‘The biggest story of my life’

Susan Koeppen remembers exactly what she was wearing on Sept. 11, 2001: a black sweater set, a black and pink flowered skirt, and black patent leather heels.

The 49-year-old anchor for WPXI-TV’s forthcoming 4 p.m. newscast was working as WTAE-TV’s consumer reporter in 2001. While she was getting ready for work that day, a report on the radio described a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

Turning on her television, she watched another plane hit the second World Trade Center tower. Ms. Koeppen’s anxiety spiked further en route to WTAE’s office in Wilkinsburg when news came over the radio that another plane had slammed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington, D.C.

Her plan was to head Downtown and cover the attacks from an economic perspective. Instead, the station told her to find out what was happening in Somerset County.

A fourth plane had gone down there — this one in Stonycreek, near Shanksville. Ms. Koeppen and her WTAE crew were the first Pittsburgh news squad to arrive at the crash site for what would later be identified as United Airlines Flight 93, just behind a team from WJAC-TV in Johnstown. Ms. Koeppen and the rest of the world would soon learn that 40 passengers and crew members had perished when Flight 93 careened into a field in that particularly rural part of southwestern Pennsylvania.

“When you go to cover a plane crash, you expect to see a plane,” she recalled. “You expect to see flames.

“There was nothing but a giant hole, and the hole was smoldering.”

Nobody expected the death and tragedy that would, as current WTAE news director Jim Parsons put it, be forever “seared into our consciousness.” The day would be one that most people who were alive then can still recall in great detail — where they were when they heard the news, how they responded, where they went.

That goes for journalists as well.

It’s a job that requires being prepared to spring into action at a moment’s notice. But, in this instance, there was more to consider than having the right equipment and reaching the right sources. It was a story so big that they also had to ponder what the terrorist attacks meant for the country and, more pressingly in some cases, their own loved ones.

Twenty years later, the Post-Gazette caught up with a few current and former local media members who covered the events of Sept. 11, 2001, from their Pittsburgh studios, Somerset County and even ground zero in New York City.

‘We don’t know what to tell them’

What stands out to Stacy Smith about how the morning began was its striking similarity to the day almost exactly seven years earlier when USAir Flight 427 crashed in Hopewell.

“It was just a beautiful, fallish, summerish September day in Pittsburgh for both incidents,” said the 72-year-old former KDKA-TV anchor who recently retired after a 50-year broadcasting career.

Mr. Smith recalled essentially being on the air all day — from the morning of Sept. 11 until around midnight. His KDKA-TV broadcast wound up getting national air time on CBS due to the proximity of the Flight 93 crash site to Pittsburgh.

“No one knew what was really happening,” Mr. Smith said. “I just went through in my mind and related the basics of journalism — the who, what, when, where and why. We knew the when and where and the how, but we didn’t know the who or necessarily the why.”

As a seasoned newsman, there was “a certain calmness” that washed over Mr. Smith that allowed him to keep his emotions in check as he did his best to parse the facts of the ever-evolving situation. In his estimation from the distance of two decades later, “Pittsburgh was served well by its journalists in print and broadcast media” on that terrible day.

It wasn’t just on-air talent disseminating information.

Christine McMahon Tumpson, 61, of Carmel, Calif., now produces One Whirl Magazine. She was a KDKA assignment editor at the time. That day happened to be her son Max’s fifth birthday, but after starting her 8 a.m. shift, she was forced to spend the next 36 hours in the newsroom answering calls “because the phones were just going insane.”

“I gave them the information I knew, which was nothing,” she said. “They’re calling the newsroom and desperate for information. … Here they are relying on us, so much so that they’re dialing in from New York. We don’t know what to tell them.”

Twenty years later, it still pains Ms. Tumpson that she has no photos of Max’s birthday that year. She thinks, “We all got a little messed up” from trying to report the news even as the prevailing feelings of the whole country were confusion and fear.

“Our job is to stay nose to the grindstone, stoic,” she said.

“You have to report terrible things, but you can’t let your emotions get in the way of that because as soon as your emotions are there, you can’t work. I think that’s probably one of the dangers of having to work in that kind of intense environment.”

Deafening silence

Ralph Bell, 60, of Hempfield, is a retired former WTAE-TV chief photographer. Like Ms. Koeppen, he wasn’t planning on leaving the city to report on Sept. 11. That changed when Ms. Koeppen came out to WTAE’s parking lot where Mr. Bell was waiting in his news truck and instructed him to “just drive” to Somerset County.

After parking next to a cornfield, Mr. Bell couldn’t believe how quiet it was.

“We got out of the vehicle, and there is this eerie silence,” he said. “There are no planes in the air. You could hear some birds chirping. It was almost like being in church. You didn’t want to speak loudly, out of respect. I had never heard such deafening silence.”

That didn’t last long.