ctv_harriet: This is Harriet Ryan, a reporter here at Court TV Online. Thanks for joining us. Hopefully just by talking and being together, we can make this day a little less horrible. For those of you not in New York City, we'd like to give you a sense of what it's been like. The footage on TV right now gives a good idea of the panic downtown, but the whole of Manhattan seems stunned. The subways aren't running in Manhattan, and people are just gathering on the corners. A lot of tourists with bags—they can't get to the airports or into hotels. Stores are closed... Okay, Karen Covington, a CTV producer who just came from the press conference at St. Vincent's Hospital, in Greenwich Village just north of the Wall Street area, is now joining us by phone: Here's what she's telling us:

Karen Covington: The chief of trauma at St. Vincent's Dr. Jeffrey A. Blumenthal told me: 184 wounded, 15 critical and 2 dead. One person died from cardiac arrest. The other one he didn't know. He estimated that both were about 40 years old. The patients coming in—most are suffering from severe burns, fractures and smoke inhalation. They are expecting many more because many more people are trapped in the building. They are guessing an overwhelming amount of volunteers. There were lines of people, close to 100, it's hard to say, lining up to donate blood. Emergency workers were coming into the hospital by the busload. They've called everyone who is not on duty and called them back into work. The doctor said the one thing they have now in the hospital that they didn't during the 1993 bombing is an adequate supply of oxygen. He said it was something they had learned from the last bombing. There are people coming to the hospital just standing around, expressing concern for their families who they don't know where they are. Some were crying. Columbia Presbyterian and NYU are also receiving victims. There's just a lot of people standing around waiting for information not knowing what to do. Just onlookers. An occasional ambulance would pull in.

ctv_harriet: Karen is walking tape from the news conference back to our Headquarters.

Karen Covington: On the way back uptown, I noticed just hundreds of people standing around. At Madison Square Garden, where I am right now, I'm actually walking down the street. Down the middle of the street. There is no traffic. You get the sense that many people working in Manhattan are trying to get out, and there is no way out. They are crowded at Penn Station right now. Again, the figures from St. Vincents are 184 wounded, 15 critically injured, and 2 deceased. That is not by any means the final number. Those are only the people already brought to the hospital. The doctors expect many more people because there are so many trapped in the rubble of the towers. Dr. Jeffrey A. Blumenthal, St. Vincent's trauma chief, said it was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. He said they were prepared though. The hospital continually goes through drills. When they heard the alarms this morning, the staff didn't even know if it was a drill or real. That's how often they practice. Severe burns, fractures, smoke inhalation are the complaints of those being brought in. The most common is smoke inhalation. The hospital promised updates throughout the day. Again, the hospital asked New Yorkers to go to the 52nd Street and 7th Avenue Blood Center in addition to St. Vincents and NYU.

Court TV Host: Right now, we are joined by Court TV editor Julia Campbell. She witnessed part of the attack this morning. Where were you, Julia?

Julia Campbell: I was taking the train to work from Brooklyn when we were evacuated at Wall Street. There was too much smoke and fumes coming into the subway tunnel.

Court TV Host: What time was this?

Julia Campbell: This was shortly before 10 a.m. The trains had been running but my particular train was stopped right before we entered Manhattan. We sat in a train car for a half hour. There were some fumes. The train finally pulled into Wall Street station, where we were told to evacuate to the street with cloths over our mouths. The smoke was thick, you couldn't breathe.

kingpommels: Was there any looting going on?

Court TV Host: How were people reacting to this?

Julia Campbell: It was chaos. I think because we were in the tunnel a while we didn't know how bad it was until we pulled into the station. People were telling us not to leave the station, but the conductors were telling us to get out as fast as we could. The entire station underground was covered with white ash, smoke was everywhere. When I walked to the street, people were streaming down the streets, sidewalks, hundreds of people walking east toward New York's East River. What I learned later was that the second twin tower collapsed.

ohios_angel: Do you think everyone in America is feeling like these people in chat do? Just about revenge?

Julia Campbell: I think it's natural to feel angry when this happens...but as we walked out of lower Manhattan an Arabic-owned garage was helping people, telling people to stop, rest and use the restrooms and passing out water. They had a phone bank for people to call home. There was no ill regard. Everyone was simply trying to help each other, whether they were white, black, Arab.

Julia Campbell: The scariest part was seeing the panic. People were running wildly when the second building came down. We thought it was another plane...there was a loud sound like a plane engine would make as it's descending, but it turns out it was the second building imploding. It sent a tornado-like plume of smoke down one of the streets toward us and the cops told us to run as fast as we could toward the water. One man that I was next to me witnessed a lot more. He was in one of the twin towers and was covered with white dust...he said people were leaping to their deaths from his building.

knb4life10: Why the World Trade Center? ctv_guest: The twin towers of the World Trade Center are one of New York's most famous landmarks...visible from most points in the New York area. The towers were of course the site of the terrorist bombing in 1993, that killed six New Yorkers and injured more than 1,000 people.

Court TV Host: Thanks a lot Julia. Glad you are back safe with us!

Court TV Host: We're going to be talking to another witness to the attack on the World Trade Center today, Court TV's Rick Derman, who saw the second tower collapse this morning. Thanks, Rick, for joining us...What was it like?

Rick Derman: It was a beautiful crisp morning here in New York, and while I was shaving I heard a strong dull thud...I thought something had fallen upstairs in my house in Brooklyn. Rather, it was the first plane slamming into the World Trade Center. It was only after I left my home to go to the subway that a neighbor told me what had happened.

Rick Derman: There was a huge plume of smoke trailing across the sky from in the direction of the Trade Center South (my wife, by the way just told me that our neighborhood in Brooklyn is covered in ash.) When I got out of the subway at West 4th Street, I saw the north tower blazing. Fifteen minutes later, as I was walking north toward Court TV, someone gasped. I turned around and looked straight down sixth Avenue to watch the north tower collapse. It was in slow motion, and took about ten seconds to collapse in on itself. I just saw a replay on CNN. It was as if I was part of a weird Godzilla movie. People stood stunned. Crying. Praying. Sobbing. I passed an Orthodox Jew, facing south toward the World Trade Center. He had a prayer book open and was swaying back and forth.

Rick Derman: Some people in the street were preaching that we were at the apocalypse. New Yorkers, expressing their usual tact, told them to shut up. People in the streets stood in knots around cars with radios blaring the news stations.

classic_cola_girl_2000: Rick Derman, was the collapse breath taking?

wonderfulgirl_4u: What was your first thought when you saw it?

Rick Derman: The collapse was unreal. Hard to believe it was really happening. My brain was stunned. I'm not sure I really had a thought...it was numbing.

Court TV Host: Thanks so much, Rick. We have another first-hand account. This one is from attorney Mark Picard, on his way to work at 40 Center St. in lower Manhattan where he is a law clerk for a federal judge. Mark, tell us what you saw.

Mark Picard: I was taking the subway to work and the subway was encountering all kinds of delays, and they said the delays were due to a police action. When I finally got to my stop at Chambers Street, it was hard to get out because people were not leaving the station. They were stopped on the stairs. When I got to the top of the stairs, I found out why. When you get to the top of the stairs, the first thing you see is the Twin Towers, and when I got up there it was about 9:50, and both towers were in flames, you could see, it looked as though the fires were on the 80th or 90th floor, and no one coming out of the train knew what was going on. Usually, walking out of that train station, I would see the towers, and it's usually a beautiful sight on a day like today, but today it was in flames. There were hundreds of people, standing around, in shock , really. What I did next was, since I've lived with a television producer for 20 years, the next thing I did was to run and get a camera from a newspaper stand, and when I got back to the corner where I could see the Twin Towers, just as I began taking pictures, the first tower began to fall. It seemed surreal. You watch so many of these movies, like the Die Hard movies, and you get used to seeing so many of those things happening in movies, but this was real. Then there was a huge cloud of smoke. It seemed like it was 20 stories high, because of New York's large buildings, it was like a canyon, and the smoke just came rushing at you, and people just started running to get away from the smoke, though it didn't seem like it was moving so fast that you couldn't run to stay ahead of it, because I did. And then after that there were police and FBI everywhere downtown. They were directing people uptown. They were clearing that area. And then, I tried to go to work, but the building was closed. It was only my second day at this new job, so that I thought I should attempt to go there. Then I walked back over towards Greenwich Street, the actual street where the Trade Center is, and there were hundreds of people there, just in the street watching, About five minutes after I got there, the second trade center collapsed. The first one, when it collapsed, looked like it was a kind of explosion, but the second one just seemed to collapse. The pictures that I took just show the two towers collapsing, the pictures of the first show the smoke coming towards us. I think when the second one collapsed was when the reality of what happened hit me.

ghostfairy: I heard that the people of New York were calm in the face of this horror, did your observations reflect that?

Mark Picard: I suppose, relatively speaking, yes. When the first building collapsed, there was, I suppose, controlled pandemonium. I didn't think people were panicked, but people were getting the hell out of there

gibran_64: Was the noise deafening?

Mark Picard: From my vantage point, it wasn't. I was probably four or five blocks away. And the noise, I wouldn't call it deafening, although it was loud. I'm sure it was deafening right near the site.

fireball2_us: How do you feel now?

Mark Picard: I'm very concerned about where we go from here. I think that what's happened is going to change everything about living in America. Basically, in one swoop, we the citizens of the United States have been brought up to speed to the rest of the world, as far as vulnerability to terrorism.

Court TV Host: Thanks to Mark Picard. We're now going to turn to our next guest, who also was an eyewitness. Tom Weber lives just blocks away from the World Trade Center less than a quarter of a mile from the Twin Towers. He was just on Court TV...and now he joins us online. Thanks for being our guest, Mr. Weber. ctv_host: Can you tell us what you saw?

Tom Weber: I was in my bedroom in my apartment which has floor to ceiling windows that look downtown directly at the World Trade Center and through to the river. I'm inside a quarter of a mile from the World Trade Center. I mean, we're close. My piano is against that window and I play my piano every morning before my wife and I leave to go to work. So I'm sitting there, on the 39th floor, and we're used to plane traffic, the sounds of planes are very familiar, but I heard a much louder sound, a sound closer in proximity than I've ever heard before which caused me to look up in the direction of that sound. I saw a commercial airliner which appeared to be banking to the east just go what appeared to be right through the WTC causing an explosion on one end and an explosion on the other end. At that point, there was a large fire and literally rainfall of debris. Within seconds you started to hear sirens, emergency vehicles and all that stuff. I was shocked and kind of sickened, actually. I let my wife know what I thought had happened. And we both looked on in shock and horror. I made a couple of phone calls to her mother and my mother to communicate with some people, came back to the window and I saw the second plane, and I never gave the second plane any credibility because there couldn't be another plane flying into the World Trade Center because that's impossible, almost impossible as the first one. And it was flying south. It wasn't as direct a hit as the first plane was. It kind of hit like the edge of the building, but the explosion was way worse than the first one. The first explosion wasn't...as a matther of fact, the first plane didn't have as big an explosion as the second. The second hit and our building shook. I was in shock, my wife said let's get out of here and we did. We took the elevator downstairs to the lobby where of course everyone was milling around. I have a car that I park on the street so now we were headed further south. People were all over the place but very orderly. It made an impression on me, it wasn't a mob scene. People didn't block intersections, traffic got through pretty smoothly and people were very, very moved by what had taken place. At that point, I knew I couldn't go anywhere, so I drove my wife up here and this (midtown) is where I've been ever since.

Court TV Host: Are you shaken up?

Tom Weber: I lived in my neighborhood for 16 years. I think New York is the greatest place in the world. I think it is the greatest social experiment in the history of mankind, and I've seen it become a safe wonderful place to live, especially in the last eight years. And I consider the World Trade Center and all the landmarks to belong to me and everybody else who lives in New York and they are very personal, valuable things in my life. And I can't imagine the implications of these events. And it breaks my heart.

Court TV Host: What do you expect to face when you go home tonight, and over the next several days?

Tom Weber: My little neighborhood is changed forever, and I'd imagine that the world is now changed forever. What I've lost pales in comparison to what I'm sure thousands of people have lost. People ask me a lot about our view because it is spectacular and we are really lucky to have that view. There was never a day I didn't wake up or go to sleep marveling at that view. I never took it for granted. Never. Based on what I saw on television, (the neighborhood) is part of the crime scene. Have you ever gone through a wake and a funeral? I'm not physically tired, I'm emotionally spent.