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WTC Attack Fourth Brush With Terror For Trinity’s Security Chief
by Kathryn Soman
In 1975, John Liegel, a young New York City police officer, was
directing traffic when a bomb exploded at LaGuardia Airport. In
February 1993, just reporting for duty at his post as Port Authority
police officer assigned to the World Trade Center complex, he heard
the impact of that car bombing. In 1994, he was seriously injured in
the Fulton Street subway station explosion. “I was standing by the
Millennium Hotel when the bomb went off,” he recalls.
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| John Liegel
outside St. Paul's Chapel. |
On September 11, John -- a member of U. S. Security Associates and,
since July of this year, Director of Security for the Parish of
Trinity Church -- would experience terrorism at work for the fourth
and most frightening time.
That morning, he had just emerged from the Trade Center (through
which he commuted to work each morning) and was standing at the coffee
cart nearby on the southwest corner of Liberty Street and Church
Street when the first plane smacked into the tower. “My first
instinct,” he recalls, “was that they blew up the World Trade Center
again. I sensed it was going to be a catastrophic day.”
Running up the block to St. Paul’s Chapel, John’s first objective
was to have his colleague, Roy Henry, secure the chapel. “The goal in
this kind of disaster scenario,” John says, “is to close and lock all
gates and doors immediately and assess the situation. With the chapel
almost directly across the street from the Trade Center, I was really
worried about how this situation might progress.”
Joined almost instantly by his Deputy Director of Security, Joe
Redican, who’d been attending a seminar at nearby Pace University, the
two men “stood there gawking,” John recalls wryly, “until we heard a
massive explosion and ducked for cover in St. Paul’s.”
Praying that St. Paul's would not fall
Standing inside the magnificent old structure, John and Joe
listened in horror as debris began to rain down upon the roof, praying
that the church itself wasn’t going to fall.
After several minutes, the men rushed down to the main Trinity
Church office building at 74 Trinity Place, just a few doors down from
the site of the disaster, “We needed to determine if the evacuation
plan had been put into place,” John remembers. “Fortunately, Dominick
Lavino [Fire Safety Director, Trinity Church] had already begun to act
on the plan.” John learned to his relief that the Trinity PreSchool
had already been evacuated to the basement.
“I told Joe,” he says, “that I had to run up to the 6th floor to
retrieve my lists with all the Trinity contact phone numbers I knew I
was going to need. I’d just closed my office door when I heard a
tremendous noise. The building was shaking as if there’d been an
earthquake. I didn’t know it yet, but the first tower had just come
down.
“I stood there, stunned. When this horrendous rumbling finally
stopped, our building immediately filled with smoke.”
Opening the door to the stairwell, John was dismayed to see it
obscured in a thick black haze. “Black smoke is truly un-breathable
smoke,” he tells us. “I knew that this was not a good sign.” He raced
down the stairs to the lobby and saw even worse signs. “Out the front
and back doors it was complete darkness. It looked like they’d been
painted black. I was really having trouble breathing.”
"There was no hope for us if the second tower fell"
Making his way to the basement, he found the air slightly better.
But, as he conferred with Joe, Mike Borrero, Trinity’s Property
manager, Dominick Iuliano, Facility Manager, and Frank Lynch,
Operations Manager, for a quick assessment of the situation, he really
began to feel fear. Breathing deeply, the five concluded that the
unthinkable had occurred, that one of the towers had come down. It
seemed only a question of time to them before the second tower would
also fall. “ ‘How long?’ we wondered. ‘Five minutes? An hour?’ We felt
there was no hope for us if the second tower fell; we couldn’t
possibly breathe through a second round of this debris and smoke. We
knew we needed to get everybody out of the building as fast as we
could.”
With two of the men watching both exits for signs of the smoke
lifting, the others set about organizing the estimated two-hundred
people (a mix of tenants, Trinity staff, and passing strangers) taking
shelter in the basement, including numerous preschoolers, for an
instant emergency evacuation.
“We got everybody together, single-file, and told whoever was free
to take one child and be ready to run when we gave the word. We
waited, it seemed like forever, but it was probably six minutes,” says
John. “Suddenly, we could see a ray of sunshine just above floor level
at the Greenwich Street exit.” He was somehow certain they wouldn’t
have more than two to three minutes to race the whole group out and
south.
“We gave the word to go as fast as they could and told them to keep
running towards Battery Park. I had just made it to Rector Street, a
block away, when the second tower collapsed. In the middle of that
mushroom cloud of smoke and debris, Michelle Wilson [Trinity’s
switchboard operator] and I ducked into a parking garage. We didn’t
come out, believe me, until the smoke was gone.
“After that,” John says, “everything is kind of blurry. We realized
that all of us had made it out safely. I know the children were taken
away on buses… I wound up meeting Frank Lynch and Joe Redican and we
sat for a while in Battery Park to breathe and rest.”
Soon after, the three made their way back towards the Trade Center
site. It was early afternoon and they needed to assess the damage.
“I’d thought that Trinity Church would be okay,” John tells us. “But I
really believed that we’d lost St. Paul’s. When I saw it standing,
undamaged -- that was an emotional moment for me.”
"I know 80 people who were killed
John stayed in the area, checking on Trinity buildings and
personnel, until about 4 pm that day. “When 7 World Trade Center
collapsed, we ran east. We’d had enough! I was evacuated by medical
tug to Christ Hospital in Jersey City with two scratched corneas that,
thank God, have just about healed by now.”
Have any of the other terrorist attacks he witnessed previously
come close to matching the WTC disaster?
“No way,” John says with passion. “This was comprehensively
awful, absolutely, the only one that’s had a real personal effect on
me. I know 80 people who were killed – Port Authority civilians, 37
Port Authority officers, former co-workers, friends, neighbors, a man
I commuted in to the city with…
“Maybe,” he continues reflectively, “it was the complete surprise
of it. I was shocked to think that the Trade Center would fall down. I
was one of those self-described, so-called ‘experts’ who said it
couldn’t fall down. I never thought of this scenario.
“But, I suppose,” John Liegel concludes, “I have to be grateful
that so many people survived, that our people survived, that Trinity
Church and St. Paul’s Chapel survived, too. Whatever I could do to
help, I’m glad I was able to do it. It could have turned out so
different… In my field, you have to make what you think is the best
decision you can make at the time. Looking back, everything worked out
I guess as best as it could. We were so lucky that no one was
seriously hurt.” -
Trinity News
Posted October 9, 2001
Trinity Church is located at Broadway and Wall Street in NYC
Source:
http://www.trinitywallstreet.org/u/d/News/alert_93.html
September 10, 2003
The Pipes Are Gone but the Organ Resounds
By JAMES R.
OESTREICH, NYTimes.com
Concert settings around the city for decades have had to endure the
shake, rattle and rumble of subways passing nearby. The new Zankel
Hall — in the Carnegie Hall basement, with a subway nine feet away —
will soon carry the skirmish to a new front, reportedly well defended
with sound insulation.
But the historic Trinity Church, at the foot of Wall Street, is
preparing to fight back.
"We'll be rattling the subways," said Owen Burdick, the church's
director of music, as he listened to a mighty crescendo in an early
test of an innovative digital organ, just built and installed there by
Marshall & Ogletree of Needham Heights, Mass.
The instrument replaces the church's old Aeolian Skinner pipe
organ, which was all but destroyed in the attacks of Sept. 11. The
church lies a mere 200 yards from ground zero, and the building itself
suffered remarkably little damage. But it was permeated with a thick
coating of dust and grime, which corroded organ parts made of leather
and other vulnerable materials.
The Aeolian Skinner now lies dismantled in storage, pending an
insurance settlement at least a year off. (One item in issue,
apparently, is how much of the dust predated the attacks and how much
was caused by them; a "doctor of dust," in Mr. Burdick's phrase, was
brought in to examine the layers.) Rebuilding the instrument, or
building a new pipe organ, would probably take an additional three to
five years, Mr. Burdick said, while affirming the church's intention
to do one or the other eventually.
"This is an elegant interim solution," he said of the Marshall &
Ogletree instrument.
The organ will make its public debut tomorrow evening at 7 in a
performance of William Albright's oratorio "A Song to David," for
chorus, soloists, narrators and organ. Mr. Burdick will conduct and
Dean Billmeyer will be the organist. The performance will be broadcast
live on WQXR-FM and streamed on WQXR.com. (WQXR is owned by The
New York Times Company.)
The Trinity congregation has limped along since the church reopened
in November 2001 with a jury-rigged system of electronic keyboards and
synthesizers. "We call it the Toaster," Mr. Burdick said, evoking a
term used by pipe organ aficionados to dismiss electronic organs
generally.
Electronic organs, to be sure, don't get much respect from music
professionals. But if Trinity's new instrument is not your
grandfather's pipe organ, neither is it your father's electronic
organ.
Mr. Burdick, who has long been involved in electronic music, joined
the Marshall & Ogletree builders at the drawing board. Their goal was
to produce the best instrument that could be conceived within current
technological limits if price were no object.
The resulting prototype relies not on one computer but on 10 of
them. It also deploys 74 large speakers — set in ranks, like organ
pipes — and six refrigerator-size subwoofers.
"It's one hell of a stereo system," Mr. Burdick said.
As on a typical electronic organ, the sounds are derived from pitch
samples recorded from pipe organs. But here there is no resort to
transposition or other manipulation to derive many pitches from one.
Each pitch has been sampled individually from fine pipe organs around
the country. Even the wheezes and creaks of the pipe organ's mechanism
have been sampled into the sound.
"If you were to listen to every sample in the instrument from
beginning to end, it would take about 34 hours," Douglas Marshall, one
of the builders, said in press materials. A similar process on a
standard electronic organ might take about three minutes, Mr. Burdick
added.
The prototype, an infinitely complex contraption, cost about
$300,000 to develop, much of that sum to be borne by Trinity Church
from — Mr. Burdick hopes — insurance proceeds. By contrast, he added,
a typical electronic organ of concert-hall dimensions runs $60,000 to
$75,000, and a comparable pipe organ might reach $2.5 million to $3
million.
The organ was delivered to Trinity last Thursday evening by the
quaintly named Death Wish Movers, and the process of setting it up was
virtually completed by 2:30 in the morning. The sound was impressive
in tests later that morning, far surpassing that usually heard from
electronic organs in concert halls even though a connector was found
to be miswired and had yet to be corrected. The thunderous bass sounds
seemed to vibrate the very walls and floor of the church, prompting
Mr. Burdick's threat to the subways.
Might the instrument prove satisfactory enough that the church
would simply adopt it as a permanent fixture? No, Mr. Burdick
insisted.
"There will be pipes again at Trinity," he said. "Everyone is
committed to that. But this instrument raises the bar for electronic
organs, and C-plus organ builders should be on alert. There is no
reason to look down on it. It is a logical extension of the technology
we take for granted in every other area of our lives, and 99 percent
of the people who hear it will be unaware of any difference. But is it
beautiful?"
He answered his own question in the negative. "It lacks an inherent
`suchness,' " he said, borrowing a Zen term for something between,
say, "essence" and "gravitas."
But churches aside, what of a hall like Carnegie, which is not
about to tamper with its acoustical makeup to the extent of installing
a pipe organ? Sheerly in terms of sound, the new instrument would seem
far preferable to the more or less generic electronic instrument the
hall uses now.
"It's so new that we haven't had inquiries," Mr. Burdick said.
Robert J. Harth, the executive and artistic director of Carnegie
Hall, is keeping a wary eye. "I'm always interested in knowing what
opportunities there are without making any permanent changes or doing
anything that would affect the hall's acoustics," he said.
Kent Tritle, who, as director of music at the Church of St.
Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, oversaw the installation of a splendid
new Mander pipe organ there in 1993 and who, as the organist of the
New York Philharmonic, plays an electronic instrument as well, is also
watching from afar.
"It doesn't look to me as though it's anything radically new," he
said, "although it should certainly be better than what we have in
Avery Fisher Hall. You can do a lot now to get better sound
electronically, but it will never replace the original."
Adapting the system to concert hall use would seem problematic in
any case. Ranks of speakers looming above and behind the players,
where organ pipes might ordinarily be, would lack the visual appeal of
pipes. (In Trinity Church, the speakers are tucked away behind dummy
pipes.) What's more, in the mysterious workings of psychoacoustics,
they might even detract from the listening experience.
Certainly, few halls would devote prime real estate, on stage or
off, to any permanent installation. All of which leaves the logistical
nightmare of repeatedly moving whole batteries of speakers into place
and making all the proper connections.
But the instrument, big and booming as it is, is still in its
infancy. As Mr. Harth of Carnegie Hall said, "We need to watch this
very closely." And listen hard.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/10/arts/music/10ORGA.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
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