Where were you on 9/11?

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Beryllos said:
The servers for US news outlets were overloaded and practically unresponsive.
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During the brief half hour or so I was in my office that morning before I decided to go home as the streets were filling up with people under my window like some Godzilla movie, I could not get any news website to come up and was getting news from a guy in Australia who was posting it to one of my e-mail fan lists for a rock band (a lot of people were still using listservs then, hosted threaded forums hadn’t really taken off yet). A lot of the news he was getting was unreliable, such as “Explosion on Capitol Hill”. I half expected to see the dome blown off when I passed the Capitol on the way to Union Station, but when I hit that block it was completely intact, the report was a false alarm. I was not practicing Catholic at that point in my life but I remember giving a little prayer of thanks to God when I passed that dome. Later found out that the plane that the passengers made crash in Shanksville PA was headed either there or the White House.
 
I had just come back from morning mass. The day was bright and beautiful. My mother was waiting in the living room for Dorothy who came every Tuesday to bring my ailing mother Holy Communion. Dorothy was a retired nurse and flight attendant for what use to be Pan Am airlines.
The phone rang and my friend told me to turn on the TV as one of the Twin Towers was hit by some kind of ✈️. Dorothy was saying no pilot would ever come that close to a building, if the plane was in trouble. Then the next plane hit.
I remember the day as if it was happening now. I can see the horrid smoke of the buildings in the bright blue sky. The eerie silence of no flights in the sky. I hear the sirens rushing to Manhattan and the phone ringing telling me my good, kind friend is in the second tower. Her last day of work and she decided to go in to clean up her desk for the next person coming to take her job. I feel the arms of a child clinging onto me as I enter the classroom for the first day of after school care and children are being taken out of class, one by one. We are not to let the children know what has happened.
I wait like everyone to hear who has come home, who has been hurt and I wait and I wait…
 
I was on a business trip to a Bell South Central office in Miami to investigate some issues with our product.

I looked up from my measuring instrumentation and was going to explain some issues to their personnel. No body was there.

Now, NO ONE is left alone in a Bell switching office. But nobody was around. I went searching and found a bunch of employees gathered around a TV.

THEN I found out what had happened.

Went back to the hotel and tried to get transportation back to California for a day or so. Gave up after nothing available Wednesday eve.

Ended up driving cross country by myself in the rent a car. I HAD to get home, as my spouse was dying from cancer. (I expected to be gone less than 24 hours.) Made it in 3 days… 2700 miles. That was tough.

Aside: There really is such a thing as a “flea bag hotel”. The place I stayed at Ft. Stockton TX was 4 cinder block walls, a bare light bulb in the middle of the room and a TV. Stains on the carpet. Blood? Could have been. Slept in my clothes on top of the covers. Left early for the final leg of that trip.
 
I didn’t exist in 2001. But in 2017, my maths teacher, who had taught in the same classroom for about 20 years and was about to leave the school, said “I watched the twin towers fall in this room on a black and white TV”. He obviously will remember that moment forever.
 
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I was up early with my two year old and put the news on to stay awake …and couldn’t believe what I was seeing,so horribly surreal ,heart sank.
Prayed as the news repeated over and over.
 
Seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? And your 2 year old is now 20. My son turns 30 next week. Time sure flies.
 
It really does,many ups and downs since then.
Seeing something so terrible on the news I wanted to speak to some one about it ,make reason (?) of it but had to wait.
 
I was in college and my room-mate came home from his 8 am class and told me to turn on the tv. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. Just flame and smoke pouring into a robin egg blue sky. Then the second plane hit. I will never forget that moment.
 
I was at work in Philadelphia. We all gathered around the TV after the 1st plane hit, and saw the second hit live. Our company had offices in the WTC (we lost almost 300 people) and I remember people coming around to make sure we were all accounted for and not in NY on business. I lived in a high rise with a view of Center City and I was petrified that night looking out at the buildings and being up that high.
 
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I had just started my first year of homeschooling the kids. I was sitting in my dining room doing a math lesson when my mil who lived in Long Island called, told me the news, told me that none of the family was currently in the city and was safe. I was so thankful she’d gotten in that call as the cells became overtaxed and we couldn’t get in contact for a while. I was so thankful my kids were already home. I was thankful hubby’s company sent people home. I sent the younger kids down the basement and told the fourth grader to play videos for them them and then turned on the tv shortly before the first tower fell and watched it with the eldest in horror. Eventually, I figured out enoughof the gist of what was happening to tell the kids and say a quick prayer and then send them back downstairs with the toys and videos… It was too much for me and I didn’t need them seeing all of it.
 
My best friend’s mom had a ticket for that first plane. She was supposed to be on it. She canceled at the last second.
 
catholic03 said:
Is it just me or do huge numbers of Americans have connections to 9/11?
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There were a huge number of people working in the buildings that were hit and/or responding to the disasters, and an even huger number of people working or living in the vicinity of the disasters so they saw what happened first hand or had to find their way home in the ruckus that was going on. It’s not surprising that a lot of us would know people who were killed, maimed, narrowly escaped, or were otherwise affected.

I personally know, from all different social circles unrelated to each other, one guy who died in the South Tower, one guy who narrowly escaped out of WTC7, one lady who was trapped for an hour or more in the subway one stop from being under the WTC when it hit, a boatload of people who, like me, were at their DC offices including a bunch who could see the Pentagon burning from their building, and one guy from Ohio who happened to be visiting NYC for work or something and saw the second plane hit with his own eyes.
 
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Very interesting. I suppose the worst disasters we had in NZ both happened in the last 10 years. The huge earthquake in Christchurch killed around 150 people and the mosque shooting killed 51 people earlier this year.

But nothing like 9/11.
 
My workplace, a Federal Government facility, had an assembly the morning of 9/11. Instead of our planned agenda, we watched the news coverage on our conference room’s giant screen. We were sent home early that day.
 
It is hard to believe that those born on the day of the 9/11 attacks are now old enough to vote and buy tobacco. 😮
 
I had just gotten off work and had stopped at the local supermarket. They were playing a local radio station and announced that a plane at crashed into one of the towers. I, and others, thought it to be a small aircraft accident.
When I got home I flipped on the TV just in time to see the 2nd plane hit, then I heard the news about the Pentagon and the plane crashing in Penn. The plane had struck in the area where my wife had worked a few years before.
I did not know anyone at the trade center, but I did at the Pentagon. One of them was severely burned, but survived although he still very scarred.

The shock to the nation and world reminded me of the day JFK was murdered. I remember that too.
 
I was 4 about to become 5. My mom was dropping me off at preschool when it happened. I had no memory of that day since I was a late toddler, but it still breaks my heart learning about it from years to come.
 
In an office building. Shortly after, we watched train cars of military equipment pass to a nearby port–almost daily.

Whether or not the response was proportionate is a different question.
 
I was working at a bank at the time. I had gone to morning Mass, and then to the bank to open up (as I was the first one there that day). I sat down at my computer and checked email and saw an email from the bank VP saying that in light of the morning’s events, we should review our security protocols. I just shrugged it off thinking another bank in town got held up or something.

Then the assistant manager came in and frantically said to turn on the TV because a plane just flew into the World Trade Center. I thought she was joking. We turned on the TV just as the 2nd plane hit.

We couldn’t exactly close and go home, but it was hard to go on with business as usual. I actually had to call my insurance company that day as I was in my 1st and only car accident the day before. After 9/11, though, it definitely put that whole inconvenience into perspective.
 
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