Sept. 11 probably started out just like any other day for the electricians working at the World Trade Center. Many probably grabbed a bagel and coffee at their favorite deli on the way to work. They took the same service elevators to job sites on one of the 110 floors in the Twin Towers. At the job, fans of the Yankees, Mets, Jets and Giants razzed each other.

It wasn't quite time for a mid-morning coffee break when something went horribly wrong. Within 18 minutes of each other, two jetliners crashed into two irreplaceable icons of the New York skyline.

Suddenly, a lot of things weren't so important any more to the electrical workers in those buildings. Forget about the distributor shorting an order by a few locknuts, the squirrelly conduit run installed by a new apprentice or the picky-picky electrical inspector who would be on the job later in the day. Forget about jobs running behind, or union versus non-union issues. Those workers had to get themselves out of the buildings alive.

While I am writing this editorial, we don't know exactly how many workers succeeded. At press time, the IBEW Local #3 Web site said well over 200 Local 3 members were working at the World Trade Center at the time of the attack and that 16 union members were still unaccounted for. One is too many; 16 are unfathomable. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those lost.



From that day on, the World Trade Center was always a special place for me. I would get there occasionally on business, while working in Manhattan, N.Y., for Electrical Wholesaling magazine, or passing through its subterranean subway tunnels after work on my way to a night out on the town.


The Twin Towers never looked more magnificent to me than the Sunday morning when I saw them glimmering in the bright morning sunshine with other 20,000-plus runners on the Verranzano Narrows Bridge at the start of the 1999 New York Marathon. I also always loved to see the World Trade Center, that familiar touchstone, on my many airplane flights back home to Newark Airport.

It's gone now. Utterly, imponderably gone.

In light of these tragic events, it's seems strange how much a building can mean to us, whether it's the first house you buy, an office that you helped build or in this case, one of the best-known landmarks in the world.
