Julia Worcester envisioned it differently. It wasn’t an attack, just an unfortunate freak accident. The pilot must have made a mistake, clipped the edge of the north tower.

But that ‘accident’ was enough for her professor to dismiss class early. He advised his students to go home and get in touch with family instead.

Worcester, then a senior music industry major at Syracuse University, didn’t go home. She followed a stream of people piling into the second-floor lobby of Eggers Hall. At least 100 pairs of eyes were fixed on the television screens as they watched live footage of the second plane crashing into the south tower on Sept. 11, 2001.

People cried. Others were on their phones, frantically trying to touch base with their loved ones. A few passed out.

As unlikely as it was for two accidents to occur at the World Trade Center, it never crossed Worcester’s mind — at least not until much later — that terrorists were attacking the country.

‘It was terrifying,’ she said. ‘Nobody knew the word ‘terrorism.”

***

Kelly Brown wasn’t scared — not yet. The junior public relations major didn’t have enough information to be scared. She couldn’t process what was happening.

About three-quarters of the class showed up that morning, but her professor dismissed the students early. He told them to watch the news instead.

‘No one really knew what to do,’ said Brown, now the director of the Career Development Center at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. ‘It was insane. It was like nothing else.’

She wasn’t too worried about her family. They were in upstate New York, not too far from Syracuse, where she knew they were safe. But she watched as her peers panicked. She watched as they ignored the jammed phone lines, as they kept calling and texting, hoping to hear back from their families.

But Brown was more focused on learning as much information as possible. She watched the news the entire day, keeping an eye out for developing stories, speculations and replays of the attacks.

As the details were confirmed — the then-unfamiliar name of Osama bin Laden was mentioned every so often — Brown became scared.

‘If you got enough information, you got scared,’ she said.

 

***

 

Kenneth ‘Buzz’ Shaw remembers the fear. But more importantly, the then-chancellor remembers the uncertainty on campus. Was this the first of many attacks? Where might the next attack be? How could SU become a safer campus?

‘I was — I think as most people were — immediately in denial,’ he said.

But SU officials had dealt with tragedy before. A few staff members who had experience dealing with the aftermath of the Pan Am Flight 103 crash in 1988 were still employed at the university at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Shaw said.

‘No crisis is the same as the previous one, but you begin to develop the people that think about the right things,’ he said.

Classes weren’t officially canceled, Shaw said, because students needed a place to ask questions and discuss the situation. Phone banks were arranged for people who hadn’t yet gotten in touch with their families and relatives. Counseling and grief services were organized immediately.

Looking back, Shaw said he didn’t know how helpful the students found the phone banks and services to be, but he wanted to provide an avenue for them to communicate and learn from the difficult situation.

‘We wanted to be set up for people to get information quickly,’ he said.

 

***

 

Only a few people didn’t know what was going on, and Jerry Evensky was one of them.

The economics professor had a Tuesday morning routine that semester. It started at 8 a.m., when he waited in line at the Schine Student Center for a cup of coffee. Nearly half an hour later, he settled in at a carrel on the fifth floor of E.S. Bird Library, where he worked on his book.

On that particular day, Evensky didn’t leave the library until 2 p.m. He took a break and went for a walk on campus when he bumped into a former student.

‘Can you believe it?’ the student asked. Evensky wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

The student, who Evensky said seemed agitated by the attacks, informed him of that morning’s events — of everything he had missed while he was in the library.

‘It just seemed unbelievable,’ Evensky recalled. He then went to his office to watch coverage of the attacks more than five hours after they occurred.

As the details became clearer, Evensky said he was shocked. Full of disbelief.

‘I was probably the only person on the developed world who didn’t know until two in the afternoon,’ he said.

 

***

 

It took a while for things to return to normal.

Jason Sacks, who worked for the WAER-FM radio station when he was a junior broadcast journalism major, said sports took a back seat that week. Anything related to the attacks was more important.

The football game was canceled that weekend, and Sacks said it wasn’t until the following weekend during the game against Auburn University when ‘some life was back to the campus.’

Plans had to be changed. Sacks decided not to study abroad in Spain during the spring semester. It was too risky, he said: Security issues related to traveling were rising; America’s relationship with other countries was in jeopardy; and his parents and family would be too worried about his safety.

Such concerns made it difficult for students to get back to their routines, but they eventually settled down as they learned more about what was happening and of the changes that were in store. People became more patriotic — several hung up American flags, Sacks said — but things otherwise went on as they did before.

‘It slowly eased back into things a couple of weeks afterward,’ he said, ‘because people got back into their normalcy.’

shkim11@syr.edu

Published on September 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm