Watching
What do you do when you're in the office, about to start a late meeting, and co-workers begin to receive text messages and cell phone calls indicating that a)a building has collapsed near Grand Central, b)a transformer has blown up in midtown, c)Grand Central itself has blown up, and c)people are running through the streets covered in ash, in an eerie repeat of 9/11?
You run to the omnipresent TV monitors, where oddly enough CNN is covering something completely unrelated. You flip open your laptop, log onto wireless Internet, and find that the only websites with anything are NY1 and Newsday, both of which at this early point have barely two paragraphs. "Not terrorist-related," is the only phrase that pops out, although the cynic in you wonders how they can know this within 15 minutes.
No mention of collapsed buildings, and when, hours later, you finally have access to a TV, you learn that a water pipe explosion sent debris and steam flying so high into the air that the scene was covered in smoke and dust, similar to when the towers fell.
When the towers fell? I was on that very same street near Grand Central, watching in horror as a huge plume of white smoke began to race uptown towards us.
But we are practical as ever. After "are you okay?" the first questions always are, "are the trains running?"
You run to the omnipresent TV monitors, where oddly enough CNN is covering something completely unrelated. You flip open your laptop, log onto wireless Internet, and find that the only websites with anything are NY1 and Newsday, both of which at this early point have barely two paragraphs. "Not terrorist-related," is the only phrase that pops out, although the cynic in you wonders how they can know this within 15 minutes.
No mention of collapsed buildings, and when, hours later, you finally have access to a TV, you learn that a water pipe explosion sent debris and steam flying so high into the air that the scene was covered in smoke and dust, similar to when the towers fell.
When the towers fell? I was on that very same street near Grand Central, watching in horror as a huge plume of white smoke began to race uptown towards us.
But we are practical as ever. After "are you okay?" the first questions always are, "are the trains running?"
posted by medusa at 6:39 AM
1 Comments:
Wow. My friend's apartment was near the WTC and was utterly destroyed when they fell. Thankfully she is okay. I have never asked her for her perspective, so reading yours, though it was only a smart portion of the post, was very interesting.
Glad to see you made it out all right. :)
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