We never know what each day will bring
On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was a guest speaker on a media-related panel at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto. When I left home for the event, I knew one of the towers at New York’s World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. By the time I arrived, a second passenger jet had smashed into the other tower. It was now clear there’d been an attack on the United States. Those with BlackBerrys checked them furiously.
The panel went ahead, but nervously. Everyone knew something tragic and life altering had occurred.
Back then, I was a host for Report on Business Television (now BNN Bloomberg). When I got to the office, I immediately saw the huge whiteboard on the newsroom wall had been wiped clean. Normally, a grid showing all the guest slots for the day’s programming was progressively filled in with magic markers: red for analysts, green for CEOs, blue for money managers.
Our assignment editor, Michelle
Donovan, who always greeted people with a smile, looked ashen. It’s an understatement to say everyone was shaken, but as a “live” news organization, we had to start from scratch. Every guest had either cancelled or been cancelled. Few business leaders or analysts wanted to go on television to discuss what had happened.
The late, great Jim O’Connell was already on the air, sharing whatever had been learned. Our boss, Jack Fleischmann, said that instead of 7 p.m., I would join the coverage at 2 p.m. and be in the studio for seven hours.
Typically, we’d cover North American markets through the day. But they didn’t open and would remain closed that week. However, certain overseas markets were opening. We connected with the business editor of the Sydney Morning Herald when the Australian market opened.
Tone was everything. An unspeakable tragedy had occurred. Some 3,000 lives (including 24 Canadians) had been lost not only in New York, but in Washington, D.C., where the Pentagon was hit, and in a field in Pennsylvania where a fourth hijacked plane crashed.
It felt unseemly to talk about business amidst overwhelming loss of life. Yet, we couldn’t ignore that the nerve centre of the financial world had been targeted. We couldn’t not cover that fact but had to do so in the most delicate, sensitive of ways.
A few established guests agreed to join us to share their recollections of previous, outof-the-blue shocks. At one point, we opened the phones to let viewers just talk about what had happened, as though the channel was a support group. The fear was palpable.
The evening before, I’d interviewed New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord who was in New York City, selling his province’s story to investors. On 9/11, I phoned the hotel where he was staying and managed to get through to him. He and his team had rented a van and were driving back to New Brunswick.
In 2001, BlackBerry (then called Research In Motion) was just embarking on what would be a stratospheric run over the next half decade. Initially, however, the device didn’t have a phone. It was just for email. But Bob Hormats of Goldman Sachs told us how critical it had been for communication amid the destruction.
Additionally, a source at BlackBerry told me that shortly after the attack, the company had programmed devices to emit a locator signal to find users who were missing in the rubble. The company wanted no publicity for this. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no one was located this way.
BlackBerry users also furnished us with riveting on-theground accounts. A Canadian in Manhattan’s financial district sent us a lengthy and moving eyewitness report. Choking back tears, I read it on air in its entirety. I’d reported from the World Trade Center a few years earlier and recalled the enormity of it. The thought that it no longer existed, with people crushed by its collapse, was nauseating and hard to believe. Much worse, our New York City correspondent Jeanne Yurman lived across from it. She saw the planes hit and people leaping to their deaths.
On the day of Canada’s national memorial service for the victims (held on Parliament Hill), everyone in the newsroom stood to observe a lengthier than usual silence. It felt like the Third World War had begun.
Since 9/11, not only has there been a 20year war in Afghanistan, but also a global financial crisis, the Trump presidency and a rise in authoritarianism, a deadly pandemic and now an urgency to address climate change. If that awful day taught us anything, it’s that you never know what awaits you in the morning.
A Canadian in Manhattan’s financial district sent us a lengthy and moving eyewitness report. Choking back tears, I read it on air