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Twenty-five years ago, at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, the first of four hijacked planes hit one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York, ending for this nation a certain innocence, and the belief that such an attack would never happen on American soil.
An economics professor from WVU, Tom Witt, was on site when the planes hit and he gave an exclusive interview to then-West Virginia Public Broadcasting news director Beth Vorhees. Click the link below to listen to that interview and complete coverage from that day on “Dateline West Virginia.”
Witt was attending a meeting at the Marriott hotel nestled between the twin towers. His wife came to New York with him but wasn’t at the meeting.
“I was listening to a speech in the hotel ballroom when the first plane hit the North Tower,” Witt said. “Those people who were in attendance at the breakfast meeting exited the ballroom and waited in the lobby until it was safe to exit and head towards the Hudson River. I was on the phone looking at the tower when I saw the second plane crash into the south tire at 9:03 a.m.”
By that point he – and much of the nation – realized this was not just a fluke accident.
“Oh, yes,” Witt said. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. We were gob smacked by the event.”
Courtesy of WVU
Not sure if his wife was alive, and with no way to immediately reach her, Witt made his way into Midtown Manhattan and called his office again. There were multiple messages from reporters, seeking interviews.
“And I said, I’ll talk to one person and I’ll talk to Beth Vorhees at West Virginia Public radio and that’s when the interview occurred,” he remembered.
Vorhees began the interview with a simple request.
“Tom, take us through it from the very beginning this morning. What happened?” she asked.
“About a little bit before 9 o’clock we heard a muffled explosion and then the chandeliers started tingling and then we realized that something happened and almost simultaneously everyone stood up and moved out of the ballroom and out into the street,” Witt said. “At that point we turned, looked up and saw that there had been an explosion.”
His wife was in the hotel somewhere, but he had no idea where she was and no way to reach her. He got to a phone and called his office.
“I was on the phone, turned around and I literally saw the second plane plow into the other tower. At that point I hung up. I mean I was in shock as well as everyone else around me. I recall one of my neighbors, Herb Morrison, who was the voice of the Hindenburg disaster at New Jersey [in 1935], who said, ‘Oh, the humanity.'”
“I’ve been thinking of that quote all day,” Vorhees said.
“And I thought of it myself, particularly when you saw people jumping from the 80th and 90th floors of the building to their deaths,” Witt said. “What I saw was something that was just unbelievable.”
He and others from the conference simply walked down the street, men in coats and ties, women in high heels, all heading north and away from the towers.
“We looked around on occasion and we saw one tower go down to its base and then the second tower, and we immediately knew that the World Trade Center Marriott Hotel where we had been having our conference was probably no longer there,” Witt said.
He still didn’t know if his late wife had survived.
“And that’s when around noon, I believe, I got on the phone with Beth Vorhees and had the interview with her. And that’s also when I found out that my wife was alive,” he said. “She had been up in the room getting dressed when the first plane hit and she ran down the stairs and out in the plaza where she was directed by security to go to the mall below the plaza.”
After the second plane hit, she exited to the east side, made her way through Chinatown and walked across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn.
“Around noon or shortly thereafter, I found out that she was alive and we were reunited in the afternoon around 4 o’clock. It was a tearful reunion,” he said.
Now, 25 years later, what stands out the most is how the attacks unified the country.
“On that day, everyone in America was coming together to share food, shelter, money to those impacted by the attack. There was a true sense of community that prevailed as a result of that event for several years,” he said. “At that time, we had a sense of community and mutual respect, both in our country and with many of our foreign friends. And I long for the days when we can return back to that sense of community and mutual respect.”
Back in Morgantown, West Virginia, Mark Lambert, now the director of the WVU Extension Fire Service, was working as an investigator and bomb squad member for the State Fire Marshal’s Office. That morning, he was preparing for a trip to Charleston, and had the “Today” show on.
“And Matt Lauer said, ‘We’re going to take you to New York. Apparently some kind of plane or something has hit one of the towers,'” Lambert said. “So I’m like, ‘okay,’ so I look, and I’m thinking it’s a Cessna or something. And then that second plane hits and my pagers started going off.”
Following the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, police, fire and EMS personnel had been training for emergency terrorism response.
“And so, yeah, when I saw the imprint for the first plane, I’m like, ‘that ain’t no small plane.’ And then trying to calculate the odds of, ‘okay, what’s the odds on a plane randomly hitting?’ And then obviously when the second one hit, it’s like, ‘yeah, no doubt.'”
He left immediately, and didn’t make it back home for a couple weeks. He, too, remembers how the nation felt stronger, somehow.
“We got more serious and we also pulled together, which I thought was great. I think we got to the point where the American people, you know, we’re like a family. We fight amongst each other. But when you mess with one of us and you got to mess with all of us,” he said.
Since then, travel in the U.S. has changed dramatically. The security checkpoints, the REAL IDs, the limited liquids for carryon. But both men say it’s that sense of unity that followed 9/11 that they most miss today.