When W. Robert Knechel’s plane landed in Brussels, Belgium, on the morning of March 22, everything was normal.
But while the UF accounting professor was waiting to get off the plane, the pilot announced there had been an explosion.
“You don’t know what’s going on, and nobody knows what’s going on,” he said. “How do you compare something like this to almost anything?”
After the destruction cleared, more than 30 had been killed and about 260 were injured after two bombs went off.
Knechel, who travels to Belgium three or four times a year to work at a joint research facility outside of Brussels, said he could see smoke from the plane, but he was never in any danger.
He texted his wife and his daughter during the hour-long wait on the plane before learning on Twitter that the explosions were caused by bombs, he said.
He was herded into a hangar with about 1,000 people, he said.
Knechel said he was lucky; he wasn’t hurt, and he was able to walk away from the rubble.
But the people of Belgium are not so lucky.
“I’ve got some friends where this is their new reality,” he said.
Lambert Vaes, originally from Belgium and a friend of Knechel, agrees.
“It’s not that the city is all at once unsafe, it’s just the few people that make others miserable,” the 58-year-old said.
But Knechel said the bombing won’t stop him from doing research in Belgium.
“I’m not going to stop traveling,” he said.
@MelissaGomez004
mgomez@alligator.org
