Reporting from the streets of Washington on September 11

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) - Twenty-five years ago, on a beautiful September day, Priscilla Huff walked into her office at a small news agency and realized that she was watching the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. A quick conversation with the boss and he sent ger to Capitol Hill. In the office, the phones were ringing off the hook. People from around the world wanted to know what was going on in the United States.

Priscilla walked out on the streets of Washington. She realized she couldn’t get to Capitol Hill and she walked to the closest subway station. The streets of Washington were gridlocked. There were literally thousands of people pouring into the subway trying to get home to their friends and family. She realized she couldn’t make it the two and a half miles across town to the U.S. Capitol.

So, she headed to the next closest place, the White House. She walked the few blocks down to the White House – the gates to the White House were already shut. She got part of the way down H Street. U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on one side of the street, and the famous Hay Adams Hotel is on the other side of the street. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, as a Secret Service officer came out. He was standing there in the trunk of his car, and he turned around and he had a long gun, and he ordered Priscila to turn around and go back.

And as she turned around and went back, Priscilla looked across Lafayette Park and saw the White House press corps running across Lafayette Park. After filing a quick report with her office, they then then told her, could she go to the State Department?

There was rumors of a bomb threat, so Priscilla started walking across town, the mile or so to the U.S. State Department. After walking through town, she made it to the U.S. State Department, and she started looking around to try to figure out the veracity of the rumor that there was this bomb threat. She saw a purple PT cruiser enter the underground parking just here behind me.

It was known that then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell liked the PT cruiser and liked to drive those cars. This ended up being the last stop for that day for my reporting. She later learned that it was the beginning of 25 years of reporting on where the world stood. She learned a few days later that a young man who had been in history courses with her in college, he was a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, and he died when the World Trade Center collapsed.

Going forward, what was known that day was that four planes had crashed. We knew when they had crashed, but we didn’t really know what was going to happen next. We didn’t know about the wars that would come in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the times Priscilla returned here to report on the diplomacy in the foreign policy and the things that shaped the US relationship in the world in the many days and months and years that have followed the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks.