Minutes after the the first building fell at the World Trade Center, the entire subway system shut down for the first time since the 1977 blackout - if only for a few hours. Transit Reporter Jose Martinez revisits a quick-thinking subway motorman who moved hundreds of riders out of harms way after pulling into a station a block away from the Trade Center.
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, there was chaos on the ground in Lower Manhattan - and high above it. But through signal and third rail power problems, much of the subway system kept running until 10:20 a.m. after one tower had collapsed and five minutes before the second fell.
Twenty-one minutes earlier, as the first tower crumbled, subway motorman Kevin Harrington had pulled a Bronx-bound 4 train into the Fulton Street station, just a block from the World Trade Center.
"When the signals went red, I heard a lot of noise. It sounded like explosions going off upstairs or something. But I didn't pay any attention to it. Then when I was talking to the cop, all this white dust and wind started coming in the station," he recalls.
Harrington says he knew before starting the train's run in Brooklyn that one plane had hit the World Trade Center. But he says he had no idea two planes had been used to attack the buildings.
"I don't know if it was confusion. I think there was just a lack of information," says Harrington.
Told by a police officer that riders couldn't evacuate at the Fulton Street stop, Harrington talked with those on board.
"They were really calm. I only had one guy who was troublesome, he was reading something from the bible about the end of the world," says Harrington.
He says he was then cleared by a supervisor to operate the train from the rear and to move it to Wall Street - one station to the south.
"It was the only move I had to get the people out of this area. So we couldn't evacuate them here because they would have got hurt, because the second building was yet to fall," says Harrington.
But with the system on lockdown from the partial outage, his 4 train wasn't going express.
"Every 50 feet or so, it would go into emergency," he recalls.
Getting one car into the Wall Street station was enough to evacuate those on the train.
"I manually opened the doors. Me, my conductor and a fireman started bringing the people forward," says Harrington.
Then directing them, once upstairs, to walk toward the Brooklyn Bridge - and hopefully, to safety,
For years after the 9/11 attacks, Harrington says he was stopped and greeted by riders who had been on his train that day, including as recently as last November, when he says he was thanked in Israel by a man who had been one of his passengers.