I got home in the wee hours
and was rudely awoken by the phone, ringing off the hook early in the morning
and and I didn't get out of bed to to answer it
until I heard the crashing sound, that rhythmic bang, bang, bang, bang.
That was obviously the tower collapsing.
I found out later, but I didn't know what it was.
But it was accompanied by a collective scream across the city.
And I couldn't imagine what that noise was.
We couldn't be in touch with family and whatnot.
The phones in New York were what was working, was really overwhelmed.
The telecommunications was really bad.
So it was hard to keep our families updated as to where we were and to
and to find out about our friends.
I'm a native New Yorker, so I know I knew a lot of people
who worked in the World Trade Center towers.
And thankfully, the ones close to me were all right.
But I certainly a lot of friends of friends and family were lost that day.
But I was I was out of the loop. So that made it difficult.
Well, a lot of people
forget or didn't realize at the time, but don't even realize now
that for everything else that unfolded that day,
it was also tens of thousands of people made homeless.
So we had people stationed at the entry points, the access points to downtown
to Battery Park City and places around, right surrounding the debris pile
and everything, directing people to where they could get help and shelter
and get get federal assistance.
A lot of FEMA employees are retired responders.
So we had a lot of people who were former
FDNY and New York City police
who were wondering what happened to their friends and colleagues
and because they were retired and with us and busy.
On one hand, it was good to be busy.
On the other hand, we were cut out of the loop of finding out
what happened to our friends and whatnot. So it was very emotional.
I mean, it impacted me as the New Yorkers.
I knew a lot of people who had suffered a lot of loss the the night before
9/11 when I arrived in New York in the wee hours of the morning
of 9/11. I met a friend who would just watch
the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football, and he was on his way home.
I said, no, I don't go home, come in,
come in, come back in the bar and keep me company.
I kept him out late and he was late for work.
And that saved his life.
And he became. Oh, sorry.
But he lost so many of his colleagues
that he became the chief operating officer for Cantor Fitzgerald.
And my wife became the volunteer coordinator for their memorializing. So.
I did that for years to come.
I mean, like any disaster.
You see the negative parts when you see the positive parts of
people coming together.
So certainly in New York at that time, New York
was always renowned for being impersonal and even rude.
But after 9/11, everybody was
hugging each other in the streets and and it really came together.
And I think that was a sea change in the culture in New York.
And I think that was true across the country for quite a long time.
Having a having a disaster like that affect my hometown like that
really brought home a lot of the importance of our mission,
the nobleness of our mission, and and showed me firsthand
what communities go through when they when they go through a disaster like that.
So to me, it strengthens the importance of the mission of FEMA and gave me
personal touch point to to identify with people in disaster areas after that.
When people tell me about their hometown
being devastated, I had a story of. Yeah, me, too.