Ms. Woznick

That day hit all of my senses as much as my brain. I was living only 2 miles from the World Trade Center, in Brooklyn. I could see the smoke rising, and I was outside when the first tower fell. I could hear it - it sounded like an earthquake. I was in a park near my house and started to run for home. We had to cover our faces because within a few minutes the debris got pretty heavy. At home we had to close all the windows to keep the dust out. Papers from people's desks were falling on our street. For days after we heard fighter jets and helicopters overhead, but no regular planes. The fires burned for a few weeks and we could smell them if the wind blew toward Brooklyn. The trucks with the debris on their way to the landfill came through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel a few blocks from us. Sometimes I'd see a whole procession of trucks going by and it would just make me stop in my tracks because I knew what was in them. When you went on the subway it was scary because we were all worried they'd target the transit system. There were heavily armed police and guardsmen in some of the subway stations and near other important buildings. Flyers about missing people were posted by all the subway station stops almost immediately. People were hoping their relatives were only missing and not dead. It was so hard walking by those pictures every time you went out of the house.