Nearly twenty years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the memories witnessed from that Tuesday morning continue to affect many of the nation’s people as the levels of fear and uncertainty have increased in recent weeks.
“[I was] working at North Fourth St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was a few blocks away from the East River,” Karla Torres, New York City resident, recalled. She was working at a leatherworking factory on the morning of 9/11. As she was feeding the leather through the machine, Torres received the first notification of the attacks.
“The first thing I heard was at my job,” she said. “Someone from Los Angeles called my friend at work and told her that something had happened at the World Trade Center.” Torres began walking a couple of blocks towards the East River to get a better view of Downtown Manhattan and became instantly fearful about what she had seen.
“I saw the towers. At first, they said it was a fire. I arrived at around 9 a.m., and at 9:03 the second plane hit. I saw it live,” Torres said. She stayed in Williamsburg as more news and events were happening. As Torres recalled, “That is something that sticks in your memory, and it’s really sad. When the towers were hit, you could see the people jumping from the buildings. I couldn’t see them, but people in the streets were screaming, ‘There goes another one; there goes another one.’”
As for the collapse of the South and North Towers, “It was like demolishing — I don’t know how to even say— like a fifty-story building. It’s not a sound I can even comprehend.”
Linda Gingell, at the time a receptionist at Penn State Harrisburg campus in Middletown, PA, remembers the moment she found out about the World Trade Center. “We had the TV on in the conference room to watch what was going on,” Gingell recalled. “It was right after it happened. [I saw] the plane hitting the South Tower in New York; that’s what we were watching.”
Gingell was initially in a state of shock. “I thought maybe [the reporting] was wrong, that they were reporting wrong. Probably because like we said at the time, ‘Who would think that would ever happen in this country?’”
As for Torres, she didn’t visit the area near the World Trade Center until 2004, 3 years after the attacks. “There were so many emotions that day that I couldn’t bring myself there for a while,” she recalled.
Gingell said she continues to worry for many years after the attacks. “Yes, I really do,” she assured. “In fact, my girlfriend and I were just talking about that the other day; you don’t know what’s going to happen.” The attacks on Sept. 11 killed 2,996 people across the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the attempted hijacked plane in Shanksville, PA. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the world.
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