Verizon Trade In Quotes

Bill Kelley, a Bloomberg employee, waited minutes before replying on his BlackBerry to a relative asking: “Bill, are you OK?” At 9:23 a.m. Kelley sent the last message of his life from the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. “So far … we’re trapped on the 106th floor, but apparently [the] fire department is almost here.”5 These messages are a sample of a vast collection of e-mails sent on September 11, 2001, and later shared with news media or stored in a 9/11 digital archive owned by the Library of Congress. Many of the e-mails were dispatched by BlackBerrys. For trapped or fleeing workers, BlackBerrys were the only reliable communication link in lower Manhattan. After the first plane knocked out cell towers on top of the World Trade Center, cell and landline circuits were overwhelmed. Paging companies lost many of their frequencies, and phone lines went dead for hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers6 when a call-switching center, several cell towers, and fiber-optic links were smashed by debris from a collapsed building.7