. She also spoke about the ash in the
air and how a classmate of her son lost her mother in the attack.“That made me realize just how important the time is before you send your child off to school. That was the last time that little girl ever saw her mother. I couldn’t believe what was happening that day. It didn’t seem real.”
“Every time I look at the sky and there are no clouds, I am reminded of Sept. 11. It began as a cloudless day. It ended in ash.
