TULSA, Okla. — Two 2 News employees talk about their experiences in the media world on September 11, 2001 – one of them nationally and one locally – and learned lessons to never forget.
“September 10th, 2001, I was owner operator for Red Dirt Communications," assistant chief engineer Nelson Durfey said. "We ran satellite trucks around the country doing news coverage for the networks. We were in Houston starting to set up for the Andrea Yates trial that was supposed to have jury selection the next day.”
“I was a reporter for OETA on September 11th, and I was just heading up to go to work," 2 News reporter Cathy Tatom said. "I was at the corner of 91st and Yale when I heard it on the radio, the first plane hit. Not a minute later as I’m driving up 91st, my husband called. He said, 'There’s been a horrible incident. You need to turn on the radio.’ I said I’m already listening to it.”
“The morning of September 11th, I woke up to go back to the Harris County Courthouse to start setting up," Durfey said. "I turned on the TV while I was getting ready, and the first plane had just hit the first tower.
Durfey said within an hour, the network had wanted his to start driving their satellite truck to New York City.
Tatom said she was still on her way to work when her husband, a Life Flight helicopter pilot, called again to say all flights were grounded.
“They never get grounded. He was stunned and he couldn’t believe that something like that could happen so fast. I said, ‘OK, I’ve got to get to work, so I just went straight and before I got to the office even, I got a call from my boss who said to go to (Tulsa International Airport), there’s a full ground stop. I said, ‘It’s affecting commercial too, not just Life Flight?’ I went to the airport where people were suddenly stuck in place. That was the first story I did that day, was how it affected the airport.”
"The next couple days we were on the road. Very eerie, empty roads," Durfey said. "No contrails in the skies.”
- WATCH: Tulsa news engineer remembers working 9/11 aftermath in NYC
Tulsa news engineer remembers working 9/11 aftermath in NYC
“The next few days were really kind of a blur with stories of how people were impacted here: oil & gas, farmers, grocery stores where they were running out of stuff because nobody was on the highways riving anywhere," Tatom said. "It was surreal. I’ve been to war zones and some of them were less stressful than that.”
“We were told to move our satellite truck into ground zero," Durfey said. "So we packed and drove everything up across the bridge then down into Lower Manhattan then worked our way through all the checkpoints and got situated in a good position to see where the buildings had stood. There was still smoke coming from the buildings. The streets were covered in ash and dust. The smell was something I’ll never forget.”
“When I got downtown the emergency folks, they were so calm. They were so collected," Tatom said. "I mean, it was the total Oklahoma Standard. But also, the people stuck in the airport – suddenly people were bringing food and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a bedroom. Do you need a bedroom?’ It was all of those things that make you once proud, but at the same time terrified. That’s about it in a nutshell.”
- WATCH: 2 News reporter remembers working in Tulsa on 9/11
2 News reporter remembers working in Tulsa on 9/11
Meanwhile, Durfey stayed working at Ground Zero for a month.
“It was a very different thing to see. It’s something that nobody’s ever experienced," Durefey said. "So yeah, (nowadays) I go to the reflecting pools. I have six names I look up. There were six broadcast engineers tending to the transmitters on top of the World Trade Center that lost their lives...Everyone needs to remember that the people that did this don’t represent the people of that culture. They were extremists. And extremism can happen in any culture. So we can’t blame everybody. And that’s what we need to remember.”
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