The moment Linda Gaccione, 34, of Secaucus, heard reports about Monday’s airplane crash in Queens, she turned off the TV and radios. She did not want her kids to hear about the disaster. They had already gone through a living hell at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and didn’t need any reminders.
Raised in Union City, Gaccione attended Pace University and has lived in Secaucus ever since she was married two years ago – although she has fond memories of working at the Secaucus Lowes Meadow Six theater when younger, as well as dishing ice cream at the now defunct Hagen-Daas in the mall. But she went on to bigger and better things, becoming an assistant foreign exchange trader at Fuji Bank in the World Trade Center while her husband worked near Exchange Place in Jersey City. She was at the World Trade Center in 1993 during the first terrorist attack.
"I thought since I survived that, nothing like that would ever happen again," she said last week.
On Sept. 11, she got lucky. She was on the 50th floor instead of the 80th with some of her co-workers. Fuji Bank was in the process of merging with two other banks. She was among the first to be transferred down to the lower floor in Tower Two.
"I moved down over Labor Day," she said.
When the first plane struck, Gaccione fled, but many of her co-workers did not. In fact, 22 of them never made it out at all. In her head, Gaccione still sees their faces as well as the faces of the guards and others who had worked with her for seven years.
During her escape, Gaccione thought mostly of her kids, Amanda, 3, and John Jr., 17 months, who were in a day care center in World Trade Center building number five. At the 40th floor, she stopped to call the center.
"I got an answering machine that told me they had already evacuated the children," she said. "But I was still afraid."
She saw things falling out of the buildings and feared the kids might be in the plaza below. She also recalled that a fire in one of the subways earlier in the year had caused the staff to evacuate the kids from building five to building seven. Both of those buildings later collapsed after the two towers did.
Gaccione saw an army of firefighters climbing the stairs as she and others made their way down. Each one was loaded down with fire-fighting equipment. She can still recall the loud thump of their footsteps climbing the stairs. She remembered several stopping to break into a water machine, taking off their helmets to cool down by pouring the water over their heads. It was only later that she realized that all of them had died.
Looking around
Once outside, Gaccione found the plaza between the towers blocked, and in the confusion, she thought she heard someone tell her the kids from the day care center had been taken north. So that’s the way she went.
"It was like a powerful dream," she said. "It was a scary."
It got worse. She heard the whir of the second plane and then saw the strike, debris falling down onto the highway around her.
"It was like I was in a bad movie," she said. "When that second plane hit I knew we were under attack."
She was convinced she was going to die, and envisioned a scene from Pearl Harbor or some other war movie with fighters strafing people on the ground.
"I thought we were going to get shot by machine guns," she said. "I felt as if I was a target. I was standing right out in the open in the middle of the West Side Highway."
‘Children’s Discovery? Children’s Discovery?’
Gaccione kept moving north. She was among the huddled masses making their way out of the disaster zone, and the whole time, she kept calling out the name of the child care center. Had anyone heard any news of Children’s Discovery? More than once, she thought she saw a teacher from the place, only to have her hopes dashed.
She did not know at the time that the teachers had grabbed the children and fled after the first plane strike. Gaccione simply found herself on 39th Street where some kind soul helped her to a police station. Another person thrust a can of soda into her hand and sat her down. She finally got to contact her husband in Jersey City, where he was in a panic over her and the kids.
"He thought we were dead," she said. "I couldn’t tell him about our children. Because I didn’t know."
One of the officers had a Walkman and claimed to have heard a report about the day care center.
"He kept saying kids from Discovery were at St. Vincent’s Hospital. He didn’t say Children’s Discovery, so I wasn’t sure," Gaccione said. "So I called my husband and had him put 1010 news radio on. He told me that they were there."
St. Vincent’s Hospital was at 12th Street. She walked back downtown to learn that only Amanda, 3, was there. John Jr., 17 months, was up at St. Clare’s Hospital on 51st Street.
With no cabs or buses running, Gaccione gritted her teeth and made her way uptown again. She picked up John Jr. It was around 4 p.m.
Gaccione had been walking through Manhattan more than six hours, covering many miles, and she was exhausted. Her husband told her to seek out their neighbor, Richard Ricco, who ran a trucking operation in Manhattan.
Using a shopping cart to hold her kids, Gaccione made her way to 19th Street, the cart’s wheels rattling over every crack in the pavement.
"She showed up at my place about 4:30 p.m.," Ricco recalled. "She looked shocked and scared."
Ricco piled the reunited family into his car and drove them north, thinking they could cross back into New Jersey via the George Washington Bridge. Gaccione thought the ordeal was over.
"We were five cars from getting onto the bridge when the police stopped us," Ricco said. "I told the officer that Linda was almost a victim at the World Trade Center. The officer told me that if he let us on the bridge, she might be a victim there. Someone had threatened to blow up the bridge."
Gaccione had stopped worrying, though.
"I kept thinking if we were all going to blow up, we would be like that woman in the movie ‘The Titanic.’ At least we would go down together."
During that wait, the faces of people she knew flashed before her.
"I was seeing a colored negative of every face I ever knew," she said. "It was like looking at a negative yearbook."
At 8:02 p.m., the bridge opened and Ricco drove her home, beeping the horn when they reached the house.
"Everyone came out to greet us," she said. "All of my neighbors were there."
Still shocked two months later
The ordeal still haunts the family.
"My daughter saw dead people," Gaccione said, "and she’s told me she knew people had jumped from the building."
For the first few days after the Sept. 11 disaster, the sound of airplanes overhead scared them all.
"When the president came to New York to look at the site for the first time, there were fighters flying over our house," Gaccione said. "I went outside. My daughter followed. She said: ‘Mommy, come inside. The planes might crash into the house.’ I told her they were our planes, but she wanted me to come into the house anyway. She didn’t want to take the chance."
Her daughter, Amanda, has had nightmares. Although these have calmed some, Gaccione said that the Nov. 11 crash in Queens brought it all back again.
"When I heard about the plane, it stirred up everything again," she said. "While I can put on a face when I’m around the kids, whenever I’m alone, I start to cry."
Although neighbors and family members have been extremely supportive – and local officials, including the mayor, have come to see her – Gaccione said she is afraid.
"I’m scared to go into the city, and it’s horrible. I’m a city girl," she said. "I feel I shouldn’t be afraid, but I can’t help it. I hate the fact that I’m scared."
She prays a lot, she said, and that gives her comfort. But much of the stability she knew vanished on Sept. 11. Her fellow workers who survived are now scattered throughout the area. She works in an office in Jersey City.
"I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to go," she said. "But there is only so much planning I can do. We have to live day by day and we can’t take anything for granted. My neighbors have been unbelievably supportive."
While Amanda seemed to have come through the experience, she has not come to grips with how much the world has changed.
"She is waiting for someone to fix the World Trade Center and her old school so she can go back," Gaccione said.