Everyone has a story to tell about their personal experience with Tuesday's terrorist attacks, even if only through watching it in horror on television.

        Here are some of the most compelling stories the Enquirer heard.

Son counts floors

        Arun Goyal of West Chester Township was sure his father was dead when he watched in horror Tuesday as a plane slammed into the second tower at the World Trade Center.

        Shiam N. Goyal, a 71-year-old civil engineer from Kendall Park, N.J., had worked on the 91st floor of the south tower for 21 years.

        “I started immediately counting the floors on the building. I thought there was no way my father had a chance to get out of there,” Mr. Goyal said.

        Then the call came from his mother: His father had called home from a bus on a borrowed cell phone. He was safe.

        The elder Mr. Goyal, who also has a brother, Dr. Prakash Goyal, in Amberley Village, later recounted to family members how he walked down 91 floors just after the north tower was attacked. He was out of the building before the second plane hit. He ran from the scene and hopped on one of the last subway trains out of the area.

        “We are grateful my father is safe, but this is still a sad, sad day in the U.S.A.,” the younger Mr. Goyal said. “I grew up in New York. I saw the buildings go up. I look at the pictures and I cry.”

        As of Thursday afternoon, his boyhood friend, Mukul Agarwal, who also worked at the World Trade Center, was still missing.
       

Hours in a taxi cab

        Rich Hempel's $185 New York City taxi cab ride Tuesday was no bargain.

        His plane landed at La Guardia Airport in New York before 9 a.m. Tuesday. By 9:05 he was in a taxi headed for a 10 a.m. meeting, the panorama of Manhattan sprawling in the distance ahead.

        The cab's radio perked up. A plane has hit the World Trade Center. Mr. Hempel, president of AF Kelly & Associates consultants in Covington, looked up and saw smoke billowing from the towers.

        As the cab neared the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan, police began putting up orange cones and diverting traffic.

        He heard a radio reporter gasp on-air. He looked up and saw the north tower collapse.

        “When the first building fell is when the tension went way up. ... That's when people realized how serious it was,” he said. “At that moment, you were thinking what was going to happen next? Were there car bombs around? Were bridges going to start falling?”

        The taxi eventually took him to White Plains, north of New York, where Mr. Hempel rented a car and drove back to Cincinnati.

        He was never in harm's way, he said, but “it was the fear of not knowing, and I guess that's what terrorism is all about.”
       

A witness to disaster

        Sitting in his car on Washington Boulevard next to the Pentagon Tuesday morning, Jim R. Cissell saw the plane coming a couple of hundred yards to his left.

        The Clifton native watched it cross over the road, then plow into the side of the Pentagon.

        Mr. Cissell, son of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Jim C. Cissell, said he doesn't even remember the sound of the explosion.

        He remembers, though, muttering “oh my God” as the plane hit, and the fireball was unforgettable. Mr. Cissell said he never thought for a second that the crash was anything but intentional.

        “It's as though he picked a spot on the building and that's what he was going straight for,” he said.

        Mr. Cissell drives past the Pentagon every day on his way to work at the Newseum in Arlington, Va., where he heads its Web site.

        Tuesday morning, he called his wife on his cell phone to let her know he was OK, and he pulled away after being told to clear the road. It wasn't until he got to work that he began to see the extent of the destruction.
       

Banners greet rescuers

        Wednesday was a day of firsts for Ed Thomas, a Green Township fire captain assigned to a search-and-rescue team at the World Trade Center.

        For the first time in three days he got a shower, brushed his teeth and slept.

        In a 9 a.m. phone call to his wife Judy — the first time the couple had spoken since Tuesday — Mr. Thomas talked of being overwhelmed by the welcome banners that greeted rescuers, and of the carnage at the World Trade Center site.

        “He said it's just unbelievable. There are huge firetrucks overturned, squads overturned, cars smashed like pancakes,” Mrs. Thomas said.

        “He said, "Judy, I could describe it to you, and you still won't understand what I was talking about. It's that devastating to see a whole block gone.'”

        Capt. Thomas, among 17 local firefighters sent to the scene, is working a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, searching for survivors and the dead in the trade center wreckage.

        They are not allowed, however, to recover the dead, Mrs. Thomas said.

        “He said if they do find bodies or body parts, they are not allowed to recover them. It is a strict order that the people from New York want to recover their own people,” Mrs. Thomas said.
       

Physicians lend a hand

        Three Cincinnati emergency physicians and a paramedic who were in New York for a conference found themselves working among the early medical responders to the World Trade Center disaster.

        Drs. Mike Ottaway, John Van Zile and Michael Sayre and paramedic Laura Nolting were evacuated from the Marriott hotel in Brooklyn soon after the planes crashed Tuesday morning.

        They saw the flaming twin towers burn and then collapse.

        “I'll never forget watching what we thought was debris falling from the towers, only to find out later that it was people jumping. It still puts a knot in my stomach,” Dr. Ottaway said.

        Dr. Van Zile worked on some of the “walking wounded” in a temporarily ambulatory surgical area. Dr. Ottaway moved to a staging area closer to the towers, where he drew blood from about a dozen volunteers before supplies ran out.

        Dr. Sayre said he'll never forget the expressions on the faces of the hundreds of bruised, bloodied and dust-covered people who streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge. And he'll never stop thinking about the firefighters who rushed into those towers before they collapsed.

        “Just realizing that so many people in those buildings weren't going to get out,” he said.

        The four returned Wednesday in a rented car.

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