Ram Singal was writing an email in the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, when the building shook. At first, he thought an earthquake had struck.

Then the building shook again.

Singal, a Port Authority project manager who had developed a structural integrity inspection program for the complex, knew the tower well. His instincts told him to evacuate.

As he joined others descending the stairs, a second plane struck the South Tower.

“As we were going down, all of a sudden the other tower started to shake,” he said. “The South Tower, which was hit, started to collapse. While it was collapsing, we had the floor shaking, pipelines rattling, plaster falling, emergency lights flickering. It was like a movie scene.”

Flooding from broken pipes forced Singal to change staircases three times.

“Water was coming with such a high speed,” he said. “If we didn’t hold on to the handrail, we would have flushed down.”

Moments after Singal escaped the building, the North Tower collapsed.

“It was a sunny day, but the dust was so thick I couldn’t see faces even two feet away,” he said. “All of a sudden, we felt the ground shaking underneath. We looked back. Our tower had started to collapse.”

Singal, now 74, lives in Haines Falls. He moved from Long Island to the Hunter hamlet in 2009 and now works closely with Peace Village, a nonprofit spiritual study and meditation retreat off state Route 23A.

He is among the thousands who survived the four coordinated plane hijackings carried out by al-Qaeda. Two planes struck the World Trade Center, another hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers fought back.

Nearly 3,000 people died.

In the years since, thousands more first responders, recovery workers, and survivors have died from cancers, respiratory diseases, and other illnesses linked to toxic exposure at and around Ground Zero. More than 170,000 pages of city records released this week include internal warnings about hazardous conditions and potential liability, indicating that New York City officials knew the air posed health risks even as the public was assured it was safe.

Twenty-five years later, the attacks still reverberate across the Catskills. Victims and survivors had roots in the area, while others, like Singal, later found sanctuary in the mountains. Survivors carried the trauma into new communities, security transformed around the Ashokan Reservoir, more New Yorkers moved north, and memorials across the region continue to preserve the names and stories of those who died.

Responders Face Lasting Health Effects

Stan O’Dell, a member of the Saugerties Fire Department and a retired State Police senior investigator, was dispatched to Ground Zero after the attacks.

The World Trade Center housed the headquarters of the State Police’s Troop NYC, where O’Dell had been sworn in.

“I had a personal attachment to the buildings,” he said. “And here they are in a pile of rubble, and just so many people lost. That itself, just that day, and the days after that I worked down there were just enormous.”

O’Dell, now the Saugerties town justice and an associate village justice, said his exposure to smoke and dust at Ground Zero later caused serious health problems. He was fortunate that doctors detected them early, he said, while many other responders have died from illnesses related to the attacks.

“There’s people we’re still losing,” he said. “There’s spouses that don’t have their spouses anymore, and kids that don’t have their parents anymore.”

O’Dell said Saugerties’ annual ceremony honors those who “run into danger when everybody else is running away” and recognizes how profoundly the attacks changed the lives of firefighters, police officers, and other emergency workers.

“I think it changed everybody’s life,” he said. “It certainly changed mine.”

The Ashokan Reservoir Under Guard

In Olive, concerns quickly arose that the Ashokan Reservoir, a crucial part of New York City’s drinking-water system, could become a target.

“DEP and their powers that be out of the city ordered the reservoir to be shut down,” said Chris Winne, chief of the Olive Fire Department and an assistant chief in 2001. “If that system is damaged or poisoned, especially if it’s poisoned, it will kill millions of people.”

Officials restricted crossings over the reservoir in stages. They created a pass system for certain vehicles and established checkpoints with armed guards. Some areas remain closed.

Emergency services continued operating, Winne said, after officials convened a meeting to determine how fire departments and other agencies could work around the closures and prepare for a possible attack.

Winne was doing roadwork for the town highway department when news of the attacks reached him.

“Everybody kind of just stopped what we were doing to wrap our heads around what was going on, as things were coming across radios of ours,” he said. “We were dumbfounded by what was happening.”

New York City Department of Environmental Protection police now patrol the watershed by foot, bicycle, vehicle, boat, and helicopter. The department also has specialized detective, emergency service, canine, and aviation units.

Hunter Memorial Incorporates World Trade Center Steel

A 14-foot-high memorial at Dolan’s Lake Park in Hunter incorporates steel recovered from the World Trade Center. The village built it in 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

Joe Jove, a Hunter resident and retired New York City fire lieutenant, spearheaded the project. Jove, 79, retired two months before the attacks and secured the steel through a friend in the Port Authority Police Department. David Slutzky, the former owner of Hunter Mountain, retrieved it from Staten Island before the pieces were cut and installed at the park.

The sections, originally about 25 feet long, had supported floors in the complex.

“Those studs sticking out held floors up,” Jove said. “There would be concrete over it.”

Jove recalled a surreal moment on the foggy morning the memorial was installed.

“Just as they got the last column in and were bolting it down, like a snap of my finger, I look up, and there’s no more fog,” he said. “If that didn’t send chills down my back, nothing would.”

New Yorkers Move North

The attacks also helped reshape some communities beyond New York City as residents carried their memories and grief north.

Teresa Giordano lived in New York City for 40 years before moving to Saugerties in 2022. She remembers streets lined with photographs and missing-person posters after the attacks.

“Every day after that was like waking up and going to a funeral,” Giordano said.

Although she did not personally lose anyone that day, Giordano felt surrounded by the grief of those who had.

“I think it reverberated everywhere,” she said.

Giordano said former New Yorkers affected by 9/11 have since formed communities in Saugerties and elsewhere in the Hudson Valley.

Leonard Nevarez, a Vassar College sociology professor and former director of its Urban Studies program, said the region experienced a modest but visible population increase after the attacks.

“It definitely surged in a modest but visible and significant way,” Nevarez said. “That more or less continued until the recession in 2008, when everything sort of froze again.”

The greatest growth occurred in communities with access to the Thruway or commuter rail, he said.

“It was much more of a family, household-based movement, not as far-flung as the rural areas, but into places like Highland, for instance,” Nevarez said. “A lot of those places are more accessible to things like the Thruway or the commuter rail than this kind of full-on, second-home, reverse commute that we see now into some really small places.”

Nevarez views that movement as a precursor to the broader migration that followed the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think of it as the way a strong rain sets channels in the terrain,” he said. “These are demographic paths that were set after 9/11 that have overflowed now. It’s really spilled out into less populated, more rural areas.”

Communities Plan Memorial Ceremonies

Communities across the region will hold ceremonies on Sept. 11.

The Saugerties Fire Department will hold a memorial ceremony at 6 p.m. at Cantine Field.

In Woodstock, volunteer firefighters will hike 2.4 miles to the summit of Overlook Mountain, making a climb that organizers describe as equivalent to the World Trade Center’s 109 floors in solidarity with the New York City firefighters who entered the towers.

A Windham ceremony will begin at 6 p.m. at St. Theresa of the Child Jesus Church, where a monument honors those killed. The service will begin with a presentation of flags before moving inside the church.

Hunter’s ceremony will begin at the village memorial at 8:15 a.m.

After the anniversary, the village plans to add a pentagon-shaped sidewalk, planters, a new flag, and a plaque commemorating the plane that crashed near Shanksville. The work will be supported by the village’s general fund, with officials hoping to recoup some costs through a brick sponsorship program.

Mayor Alan Higgins said the village delayed construction until after the anniversary to avoid detracting from the commemoration. He hopes the concrete work can be completed before winter.

Singal was invited to speak at the Hunter ceremony. He said he has struggled with survivor’s guilt since escaping the North Tower.

“In our office, we lost 10 people,” he said. “My friends, even our general manager, and our other engineers, because they decided to stay back and wait for the instructions.”

That guilt led Singal in 2009 to develop “7 Billion Acts of Goodness,” an initiative encouraging acts of kindness. He has promoted it in 25 countries, including his native India.

“You can do it in your community, you can do it in your family, you can do it with your own self,” he said. “Feeling good about yourself is an act of goodness.”

“If you keep doing good, good will keep happening,” he said.

Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter, and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.

Isabella Schoonover is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Woodstock, Saugerties, Hurley, and surrounding Ulster County communities. Send correspondence to isabella@theoverlooknews.com.

Mia Quick is an editorial assistant at The Overlook. Send correspondence to mia@theoverlooknews.com.