Disaster hits close to U. trip

Last Friday afternoon, the area around the World Trade Center was not the place to be. But a Wharton Women field trip happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and yesterday the women described what they saw of the bomb explosion at the World Trade Center as frightening and chaotic. "If you've ever seen Godzilla as Godzilla comes down the street . . . people were running, helicopters were swarming," College sophomore Cynthia Gaylor said. "It was like The Twilight Zone." The trip of the 12 members of Wharton Women to Merrill Lynch and Citibank in Manhattan was planned to help members find out about career opportunities. Along with insights gained into professional life, however, the women saw New York at its far from finest. Wharton junior Christine Wu said the group took a PATH train into the World Trade Center station for its meeting at the World Financial Center across the street 30 minutes before the explosion. Many members of the group said that, in retrospect, they were especially afraid because they came so close to death. "When I got home and saw it on the news, that was when it hit me that we had missed death by a half hour," Wharton sophomore Donna Barber said. "It was really just a matter of a half hour that we were at the subway station where the ceiling collapsed." In another fortunate coincidence, the group's trip had not been planned for the World Trade Center, but the Merrill Lynch office in the World Financial Center across the street from the Twin Towers. "If we had chosen another company that day, we probably could have been right in the middle of it too," Gaylor said. "I guess you could say we were pretty lucky in that sense." Shannon Fullerton, Wharton Women vice president of New York trips, said that the group was in the middle of the Merrill Lynch presentation when the bomb exploded. Fullerton said that no one in the group thought that it was an explosion. "It wasn't the first thing that came to our minds," Fullerton said, adding that the sirens afterward were deafening. People who had gone on the trip said that no one was sure exactly what was going on when they left the World Financial Center. Wharton sophomore Elizabeth Fuss said the scene outside the World Trade Center "looked like a movie." "It was just not normal, so there was no real way that you could react," Fuss said. "When we went out, all you could see were ambulances and fire trucks and every type of emergency vehicle," Fuss added. "We didn't really understand what had happened." "It looked like some sort of disaster scene," Fullerton said. "People were screaming and crying. It was really scary." Wu said that she saw a woman crying because her husband was still inside the building. "People started breaking windows, and there was shattering glass everywhere," Wu added. "At first, we were all kind of enthralled, but when we started seeing the people come out [of the World Trade Center] covered in soot, you realized there was really something there," Fuss said. "Their faces were black, and it hit us that people were going to die," Barber said. One more aspect of the situation, however, struck students familiar with the area as odd. "I never saw New Yorkers actually take interest in anything like that," Wharton sophomore Stephanie Packer said. Members of the group said that they are happy that they made it out unharmed. "I don't feel like doing work right now," Wu said. "I feel like going out. I'm just glad to be alive."