The same stillness had settled over JFK. \u201cIt was very eerie,\u201d Graser said. \u201cIt was so quiet and peaceful, but you just kept seeing smoke coming from the Trade Center site.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both airports had members of their Port Authority police command respond to Lower Manhattan. By the end of that day, PAPD had lost 37 officers.<\/p>\n
It would be hours before Kroeppel could reach his fianc\u00e9e, a station manager for Continental Airlines at JFK, to make sure she was safe. When they finally spoke that evening, the wedding they’d spent months planning suddenly felt like a distant memory. They began thinking about postponing the celebration.<\/p>\n
Graser was concerned about his daughter, a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., near another target that day. His family was likewise concerned for him, knowing he frequently attended meetings at the World Trade Center. They reconnected that evening once phone lines opened up again.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe worst was starting to find out the Port Authority staff who were killed,\u201d Graser said, \u201cand immediately knowing the ones you knew well.\u201d In total, 84 Port Authority employees died on Sept. 11, 2001. Dozens of funerals followed over the next several weeks, with senior Port Authority staff attending as many as they could out of respect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The same stillness had settled over JFK. \u201cIt was very eerie,\u201d Graser said. \u201cIt was so quiet and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-344872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344872","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=344872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}