New Jerseyans on the scene in Brussels recount panic

BY NICHOLAS PUGLIESE AND ABBOTT KOLOFF
STAFF WRITERS |
THE RECORD

As she waited for a flight out of Brussels, Wyckoff native Ashley Bruggemann saw people suddenly rushing toward her on Tuesday morning, and thought they were trying to catch a plane.

“Then a whole lot of people started running,” Bruggemann, 25, said in a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon. “They were panicked. A few people were crying.”

Another New Jersey native live-tweeted his evacuation from a Brussels subway train and wrote that there was smoke in the tunnel as he and others walked in darkness to the nearest safe station, with a child heard crying on a video he posted.

New Jersey residents with Belgian roots received text messages from relatives letting them know they were safe, and expressed shock at the terrorist attacks in Brussels at the airport and a train station that left at least 34 people dead and scores injured.

“People cannot get their minds around something like this,” said Wim Vanraes, a Hillsborough resident who grew up in Belgium and was an editor of a Belgian-American newspaper based in Michigan. He said some people in his native country have been expecting a terrorist attack for “a long time” but that others have been “in denial.”

Valerie Blouin-Hunter of Oakland, whose mother came from Belgium, said she received text messages from aunts and cousins Tuesday morning letting her know they were safe. She said she thought about the possibility of a terrorist attack in her mother’s homeland after the Paris attacks last year but put it out of her mind. After Tuesday, she said, “I am very concerned for my family.”

https://www.northjersey.com/news/new-jerseyans-on-the-scene-in-brussels-recount-panic-1.1531558