Lasting memories | Tiger Bay Club speakers remember tragedy of 9/11

BRADENTON -- On 9/11, Brad Steube was in charge of a team assisting the Secret Service during President George W. Bush’s appearance in Sarasota.

Security teams guarded Air Force One, the President’s plane; parts of Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport, where it had landed on Sept. 10; and a motorcade that ferried the president to his destination on the morning of Sept. 11, Booker Elementary, Steube told the Tiger Bay Club on Thursday.

He was one of several speakers talking to the group about their 9/11 memories.

When the first reports that a small plane had hit one of the towers at the World Trade Center in New York, it was thought to be a tragic accident, Steube said. But when, a few minutes later, another airplane hit the second tower, President Bush’s security team stormed into action, he said.

Agents rushed the President to his car, and the motorcade sped back to the airport.

During the ride, the Secret Service and the White House staff wondered how best to protect the President, as it became clear that the nation was suffering multiple attacks perpetrated by terrorists hijacking commercial airliners.

“The decision was made to put him on Air Force One and to fly him out, as quickly as possible,” Steube said.

Once the President left, the enormity of the day finally settled upon Steube.

As he saw television images for the first time of commercial jets flying into both towers, he noted, “That is something I’ll never forget.”

The airport staff at SRQ was “extremely nervous” after Bush’s plane left, said Rick Piccolo, the airport’s president and chief executive officer, who was flying home from a conference in Montreal when he heard news of the terror attacks.

He became stranded in Atlanta, but after renting a car to drive back to Florida, he found SRQ strangely silent: Every airliner in the nation had been grounded.

“Certainly, I had great concern, well, will aviation exist after that day?” Piccolo said. “And it was kind of eerie to be in the airport for the first couple of days when nothing was flying, and everyone was wondering what was going to happen.”

Since then, airports have added a great variety of manpower and machinery to guard against such attacks, but also important in the post-9/11 world has been a change in the mindset of airline passengers, Piccolo told the crowd at Pier 22 Restaurant.

Now the anxiety level of flying is much greater, he said.

Passengers are sitting in the plane thinking, “‘I’m fighting for my life,’” Piccolo said. “How many of you, when you fly now, watch -- I always watch -- who is going to the restroom? I used to never watch who goes to the restroom.”

He does not foresee a similar incident happening again “because passengers aren’t going to go down without a fight,” he said.

It was a seemingly simple decision on 9/11 that spared the life of Cathy Giliberti.

Rather than go to her firm’s new office at the World Trade Center, she decided to go to an office elsewhere. As the Twin Towers burned and collapsed, four of her colleagues perished.

The company’s directors had survived, and set a meeting for the next morning.

“The first morning was, as you can appreciate, a very emotional morning,” remembered Giliberti. “All we did all morning, we called the cell phones of the four people that were lost. Because at that point, no one knew that the missing were, in fact, missing forever.”

As the World Trade Center’s leasing company, her firm also faced the knotty practical difficulties of finding office space for hundreds of thousands of people who had escaped the disaster, but had nowhere to work.

Her company, Silverstein Properties, was able to find temporary office space for companies with surviving employees in buildings elsewhere across the city, she said.

“What we accomplished, it was incredible,” she said.

“It wasn’t a mass exodus, and I’m proud of the way New Yorkers banded together, and made it through those times,” she said.

Sara Kennedy, Herald reporter, can be reached at (941) 745-7031.

This story was originally published September 9, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Lasting memories | Tiger Bay Club speakers remember tragedy of 9/11."