When the unthinkable became the thinkable

When Roger Monteforte saw the flaming wreckage of the first plane in the side of the World Trade Center's North Tower 10 years ago, he knew instantly that initial news reports of a small plane hitting the tower were wrong. At the time, Mr. Monteforte, a branch manager with independent broker-dealer National Securities Corp., lived north of Manhattan's financial district, in SoHo. “I was hailing a cab and when I looked up, I saw the hole and began counting the floors and knew that wasn't a small little aircraft,” he said. “I saw the flames shooting out and knew it was major.” Mr. Monteforte, now 38, called his office and told everyone to evacuate. As he headed by cab to NSC's offices on lower Broadway, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, traffic came to a halt. “That's when the second plane hit, and literally, my cab hopped off the floor. It felt like an earthquake,” Mr. Monteforte said. “It was hysteria,” he said. “People were screaming and running the other direction.” Mr. Monteforte had worked for less than three months for National Securities as a manager building a branch of about 15 independent representatives and advisers. Both his sisters, Lisa and Denise, worked at the firm, and brokers whom he had known for a decade reported to him. “My main instinct was to get here and get into the building and make sure everyone was safe,” Mr. Monteforte said. When he got to his office, security guards wouldn't let him enter. Mr. Monteforte ran back to his apartment. The first tower collapsed, and he thought his sisters, caught in a cloud of ash and debris, were dead. “People walking north looked like statues, like the petrified people they found in Pompeii,” Mr. Monteforte said. The second tower fell as he frantically searched for his two sisters. Mr. Monteforte found them a few blocks from his house. “They were completely covered in ash and hysterical,” he said. The fears triggered by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are deep and lingering, Mr. Monteforte said. “The unthinkable became the thinkable,” he said. “The other day, we had that little tremor from the earthquake. I didn't feel it, but I looked around the office and it was hysteria,” Mr. Monteforte said. “People were flooding to the stairway,” he said. “The first instinct is, "We just got attacked again.'”