It started as a normal day 25 years ago. Michael Behrent, an App State professor, woke up at about 7:30 a.m., made some breakfast, and looked out across northwestern Brooklyn \u2014 an urban landscape dotted with those distinctive water towers at the time \u2014 to the skyscrapers above lower Manhattan.<\/p>\n
On that day, the largest structure Behrent could see through his small student apartment kitchen window was the twin towers of the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
About an hour later, his roommate \u2014 a fellow grad student at NYU \u2014 woke up and sat on the other side of the kitchen table with her back to the window.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was having a conversation with my roommate, and I was facing the window and just at a certain point, I looked out the window \u2014 a perfectly clear view of the towers \u2014 and I saw the smoke coming out of the lawn and I just said \u2018Gee, I wonder what\u2019s happening to the World Trade Center,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Through the window, a thick column of black smoke was billowing up from the upper floors of the nearest tower. So Behrent checked the news online. Nothing. Behrent and his roommate then turned on the TV, and the morning news show was covering it, but they didn\u2019t know what was happening.<\/p>\n
Then the second plane hit.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was only a few miles away from the towers, but, like tens of thousands of people, I saw the second tower blow up on a television screen,\u201d Behrent wrote in remembering 9\/11 on the 10th anniversary. \u201cI raced back to the kitchen. From the window, across the East River, I watched the explosion in the far tower swell into a bright yellow fireball.\u201d<\/p>\n
All he could feel at first was puzzlement. It was hard to register what was happening. He does remember the odd silence that occurred in Brooklyn. But then almost in unison, sirens filled the air.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that what\u2019s striking to me about seeing that is the sheer kind of confusion and \u2018ungraspability\u2019 that witnessing an event that you can\u2019t understand brings about,\u201d Behrent said. \u201cThe experience of actually looking out the window of the apartment that I was living in at that time and seeing the World Trade Center exploding \u2014 it was more just confusion and unreality than anything else. I was looking at it and couldn\u2019t quite believe that I was looking at it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rest of the day felt surreal. Behrent and his roommate sat huddled around the TV and a grad student couple that lived next door joined them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithin an hour, the sky was so dense with smog that the towers themselves had become completely invisible,\u201d Behrent recalled on the tenth anniversary. \u201cIt was by watching the news that we learned that the buildings had collapsed. From our window, all that could be seen was a thick gray cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n
Behrent had other family in the New York area and checked in to see how they were doing. At a certain point \u2014 after hearing about Pennsylvania and the Pentagon \u2014 Behrent knew that there would be a lot of deaths.<\/p>\n
Later that day, Behrent went for a walk. He found seared office paper laying in the middle of the street with what he believed was a law firm\u2019s letterhead. He wondered if that had blown over from the towers, across the East River and to Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
This story was originally published for the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. It was one part of a longer story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It started as a normal day 25 years ago. Michael Behrent, an App State professor, woke up at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,18624,9,24,63,84426,6206,121566],"class_list":["post-343611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-explosion","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-september-11-attacks","tag-tower","tag-world-trade-center-1973-2001"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}