When a hijacked airplane crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Linda Raisch-Lopez, a lifelong Secaucus resident, was at work at Fiduciary Trust Company on the 97th floor of the South Tower.
At 8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the neighboring tower, between floors 93 and 99.
“I was at my desk and my view was of the first tower, the north tower,” Raisch-Lopez said. “We heard a loud boom and we saw flames and paper by the windows. When we saw that, some people started screaming.”
She said the heat from the other tower was “coming through the glass. I remember the intensity of the heat.”
She went to the stairwell to try to evacuate. When she was between the 60th and 70th floors, the second plane hit her building, throwing her against the wall.
“Everyone was hugging me and all I wanted to do was be with my kids.” – Linda Raisch-Lopez
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“When I snapped to, I thought, ‘Okay, I better get the hell out of here,’ ” she said. “I had a really bad feeling that the building was going to come down and I didn’t want to be at the bottom of it when I got out…I just wanted to get home to my kids.”
Raisch-Lopez’s 6-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter were in class at Clarendon Elementary School.
Ten years ago, Juan Tous sat in his fifth grade classroom in Clarendon and heard an announcement of an early dismissal.
“I thought, ‘Yes, I get to go home,’ ” Tous said last week. “I didn’t realize what was going on. Some of my friends had relatives or friends over there and some of them were crying.”
Students, parents, and officials in town shared their stories last week of where they were during the life-changing terrorist attacks 10 years ago, and how they are recovering.
This past week, Secaucus – which lost six residents and former residents in the attacks – and many neighboring towns held memorial services for the victims of the attacks, which claimed more than 2,000 Americans.
Students speak
“I didn’t really understand why someone would do such a thing,” said Dayna Gallagher last week. “It took some time for me to understand why.”
Gallagher was 12 and in sixth grade at Clarendon. She recalled hearing students being called for dismissal one by one.
“I remember the teachers telling us not to panic,” said Gallagher.
“One of my fellow classmates lost his mom,” she added. “At the time he didn’t know.” Gallagher was friends with Kevin Babakitis who lost his mom, Arlene Babakitis. Arlene had worked in the World Trade Center for the Port Authority. Kevin passed away at his college campus in Vermont earlier this year.
Several residents noted that their terrible day started off normally.
Kathy Steffens, who was the library director at the time, arrived at work around 8 a.m., an hour before the library was due to open. The day didn’t stay quiet for long.
“Right away patrons started calling,” she said. “They think we knew more than they did but we pretty much knew what they knew from putting on the TV.”
The library closed at 1 p.m.
Steffens said, “I had a relative that was in the Pentagon. Thank God he was safe. I certainly realized how small the world became.”
Councilman Robert Costantino lost his best friend, Secaucus native Steven Strobert, that day. Strobert was 33 and worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald.
“I remember meeting my brother and my wife and we drove up to Ridgewood, where Steven lived at the time,” Costantino said. Steven’s friends, his family, parents, and wife gathered there. “We waited all day,” Costantino said.
Waiting for survivors
Councilwoman Susan Pirro watched news of the first plane hitting from her home after dropping her three daughters off at school. She was PTA president at the time.
“Somehow I had a feeling to myself that was not an accident,” she said.
Louise Rittberg was a volunteer at the town’s Office of Emergency Management as public information officer. She went to the OEM office after finding out about the attacks.
“I spent the day there until midnight,” she said. “Most significant was how we thought we were preparing for the survivors. They had to set up a triage in the ice rink. The hospital was on alert.”
But there were not enough survivors to bring over.
When fifth-grader Tyler Pein arrived home from Clarendon School, his father, who was a police officer, got called in to work. “I remember all night long hearing the sirens of the ambulance and the police,” he said, because of the proximity of his home to Route 3.
After walking uptown from the World Trade Center to the ferries, Raisch-Lopez finally arrived home. Friends and family waited for her on the porch.
“Everyone was hugging me, and all I wanted to do was be with my kids,” she said.
She said that one of the hardest moments following the tragedy was the realization that people were unaccounted for. That morning, she had spoken with a male colleague whose wife was expecting a baby later that month. She later learned that he did not survive.
“Even now it is still hard,” she said. “The people that passed, they were just going to work.”
Some said the tragedy brought Secaucus closer together.
“We could look right across the horizon,” Steffens said. “We were so close to it. We could feel it. You just felt it throughout your whole body. We grew from it. We realized we needed our faith and we needed each other.”
Adriana Rambay Fernández may be reached at afernandez@hudsonreporter.com.