World Trade Center Disaster Reaches Home for Albuquerque, N.M., Executives.

By Diane Velasco, Albuquerque Journal, N.M. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Sep. 14--ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--The attack at the World Trade Center last week hit close to home for several business people in New Mexico. "To see it on TV knowing I was just there and that these people died," said Economic Development Secretary John Garcia.

Garcia, Insurance Superintendent Eric Serna, Bruce Kohl of the state Securities Division and Bill Verant of the Financial Institutions Division all have extensive ties with dozens of business colleagues, companies or agencies based in the center.

"It is so cultured there, there was a strong sense of security. Now there's a great sense of insecurity," said Garcia, who visited the center last month to recruit companies to the state.

He and aide Peter Mitchell met with the consultants on the 80th floor of one of the twin towers.

"Sad to say, it's possible people we met with didn't make it," Garcia said.

The center was destroyed Tuesday by two hijacked commercial airplanes flown into its twin towers. A third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the same morning.

The World Trade Center was the financial center of the world, as well as of the United States, Garcia said. The towers were so huge, they were like cities.

"That it came all the way down to rubble, it's unimaginable," he said. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, of which Serna is a member, had an office in 7 World Trade Center.

That 45-story building also collapsed after the attack, but all 50 association employees got out, Serna learned from an e-mail.

He also was scheduled to attend a two-day conference of the association beginning Monday at the same Boston Marriott Hotel where the FBI searched for terrorism suspects, he said. The conference was postponed, but when it is held, its focus will be on the attack and what it means to insured and insurers alike, Serna said. Serna suggested to other commissioners that the conference be held in New York.

"We should go right at them -- I don't like terrorists having their way," an emotional Serna said.

"We should try to conduct business as much as we can and show them we are stronger than any terrorist attack however devastating. We will overcome and this country will come together. I'm angry as hell."

The attack on the Pentagon also hit close to home for Serna -- both of his college-age children are in Washington. His 22-year-old daughter Marisa Florinda Serna was caught in a traffic jam for three hours on a highway near the Pentagon after it was hit by a hijacked plane. She could see the smoke from her car, he said.

The state Securities Division dealt regularly with large brokerage firms' compliance offices in the trade center, said Kohl.

"It's hard to put into words what's happened," he said. "We really only have begun to understand what the impact will be even in places as remote as New Mexico."

Kohl said the state Securities Division has been unable to keep track of 50,000 brokers licensed to do business here because of the attack.

The National Association of Securities Dealers, on whose Internet databases the division relies, has been off-line since Tuesday.

"Whether it's because they have some of their communication facilities in or about the World Trade Center, or because of the volume of Internet traffic, I don't know, but the system has been shut down," he said.

Verant was stranded in San Francisco at a conference of the North American Securities Administrators Association, also with offices at the trade center, when the FAA grounded all flights. "There are a lot of people from New York at this conference," he said in a phone interview last week. "There's a lot of distress here -- people who know others that are lost. It's hit the securities world maybe as hard or harder than others."

The nation's largest securities firms had headquarters or offices in the World Trade Center. Some people who tried to leave the San Francisco conference got gouged by car rental dealers charging $450 a day with a $2,500 drop-off fee, Verant said.

"We're hunkered down -- it seems like a week already," he said Wednesday.

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(c) 2001, Albuquerque Journal. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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