When the word came, it was almost too much.
There they were in midtown Manhattan on Monday morning, hundreds of mental health workers attending a Red Cross seminar on how to help people cope with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. For purposes of comparison, they were watching a presentation on the airplane explosion in 1988 that devastated the Scottish town of Lockerbie, when, suddenly, the lights went up and an urgent message was delivered: a jetliner had just crashed in Queens.
Dr. Paul Ofman, who interrupted the program to share the news, is an expert in the after-effects of disaster and chairman of emergency services for the Red Cross in New York.
Even so, his initial reaction was visceral, and universal. "This can't be real," he remembers thinking.
But it was.
For a city and a region, Monday's plane crash was the deadly car accident that derails the funeral procession. Just when a city and region was returning to what passes these days as normality, bang: hundreds more dead, the Rockaways section of Queens ablaze, tons of debris falling from the heavens, and a community in panic.
All the while, the horrific words and images emanating from Queens carried the unsettling air of the familiar, the faint whiff of deja vu.
The bridges and tunnels were being closed -- again. Hundreds of soot-covered firefighters were battling a monstrous disaster -- again. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was urging residents to remain calm -- again.
Just two months and a day from the morning when two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, killing an estimated 5,000 people, the mettle of a city and a region was again being challenged, in ways that seemed beyond the call.
The only hint of comfort that could be derived from the day's events were the reactions by law enforcement officials who did not respond as if this jetliner crash was caused by terrorism. "That this would be a source of relief, or confer a sense of safety, is a sign of how altered these times that we live in are," said Ofman.
Deriving good news from a plane crash that killed hundreds was an unsettling process for many. Fran Rushing, a California resident who was visiting her son in Long Island City, said that she was shocked at times by how she digested the morning's news.
She said that she dreaded the thought that came next: "That we'd settle in and say, `Oh thank goodness, it's just a normal old 300-person-dead plane crash.'
"What have I come to?" she asked.
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