Local

Rock Hill man looking back on 9/11 says ‘it's still hard'

ROCK HILL, S.C. — Cotton Howell is the former emergency management director of York County but is still active in the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, which is a mobile morgue operated by the government that handles mass-casualty situations.

“In many ways, it seems like yesterday," Howell said.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Howell was on one of the only planes in the air after the twin towers fell.

As all commercial flights were grounded.

Howell was landing in New York. He was prepared for a horrific task that would end up lasting until after Christmas. His team was there to find and identify victims of the tragedy.

"We were given numbers that could possibly be involved of 40,000, because that was the number of people who could be in the seven buildings of the World Trade Center," Howell said.

The final number of dead was 2,977.  

Howell worked mostly at night running the operation out a nearby office building, and watching as grieving family members awaited any word of their loved ones.  

The emotions of those long weeks are still with Howell.

"I have a journal," he said. "I kept a journal while I was there, and I've never looked at it. I refuse to look at it."

Howell also refused to visit the memorial at Ground Zero for many years, telling Channel 9 he's not ready to go back, despite making several trips to New York since that day.

"It's still very real, very raw, and in some cases it's just a nightmare, bad-dream type of image," Howell said.

Richard Hulse wasn't there when thousands died on that morning, but his close friends were.  

Three New York City firefighters who were close to him are now pages in his scrapbook.

Hulse is a retired volunteer firefighter from Long Island.  

He'd already moved away when the towers fell, but remembers his reaction.

"I talk about it now and tears start to well," he said.

He was in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, on vacation and remembers seeing a crowd at the hotel bar early in the morning, glued to the TV, and extremely quiet.
 
"No one could believe what they were seeing," he said. "It was a little rough to sit there and watch it, knowing that, 'Hey, I might have known some of these people.'"

Two of his former instructors, Ray Meisenheimer and Pete Martin, were killed, and so was Thomas Kelly, another firefighter and friend.  
He finally visited Ground Zero this year and read their names at the memorial.

"I looked at Ray, his name, and I gave him a little fist bump, and the tears just started," he said.

Hulse worked for two years to get a beam from the World Trade Center placed outside the community center in Fort Lawn.

It's a sculpture made from a rusted piece of metal from the North Tower, a memorial to all the lives lost.