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It took Bill Hewgley 15 years to talk much about 9/11.
Hewgley, president of Metalworking Solutions here, is a Chattanooga industrialist who happened to be in New York City for a trade show on the morning of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
He flew over the twin towers of the World Trade Center at about 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, about 15 minutes before the carnage began. In real time, his family back home in Chattanooga thought he was a passenger on one of the airplanes that exploded into the towers.
Recently, Hewgley sat down to share his memories of that day – recollections he has kept bottled up for a decade and a half.
It’s one thing to have experienced 9/11 through the filter of television news. It’s quite another to be inside one of the first cars stopped near the the Midtown Tunnel in Queens as the curtain of security dropped around Manhattan.