Oppenheimer 60th Anniversary - 42

Reprinting of From Opportunity to
Legacy: Celebrating the First Fifty Years

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The WTC Bombing: Lessons Learned
1993 Robert Zack, then associate

No one at OppenheimerFunds was hurt in the 1993
bombing, but structural damage scattered employees
to temporary office space.

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general counsel (now general counsel),
remembers that horrific Friday well. He
has in his memory hundreds of details
about February 26, 1993, but Zack's predominant memory is the smoke - thick,
black smoke - pouring out of the ventilation system into the Firm's offices in the
World Trade Center.
Shortly after noon there had been a
loud noise - later it would be determined that a truck packed with 1,500
pounds of explosives had been detonated
in a parking garage below Tower One.
The lights went out and then, because
the Company had its own generator,
quickly came back on. The general assumption, recalled Kate Ives, an attorney
in the Denver office, was that a building
generator had blown out somewhere.
Bridget Macaskill, then Company president, had a similar memory. "The building
vibrated noticeably," she recalled, "and
many car alarms went off. But nobody
knew what had occurred." Macaskill
asked a staff member to call building
management for information, and what
she heard was that there had been an explosion in the PATH station - a subway
line below the WTC. With no mention
of a bombing, Macaskill and most of the
other staff members returned to work.
But then the smoke began to pour out

of the vents, prompting Zack to act. He
went around to different offices and told
people to leave. "We all safely evacuated through the stairwell, which was
filling with smoke, and were told to go
home pending further instructions," he
recalled. "On the subway home, I realized people were staring at me. My face
and my shirt were covered with soot."
It turned out that the bomb had
not only caused significant structural
damage to the building, but left six
people dead and injured thousands.
For OppenheimerFunds, this meant
its employees had to be dispersed to
satellite locations. Some were housed
in temporary offices in Lower Manhattan; some - the legal staff, for instance
- borrowed office space from outside vendors; while others moved into
Company offices in Denver. "After a few
weeks they were able to clean things
up," recalled Zack. "It actually took
quite some time before we were able
to recover all our files and records."
The period following the blast proved
challenging, but one crucial outcome
was that the 1993 bombing prepared
OppenheimerFunds to withstand the
events of September 11, 2001. The proof
would come eight and a half years later
when, suddenly, the Company would
be put to a powerful test yet again. n

42 * OppenheimerFunds: The First Fifty Years
Oppenheimer 60th Anniversary

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Oppenheimer 60th Anniversary
