9/11 changed people forever

CEDAR RAPIDS - Where thousands of people typically converged to pick up friends, drop off family members and hurry through security to catch their flights, there was no one.

On Sept. 13, 2001, Peter Teahen landed at New York City's John F. Kennedy Airport in a military jet to an eerily hushed landscape.

“I describe it as flying into a science-fiction movie,” Teahen said. “It was like ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.' There was nothing moving.”

No cabs in sight, a security vehicle drove Teahen toward the billowing cloud of gray smoke that filled the void left in the skyline by the fallen World Trade Center towers.

“The whole experience was indescribable,” he said. “As we approached that area … the visibility … you couldn't see a quarter of a block. There was that much smoke and debris floating in the air.”

Teahen, a funeral director in Cedar Rapids who serves as a government liaison for the American Red Cross, spent four weeks in New York City after Sept. 11. With parts of buildings still crumbling around him, Teahen said he set up respite centers, coordinated aid to thousands and managed the growing list of missing people.

“We were trying to get ahold of how many people died and how we were going to create a system to report missing individuals,” he said.

Teahen provided mental health intervention as well. He recalls one morning when a man approached him, desperate for help. It had been more than a week since the attacks, and his wife hadn't yet slept.

“That woman told me she couldn't sleep because she watched as bodies fell like raindrops from the sky,” Teahen said. “She was watching people jump to their death.”

Those images changed people forever, including Teahen. Ten years later, he said, there are mental snapshots he'll never shake from his mind.

“Family members would walk around with their loved ones' pictures hanging from their necks, asking if you have seen their husband or wife or child,” he said.

After a few weeks in New York, Teahen said, the threat of terrorism became his new reality, and he fully expected he might die. At one point, Teahen told his friends not to visit because he didn't want them to die, too.

“The whole environment was very intense and very frightening,” he said. “It took a tremendous toll on all the workers.”

Still, Teahen said, he has no regrets about his work in New York City 10 years ago.

“I've done every type of disaster there is. … I was in New Orleans on the day Hurricane Katrina hit,” he said, “but you can't compare Sept. 11 to anything else.”