Joel Orosz writes:

A firsthand account of Tuesday's tragic events was posted to the internet (and copied to the Colonial Coins mailing list) as the day unfolded by E-Sylum subscriber Eric Cheung. Some excerpts:

"I haven't yet gone off to Stanford yet but I will be doing just that in a week and a half. I live down around City Hall in Manhattan and it's a pretty commercial area; at this time in the morning there's normally quite some commotion down here particularly since everyone is trying to get to work.

I just heard a rumble that was about twenty seconds long. ... A couple minutes later, my mom came into my room and told me a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.

In utter disbelief, I kicked out of my bedsheets and looked out the window and saw lots of people running around in the streets heading up Broadway away from the explosion. I also checked out the living room and saw CNN extensively covering this disaster.

About eight or ten minutes later, ... I heard a huge explosion as the legs of my bed and the floor of my 9th floor apartment shook.

The first world trade center collapsed down to the bottom...

I walked not ten feet from my neighbor's apartment when I heard an even louder rumble. My neighbors summoned me to return to the apartment, and in the last second as I dashed to the window, I saw the final section of World Trade Center 2 tumble straight down into the ground. My neighbors and mother were hysterical. Moments later the debris and ash of the aftermath rose into the blazingly sunny sky.

I returned to my apartment about 10:28, the hallways in my building filling with smoke. I continued down the hallway where there are windows every ten feet or so, four or five in all down about a hundred feet corridor. There was white dust atop every roof I could see, and it looked like a snowstorm had just hit us, or radioactive waste from a nuclear explosion had just rained down upon us. After a while, the two look the same, and are both frightening and frustrating in equal magnitude."

To read the complete original E-Sylum article, see:SEPTEMBER 11(coinbooks.org/esylum_v04n38a02.html)

To read one of the following week's summaries of events, see:SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 AND ITS AFTERMATH(coinbooks.org/esylum_v04n39a05.html)