Terrorist acts cast strange silence over N+I

Terrorist acts cast strange silence over N+I
ATLANTA — The first loud whispers buzzed through the crowd just after 9:30 a.m. Tuesday (Sept. 11), as Don Peterson was giving the opening keynote speech at Networld+Interop. Peterson, chief executive of Avaya Communications Inc., looked confused as noise spread through the hall at the Georgia World Convention Center, then seemed annoyed as he handed the floor over to Karyn Mashima, vice president of global strategy and technology at Avaya. But N+I officials quickly filled Peterson in on the cause of the commotion. A passenger plane had been crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

Within 20 minutes, journalists were crowding the N+I press room to snare early reports of the first, then the second plane crash in New York and a separate crash into the Pentagon in Washington. N+I attendees were trying, often unsuccessfully, to reach outside lines on cellular phones, while others searched for live news broadcasts in a building only yards away from CNN headquarters. N+I organizers got the message. Within 30 minutes, every closed-circuit television providing news of the conference had been switched over to CNN.

Next door, the programmers and developers for the cable network were being asked to leave the towering glass building adjacent to the convention center. At first, refugees from the Omni Hotel in CNN Center spoke of a bomb threat, but by 11 a.m., workers said that the federal government had ordered precautionary evacuations of the Centers for Disease Control, General Services Administration, and CNN Center buildings as possible terrorist targets in Atlanta.

The trade show nevertheless opened on time at 10 a.m., to a crowd that was significantly smaller from past years — as many had predicted — but which seemed lively and engaged for the first hour. But as attendees stayed glued to the corridor TVs, and news of the magnitude of the terrorist acts spread, the N+I floor took on a silence and a visible pallor that seemed to bleach even the bright colors of the trade floor booths.

By noon, organizers had decided to cancel the rest of the day's keynote speeches and to close the show floor by 2 p.m. They were merely bowing to the inevitable, as the silence became eerie by 1 p.m. Some of the change was initiated by the number of attendees and exhibitors who elected to grab rental cars or trains to get back to loved ones in other states. (This correspondent decided not to wait for Hartsfield Airport to reopen, and wrote this missive from Tennessee while breaking from a long car trek back to Colorado.) But even among the vendors who elected to stick it out until 2 p.m., few dared to speak above a whisper.

Everyone had a story to tell about a loved one or friend who was unaccounted for. One marketing executive expressed concern about a relative who was on a plane that had not been accounted for. Another engineering executive had an aunt with a small business whose entire staff had been on the second plane that smashed into the World Trade Center.

Everyone accepted the inevitable fate of being stuck in Atlanta at least through the end of the scheduled N+I show, and perhaps far longer. N+I officials pledged the show would open on time Wednesday morning, though it was an open question whether anyone would do more than go through the motions of finishing the show.

"It looks like not many people will be going anywhere, in any event," said Judy Beningson, a product management director at Unisphere Networks. "But how can you concentrate on anything but the tragedy?"