Horrified on Tuesday, back to work Wednesday
Day after fleeing blast, man goes back to work

Date: 09/13/01
Byline: By GREGORY KARP
Of The Morning Call

Duncan Meldrum, the chief economist at Air Products and Chemicals Inc., met Wednesday morning with Chief Executive Officer John Paul Jones to go over some economic forecasts.
That might not be unusual, except that exactly 24 hours earlier, Meldrum was among the hordes of people fleeing a hotel wedged between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
Meldrum saw bodies - some alive, some not - falling from the top floors of one tower. Shards of glass and metal showered down on burning cars. And he was terrified by the crystal-clear view of a United Airlines plane smashing into the second tower.
Later, he learned that a strike on the Pentagon narrowly missed his daughter.
By walking, catching taxi cabs and borrowing a car, he was back at home Tuesday night and in his Trexlertown office Wednesday morning.
Why go to work after such horror?
"That's my way of raising my fist to whoever did this," Meldrum, 50, said. "I'm fighting back the only way I can. It's my way of saying I'm not going to succumb to terrorism."
Meldrum, of Upper Macungie Township, on Tuesday was attending a conference of the National Association of Business Economists at the New York Marriot World Trade Center. The hotel is between the World Trade Center towers.
At 8:45 a.m. Tuesday, Meldrum and more than 100 of the nation's top economists were having breakfast, listening to a talk by the chief executive officer of investment house Morgan Stanley.
There was a loud bang and the chandelier in the ballroom started rattling. They didn't know what it was - an earthquake, a car bomb, a gas explosion - but it was clear they should leave.
People couldn't go out the main exits because of the debris falling from the tower. Instead, they used minor exits, though went out through restaurants, kitchens and side doors.
Meldrum met up with some of his fellow economists, including his good friend Peter Jaquette, an economist at timber company Weyerhaeuser Co. near Seattle.
Before long, they learned the boom came from a plane hitting the north tower. Despite the crowds, there was an available pay phone. Meldrum called his home and left a message for his wife, telling her he was safe.
He had no idea how wrong he was.
Moments later, he saw a plane banking a turn around one of the towers. Meldrum, a former Navy pilot, could clearly see it was a United Airlines passenger plane.
"It was almost beautiful as it was flying," he said. "I just love the way a plane looks, particularly from the angle that it came.
"But then it transitioned from beauty to horror.
"I have certain incidents that keep replaying in my mind. One is the plane going into the building. I cannot turn that one off. It's like it keeps rewinding and it keeps rewinding.
During an interview, Meldrum paused, covered his mouth with his hand and closed his eyes.
"That's the thing that I don't think I'll ever be able to get rid of."
Thoughts of returning to the hotel or retrieving his belongings were dashed as the second plane crashed into the tower.
"After the second hit, we all said, 'We don't need to see this, we don't need to be here,' " Meldrum said.
And the people jumping to their deaths from the tower was too much.
"I didn't want to stay there and look at bodies falling," Jaquette said.
Meldrum, who had taken morning runs around the tower complex, led the group to a jogging trail nearby. The economists, clad in business suits, walked north for about two miles with a group that included traders in colorful jackets, chefs with white cook's hats, mothers with strollers, and shoeless business women who discarded their heels. Meanwhile, emergency vehicles streaked by.
They hailed a taxi cab and stopped at a mid-town Marriot to leave their names in case their belongings were recovered.
"At that point, we thought maybe there was a chance we would get our stuff back," Jaquette said.
It was there they learned the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.,, was hit.
That's the first time panic set in for Meldrum. His daughter, Sarah, commutes to work by taking a bus to the Pentagon and taking a subway to work.
"That was more of a shock," he said. "That was more difficult for me."
Turns out she went past the Pentagon about a half-hour before the strike.Besides the Pentagon attack, they also learned the first World Trade Center tower collapsed.
Calculating back, they figured they left the scene about 10 minutes before that building fell. Had they stayed, they could have been injured and covered in the heavy dust they now see on television footage.
"That's when we became really concerned, because there were an awful lot of folks watching," Meldrum said.
From there, the group took a cab to the apartment of Jaquette's friend who lives in the city. Although the friend wasn't home, a neighbor in the building let them in and they eventually hooked up with the friend and borrowed his car.
They drove to Port Jervis, N.Y., where Meldrum's wife met him. The rest of the group went on to upstate New York.
After about three hours of sleep, it was important for Meldrum to return to work.
"This is the only way I can tell these people, 'You're not going to get away with this,'" Meldrum said. "The only thing you can do is say, 'I'm not going to let you do this to our way of life.'"