Helping Victims' Families After 9/11

The morning of September 11, 2001, Rosetta Jannotto Weiser arrived to work early as usual. But at 8:46 a.m. the morning took a drastic turn.

"The building rocked from 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock," said Weiser of that impact of that first plane on the north tower of the World Trade Center. Weiser, who was on the 61st floor, remained calm. She had been through the '93 bombing at the towers. She turned off her coffee pot, picked up her brief case and evacuated her employees, heading for a nearby stairwell.

By the time they were down to the 27th floor, they heard what Weiser can only describe as another "incredible, indescribable" noise. "It must've been the second plane," said Weiser.

She remembers the stairwell being hot — but well-lit unlike in '93 — and she remembers "water on all our feet." Other memories include seeing Port Authority Police Captain Kathy Mazza on the way out as Weiser headed from WTC 1 through to World Trade 5 and out to the street. Mazza later died in the collapse. Weiser said she has blocked out much else from the evacuation. She knows that there horrible sights to be seen outside the windows on the plaza as she exited, she knows she saw them, but she says she has no recall of the images.

Weiser started walking up to Penn Station. Though she moved away from lower Manhattan quickly she remained aware of events there from moment to moment as everyone was gathered around cars and trucks on the streets listening to the news on radios at full blast.

By 10:45 a.m. Weiser had contacted her husband Alan Weiser by phone. She had walked into a business and asked to use a phone. The business owner said it wouldn't work but, indeed, she got through. Later, when she returned to Maplewood, the matter-of-fact Weiser would only say that her reunion with her husband was "very warm."

She sat in a coffee shop at Penn Station until trains started running and got home to Maplewood by 4 p.m.

"On the train, it was so surreal," said Weiser of the crowded but silent ride home.

Once home, Weiser sat down and contacted her staff one by one — 30 employees — all of whom survived.

But her real work and the real ordeal had only begun. As director of employee benefits, Weiser spent the next several years working with and for the families of the 74 Port Authority employees who died that day, helping them to secure any and all benefits available to them through the Port Authority or the federal government.

When asked how long this went on, Weiser said, "It never really ends. The family is connected to the Port Authority." Weiser noted that the calls and visits to the Port Authority's benefits office — set up in Newark Airport for 10 months after 9/11 — at first were "fast and furious." When the crush of the first few months started to settle into a routine, she noticed that calls would spike on Friday afternoons; Weiser felt that the families needed to touch base with the Port Authority in order to make it through the weekends.

The work was still ongoing even when Weiser retired from the Port Authority in 2007 (by that time she was director of human resources). Weiser, now 63, left for a variety of reasons — wanting to spend more time with her elderly mother and the commute was wearing her down.

She says that she still stays in touch with a core group of 10 people from the Port Authority.

What is the lasting change in her life from 9/11? Weiser says she "doesn't sweat the small stuff."

She also laments the loss of those 74 colleagues and so many others. She talks of those she knew who were in wheelchairs, or who were incapicated in some way — those whom she knew were gone as she heard the towers fall behind her while she headed north.

Despite the lingering grief, Weiser is content in Maplewood where she is a business leader in Maplewood Village, running the  along with her husband of 17 years, Alan. Weiser has become co-chair of the annual Dickens Village event and is actively involved in many Maplewood Village Alliance promotions.

Still, she remembers, and misses, the beauty of working in the World Trade Center.

"It was beautiful," said Weiser of her lofty perch in the towers. "There were the views and you could watch every season, every change of light, the bridges, the Statue of Liberty."