Interviews in the Rain

I went to the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center yesterday and interviewed a lot of people for my ‘Writing and Reporting the News’ class. I felt so bad because they all poured their hearts out to me but because I had a word limit I couldn’t use all of their stories in my article! I met one guy who worked for Marsh McLennan at the time whose office was on the 95th floor in the 9th tower. He was on the express bus coming into the city for work from Brooklyn on the morning of September 11th, 2001 when he received a call from his wife telling him the first plane had struck. Over 300 of his colleagues and friends were killed that day. One of his colleagues was the only person to escape from the 78th floor. He believes that the people he knew died slow and painful deaths due to the pages he and other colleagues who had not gotten to work yet were receiving on the two-way pagers the company supplied them with. Messages such as, “What’s going on? There’s an airplane wing in the conference room” and later, “Walls are burning,” “We’re trapped,” “Friends, goodbye.”“When I watch the tape of people jumping I think I can recognize some of them,” he says. “I can’t be sure because it’s too far, but they were trapped. They had nowhere to go. If I was there I would have jumped.”To add insult to injury, he said the company tried to act like nothing had happened afterwards. “They didn’t do anything for the survivors. They just repleneshed people and acted like ‘life goes on. We have to work.’ They just wanted to hush it down.” It’s so hard to listen to a story like that.The other thing that was hard was trying to write down what people were saying as they said it . It’s impossible not to miss anything and you have to get it right when you’re quoting them on it!