A view from Ground Zero

MANHATTAN, N.Y. – It was a beautiful September day as Tom Browder walked the final leg of his daily commute across the World Trade Center Plaza. As he stood at the foot of the North Tower, he heard what he thought was a bomb go off near the top of the tower.

Even though the concussion from the explosion knocked him to the ground, he was able to work his way through the World Trade Center plaza to the northeast corner of the complex.

“This is terrible but at least that is it,” thought Browder watching from across the street. “It was the second event that changed everything. That is when my mind said if there are two, is someone dropping bombs on the city?”

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Browder grew up in Missoula. He started working in New York City eight years prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2001, he worked for JP Morgan Chase out of the Chase Plaza, two blocks east of the Twin Towers.

Browder lived in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, about 40 miles away from Manhattan. Every morning he took the train to Hoboken, N.J. where he caught a ferry. The ferry took him across the Hudson River to the World Financial Center. From there he walked across the World Trade Center plaza between the Twin Towers, then down the stairs from the plaza to the street, where he would then continue across Lower Manhattan to his office. 

On Sept. 11, 2001, Browder arrived at the World Financial Center at 8:35 a.m. As he crossed the top of the plaza, the plane hit on the 92nd floor of Tower 1 at 8:46 a.m.

“It was just bizarre. I remember hearing a bang and I remember hearing, ‘Gee, it’s a sonic boom,’ which you never hear in urban areas,” said Browder.

When Browder looked up he saw the explosion and huge fireball blow out of the building.

“The concussion knocked me down,” said Browder. “People were running everywhere. Someone stepped on me. I had a foot print on my thigh.”

Browder escaped the falling debris by running into the World Trade Center Building #5. He exited the building and crossed Church Street where he watched and waited.

“We started to see these little specks. They were people jumping out because the flame was so intense,” said Browder.

At 9:03 a.m. the second plane came from the south and hit Tower 2 of the World Trade Center, Tower 2.

“I remember that I just saw the tail of the plane and I had this Montana thought, ‘Oh they are going to put retardant on Tower 1,’” said Browder. “Obviously that was not right but that was what was on my mind.”

The plane was going over 500 miles an hour when it hit. Debris exploded out of Tower 2. Someone standing next to Browder was hit in the head with a piece of debris.

“Then it was just total pandemonium,” said Browder. “Since there were two things going on … What was it? Was there a third one?”

Browder was in fight or flight mode as was everyone else. He remembers acres of women’s high heel shoes as they left their shoes to run.

Browder sprained his ankle in the chaos. He hobbled as quickly as he could to the Chase Plaza. He arrived around 9:30 a.m. and he headed down two stories to the training center where the news footage was being shown on the TVs. This was the first time Browder realized it was planes hitting the buildings.

Browder said they were told to stay in place and “everything was under control.” He estimated there were 4,000 employees in the building.

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Browder’s wife Carolyn Lewis was checking out the latest news on the New York Times website before she had to go to work the morning of Sept. 11. Around 9 a.m. she saw a banner alert on the front page of the website saying that a plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“My first reaction was what’s this? A new disaster movie? I haven’t heard of this one,” wrote Lewis in an email. “Then I realized that it wasn’t a movie ad, it was late-breaking news.”

Lewis rushed to turn on the TV. There was still a lot of confusion as reports continued to come in. 

“Was it a small private plane?  Had the pilot had a heart attack?  Were they going to be able to put the fire in the North Tower out?” wrote Lewis. “Suddenly a second plane came into sight from the south and it crashed into the South Tower.”

Lewis continued to watch the reports until almost 9:30 a.m. when she suddenly asked herself, “Where’s Tom?”

Since Browder did not have a cell phone, Lewis called his office number. She heard his voicemail greeting from the day before.

“I started to panic,” wrote Lewis. “He would have been walking across the World Trade Center Plaza right at the time the first plane hit Tower One and he wasn’t in the office yet.  I left a message begging him to call me right away.”  

Browder called her within 10 minutes of her message and told her he was shaken up but okay.

* * * * *

Browder stayed with his coworkers below ground despite his boss encouraging him to seek medical attention for his ankle. He watched the two towers collapse on the TV, Tower 2 at 9:59 a.m. followed by Tower 1 at 10:28 a.m.

“It was very weird watching from underground and seeing what was happening at street level,” said Browder. 

After both towers collapsed, the clouds of dust infiltrated the Chase Plaza’s ventilation system. Just after 11 a.m., everyone was ordered to evacuate including all of Manhattan south of Canal Street.

“I bet there are 200,000 people down there. That is a big deal,” said Browder.

As Browder left the building he said it was dark as night. There were three or four inches of fine white ash covering everything.

They walked to Water Street and turned north. When they reached China Town, they got out of the cloud.

“It was just amazing because it was like the difference between going into a dark room from a sun lit day. The cloud was still really dark smoke at the time.”

Browder remembers walking past Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center in the West Village. It was closest to the scene. When they walked by there were all the doctors and nurses waiting for patients but there were no patients.

“It was a pretty binary event. You either died or you were fine. There were very few injuries,” said Browder from his experience.

It wasn’t until around 11:30 a.m. when Browder saw an F-15 fighter Jet that he finally felt safe.

“There was just this nervousness trying to understand what is going on,” said Browder. “Normally you wouldn’t see fighter planes over New York. That sort of lifted the reassurance level.”

Browder walked nearly four miles to Penn Station. All mass transits were shut down until around 3 p.m. Medical personnel at the station taped Browder’s sprained ankle.  They also advised him to throw away all his clothing when he got home, since the collapse of the buildings had probably released asbestos into the air. 

He arrived at his home train station in Bernardsville, N.J. at 4:30 p.m.

* * * * *

As Browder watched the second plane hit the South Tower he swore he was moving back to Montana and would never work in New York again. However, he returned to work at the Chase Plaza within 10 days.

“It was very somber,” said Browder.

He remembered Blackhawk helicopters, special forces troops and posters of missing people hung everywhere. And the piles continued to burn.

Browder explained that each of the 110-floor towers had an acre footprint.

“When you collapse 220 acres of people, furniture and everything else into a pile the piles were as tall as these trees,” said Browder pointing to the lodgepole in Dog Town.

The piles burned for four months and it took six months to remove all the metal from the pile. Browder explained they would carefully sift through the dirt so they did not disturb any human remains.

Because Chase Plaza was downwind from the piles, they ran big industrial filters on every floor until January.

While Browder said people were pretty resilient, he was struck by how many victims were in the mid-30s and left young families. Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the companies at the top of Tower 1, lost 650 employees.

Because most of those in the Twin Towers worked in the financial industry, they were young. Browder said many didn’t have a will or life insurance to support those they left behind.

In addition to heightened national security and the war on terror that ensued, Browder noted several changes to New York as a result of the attacks.

Every building now has a security desk where everyone checks in.

Buildings started having annual fire drills, where before that was never done. People were also discouraged from using the elevator, which was the main evacuation route out of the buildings prior to Sept. 11.

Browder suspects that if this happened now, people would be evacuated immediately instead of waiting until the tower collapsed. He said people in Tower 2 were told to stay in place before it was hit.

After visiting with someone who worked with the New York City Police Department during the Rice Ridge Fire, Browder learned that the New York City Police and New York City Fire Department couldn’t communicate via radio because they had different frequencies. When the emergency personnel were debriefing the 9-11 response, someone from Region 1 went back as part of the team to explain to New York City how important it is to have an emergency frequency on which everyone can communicate.

“In some ways out here fighting forest fires we were in a better position from a communication stand point,” said Browder.

Browder worked in New York until four years ago. He returned to Montana and moved to Seeley Lake. He encourages everyone to visit the memorial and museum at ground zero of the Twin Towers. He added that many of the commuter towns now have plaques that list the names of those that were killed in the 9-11 attack.

Browder said, “It was a day that will forever be seared in my memory.”