NYC Crash Conjures 9/11 Flashbacks

Even in a place accustomed to the murmur of terror alerts - where subways and skyscrapers are viewed as targets, guardsmen with guns patrol the main train stations, and squads of police cars routinely line up on the sidewalks in a post-Sept. 11 show of force - Wednesday afternoon's relentless screeching of emergency vehicles, followed by news of a plane crash, was hard on the nerves.

The adrenaline was palpable in New York for several hours on October 11 - before the details emerged and before Mayor Michael Bloomberg approached the microphones with the "not terrorists" news New York hoped to hear - as people turned on their TVs and radios, read text messages from friends and knew only this:

A plane had crashed into a building in Manhattan.

And then came an emotion, hard to define and distinct to the five years since Sept. 11, and probably more common here than anywhere else. You could call it relief, except relief is not usually laced with guilt.

It was a small plane, nothing bigger. The most intense fire appeared on television to be visible through two windows, just two, in an Upper East Side high-rise.

But along with the billowing smoke, anxiety had been let loose, and New Yorkers stood by, some craning their necks in the rain, staring at the charred hole punched out by the plane.

Fighter jets were dispatched into the skies over "numerous U.S. cities" as the feds - and New York - awaited word on whether the crash was an accident - or an attack.

Later in the day, word came that two people had been killed. Just two... one of the them Cory Lidle, a pitcher for the Yankees, who had been eliminated from the baseball playoffs last Saturday.

Still, even after authorities ruled out terrorism and the crash emerged as, in the words of a Homeland Security Department spokesman, a "terrible accident," it was impossible not to think of Sept. 11.

Marla Kauffman was one of hundreds of witnesses, reports CBS News national correspondent Byron Pitts. Seconds after the crash, she says she had a flashback: New York City five years ago.

"You think terrorist — 9/11 right away, and it was very scary," she said.

Sept. 11 was also on the mind of Beata Jankowska, who works as a housekeeper on the 33rd floor of the very building that was hit, on East 72nd Street close to the East River in Manhattan.

"Everything reminds me of Sept. 11," said Jankowska, who was preparing a dinner of chicken Marsala when she heard an explosion, saw flames below her out the window and raced down 33 flights of stairs to get out, taking nothing with her.

"I was very afraid," she said. "I remember Sept. 11. I was watching that from the very first second."

You could look at a television and wonder whether what you were seeing was live or five years old: Gear-burdened firefighters trudging toward the scene. Crowds of people in a densely populated neighborhood, all looking up.

Public officials were quick to say there was no indication an attack had taken place, but they acknowledged the crash — on another 11th — had rattled the city's psyche.

"I understand that since Sept. 11, when something like this happens, there's a high level of anxiety, and people reflect back to Sept. 11," New York Gov. George Pataki said on CNN.

And even after it was clear the crash was an accident, "still you're thinking it could be something else and you don't feel comfortable taking the subways," said Catherine Schreckinger, who was running errands on 57th Street when her 13-year-old daughter called from school to say administrators were not letting the children leave because of the crash.

"People in New York are traumatized still. People are thinking of it always, every day. I think, `What if? Who will be the person I'll share this horrible experience with?' People from other countries don't understand that. It wasn't one day. It was months and years," she said.

It's not that this city hasn't had its nerves jangled in the five years and one month since the attack on the World Trade Center.

There was the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in a New York City residential neighborhood, just two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, deadlier by many times — 265 killed — than Wednesday's incident.

There was the blackout on a sweltering summer day in 2003 that sent New Yorkers streaming out of lower Manhattan — but that was just a widespread power outage, and it is remembered today by many people here as an oddity, even fun.

There was the steady flow of terror alerts that followed the attacks, some unspecific and some all too detailed — suggestions terrorists might have been eyeing banking centers, the subways.

And yet not since the trade center attack had New Yorkers heard those words: A plane crashed into a building.

In just another chilling reminder of what happened five years ago, when medics stood idly watching for victims who never came, Upper East Side medical centers sent ambulances to the scene on Wednesday, and could do nothing but wait.

"It looks like people are waiting," said Sandy Teller, who lives a block away and was speaking over the wail of sirens. "There's a sense of helplessness. Cots and gurneys, waiting. It's a mess."