Former Ozarker tells firsthand Sept. 11 experience

It's just been one thing after another in New York City, ac-cording to former Springfiel-dian Gene Anderson, who lives in Manhattan but visited the Ozarks for the Thanksgiving holiday.

On Nov. 11, he was standing on the roof of the 21-story apartment building where he lives at Second Avenue and 19th Street, reflecting that some signs of normalcy were returning.

"I was looking up at the sky. I could see planes were landing every two minutes at La Guar-dia (Airport) ... I was thinking, Wow, air traffic has gotten pretty much back to normal'... There was tons of traffic."

Overnight that changed.

Nov. 12 a large passenger plane crashed in Brooklyn kill-ing 260.

When Anderson turned on his television "there was the wreck and the neighborhood was on fire. ... My immediate feeling was I wondered if this was a terrorist action. I felt bad. I knew that a bunch of people had died."

Anderson, 36, is a researcher in ABC News' video and film department and prepares materials for "Peter Jennings' World News Tonight," "20/20" and "Nightline." He graduated from Southwest Missouri State Uni-versity in 1989 with a degree in political science and has lived in New York for 10 years.

The attack

Only 61 days separated the Brooklyn plane crash from the day Anderson heard a low-flying rumble as the first of the hijacked planes hit the Trade Center.

"It woke me up. I was laying in bed half awake. I thought, A plane's going to crash. Are you kidding me?'"

He didn't hear anything else until the sirens started to wail, "but you hear sirens all the time. The thing was this just continued to build."

When a friend called him about 9 a.m. to tell him the Trade Center had been hit, "I immediately ... ran up to the roof," where he and other tenants had an unobstructed southern view of the Manhattan skyline two miles away, dominated by the burning Trade Center.

Anderson came out onto the roof just after the second plane hit. What had been a beautiful day with a clear, blue sky was suddenly filled with smoke. "It was so much more intense than what you see on TV."

Because his job allows him to stay abreast of world events by reading several newspapers a day, Anderson immediately suspected Middle Eastern terrorists, especially Osama bin La-den.

Anderson used binoculars and saw debris fall, later learning that people had also jumped.

"I knew there was fire and that there had to be a lot of people killed, but I also knew that they would be getting out, so that each moment that went by, I was thinking, Good! People are getting out, they're getting out.'"

Meanwhile, "Second Avenue was just filled with emergency vehicles, one after another after another, bumper-to-bumper, just constantly streaming downtown."

Anderson's building is next to the police academy and precinct house. "Immediately there were snipers up there with rifles on the building. They definitely had a contingency plan for this. ... Pretty soon buses pulled up that had cadets on them. They told me what they were doing ... where they were going to put people to shut things down to create security."

The street was filled with people. "I saw the faces of the emergency workers. ... It was all business ... serious business. I don't know if some of them were killed or not."

Going in the other direction were "thousands of people just walking away from it just getting out of that area. (Police) cleared out below 14th Street ... told people to go home."

Falling buildings

Anderson left the frantic street and ran back to his apartment in time to see the televised image of the first building fall-ing. "It never crossed my mind that the buildings were going to come down. I got up there right as the (first) cloud was coming up. I ... watched it expand and cover all those buildings down there ... this huge skyline you just couldn't see it."

He took photographs of the second building as it imploded and fell. "People were crying ... it was so wild to see those buildings burning and the huge clouds of smoke." Anderson, a history buff, imagined the scene was similar to what residents of Oahu, Hawaii, saw at Pearl Harbor.

"I was mad. How many people died? I knew it had been an hour (since the first crash), so I was hoping that pretty much everybody below ... got out."

News reports starting coming in. "All air traffic had been shut down, then you hear that the Pentagon's been hit." Up on the roof, he and other tenants worried, "Are more planes going to hit us? What's going on? ..." For a moment the memory rendered him unable to speak.

"Right after the first building fell, this fighter jet came out and just circled. You really had a sense ... that this was totally war." Seeing the jet made Anderson, a military veteran, feel good. "If anybody else tried to fly a plane into us they were going to get blown ... out of the sky."

A job to go to

Anderson worked that day, and the subway was up and running, he said, but some stops were off limits. "It was so surreal. ... The bars were just packed with people who couldn't get home."

He walked through Central Park and "there were people laying out sunbathing. It was such a weird, surreal juxtaposition." He saw what he assumed were tourists eating outside at cafes "and from their vantage point, you could see this huge plume of smoke going up."

Anderson said he thinks he is managing quite well in the aftermath and so are fellow New Yorkers. He's talked about the events with his parents, sisters and close friends.

At first, most people weren't talking about it, "and I thought it was weird that day, but then I realized they were in shock. I feel like I was better prepared because I had been in the military and an earthquake."

New Yorkers talk about it now, he said. New York One, a local radio news-all-the-time call-in program offers informational guests such as mental health professionals or biologists, he said. "There is lots of discussion all the time there in the media. It's a good thing."

Many people at his workplace need to talk about it, he added. They have been so focused on their jobs that they really haven't dealt with it. During the live news coverage, he said, everyone performed as professionals. "It helped that everyone felt that they had a job to do to get this information out to people."

Reminders are everywhere from the smell of smoke to the posters of those who were lost. "It was just so sad, seeing all those (people). They were just normal, happy people and (their families) put up photos of them smiling; and to know they were really dead for no reason really it was really sad. They were just innocent people."

Anderson said he didn't know anyone who died in the tragedy, nor did any of his immediate coworkers, but many others knew people old school friends who perished. ABC lost its engineer who was stationed with its transmission tower, he said.

Anthrax strikes

Anderson had been recovering well and even spent a fun night on the town the first time in a long time with friends.

Then he heard about NBC's anthrax attack. He was angry again. The next morning he learned that there was an-thrax at his workplace. His nasal swab was negative.

At work, health officials and physicians tried to explain that everything was under control, but "I got the sense that they (were) making it up as they go, creating procedures while this was happening. Do they exactly know what they are doing?"

Living in New York

Anderson doesn't live in fear, even though he remains in New York. "You do know it is a target so many people consolidate there it would be a prime place for biological or chemical attacks, or if they were to blow something up and have radiation on it."

Even now, he said, both sides of his street are blocked off and there is a po-lice presence.

He knows that the authorities have stopped terrorists in New York before they were able to blow up subways or the United Nations building. "They captured the guys ... it wasn't a big deal because nothing happened."

But, he added, "It will continue to happen until these terrorists are eradicated."