Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 36

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 DECATUR, ILLINOIS SPECIAL EDITION 5 TERROR STRIKES 1 just saw the top of Trade Two come down' Nightmare scene hits streets of New York By HELEN O'NEILL AP Special Correspondent and through a window saw a plane go by and hit the other building. He and his co-workers raced down the stairs. When they reached the 70th floor, they felt the building shake as the second plane hit. Later, in tears, his hair covered with gray ash, he added: "I worry about some of my co-workers." Jennifer Brickhouse, 34, from Union, N.J., was on the escalator heading for her 76th-floor office in the World Trade Center when she "heard this big boom. Everyone was going crazy.

We all got out. The minute I got out of the building, the second building blew up. All this stuff started falling and all this smoke was coming through. "People were screaming, falling and jumping out of the windows," Brick-house said. "I just saw the building I work in come down," said businessman Gabriel loan, shaking in shock outside City Hall, a cloud of smoke and ash from the World Trade Center behind him.

"I just saw the top of Trade Two come down." Nearby a crowd mobbed a man on a pay-phone, scream NEW YORK It was the scene of a nightmare: people on fire jumping in terror from the Trade Towers just before the buildings collapsed. "Everyone was screaming, crying, running cops, people, firefighters, everyone," said Mike Smith, a fire marshal from Queens, as he sat by the fountain outside a state courthouse, shortly after the second tower collapsed. "A couple of marshals just picked me up and dragged me down the street. It's like a war zone." Others compared it to Pearl Harbor as thousands of people poured off the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side, covered in gray dust and ing at mm to get on the phone so that they could call relatives. "People were jumping out of windows," said an unidentified crying woman.

"I guess people were trying to save themselves. Oh my God!" "I was in the World Financial Center looking out the win aeons. Many wore respiratory masks, given by the police and fire departments. Ambulances screamed down every major thoroughfare in Manhattan, depositing casualties at hospitals and returning to get more. Clusters of people, their hands clutched to their heads in horror, stood at boom-boxes set up outside 'It looked like a ticker tape parade because there were parts of the building floating down with the Matthew Low, 29, of Manhattan dow," said one woman.

"I saw the first plane and then 15 minutes later saw the other plane just slam into the World Trade Center." Another eyewitness, AP newsman Dunstan Prial, described a strange sucking sound from the Trade Center buildings after the first building col ON THE RUN: Pedestrians flee the area of the World Trade Center as the south tower crashes to the ground this morning. Air traffic comes to a haft stores to listen to the news. Others gathered around cars, their doors open and radios turned up high. Looking down West Broadway through billowing brown and black smoke, Tower Two tilted across the street. Ash, two inches deep, lined the streets.

Police and firefighters gasped for air as they emerged from the sealed-off area. At least three explosions were heard, perhaps from gas lines. Army Humvees whizzed by on their way downtown. Workers from Trade Center offices wandered lower Manhattan in a daze, many barely able to believe they were alive. Donald Burns, 34, being evacuated from a meeting on the 82nd floor of One World Trade Center, saw four severely burned people on the stairwell.

UI tried to help them but they didn't want anyone to touch them. The fire had melted their skin. Their clothes were tattered," he said. Boris Ozersky, 47, computer networks analyst, was on the 70th floor of one of the buildings when he felt something like an explosion rock it. He raced down 70 flights of stairs, and outside, in a mob in front of a nearby hotel.

He was trying to calm a panicked women when the building suddenly collapsed. "I just got blown somewhere, and then it was total darkness. We tried to get away, but I was blown to the ground. And I was trying to help this woman, but I couldn't find her in the darkness," Ozersky said. After the dust cleared, he found the hysterical woman and took her to a restaurant being used by rescue workers as a triage center.

Clyde Ebanks, vice president of an insurance company was at a meeting on the 103rd floor of the 110-storey South Tower of the World Trade Center when his boss said, "Look at that." He turned lapsed. "Windows shattered. People were screaming and diving for cover. People walked around like ghosts, covered in dirt, weeping and wandering dazed." "It sounded like a jet or rocket," said Kddie Gonzalez, a postal worker at a post office on West Broadway "I looked up and saw a huge explosion. I didn't see the impact.

I just saw the explosion." Morning commuters heading into Manhattan were stranded as the Lincoln Tunnel was shut down to incoming traffic. Many left their cars and stood on the ramp leading to the tunnel, staring in disbelief at the thick cloud of smoke pouring from the top of the two buildings. Throughout lower Manhattan, rescue workers and police officers wore surgical masks to protect them from the dust. Police, some of them with semiautomatic rifles and dogs, guarded federal and state buildings and prevented anyone from entering. At the city's hospitals, hundreds lined up to give blood, after hospital workers yelled on the streets, "Blood donations! Blood donations!" Roman Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan arrived at St.

Vincent's Catholic Medical Center to comfort the injured; other priests also were on hand, many wearing blue rubber gloves. Mark Ackermann, chief corporate officer at St. Vincent's, said: "I was here during the World Trade Center bombing (in 1993) and this is a hundred times worse." Air traffic around the nation was paralyzed today as stunned travelers watched television screens in horror over the smoking wreckage caused by apparent terrorist attacks at New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered all outbound flights grounded after the fiery twin disaster at the World Trade Center. Runways were kept open for incoming flights.

"Anybody that is planning on going somewhere isn't going anywhere at least for now," said James Kerr, deputy director at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee. Heightened security measures also were put into effect. At Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, passengers were asked to provide tickets and identification before they entered the metal detector area that leads to passenger gates. Two airplanes crashed into the twin 110-story towers in New York around 9 a.m. Explosions later rocked the Pentagon and the State Department in Washington.

A Boeing 757 plane crashed in the Pittsburgh area later Tuesday morning. It was not immediately clear if it was related to the other attacks. The unfolding scene of billowing smoke, running crowds and the collapse of the trade center tower stunned passengers, some of whom watched the tragedy from television sets at airports. "I was pretty shocked," said Rob Taylor, 32, of Colorado Springs, a traveler at Denver International Airport. "I mean, it's turning into anger pretty quickly I hope they take this as a final sign that they need to be a little more hard-handed and take the gloves off and go after these people." June Locacio, 58, watched the horrific scene on television in a standing-room-only bar at Lambert Airport in St.

Louis. She heard the news after she got off a plane from Atlanta, Ga. as she was heading to Sioux Falls, S.D. "It's absolutely stunning," she said. "I think it's an act of war.

I can't believe they hit the Pentagon as well. I hope we're up to the task." Associated Press GROUNDED: Passengers wait at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus, after the terrorism attack on New York and Washington this morning. All U.S. airports were closed down in the wake of the attack. At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, hundreds of people were stranded after federal officials canceled all flights in the United States.

There were long lines at airport pay phones as family members called friends and family. "Someone is trying to make a serious statement and I hope we do likewise," said Scott Gilmore, 55, who had planned a trip to Washington, D.C. At the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans, Kelly Lenox returned from the airport where she had been scheduled to fly home to St. Louis. She said security officers told her to leave the airport, and police were not even allowing people to get out of taxis.

"You think you're safe, but you're not," she said. "Who would have thought the Pentagon Her voice trailed off. Lenox said she would rent a car to get home. Associated Press SHOCK: People in front of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral react with horror as they look down Fifth Avenue toward the World Trade Center after the planes crashed into the towers this morning..