11 reflections on 9/11: Steve Netter, Graduate student

I was working in Jersey City, N.J., directly across from the WTC on the other side of the Hudson River. After the planes hit, everyone stopped working and became fixated on Lower Manhattan. It never crossed my mind that the towers were in danger of collapsing.\nUnfortunately, I was mistaken. I had a front row seat as the first one collapsed and remember repeating, "This isn't happening." It was quite a surreal moment. I was in complete shock and denial as I watched in horror and heard the screams around me. In no more than a few minutes, all of Lower Manhattan had disappeared in a dark cloud.\nIn what seemed like moments later, boats started ferrying people out of New York to the dock outside our office building. A makeshift triage center was constructed and complete strangers worked together to carry the injured off the boats. The healthy were rushed inside to make use of the few phones that were still operational so they could let their loved ones know they were unharmed.