24 years ago today, Feb 26, 1993, was the day of the first terrorist attack against the World Trade Center, when a bomb exploded in the underground garage. I was working at Metro Traffic at the time – on the 21st floor of Tower 2. It was supposed to be a normal day – I’d been working as a fill in traffic reporter for less than a year and I’d also picked up some producing shifts. That day I had to be in at noon to cover the midday, but I was running late. Not a bad thing as it turned out. By the time I got to the studio, shortly after 12 noon, our intern, Dan Rice, who’d been there since early morning working his first producer shift, was ready to leave for the day and hadn’t been able to grab the PATH train home until I arrived. He briefed me on what was going on, I sat down at the desk as he started to head out the door – and the building sat.
It’s the only way I can describe it. It felt as though the entire building abruptly sat down. The next thing I noticed was the silence. We had multiple police scanners and two-way radios in the ops area – that’s how we got much of our information and were used to the cacophony. But everything went silent. Oscar Serra, Dan Rice, Tina Lang, the phone guy (from NYNEX – precursor to Verizon – who seemed to always be there fixing the ISDN and other lines) and I just looked at each other. Oscar ran out to see what was going on, we grabbed a battery operated scanner and two-way and tried to raise anyone who could tell us what happened. Then the smoke we now saw outside started to filter into the hallway from the far staircase and we figured it was time to leave. Dan, Tina and I grabbed the scanner and two-way and kept trying to find out what was happening as we walked down the stairs in the dark with hundreds of others leaving the building, as the smoke got thicker and thicker. The phone guy must have left before or after – he wasn’t with the 3 of us.
We finally burst out of the building to find a sort of orderly panic everywhere. People were running. Others lined up patiently at phone booths waiting to make calls. Dan, Tina and I ran up to the head of one line – abruptly excused ourselves to the person about to grab the phone and took it over. (I may have had the attitude for that – native New Yorker and all – 6 ft. something Dan certainly had the bulk.) Tina had a traffic report coming up in less than a minute – and the show must go on. Tina did her report as I held the sponsorship copy in front of her (a report’s not a report without the sponsor) and Dan held the line back. Listeners got a lot more than they bargained for in that report and the ones that followed.
We never went back.
We made our way over to the Millenium Hotel, where Mike Weinstein was staying after pulling an all-nighter and dragged him out of bed. Mike got on the phone and arrangements were made for us to work out of the hotel where we spent more than a week. I only got home for a quick trip to swap out clothes during that time. It was a crazy time – working ‘til exhaustion and gorging on seafood fountains that were in abundance all over the place and just magically appeared whenever anyone was hungry. After that we ended up working out of individual radio stations for weeks, months I think – I ended up over at WBLS / WLIB – until our new studios were built out in midtown.
This time every year a few thoughts go through my mind.
6 people died in that bombing. John DiGiovanni, Robert (Bob) Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, Bill Macko, Wilfredo Mercado and Monica Rodriguez Smith who was pregnant and about to go on maternity leave. More than a thousand were injured.
The ceiling and walls of the PATH station under the towers collapsed trapping those who were there – the station where Dan would have been waiting for a train had I not been late to work that day.
I’d heard talk around Metro that we were supposed to move our studios from the 21st floor of Tower 2 up to the Observatory. That move never happened – we moved to midtown instead. I don’t know if that was the reason we didn’t make the move upstairs or whether it was something else or a combination, but I sometimes wonder if we would have been up there for 9/11 had ’93 not happened.
Though 2/26/1993 sometimes gets lost in the aftermath of 9/11/2001, I remember this date every year and was proud to be the voice talent a while back on the initial marketing video for the new tower, One WTC, for which I won an award. Here’s a link to that video and other more recent ones.
Wind, Energy, Power – BKW Windenergie
Infinity – Coiffure Award Video – EDIT
melissa eXelberth
american female voice over talent
February 26, 2017