LEHIGH VALLEY, PA. – For former Trans-Bridge bus driver Bob Dottery, one of his most vivid memories from the morning of September 11, 2001, began with something ordinary: a late passenger.
Dottery was preparing to leave when he saw a car racing toward the terminal.
“Had one headlight. I’ll never forget that,” Dottery recalled. “I knew it was Alan, so I waited.”
Alan Merdinger, of South Whitehall Township, parked his car and ran toward the bus.
“Thanks for waiting, Bob,” Dottery remembers him saying.
Merdinger was one of the Cantor Fitzgerald employees who regularly rode Dottery’s bus to the World Trade Center. Dottery dropped his passengers off in New York around 7:45 that morning.
Merdinger and the other Cantor Fitzgerald employees aboard the bus that day died in the terrorist attacks.
“I always keep thinking if I would have kept going, Alan would have made it,” Dottery said. “He was such a nice guy.”
Bob Dottery Full Interview
Two days after the attacks, Trans-Bridge resumed service into New York and Dottery returned to his regular route.
The difference was immediately apparent.
“Everybody was quiet,” he recalled.
A passenger eventually told Dottery, “Did you hear we lost Alan?”
Then came more devastating news.
“We lost everybody from Cantor Fitzgerald.”
In the weeks and months that followed, Dottery learned how small changes in routine could produce dramatically different outcomes.