TRR columnist looks up as jet hits twin towers

By DAVID HULSE

MANHATTAN — Even in the noisy street, Cass Collins heard the roar and saw the gleaming silver fuselage of a passenger jet as it soared straight into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Collins, whose “River Muse” column appears in TRR, is a part-time Narrowsburg resident who happened to be downtown Tuesday morning as Election Day was to begin.

Standing at Chambers Street and Greenwich in front of PS 234, Collins was six blocks away from the towers as she introduced candidates to potential voters and handed political literature. She had a clear and unobstructed view of the jet’s deafening impact. “It just disappeared inside the building and erupted in flames. “You could see the v-shape of the wings at first, before the smoke and debris started to fall,” she said.

Collins ran weeping west on Chambers toward her 10-year-old daughter’s school near the West Side Highway. Weeping yes, but also already assured that she had witnessed a terrorist attack, not a freak accident. “The planes never fly that low… the tower was by far the biggest target, and he took such a dead-on aim,” she said.

Arriving at her daughter’s school, she waited for her child’s release in the schoolyard, sitting on a bench, head in hands, trying to regain her composure. “Then the same [aircraft] sound came again and there was another explosion on the east side of the South Tower.” Collins didn’t see the second plane from her vantage point, but she saw a large round object, “I think it was a jet engine,” fall from the building onto the roof of another.

She met her husband at the school. The couple, with their daughter, began walking north toward their Tribeca home as the towers started collapsing on their right. As if rejecting the memory, she added, “I did see what might have been people jumping from the top.”

As the North Tower folded, she watched a section of its side, estimated at 15 stories in height, slip and slide down “as in a cartoon.”

Then came the noise, the growing rumble and roar and “that gray cloud of debris.”

Home was welcome, although the rest of the day carried the threat of further terror. The sight of her son, home later from another school, was the relief she wanted. “You need your family together at a time like this,” she said.