Terrorism canceled meeting in Manhattan on 9/11

While waiting for an out-of-town business meeting to start in Manhattan, one mile away from the World Trade Center, a group of five from the Candesa advertising agency were beginning to wonder why their meeting was running behind schedule.

A few minutes later a woman came running into the office, flipped on the TV and everyone watched in disbelief as one of the towers had just been hit on Sept. 11.

Yuma Sun's interactive manager, Jennifer Vanston, who was working for Candesa at the time, explained that they were supposed to give a presentation to a group from Hallmark, and they soon began to realize why they had not yet shown up to start the meeting.

She looked out the floorlength window next to her, and to her dismay, the same building that was burning on TV was also the one burning just a mile down the street.

The moment that they saw the second plane crash into the towers with millions of other TV viewers across the nation, she said that the group just went numb and sat there unmoving as the building's alarms began to sound.

Vanston said that she refused to leave the building until she could get through to her husband, who was fast asleep back home in Utah.

“I knew I needed to make an attempt to call my husband...I knew it would be the last that I could call him for some time,” she recalled.

They were then escorted out of the building by security as an evacuation was under way.

After climbing down multiple flights of stairs, the group rushed through the doors and looked up at the two towers as throngs of people pushed passed them screaming.

“There was just so much noise,” Vanston said. “Manhattan is already loud — it's just constant sound and movement and life. But it was turned up to an extreme level that day, to where it was just deafening.”

Vanston said that as she stared at the towers in agony, she was overwhelmed knowing that many in the buildings were not going to make it out alive.

“I couldn't look at it anymore – I just had to turn away,” she remembered.

She and her coworkers managed to make it back to their hotel, closed the door to their room and just shut down, Vanston said.

Throughout the rest of the day, they watched the events unfold on their TV screen and she said she remembers feeling so helpless.

“We didn't know what to do,” Vanston admitted.

And on top of feeling helpless, they heard the news that the ferry was not running and that the bridges had been shut down — there was no way off the island.

The sounds of the city that had once been so deafening soon began to fade.

“There was no sound. There were no sirens — nothing. The city that never sleeps was completely silent,” Vanston said.

After a few hours, the group wandered back outside to find Manhattan had stepped into the “twilight zone.”

“We walked outside and the sky was gone ... people were just numbly walking around, some covered in dust, some just exhausted because they'd been crying so long and there were other people just sitting in their suits on the street corners.”

Something that shocked her, she said, was that even though people in New York don't usually make eye contact with one another, everyone soon began to look around and band together.

“We were all kind of isolated on this island and we couldn't go anywhere,” Vanston said. “Shockingly the people of Manhattan couldn't have been more cohesive and supportive of each other.”

About four days later, the group was able to secure a flight back home, only to soon find out that they would be stuck in New York for a few more days.

As they sat in the JFK airport, Vanston said she remembers watching the security and other airport personnel around her and noticing that something was definitely wrong.

“Ten minutes later, they announced there was a bomb threat at JFK airport. They thought another terrorist hit was coming in. Everyone was evacuated, everyone was screaming, everyone was running,” she said.

Vanston recalled the experience and said that at that point she and her coworkers just felt like zombies, just trying to make it through the days so that they could get home.

“We were trying to stay so strong the whole time because we just had to get out,” she remembered. “If we fell apart before we got out then we probably wouldn't have gotten out when we did — we would have let it own us.”

Amid the destruction and loss, the group decided to attend the “Lion King” Broadway play the day before they left for home in order to answer former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's call to continue to support the area economy.

Although it felt shallow to go to the play during the time, she said, upon arrival they found that the staff was taking up a collection to raise funds for the victims.

“It was like a sense of normalcy that we could finally let our guard down and finally feel what really happened,” she said.

She recalled that the cast members and producers came out after the show was over and said, “We're not going to let New York be destroyed and we're going to come together and get through this.”

Three months later, the same group came back to Manhattan for a rescheduled meeting with Hallmark and they ventured down the street to visit Ground Zero.

“I didn't want to go back to Ground Zero but I think it was more helpful than I realized to be there...It helped us move on with our lives because life had to continue.”

Sarah Womer can be reached at swomer@yumasun.com or 539-6858.