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FROZEN IN TIME. Sept. 11, 2001 is now almost synonymous with the day President John F. Kennedy was shot in terms of shock and horror. Like most Americans, many Ground Zero participants witnessed the unfolding of events on television. Others were frantically called by relatives or colleagues who worked near the WTC complex. James Abadie, senior vice president of Bovis Lend Lease, remembers a phone call from a superintendent at Battery Park City, screaming that the second plane had missed his building by 100 ft. "It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up," he says. George Tamaro, partner in geotechnical firm Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers and a veteran of the towers' foundation construction in the late 1960s, remembers going "intellectually numb."

Others were eyewitnesses to the attack. Mueser Rutledge engineer Pablo Lopez was across the river at the Hoboken, N.J., train station supervising foundation repairs when he saw the second plane. With the first tower in flames, it was a puzzling sight. "No one signs up for a flight where you fly by a tower on fire," he remembers. Lopez and colleagues later became relief workers for hundreds of dazed refugees evacuated by ferry to the station.