A day in Manhattan I’ll never forget…

It was at about 630AM on September 11th, 2001 that I awoke in the Grand Central Hyatt Hotel in NYC, preparing for the day’s energy conference sponsored by CIBC World Markets. The night before, we had visited Lehman Brothers, a major finance firm which wanted to get involved in solar energy companies. The meeting took place at 6PM in Tower 7 of the World Trade Center.
Arriving at the World Trade Center at about 530PM, I was in awe at its size. Although I had been to New York several times for personal reasons, this business trip was special. We had driven the company car down through New Hampshire where we had stopped for a meeting on the 10th AM, then continued onward to New York City. Simply walking into the buildings lifted your business spirit. We walked through Towers 1, then 2 and finally got to 7 after a bit of a detour. We’d never been, so frankly even getting lost in them was OK. We finally arrived at Tower 7 a few minutes late for our meeting which then ended at about 730PM.
Having breakfast at the Grand Hyatt on the 11th, we could not know how fateful it was to have scheduled the meeting for the 10th at the WTC, rather than morning of 11th. Since the conference started at 9AM, there was no way to miss it anyways. By 10AM, the conference was over. We were advised that the WTC had been hit by one plane, then another. Needless to say, we heard all the sirens going off and went straight to our rooms to glue our eyes onto the TV sets watching CNN’s coverage.
It was all so unbelievable to us to watch what was going on the TV, until the sirens went off in our own building. There was a bomb scare at Grand Central Station and we had to run down the 26 flights of stairs because the elevators were unusable by patrons. The scare turned out to be a false alarm yet it was our first venture onto the streets. We could see smoke rising at the southern end of the island of Manhattan in a manner you just really aren’t prepared for.
At around 330PM that afternoon we heard that the mid-town tunnel had been opened for those wishing to exit Manhattan. We packed up our bags and left onto FDR. As we headed north onto FDR the radio announcer then mentioned that the George Washington bridge was also now open. Since that was our best route to Montreal, we modified our trip plan and headed straight there. We were off the island by about 5PM and virtually alone on the road heading to the Canadian border.
We arrived at the Canadian border only 5hours thereafter (record time) to be greeted by 3 barricades and filters of authorities, each requesting our passports and asking us virtually the same questions. After some verifications, they let us through and we were homeward bound, arriving in Montreal at about 1030PM that night. Five and half hours for a trip which usually takes 6-7 hours of “legal limit” driving!
Through this all, my job (as I saw it) was to keep “cool”. I had personnel of ICP Solar in planes above Pennsylvania and in the southern US. It took only a few minutes to confirm that one was OK in the south, yet several hours before we knew if the other was in that plane which was commandeered by its passengers to avoid being used as yet another missile. Luckily, he was not on that plane, yet not far away either. My wife was back home with young children and for the few minutes when the cellulars were dead and we could not dial out of the hotel, she obviously was fearing the worst. I finally managed to get word through my office to all my family that I was OK and in a “relatively” safe place. Who was to know what was safe and what wasn’t, yet there was no sense in making anyone feel any worse than they already did.
Thinking back to 5 years ago, I know how lucky I am that our meetings were not for the morning of 11th at the WTC and how lucky we were to get out of Manhattan as quickly as we did. It simply wasn’t OUR time to go. Each of us on this earth have been affected in some way, shape or form by Sept. 11th. All I know is that we all need to find a better way. Leading people to want to destroy each other to the point of killing thousands of innocent civilians in one single act cannot be what G-d meant for us when he created the Earth we inhabit. Some people danced in the streets the day of September 11th, yet I cannot help but feel sorry for them. Their plight in life must be so bad that they rejoiced at the deaths of others, simply because they have so little value for life themselves. When you have nothing to lose and blame this on others, your enemy’s despair becomes your reason for happyness. How sad is that?
I don’t pretend to have any answers. I simply ask that we focus some energy on the questions. It is the only way that one day, leaders will emerge that can resolve the issues that led to this event, (and others before and since), which are at the root cause of the evil we lived on that day. Some people feel that military force with its bombings and invasions will stop the kind of energy that created the evil which engulfed us on that day. I happen to see things differently.
Sass