Twenty years ago on Sept. 11, Carlye Dougherty woke up and started getting ready for a job interview.
“It was a totally normal day,” said Dougherty (nee Clark), a 1995 Franklin High School graduate. But it was soon to turn into a day like no other.
Dougherty had graduated from the College of Charleston in May 2001, re-located to New York City, and she and her roommate had just moved into a new apartment at 11th and Hudson with a view of the World Trade Center. On that Tuesday morning 20 years ago, her roommate stepped outside and yelled back, “You have to come outside and see what has happened.”
“It was like nothing I had ever seen,” Dougherty said. “The first building was on fire. No one was quite sure what was happening. Literally news was unfolding right in front of us.”
The internet was not like it is today, so word had not spread immediately as to what was going on. Cell phones were not reliable, and they could not get a call to go out on the landline. She got a call from a Franklin High School friend checking to see if she was OK.
She watched as people covered in ash began streaming up the street and was standing on the street corner when the first U.S. fighter planes flew over. “I had this overwhelming feeling of relief,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re here, we’re safe.’”
It was impossible to get a cab, so she walked 34 blocks to her job interview. After the interview she came out and people were everywhere – emergency workers, media, people just walking around. “It was completely crazy,” she said.
She realized she needed to talk to her parents, Keith and Jane Clark, and began searching for a payphone. There were long lines at the phones – people all waiting to do the same thing – trying to reach loved ones to let them know they were OK or trying to find their family members, not knowing if they were safe or in one of the burning buildings.
She finally found an available phone and used a calling card to call her parents. She still has that card, now a relic from bygone days of long-distance calling and a reminder of one of the most tragic days in U.S. history.
When she reached her parents, they had been watching events unfold on television and told her, “You got to get out of there.” But she stayed.
One of the weird things she remembers was how hungry she was the next day. “I was hungrier than I had ever been. I ate this huge breakfast. Nobody knew what to do. People were just walking around, and people had started putting up signs (looking for missing friends and family members).”
As she was walking, she came across a big group of people near Canal Street. “Everybody wanted to help,” she said. Crane operators were volunteering, sheets of paper were circulating asking people to write down their blood type. She remembers the crowd suddenly parting and a group of men walking through – they were smoke jumpers from Wyoming who had come in to help. In the days following, Dougherty volunteered to give out water.
She remembers the smoky smell, ash covering everything, and the feeling of fear that hovered over the city. “It was a weird place to be.”
Although people wanted to help, she said after a while it was limited what people could do. “It was a recovery that nobody could have imagined.”
She remembers when WLOS interviewed her following the attacks, the reporter asked how she would describe the scene. “It would be like if someone came in and blew up Wayah Bald or Mount Mitchell making a big, gaping hole,” she said. Even 20 years later, she says it’s hard to find a way to describe it.
Dougherty moved back to Charleston in 2007 and lives there with her 17-year-old daughter, Ella Jane. She is director of digital marketing for Amanda Lindroth Design in Charleston and Nassau, Bahamas, and was co-founder of Heirloom Book Company in Charleston. She loves going to back to New York and has visited the 9/11 Memorial. “I think they did a really great job with it,” she said.