ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Vicki Catalano was supposed to be on a train under the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
But her professor canceled class.
Catalano was 29 and living alone in Brooklyn. She had recently moved there from Manhattan and was working in Midtown while taking classes at NYU.
That Tuesday morning, she was getting ready for work when she heard on NY1 that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers.
At first, they reported it as an accident.
She went outside and looked toward Manhattan.
“I could see it well enough, like, holy shit, there’s smoke coming out of the — oh my God,” she said, her voice turning to a whisper.
She went back inside to get ready for work.
Then came word that a second plane had hit the other tower.
“That was not an accident,” Catalano said. “We were under attack.”
She went outside again.
Even from Brooklyn, about 5 miles away, she could see the smoke.
But seeing it didn’t make it easier to understand.
“It was just so hard to believe, even seeing it with your own eyes,” she said. “It was like, that can’t be real. Maybe I’m still asleep. Maybe I’m dreaming.”
There was no one else in the house to tell her whether what she was seeing was real.
She kept going back and forth — outside to watch, down the block for a better view and inside to follow the news.
People in the neighborhood started coming out of their houses, too.
“It was eerily quiet,” Catalano said. “Nobody was really talking. Everybody was just staring.”
She started trying to call family members.
The phone lines were already becoming difficult to use. Everyone was trying to reach someone.
Some people could reach Catalano. She couldn’t reach some family members for days.
“There was no internet, there was no phone, there was no way to let people know if you were OK or not,” she said.
Eventually, she gave up on trying to get to work.
There wasn’t much chance she could have gotten there anyway. The trains were incapacitated, and transportation into Lower Manhattan had stopped.
Catalano stayed outside for hours.
She had just moved to the neighborhood and didn’t know many of her neighbors. That changed quickly.
“I just kind of paralyzed,” she said. “There was nowhere for me to go.”
At one point, she realized she was hungry.
There was a bodega across the street, so she tried to eat, but couldn’t.
“I was literally sick to my stomach over what I was seeing,” she said.
Then there was the air.
The cloud from Lower Manhattan eventually reached Brooklyn.
Catalano said it wasn’t just smoke.
“It was gritty,” she said. “It wasn’t just like smoky, foggy weirdness. It had texture.”
The debris collected on her front stoop and stayed there for weeks, she said.
She remembers the smell, too.
Jet fuel.
Burnt hair.
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever smelled,” she said.
She knew the cloud contained more than the buildings’ remains.
“Human remains were part of that,” she said. “And everybody was very conscious of that.”
From where she stood in Brooklyn, she couldn’t make out everything happening at the towers. Before they collapsed, she could see things coming out of them but wasn’t sure what she was looking at.
At first, she thought the objects might be furniture or parts of the buildings. Then she realized some of them were people.
People began bringing radios outside so they could follow the news together.
Neighbors gathered in the street.
Across from Catalano’s house was a Jewish temple. Members of the congregation gathered there, prayed and tried to help their neighbors.
People were also trying to figure out who was missing.
“I can’t find my brother.”
“My daughter works in the towers.”
“Have you heard from so-and-so?”
“There was a lot of that,” Catalano said.
‘Have you seen my daughter?’
Catalano eventually got a call from her aunt.
By then, she had spent hours outside. She went back inside because she wanted some privacy.
She and her aunt talked and cried until the phone line went dead.
Her aunt was able to let the rest of the family know Catalano was OK.
A few days later, Catalano returned to Manhattan.
As she came out of the subway, a woman grabbed her arm.
The woman was holding a photograph of her daughter.
“Have you seen my daughter?” the woman asked.
Catalano hadn’t been back in Lower Manhattan for more than a few minutes.
“I just lost it. I just started crying,” she said.
The city was covered in missing-person posters.
They were on doors and windows, subway walls and bus stops, outside bodegas and businesses.
They were everywhere.
“It was very creepy to just go about your day amidst all that,” Catalano said.
Catalano also lost co-workers and classmates that day.
Some of her classmates had learned their class was canceled and decided to go to the library instead.
“I never saw them again,” she said.
For 25 years, Catalano has thought about what would have happened if that class hadn’t been canceled.
She knows she would have been on that train.
“I don’t know what I believe,” Catalano said. “Coincidence, the stars aligned, karma, I don’t know.”
“I should have been on that train,” she said. “It was the time of day that I would have been right there.”
Life after 9/11
Catalano stayed in New York for another five years.
By the time she decided to leave in 2006, she was married.
She and her husband, a native New Yorker, decided they didn’t want to raise their future child in a city where the changes after 9/11 had become part of everyday life.
Armed National Guard members were a common sight.
“You became desensitized to it,” she said. “It just was normal.”
But Catalano and her husband didn’t want that to be normal for their future child.
“I love New York, but I don’t want to bring a child up where her first day of school we’re walking past armed National Guard,” she said.
Her husband moved to North Carolina with her.
She has returned to New York over the years, mostly for family events and other happy occasions.
And 9/11 isn’t something she thinks about every day.
But it changed the way she looks at her life.
“It was the worst day of my life,” she said.
She also remembers that the day started beautifully.
The skies were sunny. The temperature was comfortable.
“It was a perfect day,” she said.
Then the sky turned dark.
“It really was very apocalyptic,” she said.
But there were still small patches of sunlight.
“There would be tiny slivers of sun trying to poke through,” she said.
That became a lesson she has carried with her.
“Look for the silver linings even in the darkest times,” Catalano said.
She said 9/11 changed her understanding of gratitude. She was grateful to be alive and grateful for her family and friends.
Then came Helene
When Tropical Storm Helene hit Western North Carolina in 2024, some of those memories came back.
Cell service was spotty. Transportation was limited. Water was difficult to get.
Then the helicopters started flying over her home.
Catalano was sitting on the porch when she had what she described as a panic attack.
“It reminds me of 9/11,” she told her partner.
The circumstances were different, but the quiet streets, limited communication and helicopters overhead brought back memories of New York.
“It was eerie and it was quiet and we’re kind of stuck here,” she said.
It also brought back the gratitude she had felt after 9/11.
“I was grateful to be alive,” she said.
Catalano doesn’t know exactly why she was spared on Sept. 11.
She doesn’t know if it was coincidence or something else.
“I should have been on that train,” she said. “It was the time of day that I would have been right there.”