CLARK, N.J.-In the middle of the chaos, with employees frantically exiting the offices of FAA Eastern Region FCU in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 2001, one employee had to make sure she got her job done first.
"One manager was desperately looking for a way to make our deposit," recalls Ellen Weber, a lending underwriter who was working for FAAERFCU the morning of the tragedy. "Through it all she was trying to wrap things up-and she got the deposit made."
Weber is still employed by the credit union, now known as Aspire FCU. She said every CU employee successfully exited Building 6 of the Trade Center that day. Later that night, Building 7 collapsed into the CU's office and the credit union has not re-established a location in the city.
"I recall the chaos, the panic, and the franticness of trying to get out of that building after we learned a plane had crashed into the Trade Center," said Weber. "I know employees never forgot that day, as I have not. But we tended to purposely not talk about it much as the years went by just because everyone either knew someone or had someone close to them perish that day."
The event changed the credit union, said CEO Thomas O'Shea, who joined Aspire in late 2005. "It pushed the credit union to become a more virtual organization with less emphasis on branches."
The majority of Aspire's locations are in air traffic control centers, as one of the $190-million CU's primary fields of membership is the Federal Aviation Administration. "They had good security before 9/11 and afterward security was stepped up," pointed out O'Shea. "These days you have to be employed by the FAA and on your shift to get into the facility and therefore the credit union. We had to emphasize remote access."
O'Shea estimated that 10 years ago the credit union handled 80 percent of its transactions at the branch and 20 percent online. Now those numbers are reversed.
"Whether we wanted to move to remote access at the pace we did, 9/11 pushed us to where we needed to be," said O'Shea. "But when we do member surveys, especially of Federal employees in Manhattan, to this day we get asked when we are going to reopen a Manhattan office."
Like most Americans, O'Shea remembers where he was on 9/11. Working as CEO of Raritan Bay FCU in Sayerville, N.J., he was attending a hearing on an unemployment case in a New Jersey courthouse and saw the attacks on a TV as he waited for his case to be called.
"It was surrealistic. I could not believe what was going on. And when everyone learned what had happened, my response was that the United States had just entered the world stage. Now we would begin experiencing some of the same issues many other countries go through on a regular basis."
That feeling O'Shea had on 9/11 came back briefly when the earthquake recently struck the Northeast U.S. "I was sitting at my desk and the credit union building began to shake. Since earthquakes are rare here, the first thing that goes through your mind is did something blow up? It took me right back to Sept. 11."
