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A Day of Grief and Miracles
Amid the staggering death and destruction Sept. 11, there were countless miracles.
For Verizon repair technician Bryan Clement, deciding which job he was going to tackle first at the Pentagon turned out to be the difference between life and death.
For hundreds of CWA-represented employees working in and around the World Trade Center, timing and the blessing of being on low floors meant that almost all of them survived unharmed.
Clement, of CWA Local 2222, is one of about 30 Verizon employees permanently assigned to the Pentagon. Every morning, he picks up his “trouble tickets” that tell him what needs to be fixed.
On Sept. 11, one of them — labeled “priority” — asked him to reprogram a telephone system that had lost power in a newly renovated area. Because repairing the system was going to take a chunk of time, Clement decided to first fix a couple of smaller problems in other parts of the complex.
It was while he was taking care of the minor repairs that the hijacked American Airlines plane crashed into the Pentagon. It struck the hallway where Clement would have been working if he’d hadn’t shuffled his assignments.
“I’m still in disbelief,” Clement said the next day, describing how close he came to dying and the overall horror of the day’s events. “It’s just an unbelievable shock.”
Clement said he’d heard what sounded like a boiler room explosion. It shook the building but he didn’t see or smell smoke. People started yelling “evacuate” and streams of workers began pouring out of the building. At the time, he didn’t know about the World Trade Center attack and when he heard that an airplane hit the Pentagon, he didn’t believe it.
“People were talking about a plane crashing but you didn’t see any part of a plane,” he said. “You didn’t see anything — no fuselage, no engine, no wings, no tail.”
As the Pentagon burned in Virginia, Ed Rodriguez was at Ground Zero in New York City. The Verizon representative and steward for Local 1105 had been buying his morning coffee and doughnut from a street vendor when the first plane struck the World Trade Center, just across the street from a Verizon building where hundreds of CWA members work.
Suddenly people were running and police were yelling as confetti-like pieces from the hole in the building began raining down. Rodriguez stared, unsure what he was seeing. Then the second plane struck.
“That’s when everybody’s day ended,” he said. “It was no accident anymore. Everybody was scared. It looked ‘Diehard.’ The explosion was so big it made the tower look small.”
Rodriguez began to see what looked like debris falling from the upper floors of the buildings. “Then I started seeing arms and legs,” he said solemnly. “A lot of us just stopped counting after a while. I kept thinking, or maybe it was just me hoping, that this many people couldn’t be jumping, or falling, without the fire department having a net or cushion.”
When the first tower fell, “it looked like another bomb went off,” he said. “It was out of a movie, just out of a movie.” As the smoke and debris poured into the streets, Rodriguez ran to safety through a parking lot with throngs of other people.
Rodriguez, who counts a cousin among the missing firefighter, talked to a counselor provided by Local 1105 the next day. He said it was a tremendous help.
“She told me not to feel guilty as a survivor,” he said. “I felt so bad that I witnessed all this and I couldn’t do anything for anybody. The firefighters, the police, they were all working so hard to save people and so many of them lost their lives. I felt totally helpless.”
For Verizon repair technician Bryan Clement, deciding which job he was going to tackle first at the Pentagon turned out to be the difference between life and death.
For hundreds of CWA-represented employees working in and around the World Trade Center, timing and the blessing of being on low floors meant that almost all of them survived unharmed.
Clement, of CWA Local 2222, is one of about 30 Verizon employees permanently assigned to the Pentagon. Every morning, he picks up his “trouble tickets” that tell him what needs to be fixed.
On Sept. 11, one of them — labeled “priority” — asked him to reprogram a telephone system that had lost power in a newly renovated area. Because repairing the system was going to take a chunk of time, Clement decided to first fix a couple of smaller problems in other parts of the complex.
It was while he was taking care of the minor repairs that the hijacked American Airlines plane crashed into the Pentagon. It struck the hallway where Clement would have been working if he’d hadn’t shuffled his assignments.
“I’m still in disbelief,” Clement said the next day, describing how close he came to dying and the overall horror of the day’s events. “It’s just an unbelievable shock.”
Clement said he’d heard what sounded like a boiler room explosion. It shook the building but he didn’t see or smell smoke. People started yelling “evacuate” and streams of workers began pouring out of the building. At the time, he didn’t know about the World Trade Center attack and when he heard that an airplane hit the Pentagon, he didn’t believe it.
“People were talking about a plane crashing but you didn’t see any part of a plane,” he said. “You didn’t see anything — no fuselage, no engine, no wings, no tail.”
As the Pentagon burned in Virginia, Ed Rodriguez was at Ground Zero in New York City. The Verizon representative and steward for Local 1105 had been buying his morning coffee and doughnut from a street vendor when the first plane struck the World Trade Center, just across the street from a Verizon building where hundreds of CWA members work.
Suddenly people were running and police were yelling as confetti-like pieces from the hole in the building began raining down. Rodriguez stared, unsure what he was seeing. Then the second plane struck.
“That’s when everybody’s day ended,” he said. “It was no accident anymore. Everybody was scared. It looked ‘Diehard.’ The explosion was so big it made the tower look small.”
Rodriguez began to see what looked like debris falling from the upper floors of the buildings. “Then I started seeing arms and legs,” he said solemnly. “A lot of us just stopped counting after a while. I kept thinking, or maybe it was just me hoping, that this many people couldn’t be jumping, or falling, without the fire department having a net or cushion.”
When the first tower fell, “it looked like another bomb went off,” he said. “It was out of a movie, just out of a movie.” As the smoke and debris poured into the streets, Rodriguez ran to safety through a parking lot with throngs of other people.
Rodriguez, who counts a cousin among the missing firefighter, talked to a counselor provided by Local 1105 the next day. He said it was a tremendous help.
“She told me not to feel guilty as a survivor,” he said. “I felt so bad that I witnessed all this and I couldn’t do anything for anybody. The firefighters, the police, they were all working so hard to save people and so many of them lost their lives. I felt totally helpless.”