The following is a personal firsthand account from Tim Cochrane’s experiences at the New York Stock Exchange on September 11, 2001.
Like everyone else who woke up in NYC that day, my story starts with me remembering how blue the sky was on that morning. I arrived early to the New York Stock Exchange for a floor member’s emergency fund meeting. There were about 10 of us, and we were sitting around a large round table when we heard an extremely loud boom from outside.
I turned to the guy sitting next to me and asked “was that thunder?” He stated that he was the last person in the room and it was crystal clear out when he came in. I then stood up, walked to the windows, which were covered by big heavy velvet curtains and when I pulled the curtain to the side, I remember seeing a burning piece of paper floating past the window. It was pretty surreal and as I looked up the street there was a cloud of smoke and debris coming around the corner of Wall and Broadway. I told the others in the room what I saw and I remember the conversation turned to what could that possibly have been?
At that point, I walked out into the hall and as I did, the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, Dick Grasso, walked out of his office next to us and he was on his cell phone. He looked at me, put his hand over the mouthpiece and said it’s Mayor Giuliani. I stood there as he was speaking to him, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but could tell from Dick’s face it wasn’t good. When he hung up he said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and that there was burning debris falling all over downtown and that we needed to clear the building for fear of it catching the building on fire.
We hit the alarms and evacuated the building. Like everyone else I made my way downstairs to the street and all the employees poured out of the exchange building into the middle of Broad Street. It was then that the second plane hit the South Tower and people just scattered. Myself, my business partner, and some of my colleagues ran back into the building and a number of other people did also.
When we got on the trading floor, we went to our trading booth and we started hearing stories from our clerks that they were speaking to our clients in the World Trade center, Cantor Fitzgerald and Sandler O’Neill, when the lines went dead. We then started seeing TV pictures of the World Trade Center and could see both of them clearly on fire. There was a point where we were fearful that the towers could fall over and reach us in our building and we discussed having people stand under the marble arches in the main room to try to protect them if the towers fell on top of us. At about that time we started to hear the first tower go down and looked up at the TVs to see it imploding. The noise was booming as the tower came down and then the cloud of debris covered all the windows and it was pitch black outside. It was hard to believe when a half hour later the second tower came down.
There were so many crazy things that happened that morning, at one point a man came running into the front doors of the building with a backpack on covered in soot, and they tackled the person thinking that he was a terrorist, but it was just a man trying to get fresh air. When it happened someone said there is a man with a bomb and a crowd of people on the trading floor went running for the exit and people were almost trampled, everyone was afraid and it was total chaos.
Over the course of the morning people slowly left the building to find a way home, even though you could barely see through the dust. I left about noon with a group of my colleagues from Brooklyn. We could see out the windows down Wall St. toward the east side and see some daylight, so we decided to walk a group of people down to the East River thinking we could get across one of the bridges. When we got to the East River we saw tugboats and fishing boats coming in and we were able to climb over the wall and get on a boat which took our group into Brooklyn. I’ll never forget going across New York Harbor and looking behind us at Lower Manhattan in a total cloud of dust and smoke.
When we got to Brooklyn, we were able to find a phone and get my wife to pick us up. We really couldn’t believe what we had just experienced. We were all covered in dust and soot and were coughing from breathing it in. I was extremely happy to be home with my family.
That night, I reached out to a close friend of mine Marty Golden who was a State Senator and asked what we could do and he said he was starting a relief effort out of his office in Bay Ridge and so I went there. We knew that it was going to be a major undertaking and at that point we were thinking that we would be able to find survivors. We also knew it would take a huge effort to go through the debris and we were hearing that there were many volunteers showing up at the “pile”, so we started collecting supplies and bringing them down to the WTC site, gloves, boots, socks, masks whatever we could get our hands on. The word was getting out and people were sending all kinds of stuff within hours.
People were bringing so much stuff we had a hard time figuring out where we were going to put it, everything from cleaning supplies to food, so we had trucks bringing it down to a drop off point by the WTC site. I had a large Ford truck and was told that they needed acetylene torches at the WTC site to cut through the metal debris, and so I started going around to supply houses, oil burner and electrical shops, plumbers, anywhere we could find acetylene tanks and torches and literally every place we went to the people who owned them gave us whatever they had, no questions asked, no documenting anything, they didn’t care if they ever got it back. People just came together and did whatever they could to help.
We worked that whole week bringing stuff back-and-forth to the pile. The whole downtown of Manhattan was a disaster area from the cloud of debris. At one point, I had to drive my truck up the steps of one Liberty Plaza to the front of the Brooks Brother store where they had set up a makeshift morgue and as we unloaded the truck, a huge horn blasted and when we asked what it was, we were told it was because the building we were standing under was unstable, and it was in imminent danger of falling. When I looked up at the 54 story building I realized there was no way we were getting out of there if it came down at that point, so we just keep unloading the truck. It was a very crazy time.
Over the course of that week I learned of so many people who I knew that were killed, from childhood friends to colleagues. Years later, the two men I worked with at the site, both came down with cancer. Jack passed away and Kevin, thank God, is in remission. Some of my colleagues and thousands of others have been diagnosed with 9/11-related diseases and are gone or are still suffering from what we were exposed to.
I worked at the site until I got a call late that Friday night to go to the New York Stock Exchange on Saturday morning to help prepare to open the exchange for trading on Monday morning. By Monday morning, the exchange was ready to resume trading. My day started with Chris Cuomo showing up at my house to shadow me and document my return to work, a “day in the life” segment for ABC News. Another unforgettable moment was taking a ferry back into NYC that morning and all I could think about was the boat ride a week earlier. The NYSE opening bell was rung by Mayor Giuliani, Governor Pataki, Fire Commissioner Tom Van Essen, Police Commission Bernie Kerik, Senators Clinton and Schumer and Dick Grasso. The mood on the floor was extremely tense and somber, we all believed that the attacks were not over, but we wanted to show the world that they couldn’t stop us. It was quite a remarkable event with the entire trading floor singing God Bless America. With all that I had experienced in that last week, somehow, I knew we were going to be OK.
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