Carr Futures Inc., a Chicago-based brokerage firm, had 143 employees on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Sixty-nine of them died.
The frantic hours afterward found Didier Varlet, the firm’s chairman and chief executive, directing operations by phone from a small town in Spain where he had been vacationing. His Chicago staff scrambled to communicate with their Manhattan colleagues from a 24-hour command center set up a block away from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which had been evacuated.
Looking back, Varlet said, “Our staff has been outstanding. Everyone went through the emotion together.”
The financial services industry has helped Carr recover, he said. “Now we are back to normal operationally, but it has been a very difficult year.”
But, emotionally, Varlet and his colleagues will never be “back to normal,” he said. “You never recover from a shock like that.”
