Greenwich Time
September 13, 2001

By Vesna Jaksic

A day after he witnessed the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapse from a New York City apartment about four blocks away, Odin Wright said he was still having trouble yesterday coming to terms with what happened.

“As soon as I woke up this morning, I started thinking about all the images I saw,” said the 25-year-old Greenwich native, who moved to Manhattan just a few months ago.

Wright was at a friend’s apartment Tuesday morning and saw about a dozen people jump out of one of the towers moments before it crumpled to pieces. Like many witnesses with ties to Greenwich, Wright said he is having a difficult time making sense of the events he watched unfold in front of him.

“I still have a certain amount of disbelief,” he said yesterday at his parents’ home in Greenwich, “because I was there and saw all these things.”

“The experience will stay with him for a long time, he said, adding, “We’re all concerned as a family because this is so much more than an accident, it’s like a global thing.”

Sgt. John Brown, one of six members of the Greenwich Police Department sent to Manhattan, said he had never experienced anything close to what he saw Tuesday.

“It was an unbelievable sight to see the smoke billowing in the air over Manhattan,” he said yesterday.

Brown was in one of the two police boats sent to New York City Harbor, each staffed with three officers and a paramedic from Greenwich Emergency Medical Services Inc.

“When we came over, all you could see were gaping holes in some of the buildings around the World Trade Center,” he said. “It was surreal.”

The first boat arrived in the waters off Battery Park around 11 a.m. Tuesday, shortly after the U.S.Coast Guard issued a broadcast asking for assistance. They stayed there for the next 12 hours, ensuring no private vessels entered the area and helping transport firefighters and their equipment.

“At night, there were very few lights,” Brown said. “It was like a black-and-white picture. Everything was just gray. The soot was five to six inches deep. Papers were flying around everywhere, shoes everywhere.”

Brown, who called the atmosphere in downtown Manhattan a “controlled chaos” in the hours following the blast, compared the scene to one following a volcano explosion.

“You saw these massive tug boats transporting people out of Manhattan,” he said, “and you could see thousands and thousands of people exiting by foot. One of the firefighters said, ‘Either they died, or they walked away.'”

Sgt. Tim Duff arrived around 4 p.m. in the other vessel.

“It was unbelievable,” he said. “That’s the best I can describe it.”

About 50,000 people worked at the World Trade Center and thousands more visited the skyscrapers daily. With so many people missing and killed, people who would normally have been in the towers said they were lucky they didn’t make it to their destination Tuesday.

Tom Ragland IV, son of the former first selectman, was on his way to the second tower of the World Trade Center, where he works on the 21st floor as the vice president of sales for a dot-com company.While he usually gets to the building around 8:45 a.m., the 33-year-old Byram resident decided to go in a few minutes later on Tuesday. He was on the New York City subway when an announcement was made that there would be no stops downtown.

“I thought it was just another day in New York,” Ragland said.

When he got off at the Brooklyn Bridge stop, Ragland said, he couldn’t believe what he saw.

“It was just people running all over the place, papers flying everywhere. It reeked of gasoline,” he said. “It was total mayhem. No one knew what was happening.”

He started walking toward the building, but turned around after police officers directed everyone to move uptown. Ragland eventually caught a train and made it home safely, except for a black eye, which he said he doesn’t remember getting.

“I had total nightmares that night,” he said. “I just couldn’t get to sleep. It’s been tough today, but I just kind of have to roll with it.”

Ragland, like other survivors, said he considers himself lucky.

“It’s definitely life-changing,” he said. “You realize how lucky you are and you can never count on tomorrow.”

Petru Popescu, a screenwriter and author who conducted a screenwriting workshop at last week’s Greenwich Film Festival, was scheduled to promote his new book Tuesday on the 11th floor of one of the Twin Towers.

“I can’t tell you how it feels that a place that exists no more you associate with in such a fashion,” Popescu said. “I might have been inside. I mean, how lucky can one be?”

Popescu, a New York Times best-selling author who lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., had been staying in a midtown Manhattan apartment after traveling to the East Coast to host book signings, including one at Waldenbooks on Greenwich Avenue last Friday. He was coming back from having breakfast near 22nd Street around the time two hijacked airplanes ripped through the twin towers.

“There was a commotion I could not quite understand,” Popescu said. “There was this billowing of smoke, like a volcano and then this huge shocked silence.”

Popescu met an independent filmmaker on the street, and the new acquaintances produced hours of footage, interviewing about 30 witnesses, relatives and rescue personnel.

“Many volunteers said, ‘New York will bounce from this like it does from everything else,'” he reported yesterday.

His book, which details the lives of two people in a concentration camp, was in his thoughts as he walked the eerie streets of Manhattan late into the night.

“The fires and collapse that took place in Europe were clear in my mind, and here I was experiencing this in New York City,” he said. “It’s almost like history hasn’t changed that much.”