My September 11th Experience

2001 was the most important year of my life. It was the year I met my wife, it was when I first picked up the insurance industry, and it obviously was the year 9/11 happened.

As we reflect back on 25 years ago, I thought I would share my personal experience in New York City that day. Not because it is of any great relevance – I was not in harm’s way and my challenges trying to get home were mundane – but because I think it is important to document these things so stories don’t get lost. Mine is one of millions of stories people in New York that day experienced.

On a personal level, it troubles me how with each passing year people seem to care less and less about the events of that day and how they have shaped our country since then. I view it as the most consequential day of my lifetime so it saddens me how little it seems to resonate anymore. It’s become just another day.

I suppose part of that is those say 35 and under have no personal connection to the events that day and in the weeks that followed. They know more about what happened in The Odyssey than they do what happened on September 11th.

Sure, they’ve seen the documentaries about how the Towers fell and the bravery of the firefighters, but they don’t know the stories of many other heroic individuals who saved lives that day (when was the last time you heard the name Rick Rescorla or who can still name all the Flight 93 heroes?).

I can’t explain why those of us old enough to have been affected have lost interest. The Boomers never stopped commemorating the moon landing or speculating about who shot JFK. But most of us have little interest in discussing how impactful 9/11 was or how more wasn’t done after the 1993 attack or how it perforated the bubble that terrorism couldn’t reach our shores.

How many people working in the insurance industry can tell you how many Marsh or Aon employees died that day? Or even name one? We were supposed to “never forget” but so much has been forgotten in just a quarter century. I view that as a societal failure that more of these stories aren’t remembered and haven’t been taught to our children.

Anyway, with that diversion aside, I should return to the main topic which is recapping the events of that day from my perspective. This is going to be a bit lengthy for hopefully understandable reasons.

An Ordinary Morning

I was working for Fidelity then and was in New York for an insurance conference that day, having flown in from Boston the night before. I had only transitioned to the insurance sector that July so this was going to be my first conference where I could go meet companies in person.

I was staying at the Plaza Hotel (near Central Park). I can’t recall the exact details but I am guessing my first meeting was around 10 because at about 9am, I turned on the TV briefly before leaving the hotel.

The big news of the day was that Michael Jordan was going to announce he was “unretiring” (again) but then, just as I was about to leave, there was a brief news story that a “small plane” had hit the World Trade Center.

It was, at that time, treated as a routine story, probably some commuter plane that wandered off target or something, who knows. So, while it caught my attention, it didn’t seem like something to be overly worried about.

Thus, I left the room around 9 and checked out of the hotel. If I had waited another maybe ten minutes to get more information, my day would have gone very differently.

I got in a taxi to head to the conference which I believe was at a Morgan Stanley office. I can’t remember the precise location but I suspect it was somewhere around the Flatiron building as I was a reasonable walk from Penn Station and I could see smoke from the Towers on the taxi ride south.

Both the taxi driver and I remarked on the smoke but neither of us knew how serious it was. The streets were calm and nothing seemed out of the ordinary besides the smoke in the distance.

So I left the cab and headed up the elevator to join the conference. That’s when everything changed. When I got off the elevator, everyone was leaving. The conference had been canceled.

I was trying to understand what happened. That’s when I learned the second plane hit and this was a terror attack.

At this point, my only thought was I needed to get out of New York. I called corporate travel for help getting a flight, but, of course, that was no longer an option. The phone lines were overwhelmed and I kept getting disconnected but I eventually got through and settled on a plan to take the Amtrak back to Boston, so I headed to Penn Station.

Escape From New York

I should note I didn’t feel unsafe during any of this. I knew something bad at happened at the World Trade Center but I didn’t have any reason to suspect it was part of a wider plot.

It seemed perfectly logical to head to Penn Station and get on a train home. At that moment, it didn’t cross my mind that Madison Square Garden above could be a target or that terrorists might try to disable trains as well as the planes.

It’s also worth pointing out there was no security procedure for getting on a train. I could have had anything in my suitcase. Nobody checked.

The train boarded like normal. A lot of people had the same idea as I did as the train was entirely full. Then, we waited. It started with “there will be a small delay”, then it became a longer delay, then finally the trains were shut down because somebody wisely realized there was no way to guarantee our safety.

It was while I was waiting on the train that the Towers fell, the Pentagon got hit, and Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. I knew none of this and wouldn’t find out for several more hours.

Remember, cell phones back then were just portable phones, not computers. And my battery was low because I got disconnected so many times from travel trying to make my train reservation.

So, now what? I leave Penn Station, call travel again, and they have no solutions. My immediate focus was finding someplace to stay so I didn’t have to sleep on the streets. So I started walking back towards the Plaza hoping they’d have a room available when I got there.

Along the way, I passed a restaurant that was open and asked if there was someplace I could charge my phone. It was only then that I saw the news on TV and realized the Towers had fallen (though I still had no idea about the Pentagon or other targets).

Once my phone was charged, I thought to check my messages and had all these calls from Fidelity trying to locate me and make sure I was safe. I let them know I was fine but had no place to stay. I made some more calls and eventually found an old friend who would let me crash at his place though it was going to be a pretty long walk.

On the way there, I get a call back from Fidelity saying there were co-workers also in town and that they have rooms at…the Plaza…so I should head there and I could crash on someone’s floor.

When I got there (late afternoon), the building was on lockdown. I go to a side door and someone opens it up to ask me what I want. It’s Ben Stein, the actor (“Bueller”). I’m not kidding – Ben Stein was manning the door at the Plaza.

It was an odd enough occurrence to make you question if the whole day was a dream, but obviously it wasn’t. I don’t know if he was waiting for a friend or looking for bad guys or what but I told him I was staying with friends there and he let me in.

It was only after reconnecting with the Fidelity group that I started to get filled in on the extent of what happened and then enormity of what transpired began to sink in. Nobody had any idea if it was safe at the hotel or not. We knew the threat from the planes was over but there was plenty of speculation about what else could be lurking.

I should note we went to get dinner as a group that night and restaurants, at least some of them, were open. The streets were abandoned. You could not find a taxi anywhere and I’m sure plenty of businesses closed early, but it was not a complete ghost town. We were not the only ones who needed restaurants or bars that night, though obviously the mood was far different from normal.

After that, I slept on the floor of someone’s hotel room wondering how and when we were all going to get home.

September 12th

The next morning we got word that Amtrak was going to operate and we were booked on the first train back to Boston. So I reversed yesterday’s course and went from the Plaza back to Penn Station.

The train ride went smoothly and I was anxious to get home and watch the news to process everything that had happened. I still had no idea if anyone I knew was missing or dead.

But that was going to have to wait. Why? Because we got a phone call on the train that we were expected to head straight to the office for a mandatory meeting to discuss how the attacks would affect certain stocks.

There wasn’t even an opportunity to run home and change into clean clothes. There certainly wasn’t anyone from HR to ask about our mental health or if we needed to call on family members to make sure they were all accounted for.

Now, remember, I had been following insurance for not even two months. I was still learning how to analyze a reserve triangle or tell what a good combined ratio was for excess liability.

Now I am being asked to tell everyone at Fidelity what the attacks meant for insurance pricing. Like I had any idea! I had less information about what happened the day before than they did because I spent my day aimlessly walking the city rather than in front of a Bloomberg monitor and CNN.

By the way, the stock market was closed for the rest of the week. That meeting was not urgent. But it did make clear that my job had changed. I no longer had time for a traditional learning curve on a new sector. I had to be the expert ASAP.

They did let us go home after that meeting. I can’t say I remember details about what I did the rest of that day, but I would bet I spent it glued to the TV news and reading as much as I could online. Insurance could wait a day. I was more concerned about the people in New York searching for missing family.

For the younger readers, you don’t hear much about that in the retrospectives, but there were “wanted posters” all over New York with people desperate for information about missing family members. Many didn’t find out for sure for months.

Imagine living with that uncertainty. You didn’t just suspect your loved one wasn’t coming home, you didn’t even know if their body would ever be found. That was post 9/11 New York. It was a city in mourning. I was fortunate I didn’t directly know any victims, but I knew many, many people who were personally impacted.

September 13th and Beyond

I woke up the next morning to find my picture in the Boston Globe. A photographer had caught our group exiting the Amtrak and it made the paper as the first people returning home from New York. Little did they know we were headed straight to work!

That wasn’t the last difficult thing I had to do at work that week. The most upsetting request was from fund managers wanting to know how Marsh’s business was going to be impacted by all the people that died and, you know, should they sell the stock if it was going to be bad for business.

So, yeah, I had to call investor relations at Marsh to try to respectfully ask about whether 9/11 was a bad thing for them because they lost 300 people that day or a good thing because pricing would go up across their business.

Keep in mind, I think I had only talked to the IR once before to introduce myself. I had no relationship with him and he’s obviously going through something way more traumatic than I was. The last thing I’m sure he wanted to do was talk to me (or any other investor) about was how the attacks impacted their business.

I can’t remember the details of the conversation other than expressing regret I had to make this call and that I was really uncomfortable doing it and we both tried to get through it as best we could.

The rest of the month (and really much of October as well) were a real test of cognitive dissonance. By day, I would try to figure out how high the insurance losses were and what it would mean for pricing and whether the net of the two made the stocks buys or sells.

By night, I would read every story I could about the victims, about survivors, about the unexpected heroes who went up to save people instead of leaving with everyone else. There was I think a New York Times series that did bios on every victim. I read them all. I felt it was an obligation to recognize them.

And then in the morning, it was back to figuring out how high earnings could go if insurance pricing was really going to be as strong as people were suggesting.

Those weren’t the only changes. It probably took ten years for me to hear a plane overhead that was louder than normal without looking up to make sure it was OK.

If a fire alarm went off at work, you wouldn’t believe how fast people would evacuate the building (we were on the 34th floor!). People didn’t assume someone had left a bagel in the toaster too long. They jetted down 34 flights of stairs without hesitation.

There were even people who had evacuation slides in their offices. I don’t remember exactly how they worked but it was something along the line of if the building was bombed, you could hook this onto the window ledge and climb down and wait to be rescued.

This was considered normal. Well, maybe not normal, but at least understandable. The heightened sense of fear was ever present for at least a year.

You didn’t want to get on a plane if you didn’t have to. Certainly for short trips, take the train instead or even drive.

There was a lot of fear about the next attack and where it would come from. It’s easy to look back 25 years later and suggest we were all too paranoid or that the government overreached to prevent another attack, but it didn’t feel like that in the moment.

The Insurance Legacy

Given the demographics of the audience reading this, it is necessary to discuss how 9/11 changed the insurance industry.

Out of tragedy came much success. There was a pricing turn unlike any other. That is, in many ways, the nature of the industry as we all know. A number of insurers saw their fate permanently change for the better in the wake of 9/11.

Companies like RenRe and Ace had mind blowing growth from the resulting hard market that completely changed the market’s perception of their capabilities. The famous 2001 Bermuda startups created immense wealth for their founders.

They earned their success, without a doubt, but it also required good fortune, born out of the bad fortune of others. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.

I am also not naive to the fact that my career benefitted immensely as well. I was able to quickly assess who the winners would be and became a big advocate for many of the Bermuda insurers and reinsurers, which led to me having better career opportunities than if events were fairly routine.

In simpler, more “boring” times who knows if I would have even stuck with insurance or transitioned to another industry?

There were also more subtle, but durable changes such as more awareness of aggregation, new approaches to clash risk, improvements in capital models, etc. that led to the smoother cycles the industry has experienced in recent decades.

The industry was forever changed for the better by one of the greatest tragedies of our times. In the grand scheme of things, that is unimportant relative to the lives lost. But for those who work in the industry, it shouldn’t be forgotten how we got to this better place.

Final Reflections

Is it possible part of the reason I still feel so strongly about “never forget” is because my career success has a straight line back to the events of that day? Perhaps, I don’t know. I’m sure that’s a part of it. There was also the reality that I couldn’t get away from the news even if I wanted to. It was literally my job to analyze how catastrophic a loss it was and to talk to companies about what it meant for them.

I suspect another part was being in the city that day and also, frankly, being so consumed by the stories of the victims (and heroes) in the months that followed. It is probably accurate to say I had some mild PTSD in the following weeks.

As I said, what happened to me that day was insignificant. Yet, I remember it in great detail, certainly more than any other day from that time period.

It is not something I think I could forget if I tried. Perhaps that why it bothers me when people forget stories far more powerful and important than mine.

So if you’ve forgotten what it felt like in those days immediately following September 11th try to go back and think about how uncertain it was back then, how different life was before and after, how people rallied around each other, etc.

And for those who are too young to have lived it, ask someone who was there what their day was like. Ask your parents what things they took for granted on September 10th that they never did again after September 12th. Or when they felt safe again being in a large crowd.

Go read a book about some of the firefighters or those on Flight 93 or those at the Pentagon. Ask what it was like to see your country unified in common cause. Unfortunately, you probably have no idea what that looks like!

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking with me to the end. As I said, my story is only of relevance to me. My goal in writing it is to get people talking and maybe spark some conversations. If just a few of you spend a few extra minutes tonight reading other people’s stories and remembering (or learning for the first time), I’ll consider this effort worthwhile.