Police Chief Michael Bussiere heard the news on a radio station that never played anything but music. The DJ broke in with word of a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

Bussiere dressed and headed into the station. He didn’t have to — it was just after 8:30 a.m. and he was a patrol supervisor on night watch — but Bussiere felt compelled anyway. He and other men and women who didn’t have to be there gathered around a TV in the break room.

They asked each other if Maine officers would have to relieve police in New York City, if Maine doctors and nurses would help the wounded.

“After watching the towers come down, I remember saying, ‘There’s not going to be any injuries,’” Bussiere said. Everyone inside, he feared, was dead. “It was just too devastating.”

He remembers Lewiston City Hall called, nervous. A few officers were sent over. Not for anything specific, just in case.

After the attacks, U.S. Department of Homeland Security money came into the department for a new radio communication tower. It paid for a Lewiston-based Weapons of Mass Destruction Hazmat Team, which has responded to suspicious packages and chemical spills.

Maine’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was organized in the wake of Sept. 11. Lewiston has a detective on it. Intelligence sharing is nothing like before, Bussiere said.

“I think that, absolutely, some good came out of this,” he said. “A lot of the focus on law enforcement now is to have eyes wide open.”

Officers who before might have looked for drugs during a vehicle stop now look for drugs and anything out of place.

Not having had another attack on home soil since 9/11, “that’s not by luck,” Bussiere said. “It’s not that groups like al-Qaida don’t have any interest — they’re as interested as ever. A lot has to do with everybody working together and dealing with the issues before it happens.”

He learned a day or two after Sept. 11 that lawyer Jim Roux had been on one of the hijacked planes. In the 1980s, when Roux lived up the street from him, Bussiere had debated entering law school or the Air Force and asked for Roux’s advice.

Roux told him something like, “Do what makes you happy,” and passed on the names of a few good schools, just in case.

They’d lost touch in the years since.

“To find out he was on that plane, just minding his own business,” Bussiere said. “I was surprised I would know someone directly, but I guess I shouldn’t be. You look at all the casualties; in hindsight, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Bussiere’s mother bought Roux’s former house in Lewiston. She still sometimes gets his mail.

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