ATA Officials Escape Inferno
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(TT File Photo) |
“We went up on Sunday,” Costello told Transport Topics late last week. “We stayed in the 22-story Marriott World Trade Center right between the two towers, and now it doesn’t exist any more.”
Seconds later, Costello found out it was something different. “The whole room swayed, and we were on the ground floor. The chandeliers crashed against each other, and one of them broke,” he said.
Costello said that he, Saltes and the other conference participants fled the room and were immediately confronted with a choice. In one direction was a passageway to the tower that had just been hit. He said he could see glass and other debris raining down. They chose the other way and went out through the lobby.
Seeking safety, they ran toward the other tower, which had not yet been hit. Along with a group of other people, they crossed the normally busy West Side Highway that was oddly quiet.
Along with perhaps 100 other people on the banks of the Hudson River, Costello and Saltes looked up to see “a huge gaping hole” in the 110-story tower. “We were told by a highway worker that a plane had crashed into the building, and we didn’t believe it.”
Before the second plane crashed into the other tower, Costello also said he saw 15 to 25 people leap to their deaths from the upper reaches of the billowing glass and steel hulk.
“After a while I turned away. I just couldn’t look anymore,” he said.
Just two blocks from ground zero, Costello saw the second plane crash into the other tower. “That was just sheer terror.”
He and Saltes decided to move north and away from the financial district. They cut through the lobby of a hotel and out the back, where — dressed in business suits — they had to jump down a seven-foot wall in order to gain access to a walkway that would take them north to midtown.
Ten blocks away from the complex they saw the first tower collapse. “The dust ball from the collapse nearly caught us, and we knew that everyone in the tower — including the fire-fighters who ran in early — was doomed.”
Just a few miles to the north in midtown Manhattan, Transport Topics Publisher Howard Abramson had been attending an Internet publishing conference with Marketing and Circulation Director Paul Rosenthal.
Abramson had worked on the 27th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower in 1993 when it was bombed, and was among the thousands who escaped down smoke-filled stairwells. Now, he watched the surreal scene unfold on TV from his room at the Roosevelt Hotel, as the destruction spread too fast for many to escape.
He and Rosenthal, a lifelong New Yorker, were stunned moments later when they went into the streets and saw the actual carnage from just a few miles away — the flames and smoke and scar on the skyline they had known so well. They would also be among the thousands trapped inside the city for the next two days as train and plane service was stopped.
Down in the financial district, Costello and Saltes were moving northward away from that devastation, by this time with more than 1,000 people.
They looked back to see the second tower collapse as well, burying their luggage and laptops in their hotel rooms under tons of rubble.
Crossing the Hudson on a passenger ferry to Weehawken, N.J., they walked and took a city bus to the Hoboken residence of Costello’s aunts. They watched television news coverage of the nightmare that they had escaped. With the few clothing stores in town closed, they decided to have a beer instead at a nearby bar.
The next day, Costello and Saltes met Costello’s wife Meg at the home of another relative in Perth Amboy, N.J. They arrived in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday afternoon, the 12th.
Costello said later that while people in New York were moving to get away from the danger, or respond to the damage, “it was an orderly chaos. People were upset and crying, but they helped each other. Vendors didn’t gouge people for water; there was no cutting lines; people helped each other over barriers.”
While delighted to be home, Costello said he also feels a deep kinship with New York now. “I loved the city before, but I feel even closer now, and I’ll be back. A group of thugs is not going to keep us out.”
