Posted on 09/12/2001 12:18:37 AM PDT by kattracks
Even as they scrambled to flee World Trade Center offices, workers paused to count heads, making sure their deskmates were there. Construction workers cobbled together stretchers from materials at their Manhattan worksite. On the House floor, members of Congress hugged and sang "God Bless America."
In the midst of the chaos, humanity emerged from Tuesday's terrorist attacks. Passengers on doomed planes reached loved ones by cell phone, saying a few words final words before the connections broke. In New York, a priest couldn't find the words to comfort relatives of one of the many dead firefighters.
"I don't know what to say to them," said the Rev. Murray Gerald, who was called to St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan.
At the Hilton Hotel at Boston's Logan Airport, where clergymen rushed to be with relatives of passengers on two airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center, the Rev. David Keene said much the same. "Mostly we listen and hug," he added.
People at the scenes of devastation and beyond reached out to each other and tried to make sense of it all.
Jason Beerman rushed toward the twin towers complex as soon as he heard news of the attacks. But how could he find his older brother, Kenton, in the mayhem?
Somehow, he did. As 24-year-old Kenton emerged into daylight from the gloom of a stairwell, one of the first faces he saw was Jason's.
"I don't know how he found me," Kenton said. "He just hugged me and said, 'I'm so glad you're alive.' My brother is awesome."
Beerman described the scene on the 53rd floor, where workers stopped to take count of colleagues before heading for the street far below. On the way down the stairs, those fleeing comforted each other and many used cell phones to call home. A woman who reached her husband passed word: A plane had hit the building.
"We saw firefighters coming up the stairwell," Beerman said. "We felt kind of reassured."
Many firefighters would not make it out.
Among the casualties, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, were some of the fire department's top brass, a longtime chaplain, and a fire official, Ray Downey, who he said had led a New York fire-rescue team sent to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Giuliani was with a group of firefighters 10 minutes before they died, he said. "They were working very hard and they were working at what they loved to do."
In a late-night press conference, Thomas Von Essen, a city fire commissioner, was subdued and close to tears as he spoke of the loss of firefighters, some with 30 to 40 years of service, reciting some of their names.
"The fire department will recover," he said. "But I don't know how."
Bill Hemm of Fayetteville, Ark., who was in New York for training at an investment firm at the World Trade Center, said he owes his life to police SWAT team members who prevented evacuees from going into areas of falling debris.
"I know they died," he told The Baxter Bulletin of Mountain Home, Ark. "They had to have if they were still evacuating people. That's so sad. I guarantee they saved a bunch of lives."
Roman Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan administered last rites to a dozen victims and said the firefighters and police were "dead in great numbers."
In New York and around the nation, people seeking some way to help overwhelmed blood donation centers. One donor was Jessica McBlath, a 19 year-old New York University student, who lined up with classmates.
"It's a crisis, you must help. There's nothing else to do. You feel disempowered," she said.
Giving blood helped, but she still had one concern: She hadn't been able to get through by phone to her mother in New Jersey.
Cell phone calls did get through, astonishingly, from some people in the debris of the buildings - and, heartbreakingly, from aboard the doomed planes.
A businessman on a United flight called his father in Connecticut twice, but both calls were cut short, police said. In the second call, he said the plane was going down.
"He called to his parents' home, and so they were together in that moment," said a minister, the Rev. Bonnie Bardot.
It was just before dawn in San Francisco when Alice Hoglan got a call from her son, Mark Bingham.
"I love you very much," he told her, then added ominously, "I'm in the air, I'm calling you on the Airphone. I'm calling you from the plane. We've been taken over. There are three men that say they have a bomb."
In Westmoreland County, Pa., emergency dispatcher Glenn Cramer received a call believed to be from the hijacked plane that would soon crash nearby. The man on the line described an explosion and white smoke and then, Cramer said, "We lost contact with him."
U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson confirmed that his wife, Barbara, phoned him from aboard the American Airlines flight that plunged into the Pentagon. "I wish it wasn't so, but it is," he said.
All over the New York metropolitan area, thousands sought desperately to learn the fate of loved ones in the Trade Center. They frantically called relatives' coworkers and turned up at hospitals and police checkpoints. Often they learned nothing.
"They just tell me to check back again," Misha Phukhan told The Chicago Tribune, sobbing as she searched for her missing sister Bella at three hospitals.
Nancy Shea waited for word of her husband, Joseph P. Shea, whose office was on the 103rd floor of the Trade Center. "I heard from him after it happened," said the mother of four. "He said a plane hit the building. I haven't heard from him since."
Angelo Otchy sat on a curb near the Trade Center complex, head drooping after a long, long day. He'd arrived with other members of his New Jersey National Guard unit in the afternoon. In teams of two, they climbed up on the pile of rubble at One World Trade.
He and his partner dug and dug, using flashlights in the darkness, stopping only when ordered to withdraw, as he was when Seven World Trade Center collapsed Tuesday night.
People called faintly for help, he said, and "I must have come across body parts by the thousands."
At the U.S. Capitol, dozens of House members gathered and heard Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., say, "We will stand as Americans together throughout this time."
The lawmakers then sang, "God Bless America."
He told me he was going to start walking, he would walk across the 59th Street Bridge, which was a few miles from his office. I then got in touch with my older son, and throughout the afternoon we all kept in touch through cell phones. They couldn't contact each other, but they could both call me.
My older son rode on his motorcycle (it was impossible to get in there with a car) into Queens, which is across from NYC, where they finally found each other, and soon they were both here.
It was quite a nerve racking afternoon, to say the least.
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