102 Minutes That Changed the World
I began writing this blog the morning of September 11 but laundry, work emails, hardwood floor selections, dog grooming, texts with clients, a six-little-girls after-school playdate, and a high school football game got in the way of its completion. As I went through the motions of a typical Friday, overwhelming emotion loomed in the background, and I found myself a little stoic, grateful and reflective remembering our lives and what we experienced 25 years ago. The events are still so real in my head that it feels like yesterday in so many ways, and also a lifetime ago.
Our lives, our marriage, our faith, our friendships, our homes, and our careers were fully shaped by the events of September 11, 2001, and the many hard days that followed. My children have asked, so I'm going to re-share our story for the girls, for our family, and for our old friends and new friends, since it's been a long time since they received my original email back in September 2001. The bummer is that email is currently sitting printed in a box of memorabilia. I hope to find it this fall and I will add it to this post.
Before I begin, I want to thank all of our amazing friends who send messages and texts to us each year. Over the course of today, I received the sweetest texts: "Thinking of you both today. Love you both." "This sad day never goes by, but I'm so grateful that you and Charlie survived. Love you." "Always think of you both today." We are so blessed with an amazing network of people who love us, and ironically, I have September 11 to thank for it. So here goes my (our) story...
My Sliding Doors Moment
There was a 1998 romantic comedy with Gwyneth Paltrow called Sliding Doors. In the words of Wikipedia, "The film alternates between two storylines, showing two paths the central character's life could take depending on whether she catches a train." I have always referred to September 11 as my Sliding Doors moment.
As a little backdrop: Charlie and I were college sweethearts from Texas A&M and we were married in April 1999 and moved to London. We were so happy living abroad, but visa issues sent us to New York City in November 1999. He was working for Marsh in their Casualty group and I was working at JP Morgan in their Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities group... both details that will matter later in the story. As you can imagine, two married 25-year-olds with great jobs and great friends, living in New York City at a time when it was in an economic boom and felt like the center of the universe — we were having the time of our lives. We loved living in New York so much we saved our money (I think we ate ramen for months!) and we bought our first home together in Hoboken on August 13, 2001… yes you read that correctly. It was a 3rd floor walkup on 8th and Washington in a prime location for the best food and bars Hoboken had to offer. It was officially our first "fixer-upper," and we were obsessed with the life we were creating including our new home, our friends, and our community.
Our Home!
As a little backstory to the days leading up to September 11, we had a fun trip planned to Cabo with my parents and brother and sister in law but returned early to celebrate the wedding of our NY city friends Brooks and Kelly on Sept 8. September 10 we both went to work early to play catchup from being gone and if I recall I think we both worked quite late. My friend Chenoa and I had decided to do the Avon Breast Cancer 60-mile walk from Rockland County into Manhattan, and people had donated money — so for some strange reason, I stayed up until 1 am writing thank-you notes to friends for their donations. Very odd given how exhausted I was.
The Morning of September 11
The morning of September 11 was one of the most frustrating, strangest commutes of my life. Charlie and I both accidentally overslept a bit, and he rushed out the door to catch the bus to Midtown Port Authority. I worked on Wall Street, so I usually walked out my front door, jumped on a quick bus to the PATH train, which took me from Hoboken to the World Trade Center, then a quick 10 min walk to Wall Street. On most days it took about 30-40 minutes door to door. I walked out my front door (I'm going to assume 8:30ish) and decided to drop the thank-you notes in the mailbox a few blocks away. Why, I don't know. But I'm thankful that I did
Standing in front of the post office, bus after bus flew by — all full — and my frustration was building, since I was now pushing it on being late to work. After two, three, four buses went by, I decided it was an absolutely beautiful, crisp fall day, and since I was training for the 60-mile walk, I just sped-walked to the PATH train, adding another 12-15 minutes to my commute. I saw my train sitting there with its doors open, and I ran down the stairs into the PATH station as the train doors were closing. Like many times before, I threw my arm and leg into the doorway to trigger it to reopen for me — it bounced off my leg and closed, and I missed the train. I can't tell you how frustrated I was with my bad choices and my bad luck as I sat there for another five to eight minutes waiting for the next train, knowing I was likely going to be late to work. Little did I know that my frustration was God's protection, as that was the last train that went into the World Trade Center that morning, and I knew that because my friend had made the train.
The next train arrived, and I was so early for it that I was able to sit down to read a book. The doors closed, and the train was en route to the WTC when it just stopped. After a few minutes, the conductor came over the speaker and said we were being diverted to Christopher Street because there was a fire at the WTC. The train filled with the grunts and frustration of morning commuters, and we sat underground for a long time waiting to reach the alternate station. God's protection kept throwing up roadblocks at every PATH Station.. at 9 Street, the line was too long; at 14 Street, my subway card didn't work for the first time ever, so I ultimately took the PATH train to 34th Street to avoid the frustrated crowds — nowhere near my office —, and when I emerged from the PATH station to jump on the 2/3 subway to Wall, I heard comments about a small Cessna that had hit the tower. I emerged from the station and saw the smoke coming from the WTC. I felt unease to my core and tried desperately to call Charlie to find out what was going on, but my cell phone wasn't working. I stopped at a payphone and tried to call his office line, my parents, my brother — nothing would go through. My logic said, "You can't NOT go to work just because the WTC is on fire," but there was a strong voice that kept saying, "Go to Charlie, go to Charlie." So I ignored doing the "right" thing and followed my gut. I quickly walked 14 blocks to get to Charlie's office building. The crazy thing is, New Yorkers on the streets were just going about their day. No one knew what was going on as we were all just commuting to work. Yet our friends and families were all at home watching it unfold live.
Finding Charlie
I truly just remember walking and praying and trying to call everyone on my cell phone as I hustled north to get to him. I stopped at a couple more pay phones along the way, and my only phone call that went through was to my brother's work line. "I'm ok. I don't know what's going on, but I need you to call Charlie and tell him I'm coming to him." I walked into Charlie's building in Midtown, and all the phone lines were out trying to reach Marsh offices. I still knew nothing beyond a small plane hitting the World Trade Center, and at this point I was beginning to see sirens and emergency vehicles heading south, and I could only assume they were headed downtown.
I approached the main desk, and the beautiful young girl standing there literally fell to the floor in tears as we both learned that a commercial airliner had gone into Marsh's offices in the WTC, and her fiancé was on the 100-plus floor that day. The gravity of what was unfolding hit me like a ton of bricks. I had been in London. I had seen foreigners burning our flag on TV. I knew there was unrest, but I never dreamed we'd be attacked at home, and especially my home.
I stood there, unsure of my next steps or how I would even find Charlie. We had no smartphones, no texting, no way to get information to one another, all communication was gone. I walked toward the elevator bank for his floor to talk to security in the hopes they would let me up to Marsh offices — and at that very moment the elevator doors opened, and there, standing in front of me, was my husband. He had just done the mental math of my commute and realized I was likely in the World Trade Center, and he was coming to find me. God had a plan for both of us that day, and fortunately it was for us to be together. To put this in perspective… 1166 is a 44-story, 1.7-million-square-foot office building with 20–30 passenger elevators and 8-10k people who work there. The timing of me walking to the bank of 10 elevators at the precise moment my husband decided to leave his office, and the doors opening on the elevator with me standing there, could only have been divine intervention and His perfect timing.
Charlie's story is his to share, but we all have the annual reminder on the History Channel of the moment he witnessed the WTC attack. As I said, Charlie ran out the door to catch a bus to Port Authority and was walking through Times Square when a documentary camera caught him witnessing the moments the second plane hit on the giant Good Morning America television screen. You see the look in his eyes as he rushed out of Times Square to his offices. He and his coworkers were able to see the buildings from their offices and their boss told them to do whatever they could do to get home. Charlie grabbed a handful of co-workers to try to get off the island and jumped in the elevator when mid-way down he realized he had to go downtown to find me. And then the elevator doors opened, and I was literally 10 feet away from him. It still makes me tear up when I remember seeing him and the relief in his eyes.
Getting out of Manhattan
We both knew that all the trains, buses, and roads would be closing, since no one knew if further attacks were coming. We were all in the most real state of fight-or-flight, and we literally ran for the water, trying to stay clear of any major areas like Times Square in the event there were further attacks by suicide bombers or any other planned attacks. The timing is all a blur that morning but I believe we reached the NY Waterway Ferry at Pier 78 around 10:30. We were among the first few thousand people to get there. Within minutes, the crowd behind us had swelled to something like 25,000+ people, everyone looking for any way off the island.
Standing there waiting to board the boats, panic tore through the crowd — someone screamed "bomb," and people scattered in every direction. Rumors spread like wildfire: a plane was headed for the Empire State Building; Dallas had been bombed; Chicago too. None of it was true, but in that moment, none of us had any way of knowing what was true anymore. And then we heard that the second tower had fallen, and I wanted to vomit as I thought of all of the deaths and people we knew who were going to be affected. I sat there not knowing how the buildings fell and wondering if every friend and co-worker I had was also lost in the devastation.
We finally boarded a ferry crossing the river to Hoboken. I truly was unable to fully process what had happened, but I knew that life was now going to be very different. America was under attack, and we had no idea if more attacks were planned for the day, that week, that year and I had no idea what that meant for our country. I couldn't imagine what the next few weeks would look like; the only thing I knew was that the skyline I had looked at every day would never be the same.
By the time we reached Hoboken, the whole town was beginning to transform into a triage center for what everyone hoped would be tons of survivors from the WTC and lower Manhattan. Every street was lined with buses. Our apartment hosted a few of Charlie's coworkers, and the restaurants served anyone and everyone who wandered into the streets—we had no idea how we could help, but like many others, we felt determined to do something. Charlie and I waited in line together to give blood and then Charlie headed over to the St. Mary's triage area to help people coming off the boats that had been evacuated from lower Manhattan. The hospital had activated its disaster plan as soon as the second plane hit, setting up triage chairs and about thirty beds at the ferry terminal; by the end of the day, and according to sources, nearly 6,800 people had come through decontamination there and close to 2,000 were treated as patients. Only around 300 were transferred to the hospital itself, mostly for dust exposure, cuts, and scrapes, and just 134 were serious enough to be carried directly off the boats as casualties.
More about Marsh
What many people don't know is that Marsh held offices on eight floors, 93 to 100, of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. When American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building, its offices spanned the entire impact zone, floors 93 to 99. Everyone present in the company's offices on the day of the attack died as all stairwells and elevators passing through the impact zone were destroyed or blocked by the plane crashing into the tower where the company was; the firm lost 295 employees and 63 contractors. The reason I couldn't reach Charlie was their technology and phone systems were all housed in the World Trade Center and the cell phone towers were located on top of the WTC so there was no way for us to contact one another. Charlie lost some really good friends and a lot of office acquaintances that day — people who he sat with in midtown that just happened to be downtown for meetings. A Marsh memorial to those lost on 9/11 is located in the plaza adjacent to Marsh McLennan's New York Headquarters at 1166 Avenue of the Americas. This summer was a full-circle moment as we moved our oldest daughter to NYC for her summer internship at Marsh at 1166.
Charlie works in an industry heavily impacted by 9/11, with over a dozen insurance carriers and brokers in both towers. Marsh lost the most employees of the insurance casualties, but Aon Corporation was in the South Tower, on floors 92 and 98–105, and lost 176 employees — a toll that would have been far higher if an Aon executive, Eric Eisenberg, hadn't ordered an evacuation right after the first plane hit; more than 900 of Aon's roughly 1,100 employees present got out before the second plane struck their own floors. Every year, Charlie suits up in the same pink shirt and suit with his Marsh pin to commemorate all of the friends and co-workers lost that day. Last year he happened to be in New York for meetings on 9-11 and sent us this photo.
Why the Numbers Weren't Higher
Now some more obscure facts that you may or may not have known. When the towers fell, I assumed 100,000 people were killed. I worked downtown and commuted through the WTC every day and saw the volume of people commuting at that hour between the World Trade Center Complex, the Stock Exchange, The Financial District and Wall Street. We could only see the smoke and i couldn't fathom how they imploded and assumed they had taken down all of the neighboring buildings also. It really is a miracle as the numbers are staggering — I pulled this from Wikipedia. On a typical weekday, an estimated 50,000 people worked across the entire World Trade Center complex — all seven buildings, including Port Authority staff — with another roughly 140,000 passing through daily as visitors, shoppers, or commuters, for a total daily population of around 190,000.
On the actual morning of September 11, though, far fewer were in the towers themselves at the moment of impact, since it was still early (8:46 a.m.) Many don't realize that New Yorkers don't start work until 9 am. NIST's estimate puts the number of people inside the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks at roughly 17,400 — a fraction of the complex's normal daily population, which is part of why the death toll, as devastating as it was, wasn't dramatically higher.
So the irony of why the numbers were so low that morning, I have no doubt, had God involved. Many of our friends survived and were not in the towers because of one of the below reasons:
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Monday Night Football: the Giants played in Denver against the Broncos on September 10, 2001. Denver won 31–20, with the game staying close into the fourth quarter before the Broncos pulled away. Since it was a Mountain Time kickoff on MNF, it ran quite late back east — well past midnight Eastern. Many people stayed up late to watch the game and were running late to work. Another fact I recently learned was the Giants' team charter flew back overnight and landed at Newark Airport early on September 11, parking at the gate directly next to United Flight 93. Players were off the plane by around 6 a.m., hours before that flight would depart.
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It was the most beautiful day I have ever experienced in Manhattan, and probably top 5 most beautiful days in my whole life. It was a bluebird day, crisp and in the low 60s, without a cloud in the sky. The air felt unusually fresh because a cold front had passed through the night before, pushing Hurricane Erin out to sea and leaving clear, dry air behind. The sky itself was a deep, almost impossible blue, the kind you don't forget. Many people we know just dawdled on their commute to work. They stopped for coffee, they walked a little slower than normal, they just were enjoying a gorgeous fall day after a very hot summer. There is an amazing exhibit at the World Trade Center Exhibit that contains 2,983 different blue squares representing each one of the victims of the 2001 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
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School had just started the week before in Manhattan and many people were late because they were taking their kids to school. It was the first day of Kindergarten for many families
I am so grateful for all of the above, as I do believe it was the difference in so many people we know not being in the towers that day. If the terrorists had hit the buildings after 9:30, the devastation would have been far larger than the already devastating amount of people lost that morning.
The Real Estate Deal Behind the Towers and its impact on both of our industries
I worked in commercial mortgage-backed securities — securitized real estate lending and was primarily focused on properties in Manhattan and up and down the East Coast. Larry Silverstein and Westfield America had just closed on a 99-year lease on the WTC for $3.2 billion. Silverstein only had approximately $14 million in equity (CRAZY!), and the rest was financed through a $563 million CMBS loan arranged by GMAC — with separate securitizations by Bank of America (WTC 7) and Merrill Lynch (the nearby World Financial Center) facing the same collateral problem when the towers fell. With the collateral all gone, the only thing behind the debt was the insurance proceeds, which led to multiple trials over the "one occurrence or two" fight. Silverstein's insurance coverage had been placed in a rush before closing, through binders rather than fully negotiated policies, and different insurers ended up bound to different policy language — some to a form called WilProp, others to a Travelers form. Silverstein argued the two separate plane strikes were two separate occurrences, entitling him to double the $3.5 billion per-occurrence limit (he sought $7 billion total).
Silverstein ultimately recovered about $4.55 billion total — well short of the $7 billion he sought, but more than the $3.5 billion floor — because some insurers were held to a single occurrence and others to two, depending purely on which form of binder they happened to be on.
It's a good illustration of how thin the paperwork margins were on a deal of that scale, and how a rushed binder clause ended up mattering more, dollar for dollar, than almost anything else in the transaction.
The fallout didn't stop at the courtroom. When reinsurers pulled back from terrorism coverage almost entirely, commercial real estate lending nearly seized up — no insurable terrorism risk meant no financeable collateral. Congress responded with the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002, a federal backstop that's been renewed ever since and is still, quietly, why deals like the one I used to underwrite can get financed at all. So ultimately the outcome significantly impacted both of our industries and changed the rules going forward.
The Days That Followed
Marsh was amazingly up and running with backup technology and phones the next day, and I believe Charlie was back at work by Thursday, as they worked through all the insurance issues associated with their clients losses. I worked at 60 Wall Street at JP Morgan. Phone lines stayed down for days. We left our offices on Wall Street and moved to Midtown, and other than an eerie, creaky subway ride down to 60 Wall to get some personal belongings, we never worked in our old offices again, as we had sold the building to Deutsche earlier that year and were scheduled to move imminently.
When Charlie and I finally got through to check our voicemail, both our home phone and our cell phones were completely full — messages from friends and family all over the country who didn't know if we'd made it out, weeping, praying, telling us how much they loved us. I have never forgotten how loved I felt in that moment, in the middle of everything we had just lost.
So many people talk about September 11 but only those in NYC remember September 12 and the days that followed. Fighter jets overhead daily protecting the skies, the constant sound of sirens heading to the devastation, a military presence, media coverage of every corner. So much fear of more attacks, constant bomb threats at every major office building and tourist area. Impossible commutes to work. On Friday, September 14, we were woken around 2 am to our condo lit up by a crazy electrical storm, with booms of thunder and lightning directly overhead, and the sound of F-15s and F-16s whizzing through the sky. We were on such pins and needles that we ran from window to window and thought we were being bombed until we realized it was a terrible storm. I truly can't erase that feeling, and I think of the fear we felt every time I picture what war must be like in other lands. I hope we never have to experience it again.
Leaving New York
Every part of our lives was changed that day — our marriage, our faith, our careers, where we even chose to live. New York was different after that moment for me personally as I felt so much anxiety over the potential for more attacks and suicide bombers. I loved my job but it just didn't feel right living in the "bullseye" and I prayed for a way out of New York. On June 15, 2002 I told Charlie that he had 1 year to figure out how to get us out of New York City and on June 16 Charlie was approached to move to Bermuda, which we accepted and he moved to Bermuda in October. We sold our condo almost a year to the date that we bought it and I moved into a short term housing in Hoboken. We lived apart until January as I continued to work until I got my bonus as I had worked too hard to walk away from it. We were not sure if I was going to be able to work in Bermuda so it was important financially to our family.
The Years That Followed
Bermuda ended up being a life-changing experience for us, and it's where we met many of our closest friends in the world. We were all young executives who'd landed on the island to help build out the offshore insurance capacity the U.S. market suddenly needed, most of us arriving within a year of each other. We worked hard and played even harder, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed to heal. I was looking to see if there was information on how many young expats moved to the island in those early days and a wonderful article was written to mark the 25th anniversary that is worth a read on why Bermuda became such the hot spot for insurance.
In the years that followed, life kept testing us and tragedies continued — first the weight of September 11 itself, then losing my best friend in a car accident back in Texas in October 2002, then a couple of miscarriages, and Hurricane Fabian battering the island as a Category 4 in September 2003. But Bermuda gave me something I didn't expect: a network of women who showed up for me through all of it. New York seemed a million miles away on that little island, and that distance turned out to be exactly what let them heal me.
We spent three fabulous years on the island and welcomed our daughter Reese in Bermuda in 2005, the rainbow we had been praying for. After Bermuda, we were transferred to London where we spent the next four years and welcomed our second daughter Megan. Years later, in one of those strange, quiet coincidences life sometimes hands you, a frightening moment landed on another September 11. Our journey to 4 girls lasted from 2003-2013 and ultimately involved 8 pregnancies. On September 11, 2012 we were told during an early ultrasound that we were pregnant with twins, but neither of them were viable as they had no heartbeats and that miscarriage was imminent. Fear on that date, it turns out, was something our family would come to know more than once. And each time, by the grace of God, we came through it.
Twenty-Five Years Later
Twenty-five years later, I am as emotional about that time of our lives as if it were yesterday. I still remember most of the raw feelings and can cry at the Budweiser commercial and any other 9-11 video montage from that day. In fact I cried today listening to Alan Jackson's "Where were You (when the world stopped turning)" If I've learned anything from that day, and from everything since, it's this: call the people you love and tell them so. Hug your kids a little tighter. Don't shield them from life's hard moments — tell them about the storms you've weathered, so they know they're capable of weathering their own. And trust, even when it's hard to understand. I don't believe I would have died had I made the last train into the Trade Center that day, but from all friends' accounts, I was spared from being in the buildings that morning and seeing things I would not be able to unsee, and saved me from experiencing a level of fear that could have rocked me to my core. I was so lucky those train doors closed. I pause and feel gratitude at all of the frustrations of my life. The frustration of a light turning red when I'm late, or a plane delayed, or any other roadblocks that should create anger... right or wrong, I just always assume that the frustration and delays are God's protection as he makes no mistakes.
So yesterday, on an ordinary Friday full of work and laundry and carpool lines and dog walks, I'm grateful — for every friend who texted "thinking of you both today," for the twenty-five years we've had since with each other, the many amazing places that Marsh and life have taken us, our four girls that we don't take for granted, and for a story that, twenty-five years later, still feels like it happened yesterday.
Never forget.
Thank you so much for sharing your story! Brought tears to my eyes!