Remembering September 11
After years of reporting the traffic, alumnus will never forget what he saw the morning of Sept. 11

Tom Kaminski '84 was an eyewitness to history when the Newsradio 880 traffic reporter watched the attack on the World Trade Center from a bird's eye view. The WCBS 880 helicopter was one of the first on the scene. It was a day Kaminski will never forget. The following is his first-hand account that appeared on the WCBS Web site shortly after the event.

We were at the George Washington Bridge and had just made a left turn to the south when I saw a flash and fireball from the top of the World Trade Center. My pilot thought he had seen a plane near the building and radioed to LaGuardia tower, "LaGuardia, did you just lose one?" and got no response. Due to the angle and altitude of our flight, I have sometimes experienced the optical illusion of something appearing to hit a building. Those images would change as soon as we changed position of the aircraft. This one didn't. The fireball quickly turned to a cloud of smoke. I thought, "If this turns out to be nothing, I'm never going to hear the end of it," but I'd never put anything on the air without some type of confirmation, so I had to call the newsroom

I called frantically on our two-way radio. No answer. I learned later that everyone in the newsroom was at a south-facing window watching what I was looking at. It was 8:48 a.m., time for what would normally be my last traffic report of the morning and I was about to describe something that I hardly knew anything about. All I did know was that something had made Tower 1 look like it had been slit with a switchblade. I started my report by saying, "Something has happened to the World Trade Center" and described smoke and flames starting to pour out. As I spent the next several minutes on the air, my mind was spinning, trying to fill in the blanks: "The hole is 15 stories from the top... there are 80-plus stories below that. What time is it? How many people work in this building? Thousands, right? How the hell are these people at the top going to get out? How many of them were (hopefully) running late?"

Next, we flew directly in front of Tower 1, and confirmed that something had gone in from the north side of it. We then flew south to the Battery to see if whatever had hit it had gone out the other side. We saw heavy damage on the south side of Tower 1, but saw nothing of substance on the ground or on Tower 2, so we decided to go back north again, all the while just on the water's edge on the Manhattan side at about 900 feet. Ninety seconds after leaving the Battery, in the spot where we had just been looking, the second plane hit the second tower. We never saw the plane, but I could see the flash of the impact from behind us.

I never thought about terrorism until that moment, and as I was on the air describing the second blast, my clipboard started to shake in my hands, and my right leg, clamped down on the footswitch that "keyed" my broadcast radio, shook uncontrollably. We were able to stay another three or four minutes in that area when we were ordered to exit the airspace immediately. We needed fuel anyway, so we left the area and landed at Ridgefield Park. I kept up a running commentary on the air, describing the burning towers and wondering how many people were in there.

When I was growing up in Lodi, N.J., my dad and I would sometimes drive to Edgewater and watch the towers being built, excited to know that they would be the tallest buildings in the world. Having flown past them every day for 13 years, always admiring them, often looking at the people on the roof observation deck, it sickens me to think what it will look like from the air now.

I've been told by several people that I was the first person on the air with the story. I can't confirm that, but today a colleague called me "an eyewitness to history." Maybe in time I can say I'm proud of that distinction, but considering what this city is going through, I just wish I never had to see it at all.

Reprinted with permission from WCBS.

[back to main page]