Walking and running past papers with hand-written notes from people she knew weren’t living any more was only one of the experiences now permanently imbedded in the mind of April Farrell. The 26-year-old daughter of Kaua’i resident Steve Farrell had
Walking and running past papers with hand-written notes from people she knew weren’t living any more was only one of the experiences now permanently imbedded in the mind of April Farrell.
The 26-year-old daughter of Kaua’i resident Steve Farrell had been a Brooklyn resident for all of two months before she and her roommate came face to face Tuesday in New York City with sheer terror that she had never dreamed possible.
Working on Wall Street for Guardian Life Insurance, she had no idea of the events unfolding across the East River while preparing for work Tuesday morning in the Brooklyn apartment she shares with Tara Turczyn, 26, her best friend.
When Farrell got off the subway about four blocks from the World Trade Center, people were joking and laughing about a ticker-tape parade they didn’t know about, because the air was full of papers. Primary elections were scheduled to be held that day, so there was talk that the pieces of airborne paper were part of a political ploy.
The people had no idea that a commercial jetliner had been hijacked and intentionally flown into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
When she reported to work, her co-workers encouraged her to go into the bathroom to remove ash from her face and hair. Inside the bathroom, while she plucked out pieces of debris from her hair, a co-worker told her a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Watching live TV reports when the second plane hit the center (people on the upper floors of her building had eyewitness views of the tragedy), Farrell left her fourth-floor office to go outside and was in the building lobby when the first tower fell.
“I felt the first building collapse. All the windows in all the high-rises started shaking. There was a really bad rumbling. Everyone was screaming and running,” she said from her Brooklyn apartment Wednesday.
“When the second tower collapsed, it turned pitch black. It was like midnight outside,” she said. “It wasn’t gloomy, it wasn’t smoky. It was pitch black. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We were scared.”
People in her building were crying, trying to reach friends and loved ones working in the World Trade Center, and there were very real fears that the attacks weren’t over, especially when TV reports about the Pentagon attack first appeared, she said.
Turczyn said there was “so much fear, because every time you heard a plane overhead, you were horrified that it was going to crash into whatever you’re standing next to, or drop a bomb. You just don’t know. So it was really the most terrifying thing that anyone could ever go through.”
Farrell’s building was ordered evacuated around 11:30 a.m. The office workers cut up clothing, towels and paper towels and wet them so they could safely breath the smoky, silty, ashy air.
“It was very, very surreal to walk outside, Farrell said. She described a scene of “thousands of New Yorkers with surgical masks on, and there was probably about four or five inches of ash on the street in some places.”
Taxis, stores and fruit stands were abandoned, and taxi interiors filled with ash if the windows were left rolled down.
Bloody bandages and other graphic scenes of the horror she was walking away from were seen along her long, four-hour walk back to Brooklyn, Farrell said. The trains, subways, buses and taxis were no longer operating.
She said she saw “people’s papers from their desks” in the now-destroyed trade center towers and realized “that these people are dead and gone now. It was really heart-wrenching.”
There were incredible displays of humanity, as well, like the shoe store owner who handed out running shoes to women who had business clothes and high-heeled shoes and long walks in front of them, and those at the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting anxiously for friends and relatives to come home and handing out water, orange juice and other aid to the dazed commuters.
While there was obviously much death, pain and suffering, there was a lot of camaraderie, as well, Turczyn noted.
“It is amazing the way that New Yorkers have reacted to this. People have been overly kind. People have been helpful,” said Turczyn.
The women didn’t see any looting during their pedestrian journeys.
The catastrophic events weren’t enough to send the girls scurrying back to California, where they’re from.
Both said retaliation is warranted after the largest attack on U.S. civilians in history and the largest terrorist attack in at least the last century.
“Something needs to be done,” Farrell said. “I guess I’m a little nervous about the type of retaliation. I’m nervous about nuclear warfare, because I feel like if that starts, then the floodgates are open and we’ll have Armageddon.
“If it is Osama bin Laden, then he needs to be killed. I’d hate to see lots of loss of civilian life, but I think he needs to be gone. He needs to be captured and done away with.”
Turczyn said the U.S. “shouldn’t retaliate and kill innocent people the way we’ve been harmed. Definitely not.”
“This is a war crime. This is a crime against all of humanity,” she said. “The World Trade Center represents the world. It had 26 nations represented there. There are just thousands of people dead from everywhere around the world. It’s not just Americans that were killed. So, something definitely must be done. I just hope it’s carefully thought through.”
When Turczyn was ready to leave for work about 8:45 a.m. Tuesday, she could see smoke rising, but figured that a building in Brooklyn was burning. Having lived through many Malibu fires in California, the smoke seemed like no big thing to Turczyn, who walked to the subway station when she heard men discussing two planes colliding and hitting the World Trade Center.
She said she didn’t think a minute about not hopping on her train. To get to her workplace, she changes trains in Manhattan, only a few blocks from the World Trade Center. While waiting for her connecting train, a Wall Street businessman told her he had seen people jumping from the towers.
A subway attendant told her the station was being evacuated, and when she walked up stairs into the New York City morning, she felt the first sense of panic and looked skyward to see the World Trade Center “ablaze” about three blocks from where she was standing, Turczyn said.
She immediately broke down and cried, knowing that hundreds or thousands of people were dead or going to die in the buildings. Her grief turned to fear and then flight when the first tower fell.
“I heard a crack, and I felt the ground shake a little bit, and I saw the first tower start to buckle,” Turczyn said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, it is going to fall down.’ And people just started to scream.
“And I was like, ‘I’m going to get hit,’ because I was that close. Nobody knew that the building was going to implode. Had it fallen over, I don’t know that I necessarily would have been hit by the building itself, but I would have most definitely been hit with rocks and metal that was being propelled from the speed and pressure of the building falling.
“So I just took off running in the opposite direction. And just ran and ran. And people were just screaming and crying and running, and it was like mayhem in the streets. I literally ran for a half mile. I was fearing for my life.”
When she thought she was far enough away to be safe, she turned around to see the World Trade Center now a single tower.
“It was an incredible sight to see. As I continued to walk, I saw many people half an hour later who were just covered with ash, saw people bloodied and bandaged,” she said. “Some people just really didn’t even know where they were. They just kept walking, covered with blood. It was amazing. So incredibly bad.”
Her first thought after she stopped running was of Farrell, her roommate. “And I had no way of getting in touch with her. I feared for her, because I didn’t know where she was,” Turczyn related.
Turczyn learned from co-workers on the streets that her building was being evacuated, and they all went to the home of another co-worker’s relative.
By 10:45 a.m., through a mutual friend in California, they learned of each others’ safety.
One of Turczyn’s cousins worked on one of the floors above where the planes hit, and he is missing and presumed dead. One of their friends who works in the World Trade Center on one of the floors hit by one of the plane’s initial hits was, on vacation in Ireland.
Feelings ranging from fear to numbness will never totally leave them, Farrell and Turczyn said.
“Thousands and thousands of people died blocks from me,” Farrell said. “Your heart just aches from what we saw.”
Reports have been circulating on Kaua’i of visitors from Kaua’i who visited the World Trade Center on Monday, the day before the attacks.
Farrell, whose father is a sales representative for Kauaiworld.com, The Garden Island’s Web site, and Turczyn said that World Trade Center postcards have all been bought up, as now they are likely collectors item.
Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
