| Robert Coker was attending a breakfast meeting next to the Capitol in
Washington, D.C., on Tuesday morning.
"Everybody's cell phone went off at once. We heard about the plane
hitting the World Trade Center," said Coker, Clewiston-based U.S.
Sugar's Vice President of community and government affairs. "Then 10
minutes later the phones rang again, and they said there's been a second
plane that's hit the other building.
"Fifteen minutes later, they said, `Look out the windows. The
Pentagon has been bombed.'
"It was several miles away, but we could see the smoke,"
Coker said. "We didn't finish breakfast. We went outside and started
finding a cab."
Coker and other local sugar executives, who were in town for debates on
federal farm legislation, quickly hired a 24-passenger van with a driver
to make the more-than-20-hour drive home to Florida.
"We filled a cooler with Gatorade, Coca-Colas and water, and went
by Wal-Mart and bought some pillows. We didn't sleep much," Coker
said.
Florida Crystals vice president Jorge Dominicis agreed it was a
sleepless night, but he said the inconvenience seemed trivial.
"Everybody was very upset about our country being attacked and
about all the people affected by this, and the injured and people who lost
loved ones," he said. |