Blast Shutters Markets : N.Y. Explosion Forces Some Exchanges to Close Early

The World Trade Center explosion that killed five people and injured more than 600 left New York’s financial district in disarray Friday, forcing closure of several futures and commodities exchanges and shutting down brokerage firms in the affected buildings.

“We were successful in evacuating 750 people from the 105th floor,” said Robert M. Mercorella, managing director of Cantor Fitzgerald Securities, a moderate-sized brokerage firm based in the 1 World Trade Center tower, the building most seriously affected.

The march to ground level took more than two hours, he said--much of it in darkness and with some employees in near-panic, he said.

All phone calls to Cantor’s offices were being automatically rerouted to its Los Angeles branch. And executives in New York moved to an office of Chemical Bank, which clears trades for Cantor, to try to sort out the trades that had been made early Friday.

The New York Mercantile Exchange and the Commodity Exchange Inc., also known as the Comex, both were forced to close more than an hour ahead of schedule as smoke laced through their offices in a building next to the World Trade Center’s twin towers.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said it was uncertain whether the two exchanges would be able to reopen Monday.

Other exchanges--including the New York Futures Exchange and the Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchanges--also were forced to close early. And trading volume in U.S. Treasury notes and bonds was reduced by the incident.

But the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange and NASDAQ continued normal trading.

Dean Witter Reynolds, the nation’s third-largest retail brokerage firm, apparently was the biggest company to suffer serious effects from the blast. It was forced to evacuate and cease all operations--including trading--at its headquarters, located in 2 World Trade Center, one of the two 110-story towers at the foot of Manhattan.

A spokesman reached at home late Friday said an emergency meeting would be held in Dean Witter offices in New Jersey today to assess the damage and determine how soon trading could resume.

The explosion disrupted the transmission of news, financial tables and other information at the Associated Press, which uses a fiber optic communications center housed in the World Trade Center.

The blast and fire knocked out power to the center, which then switched to backup battery power. But the batteries failed after several hours, leaving AP officials trying to funnel all information through a communications link in Kansas City, Business Editor Jim Kennedy said.

Times staff writer Jesus Sanchez in Los Angeles contributed to this story.