Officials, locals remember 9-11

Each person has a different story about where they were when they learned that terrorists had attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.But all agreed that 10 years later, the world has changed.”I never thought that in this lifetime, I never thought we would be attacked on our own soil,” said Saugus Fire Chief James Blanchard, who was teaching a class of recruits at the fire academy that day. “This act of terrorism was actually murder. This country shouldn’t lose sight of that fact.”The 9-11 terrorist attacks killed 2,974 people after the hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., while the passengers of a fourth plane overpowered their hijackers and prompted a crash landing in the Pennsylvania countryside.Several area people asked about their memories of 9-11 recalled a progression of emotions from disbelief and confusion to despair at the impact of the events and then acceptance of a new world.Swampscott Town Administrator Andrew Maylor said when he was told by a colleague about a plane hitting the World Trade Center, he responded that they shouldn’t spread rumors.Then, like much of the country, he and his colleagues turned on the TV.Next door at the Public Library, Director Alyce Deveau moved the building’s only television into the reference room after her son called to tell her that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.Only one channel worked and there was a poor picture, Deveau remembered, but it didn’t matter.People came into the library all day to watch the news coverage.”People were sitting and watching our fuzzy screen who I think just didn’t want to be alone watching it,” Deveau recalled.Others received information from any source available.Swampscott resident Elizabeth Kausek had plenty of company when she learned about the event while at Bishop Fenwick High School, but the information was spotty.”Information really came from students, we didn’t have TVs in school, but even the teachers weren’t really knowledgeable at that time,” Kausek said. “Everybody was talking about it, but it was unbelievable, it was just hard to swallow.”Nahant resident Arthur Barrada was speaking by phone that morning with his daughter Rhiannon, who worked in military intelligence at Fort Bragg, N.C. and an architect in New York.The architect told them that he had just looked out his window to see a plane hit the World Trade Center.When his daughter called back, she described a sense of panic as the military tried to figure out what was happening and what to do.”It was very quickly known as a crisis, but the response was not so quick,” Barrada recalled. “My daughter was going a little bit hysterical and saying the problem was that nobody was listening to each other. There were 12 airplanes off course ? nobody really knew how to respond. And then while this was happening, the Pentagon was hit.”But as more information was learned – and the image of the planes striking the Twin Towers replayed over and over on television – several people recollected feeling intense grief.Kausek recalled the students gathering around the school flagpole and praying after hearing about the attacks.She had added emotions because her brother Jeffrey had just started his first year at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.”I remember all my friends were looking at me because they knew about my brother,” she said.Kausek wasn’t the only person worried.”We really believed something would happen,” recalled Maylor, who was the Deputy City Manager in the city of Chelsea at the time of the attacks. “We felt there was going to be another shoe to drop, another event.”Maylor said that one primary concern among the cities of Somerville, Everett, Chelsea and Boston was a tanker that carried liquid natural gas (LNG) into the harbor might be a target for terrorists.”We had a quasi-military presence along the waterfront whenever it came into town,” he recalled, describing a waterfront lined with police officers c