Everyone Has A Story To Remember Where They Were.

When the second plane sliced through the World Trade Center's steel skin and exploded, the concussion knocked John Pries back a few steps from where he stood staring at the carnage - a block and a half away from the Twin Towers.

Pries, the CEO of the YMCA Retirement Fund, said his organization evacuated its offices on the 27th and 28th floors of a building close to the World Trade Center after the second plane hit. He made his way to the YMCA's McBurney branch on 23rd Street, where he stayed until 11 p.m. Tuesday. It wasn't until Thursday night that the safety of all the employees had been confirmed, he said. They all survived.

With a structural integrity review to be done on their office building, which police were using as a staging area, Pries wasn't expecting to be able to return quickly.

But since its records were updated every other day, and its team deployed to multiple Ys throughout the metropolitan area in accord with their regularly practiced disaster drill, Pries expressed confidence its work would meet deadlines. "Our focus is to make sure we get our 8,000 retirees their annuity checks on time for the first of the month," he said. "Those people depend on us."

Tuesday morning, Douglas Meyer, a publicist with The Nature Conservancy, was at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, across the street from the White House, preparing for the opening of a photo exhibit conducted by TNC. He and other organization employees were talking about the gala party from the previous night.

He said incomplete reports of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center filtered in before the scheduled 10 a.m. press conference.

"We worked under the assumption of an errant commuter plane," he said. "We didn't understand the intentions behind the attacks right away.

Hearing the explosion at the Pentagon a few miles away, Meyer and other press conference attendees moved out onto the land between the White House's South Lawn and the Washington Monument. "We were standing there and (realized) this may not be the best place to stand."

Jill Schumann, president of Lutheran Services in America, was sitting on a plane over Pennsylvania when the announcement of an emergency landing was given from the cockpit. Her flight, intended for Detroit, was to land at a small airport in Canton, Ohio. "I have to say, for those of us who were in the air, the airlines and airport people were terrific," she said. "I'm happy to be in a small airport."

In an email to her constituency, she began, "I write to you from a hotel room in a town far away from my intended destination, grateful indeed, that our plane was able to land safely anywhere while others were involved in a terrible tragedy."

Normally, Gil Furst, the director of Lutheran Disaster Response, would be the person discussing relief efforts by his organization. But he was in meetings with other emergency service officials of Lutheran response teams, who ironically were grounded together at a scheduled conference in Santa Fe, N.M.

Ruth Reko, director of social ministry organizations with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America based in Chicago, said the particular circumstances in New York City have been difficult for getting organized quickly. "The first 48 hours are the chaos period. This particular situation is hampering our ability to get people in there," she said.

"Our Lutheran agency had its main agency very near the trade towers. They had to be evacuated. They moved to a church. ... We don't know if we lost anyone. We're assuming we probably have."

With the Chicago office a scant 10 minutes outside O'Hare airport, the grounding of all airplanes lent an eerie silence to the situation. "With a national organization like ours, we'll have to change a lot of our functioning if we can't get in the air," she said.

Funding came flooding in almost immediately, Reko said, although there was Little way of knowing quickly how much had come in. "The people doing the accounting were on retreat yesterday," she said the day after the attack. "We just know we've had tons of calls yesterday. We're preparing an appeal letter (and) we're putting it out on our Web sites."