People with Maine ties feel effects of tragedy

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Many Mainers and people with strong Maine ties were directly affected by the terrorist attacks.

John Bradley, formerly of Hampden and now of Stroudsburg, Pa., was at work on the 37th floor of the Travelers Building when the planes hit the nearby World Trade Center. His building was evacuated and he watched from street level in a mixture of awe and terror as events unfolded.

“People were jumping from the first building hit,” he said in a phone conversation Tuesday afternoon. “They were jumping from 70 floors up because they’d rather jump than burn. I would guess 20 or 30 jumped … . After awhile I couldn’t watch anymore.”

Bradley, 37, said that when the second tower collapsed, “It sounded like an earthquake. Thousands of people were running toward midtown. People around me thought an atom bomb might have gone off.”

Bradley, a 1982 graduate of

Hampden Academy, made his way with great difficulty out of the danger zone, eventually being evacuated by bus to Giants Stadium in New Jersey. When he was safe, he placed phone calls to his grandmother Mabel Michaud of Bradley and his siblings, including Susan Sims of Hampden and Kathy Caron of Bangor. He said he planned to kiss his wife, Erica, and 2-year-old son, Nicholas, when he got home.

Cameraman on scene

Nick McClelland, Bangor Daily News photography intern, was in New York City visiting friends Tuesday morning and was awakened by his pager going off.

His mother, in Illinois, wanted him to call.

It was about 9:45 a.m. and McClelland was in Brooklyn at a friend’s apartment.

“The phones wouldn’t work and we didn’t know what was up so I went downstairs to call my mom on the pay phone and we heard people talking about planes crashing into the World Trade Center,” he said.

His mom wanted to make sure he was OK.

McClelland and his friends ran up to the roof and saw firsthand the devastation at the World Trade Center.

“Just a massive black cloud of smoke,” McClelland said, describing the rooftop view.

He grabbed his camera and ran toward the scene.

“Right now I’m covered in soot and just sort of in shock,” he said in the afternoon by phone from Chinatown.

“The streets are covered in soot and pieces of paper from the building are strewn everywhere. It’s really quite emotional to see it. People’s day planners and things from their desk are just all over the place and they are charred.”

McClelland said traffic was pretty much stopped anywhere near the area.

“Everyone seems to be really pulling together,” McClelland said. “People are quite calm believe it or not. It’s shock I guess. People are being great. There are clinics on the sides of the streets and people stopping to help.”

McClelland, who was due back to work Wednesday, said he did not know when he would be able to get out of the city.

Spared by chance

It was perhaps the simplest, purest of American acts that spared the life of 28-year-old Christopher Allen of Orono who on any other Tuesday would have been on his way up to his office on the 87th floor of the World Trade Center.

He stopped to vote.

His parents, however, who watched live on TV as a commercial jetliner crashed into their son’s office building, didn’t know that.

From the TV studio at MPBC in Bangor, Earl Allen tried to calm his panicked wife, Phyllis, who had just heard that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. She sought reassurance from her husband that it was not their son’s building.

“Does he work in the one with the antennas?” Phyllis asked.

Earl informed his wife that his son worked in the other building and she hung up, relieved, but still anxious.

“I went back in and turned on the TV,” Earl recalled Tuesday afternoon. “I was standing there watching the coverage, worried about him, but thinking thank God his office was in the other tower. Then all of the sudden here comes this plane and I watched it fly directly into that other tower.

“My wife called back and by this time, of course, she’s right over the edge,” Allen said.

Then the Orono couple knew all they could do was wait.

“All I could do was tell her that we couldn’t do anything until we heard something from his end,” Allen said.

Fifteen minutes later, their son called them and quickly let them know that he was safe and trying to get out of Manhattan and back to his home in Brooklyn.

“He was on a pay phone on the street and couldn’t talk long because he said there was a line literally a mile long of people trying to get to the phone,” Phyllis said. “He just said that he was alive and trying to get out of the city.”

After a long afternoon, Christopher Allen, who graduated from Orono High School and attended college in New York City, found out that his co-workers began to evacuate when the first plane hit the other tower. When the second plane hit, his co-workers had made it down to the 40th floor and were able to get out of the building.

Anxiously waiting word

Louise Klaila of Eastport, at Fort Kent on Tuesday pursuing her work as a case management officer for district courts in Aroostook and Washington counties, was very nervous awaiting word from her daughter in New York City.

Cody Klaila, Louise Klaila’s youngest daughter, is a sophomore drama student at New York University in southern Park Square in southern Manhattan. She normally takes a train from where she lives in Brooklyn that goes by the World Trade Center to get to classes.

“I’m very nervous,” Louise Klaila said, on the verge of tears. “I haven’t heard from her and I have been trying to get her all morning.”

Louise Klaila, reached at Daigle’s Bed and Breakfast, said Tuesday evening she was still waiting to hear from her daughter.

She has two other children living in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Los Angeles.

Shock waves in Bangor

Word of the attack sent shock waves through the room at the Spectacular Events Center where the Board of Environmental Protection was holding a three-day hearing on Bangor Hydro-Electric Co.’s proposal to build a new 84-mile power line across eastern Maine. The first to hear the news of a plane hitting the World Trade Center was Cathy Johnson, north woods project director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Her sister worked on the 85th floor of the first tower to be hit.

Johnson abruptly left the room to try to reach her family by cellular phone.

She found out from her parents in Connecticut that her sister was late to work because she was dropping her two children off at school and had not made it to the law office where she works before the planes hit the building. Her sister passed under the building on the subway with her children about 15 minutes before the attacks began, Johnson said. When she arrived at her children’s schools, about 20 blocks from the trade center, her sister noticed the building was on fire and took her children and tried to return home. In the afternoon, her sister was still unable to leave the city for her home in Brooklyn. Johnson’s brother who lives in the city also was all right.

Then, one of Bangor Hydro’s lead attorneys, Ginger Davis, left the room after a legal assistant informed her of the situation. Davis’ son also worked in the World Trade Center. Her co-counsel returned to the room a few minutes later and asked for a break in the proceedings because the World Trade Center had been attacked by terrorists and Ginger’s son worked there, Bruce Garrity said, almost in tears.

A hush fell over the conference room before people began filing into the lobby where a giant television set was set up.

Davis talked to her son by phone shortly after 9:30 a.m. He worked in the second tower to be hit and had made it out of the building and was on the street. It was unclear late Tuesday morning whether he made it out of the area safely before the towers collapsed.

Because to the day’s devastating events, the board decided to postpone indefinitely the hearing, which had just begun its second day.

“We’re all affected somehow,” said BEP chairman John Tewhey in announcing that the hearing would be rescheduled. His daughter worked in a building across the street from the World Trade Center.

The brother of one of Bangor Hydro’s visual experts also worked in the area.

Word from cell phone

On a day that saw thousands scrambling for news of their loved ones in New York and Washington, D.C., Brewer City Solicitor Joel Dearborn learned that the older of his two sons, Jay Dearborn, had emerged from the attack unharmed.

Jay, who started a job with the American Express office in the World Trade Center on Aug. 24, was able to call home early Tuesday morning, thanks to the cellular telephone he had with him. The recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business also is the grandson of Ruth Foster, small-business woman and former state legislator from Ellsworth.

“I guess this was a day where God was really smiling down on my son’s face,” said Dearborn, who’s also a Holden selectman.

Though the attorney had not yet been able to speak to his older son in person as of midafternoon, he’d received e-mail from his son, as well as telephone calls from the numerous friends Jay e-mailed around the country asking them to let his folks know that he was safe and had made it back to his apartment.

Dearborn’s wife, Jacqueline, was first to hear from Jay, Dearborn said. “He called the house and said, ‘Mom, I’m OK – don’t turn on the TV,” which, like any mother in her position, she immediately did.” When Jacqueline Dearborn learned what had occurred at the Trade Center, she placed a call to Dearborn’s law office in Brewer. Dearborn learned of the attacks when he checked in with his secretary during a court break.

Surreal in D.C.

Yolanda Sly, a 1997 University of Maine graduate who works 10 blocks from the U.S. State Department in Washington, said the city had a “surreal” quality as she walked home Tuesday.

Notified by e-mail that her office at the American Public Power Association was closing at 11 a.m., Sly couldn’t take the city’s Metro subway system, which was closed shortly after a plane crashed into a section of the Pentagon across the Potomac River in Virginia.

The weather was warm and clear, and people dined in outdoor cafes. But as she walked closer to the White House and the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania, Sly said, the atmosphere changed perceptibly: She saw people starting to fight, streets blocked off and angry drivers.

After walking three more blocks, Sly saw snipers lining the roof of the White House and heard fighter jets fly overhead, which is a rarity in the downtown, where flyovers are prohibited.

As Sly neared her Capitol Hill home, she saw cars parked on the side of the streets, with drivers slumped inside, listening to radio reports. Others, seemingly oblivious to the news, were having a picnic lunch in front of the Capitol building.

“Any place is a target right now,” she said. “It definitely crosses your mind when you live here that things like this could happen. The only difference is that today it actually happened.”