Community Corner

Changed By 9/11: Sag Harbor Woman Compelled To Volunteer

Living in New York City that day, she lent a hand at the Red Cross Blood Donation Center.

Barbara J. Frerichs of Sag Harbor, who volunteered at a Red Cross Blood Center following the terror attacks, said she is still in awe of how people stepped up to help one another on 9/11.

She was living in New York City then and was walking along the East River that beautiful September morning when she saw the smoke. "It looked like an innocent, bright, white, billowy cloud," she remembered.

Still unaware as she came off the East River Promenade, she saw city buses going the wrong way picking up police officers as they went along.

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It being Primary Day, she stopped at a public school to vote; it was locked down. She found the doorwoman at her apartment building crying.

She hurried up to her apartment to watch the news and caught images of the towers on fire and ready to collapse. 

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"I was on my knees, I had friends there," she said. "I couldn't just stay in my apartment, I had to do something."

Frerichs went down to the Red Cross Blood Donation Center on 66th Street, near her apartment, where she found the line was already starting to go around the block.  

She had just had surgery from an accident and knew she couldn't donate, so she marched past the line and up to a doctor whom she told she was willing to do anything to help. Well into the night, she took donors to sit and eat cookies, oranges and juice after their blood drawn.

At one point, the center ran out of snacks.  "I went with another volunteer to The Garage, a neighborhood store of fresh produce and gourmet items, where I shopped. The manager told me that we could take whatever we could carry, and if we needed more, to come back." 

What stands out to her was the level of the grey dust on people's clothing. "It had started out around their shoes and as the day went on, it was getting higher and higher. These were people who had run for their lives as the towers collapsed, the more dust, the closer they were," she said. "They had walked all the way to 66th Street and all they could think of was what they could do to help someone else."

"People who couldn't find loved ones, friends, families, some shaking, some sobbing, some just in shock, coming in to help another," she said. "It amazed me how people who had just gone through the unimaginable thought of others before themselves."

Frerichs said that very experience made her appreciate everything so much more. "I try to give back as much as I can by working with various charities out here," she said. She helps organize the Donald T. Sharkey Memorial Community Fund, in memory of the late East Hampton Town building inspector who died suddenly in 2009."


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