OVERVIEW

On the morning of September 11, Walter Danielsson, senior vice president of technology at Euro Brokers Inc., was driving to work. A breakfast meeting was planned at Two World Trade Center, the south tower where Euro Brokers had its world headquarters on the 84th floor. Although it was "casual day," Danielsson suddenly decided he looked too casual for the meeting. He went back home, changed clothes and arrived downtown late enough to miss being in the building when it collapsed. Sixty Euro Broker colleagues who were there were killed, including eight who reported directly to Danielsson.

Meanwhile, the shift manager for AT&T's global network operations center in Bedminster, New Jersey, was watching not only the center's 141 projection screens showing network status around the world, but also CNN. She had three close relations within blocks of the World Trade Center (they were unhurt). Like just about anyone else with loved ones in lower Manhattan, she wanted to pick up the phone and hear their reassuring voices. Instead, she stayed on the shift to handle what long-distance carriers euphemistically call a "focused overload."

October 4, 2001 An aerial view of the recovery operation underway in lower Manhattan at the site of the collapsed World Trade Center. Photo by Andrea Booher/FEMA News Photo.

Says Dave Johnson, a spokesman at the global Network Operations Center (NOC), "When you have a sizable disaster and it can be what happened to us in New York, a bomb blast in Oklahoma City, a major earthquake in Seattle,...