Posted on 09/10/2019 5:59:52 PM PDT by luvie
Howdy, Kathy! (((hugs)))
Thanks for the ping-a-ling. I’ll bet everything came to a standstill for y’all, since not much traveling could be accomplished.
*snork*
After I had rushed back to my room, my wife and I just stared at the TV for a couple of hours... When the 3rd plane arrived and slammed the Pentagon my wife and I began to panic since our daughter and son-in-law both work just across the river one block from the White House... Then the rumors of a 4th plane possibly headed for the WH caused the wife to get sort of hysterical....
We could see the airport from our room... Needles to say it was dead quiet except for an occasional plane landing... I decided to drive (rental car) back to Las Vegas and figure things out from there... Our goal was to get to Pahrump and stay put until we could figure out what to do next... Pahrump was chosen as a place way out in the desert far away from potential city targets... When we finally were able to get through to sons and daughter, all kinds of evacuation plans were made and discarded...
After two days, we moved back to the Bellagio where we remained for the next 6-days before starting the long drive back to MD...
I was working as security for General Dynamics then, across GW Parkway from Fort Meade & NSA Hq. Someone came from a meeting and told me about the 1st aircraft. Didn’t think much of it.
Went upstairs to watch TV after the 2nd aircraft hit, and stayed to watch the first building fall. A few minutes after the Pentagon was hit, NSA director ordered all NSA evacuated, plus all contractors.
I was the last one out of our secure area. By that time the west road leading over the pkwy out of Fort Meade, which was also the access road to my building, was jammed.
I waited an hour before leaving my parking lot, but still took 90 minutes to drive 20 miles home.
That had to have been a very stressful day for you.....as for the rest of America. I can’t imagine waiting to hear if people I know had been murdered by terrorists.
Mecca and Medina - probably Tehran and a dozen other Iranian cities as well.
Work, bldg 52, hallway TV.
It was a horrible day and a day filled with small deeds that meant a lot. Those towels were everything to the ones covered with dust and heaven knows what else.
On the trip back home on Amtrak, there was a terrorism scare in Utah that turned out to be nothing more than an Amtrak engineer blowing by a red block signal. All Amtrak long distance trains were shunted onto the nearest siding until the mess in Utah was straightened out. We spent five hours on a siding on the Union Pacific route in the mountains near Dunsmuir (CA) going nowhere.
I’m surprised they didn’t make you “shelter in place”. What a nightmare of a drive that must have been!
Such a freaky day! But....I had to laugh at the thought of you yelling at the innocent little kittehs. They must have thought you’d lost your mind! LOL!
Ugh. What “fun” that must have been! I’m glad it was not a real threat however. I can remember that when the rail system was down, the country was down.
I was in the shower when I heard my husband shouted ‘oh, my God, you have to see this’. As with everyone, I was devastated by the terrorist attack. I flew my flag, day and night (through the night with the light from above). I went through 5 flags waiting for OBL to be captured. Then I just stopped. I am still not sure he was killed in Pakistan. I always sort of figured he had been killed earlier, they just wouldn’t probably let us know that.
With an aircraft and known bad guys unaccounted for, it was feared the NSA high-rise buildings might be a target. I worked close enough to one such bldg for it to hit us if it tipped over. So dirnsa ordered all contractors in the area to bug out.
It was comforting when the fighter aircraft started flying over.
Where was I? At work. Doing something that suddenly became unimportant, and the entire focus of my work changed that instant.
Thank you!
What a trip that turned out to be. I fear that I would have panicked, too, if I had been out of my comfort zone and had someone I loved so close to where it all happened!
I was enroute to my home airport in Texas. The control tower cleared us to land, then instructed us to taxi to our hangar and shut down. Well, duh. That’s what we always do. Then I walked into the offices at our hangar and everyone was crowded around a wall mounted television in the lobby. After about forty-five minutes, the local police department came to our hangar and told us to leave. We were to gather any belongings immediately and exit the building. In my mind, I still have the image of that police officer in my rear view mirror as he locked the gate behind us as we vacated our hangar for about the next five days. Then for months we had Texas National Guard in full combat gear patrolling our airport.
About two weeks after that, a lady FBI agent (who I knew socially) came and wanted to go over all our employee records for any foreign nationals.
Say, does anyone remember who said they needed to take a shower, before everything settled down? She, I think, wanted to take a shower and asked to be informed of what was happening after she got back to her computer.
That was a running joke on FR for ten years. I still see it sometimes.
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