Twenty-Five Years Later: My 9/11 Story

Twenty-five years later. Worth reflecting on. My 9/11 story has no heroics in it. I was there, but really wasn’t. Below is an excerpt from Digital Trailblazer where I first wrote about my experience and its impact on me. – Isaac Sacolick

I’m heading up to Poughkeepsie with all this data because if we merge with this other company, our team, platform, and way of working must survive. I have architecture drawings to demonstrate our scalability. I have workflow documents showing how we launch and maintain newspaper sites without impacting our software development team from innovating and releasing new capabilities. I have spreadsheets outlining our IT assets, departmental financials, and organization structure. I brought along operational reports showing how system performance is improving. I get off at Grand Central Station with all these materials in one hand and my ego in the other. I board the shuttle to Times Square and then switch to the 1‐train to Penn Station.

It’s then that I notice something peculiar. I am on the subway platform and can see a couple of trains and red signals ahead in the tunnel. The subways are backed up, and I have little time to make my Amtrak, so I’m in a bit of a panic. But the 1‐train comes and gets us to Penn after a few stops in the tunnel.

As I make my way through the crowds at Penn Station to get to my track, I see out of the corner of my eye dozens of people hovering by a television. I see a building with a small fire and quickly read the caption, “Small plane crashes into the World Trade Center.”

It’s the last train to leave Penn for some time to come.

I don’t take this train often, preferring to carpool to many of the other merger meetings held at this secret location between our offices. So the train’s emptiness isn’t surprising. I am taking in the view of the Hudson River as we make our way north.

Suddenly, the train comes to a screeching halt about forty minutes into the hour‐long ride. Five, ten, then fifteen minutes go by, and there are no announcements. I take out my brick of a cell phone to call one of my colleagues to let him know that I might be late. But there’s no signal.

I look around, and a few rows back, I see a man coated in white dust, and his face, clothes, and bag are all chalky. He looks like he crawled through a construction site. He has a radio and is listening attentively. I’m not one who regularly reaches out to strangers, but I ask him, “What’s going on?”

He tells me, “I was there on the ground when the plane hit. I’m covered in it and knew this is bad and decided to get out. The news reports that the tower fell.”

It takes moments for this to sink in. The instinctive mind that wants to respond without thinking isn’t working. There’s nothing in my hippocampus that registers what this man is telling me. All I can muster is a self‐reflection, a wait, a pause. If this were today, I would instantly understand what he was telling me. But this is before terrorist attacks and mass shootings made regular headlines in the United States.

He senses my inability to comprehend, so he repeats himself. “The tower fell,” he said a second time.

I instantly feel nauseous and, a few seconds later, sick to my stomach. “The tower fell,” I hear the man say a third time.

Pictures come to my mind of a 100‐floor building toppling over. Which way did it fall? Is it in the harbor? Oh, no, wait, did it fall forward into the middle of Manhattan? Terrible thoughts now creep into my mind.

Our office is in lower Manhattan, three blocks south of Canal Street. Would the Tower reach that far? Is half of Manhattan ablaze? My wife Michele works in Union Square on 12th Street. Surely the impact didn’t extend all the way to her. But wait, our office is on Canal, but our data center is further south on Broadway at the Nasdaq building. We chose it for its proximity to the office and its security. Was that gone?

My head continues to think in circular questions, and I lose track of time until the train begins to move again. I still can’t put this all together, and I still want to believe that none of it is true. But I can’t think beyond my direct impacts, and my mind doesn’t let me think beyond my immediate circumstances.

I’m on a train to Poughkeepsie to sell the benefits of our team, practices, and platform. One of the World Trade Center towers is gone, and I can’t reach my team, but they are all in proximity. I have no idea what’s left. I can’t think past the data center being down and losing everything. My mind is blocked from thinking about the people. Our people. Our team. People in the tower. People nearby the tower.

My imagination doesn’t go into the unimaginable until the train starts going. We arrive at our destination forty minutes later. I take a cab to the hotel where we’re meeting. I walk into the hotel and see a TV on at the bar. As I approach the screen, the second tower falls in front of my eyes.

I confess it’s hard to remember much more about this day. I was at the bar for a while watching the news unfold. No one else from my company or the one we were merging with show up, and I am there alone at the bar, thinking about who is alive and what parts of my life may now be shattered. I see the footage of the buildings coming straight down instead of toppling over Manhattan, as I originally feared. I think about my wife Michele and believe she is fine even though I can’t

The surprising thing about this day is that despite the horrific catastrophe, some things do return back to normal faster than you might have ever anticipated. Cell phone coverage returns in the afternoon, though it is hard to make a connection. I reach Bill and find out the team is starting to check in on Yahoo Messenger. Our email server is still in our office without power, but as people turn on their laptops, Messenger logs them in, and the app shows them as available. They haven’t accounted for everyone yet. The data center is up. Bill tells me to find my way home.

The Amtrak south runs again that evening, and I board it with a heavy heart. Forty‐five minutes later, I step off the train in Yonkers and see the cloud of smoke spewing from lower Manhattan. I feel cold, depressed, and angry as I walk on the platform toward the exit. Michele is at the end of the platform waiting there for me. We hug for a long time before heading back to our apartment and then sit there for days watching the news unfold.

Sacolick, Isaac. Digital Trailblazer: Essential Lessons to Jumpstart Transformation and Accelerate Your Technology Leadership (pp. 59-61). Wiley. Kindle Edition.