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Dust cloud darkened local man's apartment By BILL VARBLE David Salsa was to attend his first acting class Tuesday morning in New York City. The 22-year-old graduate of South Medford High and Portland University had moved to the city two weeks earlier to attend graduate school at New School University. He spent Monday evening in a studio on campus, where he met actor Bruce Willis, there to tape a show. At about 11 p.m. he took the subway to the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, then walked several blocks to his apartment on William Street between Maiden Lane and Platt Street. His class wasn't until 11 a.m., so he planned to sleep until 9. He was awakened at 8:48 by the impact of a Boeing 767 crashing into One World Trade Center. "I woke up," he says, "but I didn't really feel it." He tried to go back to sleep, but there were sirens and horns outside, louder and louder. At 9:06 came a second, bigger impact from the 767 crashing into Two World Trade Center. "The building shook," he says. "I thought something ran into it." It's a university-managed building, full of students, about six or eight blocks from the center. Salsa jumped up and looked out his third-floor window and saw people running. He threw on some clothes and went out and heard there had been some kind of plane crash. He could see the tops of the two buildings from his lobby. There was a lot of smoke. Something was very wrong. "It was a weird, eerie feeling," he says. Building managers gathered shaken residents on the second and third floors. Salsa went to a friend's room with a good view. Two World Trade Center collapsed at 9:59, less than an hour after it became the second one to be hit. Salsa and his friends saw people running frantically from an expanding cloud of smoke and debris between the Federal Reserve Bank and Chase Manhattan, then the cloud overtook them and covered them. "When we could see again they were gone," he says. Then the cloud covered his building. It looked like somebody had taken a big, brown blanket and thrown it over all the windows. "There was no light," he says. "Visibility zero." Some people thought they'd been bombed. "This is it," Salsa thought. A TV set was on in the building's lounge, and word went round that big commercial jets had run into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "It was like, holy s-t." People felt trapped. Some panicked. Many of those in the building were 18 years old and away from home for the first time. People were screaming and crying. Some got paper and pens and wrote good-bye letters. Salsa tried to call his parents, his cell phone in one hand, room phone in the other, calling his dad on one, his mother on the other. He finally reached his mom in Medford. "Greetings from New York," he said. It was the best greeting Ida Salsa had ever heard. "He could have been going to school," she would say later. "He goes right through there." He told her his building was 20 blocks away so she wouldn't worry. He would reach his dad, Joe, who had been calling and calling, three hours later. He wrote in his journal that he was scared but would do all he could to be OK. He grabbed a backpack, filled some Gatorade bottles with water and wrapped a bandanna around his head so he could use it as a mask. Trying to think what he needed, he threw a few clean clothes in the pack, his cell phone and charger, some pictures of his family and closest friends. Then he decided not to go out. "We knew the second building was going to fall," he says. What they didn't know was that, incredibly, it would implode and collapse progressively, floor-by-floor. Just as the air started clearing a bit, at 10:28 a.m., the second building fell and everything went black. "It was easier to take the second time," Salsa says. Papers were passed around for people to write their names on for identification. A couple of Salsa's friends were caught outside and covered in the dust of unimaginable amounts of pulverized concrete, glass and other construction stuff. One couldn't breathe. One kicked a window in. People were gasping, throwing up. The air conditioning went off. A young woman screamed in agony with her contact lenses, convinced she was blinded. "There's the thought that this is it," Salsa says. "You just look around, the last images, take it in." The afternoon wore on. The electricity was off. Rumors flew: There were eight attack planes. The Sears Tower in Chicago had been hit. Biological weapons were being been used. Salsa knew he had to hold himself together. He took a shower. At about 5:30, he walked out into the eerie dust and headed south and east toward the river to get away from the stuff in the air. He walked and walked. People offered water or the use of phones or bathrooms. On the subway, people even talked to each other. "The New Yorkers are incredible," Salsa says. "There's kind of a family atmosphere." He walked through Chinatown and took the subway to the Mayflower Hotel, where a friend's uncle works. He spent the night there. Wednesday, his friend Lily's cousin Paul said to come out and stay with him and his wife, Christa, on Staten Island. Salsa caught a train to New Jersey, switched to a bus and was starting to walk over the Bayonne Bridge when a motorist gave him a ride. He may stay with his friends for a time. "I have a surrogate family here," he says. Looking from Staten Island across Upper New York Bay Thursday, there's a hole in the Manhattan skyline where the towers used to be. Salsa saw things he never thought he'd see. For now, he has no desire to go out for a while. "When I close my eyes the pictures are still there," he says. "I'm a New Yorker now, I guess." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.