9/11 - ten years after

[Race Radio]

I remember hearing the first report on the radio as I headed out for an early ride with some friends. By the time I returned the towers were down and everyone was struggling to figure it out.

My business partner's mother was on the plane from Boston, flying out for his wedding. Another friend, Ed Murphy, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and was in the towers when they collapse. Still can't remove his email address in my address book, see it once a week.

 

[zapata]

I was at home when a friend rang my doorbell and asked if he could come in and watch my TV, because there had been an accident in New York. When we turned on the TV only the first plane had crashed, so we thought it was just a horrible accident, and then we saw the second plane hit, and were dumbstruck. It just seemed absurd, we couldn't believe that it was happening, that someone actually did it on purpose. It was a beautiful day, so we went out to get some beers, which were drunk mostly in silence. Seems like yesterday, can't believe it's ten years already.

 

[usedtobefast]

i was on my rollers at home watching CNN as usual. it was just strange to see.
my sister in law worked across Hudson Bay and saw it live. nobody expected those buildings would fall.

a sad day.

 

[Anonymous]

Turned on the tv to see the first tower in flames, and watched as the second plane hit, then didnt turn it off all day. much like everybody.

 

[LugHugger]

At my desk in the office. Shortly after lunchtime somebody said that they had heard on the radio on the way back to the office that a light aircraft had collided with one of the towers. Checked the BBC site on the internet to find the real story being updated.

My best friend was living in Edgewater NJ at the time and flitting between his office in Avenue of the Americas and a DC in upstate NJ. Spent the rest of the day trying to contact him by phone and email with no joy. Left the office at 1500 UK time to call around our friends and see whether any body else had heard from him. Of course, mobile networks were down and all lines were being diverted to the emergency services. I finally heard from him around midnight.

A friend called around and we watched the news updates until the early hours of the morning when the call came from my buddy. I remember not wanting to be alone until he called. One of the weirdest, scary days of my life.

 

[Spare Tyre]

It happened at about 11pm Melbourne time, and I was getting ready for bed, so I didn't learn about it until the next day.

Driving to work, listening to a usually cheery and light-hearted breakfast radio program, I was surprised to hear sombre tones and phrases like, "The world will never be the same." At some point there must have been a news update which gave me the bare bones of what had happened, but it wasn't until I got to work and spoke with colleagues who had seen TV footage that I understood what had taken place. And it wasn't until I saw TV footage myself that night that I really felt the uncomprehending shock of it all.

 

[ImmaculateKadence]

I was teaching a World History class, and experienced the same thing. We just kind of roamed around most of the day talking amongst ourselves and with the students. I still remember the sound of my principal's voice when he came over the intercom and said that all teachers should stop what they were doing and turn on the television...

That is exactly what happened at my school. The first time we left those rooms was for lunch, then most students sought out friends or favorite teachers and stuck with them throughout the day; many even left. Nobody was where they were supposed to be. I went to my favorite teacher's room with some friends and stayed there the rest of the day watching the news and trying to totally understand what happened.

 

[Amsterhammer]

Thanks to all for your personal memories and for ensuring that this topic didn't degenerate....I'd like to draw your attention to a little known but very moving 9/11 tribute by New Yorker, Dana Fuchs, a very lovely and talented lady whom I am lucky enough to know as a friend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBvWSmQVdzE

 

[Martin318is]

Was watching the late news (10:30pm) on channel 10 (Melbourne, Australia) and Sandra Sulley was just about to cross to the nightly sports programme when suddenly the feed changed and a graphic appeared on screen of the first tower and smoke billowing out. Sandra was haltingly speaking about what was known at the time (clearly being fed info directly via earpiece rather than reading typed script.)

My girlfriend at the time was in the air flying from Melbourne to London and had been due to land in Singapore around then. I initially had no idea where the building was because it was a close up of one of the towers and looked like an average sized building.

Then Sandra said that reports said that a large plane had crashed into the tower and the camera pulled back to show New York. My housemate and I were just sitting there in silence stunned and watched live when the second plane arrived.

All through this, Sandra Sulley kept feeding information and doing an amazingly professional job. My friend and I often talk about the fact that we were so stunned we couldn't speak whereas Sandra was able to keep it together for so long. (She was supposed to finish in 5minutes and instead was still on air several hours later and well into the Australian AM) eery new piece of information was more horrific than the last.

The US had an embassy building about 500m from our apartment and so the next morning after being up all night watching events evolve, we went out and there were already queues of people leaving flowers and signing an condolence book. I remember signing that book and I still remember what I wrote.

 

[ImmaculateKadence]

Thanks to all for your personal memories and for ensuring that this topic didn't degenerate....

Thank you for starting the thread. I've always known 9/11 was felt internationally, but didn't really know how it actually impacted people outside the US, so it's interesting to read what others were doing around the world.

 

[ChrisE]

I was at work in downtown Houston. My wife was not at work that day because our daughter was sick. A friend called me freaking out and told me he was watching the first building on TV and a plane hit the second building. He saw it live. I could not get on the internet by then so I couldn't really tell what was going on except what he told me. I called my wife and they were watching cartoons and I told her to change to CNN or something. She called back when the plane hit the Pentagon and told me she thought I should get out of the building, so I left and drove home. As I was pulling into my driveway I was listening to the news station on my radio and they reported real time when the first building fell. Until I got into the house and could see what was going on did I realize why they fell. I will never forget that day.

FYI, no conspiracy theories about why they fell.

 

[mewmewmew13]

I was home in Boulder, Colorado.
I was getting my oldest son ready for school , he was 6, and he was watching something on tv. My husband said come here and look. I remember how eerie it was, a plane was hitting the first building and there was smoke...while we watched the second was hit. We were just fairly silent and in shock --didn't want to upset our little guy.
I went to drop him off and remember the look on his teacher's face--thinking how horribly hard her day would be trying to teach first graders and appear as if nothing was so terribly wrong. I still don't know how she did it.

As I was driving to pick up my morning coffee at the local barista, my husband called my phone and said the buildings had collapsed...and maybe I should come back home. The schools were the safest place for the kids to be at the moment in lockdown. I walked into the coffee shop and normally a loud and chaotic place--just silence and everyone looking at each other in total disbelief. We just moved through our routines as if robots.

After that I spent the day glued to CNN. I couldn't move away. That night as we lay in bed we heard the fighter jets flying overhead...all other air traffic was grounded. It was the most unreal feeling I can remember.
We were being attacked and violence had come to our land....we had been so used to war on foreign soil and here it was our turn.

 

[Alpe d'Huez]

Woke up on west coast, logged on to computer, saw on the old Excite news portal site the info and thought it was some sort of hoax, that the site had been hacked (recall that MafiaBoy had hacked into some big sites a year before this). So I clicked on some other, bigger sites, likes USA Today. By then the second tower had just fallen and I turned on the TV and was mesmerized in horror, like everyone else.

The other thing I remember is that I got to work and my then employer was rather unsympathetic and didn't let anyone leave work unless you knew someone in NYC that may have been in the area.

In 2003 I went to ground zero, I just had to see it. By then they had cleared nearly all the debris out, but there was still a huge pit of nothing. It was eerie how quiet everyone was in such a normally busy place. I haven't been back since and don't want to go until the Memorial and Freedom tower are finished.

 

[on3m@n@rmy]

8:46 a.m. Eastern Standard Time when the first plane struck. On the Pacific Coast where I live it was 5:46 a.m. PST when the first plane hit. I was just heading out the door to go to work. Arrived at work at about 7:00, did the usual frantic morning ritual and by 8:00 was settling into the planned activities for the day when I overheard what was going on from people in cubicles (offices separated by 5.5 foot tall foam walls, or fake walls) around me. All kinds of feelings went through my head... disbelief, shock, wanting to sign up for the military, retracting that thought after thinking about my wife and 2 kids, feeling sorry for affected ones. I carried on the rest of the work day as best I could. By the time I got home we started seeing coverage of the heroes of 9/11, such as the FDNY. This week, the networks have been airing stories about the heroes of 9/11, many of whom gave their life to save others who were for one reason or another stuck on the floors just below where the first plane struck. They saved many lives only to lose their own.

 

[auscyclefan94]

It is still scary to watch imo.

 

[craig1985]

TBH I was actually asleep when it happened and had NFI what happened when I woke up and saw the TV and thought 'WTF has happened'.

 

[thrawn]

Was listening to the radio before going to bed at about 11pm. Heard reports that a small plane had hit the WTC. Thought it was odd at the time, but went to bed. I was woken up by my parents at about 5:30am the next morning to get up and watch the TV to see what had really happened.

I went to school that day and there was an assembly/service to talk about what happened. After that the teachers pretty much just showed us the tv all day.

 

[ramjambunath]

I remeber that day, there was a mass power outage in Hyderabad that day and around 6 or 7 in the evening the phone rang, soon as the electricity was back (around 9) I watched it on the tele, it was shocking and was absolutely sickened.

I'd witnessed the 26th November shootouts in Mumbai live, as I was staying near the region and still remains one of the most harrowing experiences in my life.

Unfortunately, though the repercussions of the incident(the wars), the political tensions around here and new found alignments has intensified terror activities in the subcontinent (both the Eastern regions like Assam and the rest of the India and Pakstan) to such a level that hardly a year goes by without two major terrorist attacks. Just a few days ago there was a blast outside the Delhi high court.

Why cant I write the full name of Pak? I'm hardly swearing.

 

[irongrl]

And I will never forget crying like a baby watching this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YogxCAWXsLs&feature=related

I remembered how moved I was that people in another country could be so understanding of the gravity of what happened, and so generous in their recognition of the pain everyone felt. It was more moving to me than anything anyone here said or did for some reason.

Thank you for posting that. I remember how moving it was too.

 

[irongrl]

It is still scary to watch imo.

It is still scary to watch imo.

Yes, it is.

I was in New Jersey for a meeting at the office of my employer at the time. We were about 80 miles from New York. I had flown in on September 10. Our meeting started at 8:30 in the morning and was soon interrupted by the news. A TV in the meeting room was turned on in time for us to witness the 2nd plane hit. Then we heard that the Pentagon was hit. No one knew what was happening, at first we didn't know the planes were hijacked. I thought we were being attacked and that more planes were coming. The news was sketchy in the first hour or so and there were many rumours going around.
I remember being very calm, in shock I think. One woman in the meeting started screaming as she had a friend that worked in the WTC.
Our meeting was cancelled and we spent the day watching the news and calling our families. All of the government offices and schools closed early in that area (Philadelphia) and some buildings were evacuated. I stayed up all night in my hotel, with the TV on watching the news. I also found a station that had Vuelta coverage, but I couldn't really focus on that.

Since air travel had been stopped, I had to find a ride back home.
I was able to get a ride as far as St.Louis, then I took a Greyhound bus home. (I lived in Iowa at the time).

Things that stand out in my memory-

The weather was so nice that day
The emotions of the people reporting-especially when the 2nd plane hit while on the air
The first responders running into the WTC
How eery it was on the drive home, that there were no planes in the air


After I got home, I couldn't watch the news coverage, it was too much to bear. A couple of years ago I decided I needed to do that so I found an online archive with all of that days coverage. Over a period of a few days I watched the coverage from all of the stations.

 

[usedtobefast]

it really was strange with no air traffic for a week i live under the John Wayne
flight path and it was, as stated, eery. i was a rep for a large guitar company at that time and had a very good day sales wise. folks were saying if this is it, i want to go out singing and playing music.

 

[L'arriviste]

it really was strange with no air traffic for a week i live under the John Wayne
flight path and it was, as stated, eery. i was a rep for a large guitar company at that time and had a very good day sales wise. folks were saying if this is it, i want to go out singing and playing music.

Such a sombre thread to learn of the otherwise hilarious fact that there exists an airport named after John Wayne!

I do appreciate the flight path thing though. When that unspellable Icelandic volcano grounded all the flights here in northern Europe, I remember hiking the rolling green plains south of Leuven, which are right under the run-in to Zaventem (now the politically-correct "Brussels International"). The silence was truly deafening!

 

[Amsterhammer]

I do appreciate the flight path thing though. When that unspellable Icelandic volcano grounded all the flights here in northern Europe, I remember hiking the rolling green plains south of Leuven, which are right under the run-in to Zaventem (now the politically-correct "Brussels International"). The silence was truly deafening!

Briefly OT - I was on one of the last planes out of Schiphol on that very day! Shortly after I left towards Philly, everything got shut down. Of course, I didn't know that till I got to the US. The captain announced that because of the ash cloud we wouldn't be flying the usual northern route, but would be heading towards Paris, then across from there. Strangely, flight time was exactly the same.

My other two abiding memories of 9/11 are CNN and other news stations broadcasting uninterrupted 24/7 for at least three days - not a commercial to be seen.

The day after, my wife and I walked the 10 minutes down to the US Consulate, where lots of flowers and cards had been stuck in the fence. We stood there quietly, tears rolling, when I noticed a young girl in her early 20's standing nearby and crying alone. I walked towards her, arms outspread, and without a word, two complete strangers hugged and cried together

 

[mewmewmew13]

Such a sombre thread to learn of the otherwise hilarious fact that there exists an airport named after John Wayne!

I do appreciate the flight path thing though. When that unspellable Icelandic volcano grounded all the flights here in northern Europe, I remember hiking the rolling green plains south of Leuven, which are right under the run-in to Zaventem (now the politically-correct "Brussels International"). The silence was truly deafening!

It's a great small airport! AND there is a terrific bronze statue of 'the Duke' in the center.
(I fly through there often...it is only 15 min from one of my brothers house.)

Yes, the eerie feeling of no flights across the country was one of the strangest 'war-time' feeling I've ever had... As a country we have been so fortunate.
only the sounds of fighter jets protecting us that night.

 

[irongrl]

The day after, my wife and I walked the 10 minutes down to the US Consulate, where lots of flowers and cards had been stuck in the fence. We stood there quietly, tears rolling, when I noticed a young girl in her early 20's standing nearby and crying alone. I walked towards her, arms outspread, and without a word, two complete strangers hugged and cried together

Thank you so much for sharing that.