"Until people grasp the magnitude of it all, all we can do is tell individual stories until they add up." That wisdom comes from TheStreet.com's George Mannes, one of the many business reporters and Wall Street workers to describe a situation far outside his - or anyone's - usual realm of expertise.
Fifty thousand people worked at the World Trade Center. "Maybe people I knew. Certainly people who people I knew knew," said Salon's Amy Reiter, summing up the thoughts of many. Fortune's Andy Serwer called his friends who worked in the twin towers, and "remarkably none of them were there" on Tuesday.
MSNBC's Martin Wolk, who was attending a business conference in the Center when it was struck, "eventually made it up to Greenwich Village, where a man named John Roccosalva was kind enough to let me and other survivors use the telephone and get a glass of badly needed water in his tiny studio apartment." Newsday's Wall Street reporter Susan Harrigan went from interviewing witnesses, to running for her life, to doing more interviews. NJ.com offered the eerie image of "shoes, scores of shoes abandoned by their owners, fleeing too fast."
The Wall Street Journal said the Los Angeles staff of the finance firm Cantor Fitzgerald was on the phone with the New York office when someone said, "I think a plane just hit us." The company had offices on the 101st, 103rd, 104th and 105th floors. TheStreet's Herb Greenberg wrote that Cantor Fitzgerald analyst and TheStreet contributor Bill Meehan, "the greatest guy on earth, was on the 105th floor of the North tower."
Toronto-based information services company Thomson Corp. spent late Tuesday trying to locate 200 employees who worked in the WTC, said the Globe and Mail, and one Thomson employee had a reservation on the crashed American Airlines Flight 11. There was some "good" news: The AP listed companies whose employees appear to have escaped unscathed, including Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.
The casualties are likely to be staggering, and the numbers probably won't be fully known for days. But reports enabling us to put faces and names to the event are starting to trickle in. Akamai co-founder and CTO Daniel Lewin was on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center, reported Reuters and others. He leaves a wife and two sons. Bloomberg reported that the CFO of MRV Communications, 41-year-old Edmund Glazer, was also on the plane. The individual stories Mannes referred to are starting to add up fast.
World Trade Center Towers Destroyed After Terrorist Attack; Four Planes Hijacked
TheStandard.com
Code of Silence: The Unspeakable Horror
TheStreet.com
NYC's worst nightmare comes true
MSNBC
Kindness, bravery amid the horror
MSNBC
Chaos erupts
Salon.com
The quiet time of international tragedy
SiliconValley.com
Cantor Fitzgerald Staff Listened as Terror Unfolded
The Wall Street Journal
(Paid subscription required.)
From the Heart
TheStreet.com
The World Trade Center Tragedy: An eyewitness account
NJ.com
'I Thought I Was Going to Die'
Newsday
Terrorism's Pearl Harbor
Fortune
Akamai founder, CTO killed in WTC jet crash (Reuters)
Boston.com
MRV Communications CFO Dies in Flight That Struck Trade Center
Bloomberg
