What were you doing on 9/11/01?

The Australian ^ | September 09 2003

[knighthawk]

Ping

[stainlessbanner]

I got hooked on FR that day. Breaking news kept me informed when the other outlets were jammed.

[Alberta's Child]

I was watching an exceptionally large number of U.S. airliners land in Calgary.

[small_l_libertarian]

I was at work. My sweetie called to tell us to turn on the TV. Just as we all made it into the conference room to watch the news, the second plane hit. We were all stunned. We all watched, horrified, as the towers came down. All we did was watch the news for the rest of the day.

[Lunatic Fringe]

I was working as a network administrator. I usually have my radio tuned to the morning news, but that morning I was monitoring traffic to our website, trying to isolate an issue we were having.

At any given time, we have 300-400 connections to our website. As I watched the graph of current users, I was stunned to see it drop from 325 users all the way down to 10 users in the span of a few minutes. I thought one of our T1 lines may have dropped.

As a feverishly tried some basic connectivity tests, I determined nothing was wrong with our connection. that's when the phone rang and my girlfriend asked me "Can you believe this?" Confused, I listened to the radio in her car over the garbled cell phone connection and my heart sank as I heard the words "A second plane has crashed into the World Trade Center, in what is now obviously a coordinated terrorist attack."

[B Knotts]

I was driving to work, listening to Bob Dornan.

[SF Republican]

My newborn daughter (the precious little Juliette) was brought home from the hospital two days earlier and we had been awake often thorough the night and about 6 am I decided to stay up and switched on the bathroom radio to what would be one of the worst day of our lives.

[dead]

I had just brought my newborn daughter home from the hospital that day, when my brother called to tell me to turn on the TV.

Spent the rest of the day trying to get news about two of my other brother, sister, and sister-in-law who all worked downtown. My sister-in-law worked in WTC7 and I didn't find out she was OK until the afternoon.

I expected to find out some friends died, but I was lucky. All my close friends got out of the area OK. One friend got a nasty hole in his back from debris in the collapse, but he's fine.

I found out later that a few former coworkers of mine were killed. I worked with them at Marsh & McLennan in midtown. After I left the company, they moved the department to the WTC, up around the 90th floor. I don't know how they died, I just hope it was quick. And I definitely hope they didn't have to jump.

[finnman69]

I was 2-1/2 miles North of the WTC. I walked around a corner on 28th and 6th avenue and noticed a crowd staring South. I saw people listening intently to radios and heard something about a bomb at the WTC. I thought it was a radio goof until I looked south at 8:50am and saw the huge smoking gash at the top of the North Tower. Unbelievable.

Shortly after that I saw the bright orange fireball of the second plane impact. Later I saw through binoculars, debris falling. Then I realized it was not debris but people flailing on the way down, at which point I turned white. Soon I was watching the towers fall and the huge dust cloud coming from down town.

The most vivid image I remember was when the second tower fell the outer structure and floors fell leaving behind what had to be 40 stories of the inner core, columns and pipes standing up for 5-10 seconds before it fell. It looked like some bizarre stalagmite and I thought, OMG, someone might be in that remaining portion all of a sudden exposed to the world around them, knowing the end was just about to come.

[Johnny Gage]

I had just got to the office, and heard it on the radio, nearly at the same time, my wife called to say that something had crashed/exploded on the first tower.

We turned on a TV, and saw the second plane hit.

And when the towers collapsed, I just sat there, unable to move or talk, thinking about all of the people in the buildings, as well as my fellow firefighters going in to rescue people who just died...all in one instant.
(I am a paid on-call Firefighter)

I felt like Obi-Wan when Alderrann (sp) was destroyed.
It felt like there was a "major disturbance in the force, voices crying out all at once, then nothing."

It still staggers my mind to think about that day

Let's Roll!

[warchild9]

I was at work. We set up a television in the common room, and stood around stunned all day. All I could think of was my brother-in-law, who often works with clients in the WTC, and another close friend who works just six blocks away from there. (They're both safe and sound.)

[ctlpdad]

Happy 2nd birthday to your daughter.

I was working in downtown Boston in the shadow of the Prudential center, one of the highest buildings in the city. my crew was on coffee break when we heard the news of the first. they turned on the tv, and we all saw the second live.

As we were doing heavy construction, and about to lift a huge rebar cage, we decided it was safest for us to hold off, because of the fear of another strike in boston, and the fact that NOBODY could think about work.

My sister was working in NYC, and I didn't find out she was OK until she walked home at 9 that night. She saw the second strike from the bus she was on.

My other sister worked for merrill lynch right near ground zero, but had been tranferred a couple months earlier.

One of the guys I work with, Henry, was in Italy on a well deserved vacation when he heard the news. He lost his oldest daughter at the wtc.

[knighthawk]

I was at work. Some one told me a plane crashed into the WTC, nothing more was known at that time.

I thought it was a small aircraft or so. But then I heard another one crahed into the other tower, an airliner.

I shouted that Bin Laden was behind it, helped by the ISI. I just knew it, he wanted to do it, and had the money and crazy followers to stage it.

When I returned home my mother said one tower just collapsed. I watched in unbelieve.

That evening I browsed the net and watched the news on tv.
(That's when I discovered the FR).

[gdani]

I stood in Union Square in Manhattan with about 20 others -- later hundreds -- watching the twin towers burn & hoping that my wife - who worked directly across the street - made it to safety.

After much effort, she made it out of her building & walked the 40 blocks north to my office -- but not before looking out her office window to see people jumping.

I had also spent some of that time darting between Union Square & an electronics store across the street to watch the TVs. When the 1st tower fell, people started freaking out in the store which I'll never forget (among everything else that day)

[SF Republican]

My newborn daughter (the precious little Juliette) was brought home from the hospital two days earlier and we had been awake often thorough the night and about 6 am I decided to stay up and switched on the bathroom radio to what would be one of the worst day of our lives.

[BrooklynGOP]

I was at home sleeping (was unemployed back then), when my friend called and woke me up and told me to turn the tv on. Then I spent most of the day on the phone trying to get in touch with my parents (both who work within blocks of WTC) and brother.

[Congressman Billybob]

On 11 September, 2001, my wife and I were on the first day of our honeymoon, in Las Vegas. I got up early that morning to call my banker in North Carolina to handle some details, and she told me, with horror in her voice, "Turn on your television."

We turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hitting the second tower. I said to Kem, "This means war." She agreed.

I had promised her not to bring a laptop on our honeymoon, and not to touch the Internet that week. Instead, with her permission, I got on the Net and got involved, writing and posting an article on "The Law of War." It was almost a week before we could get out of Las Vegas and come home. (Suffice to say, I now owe my wife a real honeymoon, a debt I will pay.)

I've read many stories of the reactions of ordinary people to the news by radio of reports from Pearl Harbor on 7 December. This event was very much the same, except it was even more horrible because we could actually see it, in real time. Most Americans had, I think, much the same reaction then as now -- that our nation was now committed to war, with an unknown duration, and unknown time, but a known outcome -- the defeat of our enemies.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column, "Paying the Wrong Piper," discussion thread on FR. Article may also be on ChronWatch and UPI.

[Publius]

I was on board Amtrak's Coast Starlight which was just entering the San Francisco Bay area. I was scheduled to attend a summit meeting of rail advocacy organizations from Washington, Oregon and California to discuss (what I felt was) the inevitable end of Amtrak.

The meeting was cancelled because the California personnel were all at their emergency stations. One of the Washington delegates was falling apart because he had just lost friends in the WTC collapse. I spent the day watching CNN in my motel room.

But thanks to Amtrak, I wasn't stranded in the Bay Area for a week. The next evening, I took the Coast Starlight back to Seattle. We were 10 hours late due to terror scares and dispatching problems with the Union Pacific, but after a few drinks in the Pacific Parlor Car (a renovated 1955 Santa Fe bar car), I didn't care.

[ravingnutter]

I woke up ill that morning and called in sick. Hubby called me from work and told me to turn on the TV. All I could do at first was keep repeating "Oh My God" and crying. I then composed myself and called my co-worker at the Air Force base who is in charge of base security, I was shocked that they did not already know. Once they were notified, I called relatives to make sure they were aware of the attack. I spent the rest of the day watching the coverage, although the coverage within the first few hours was the most shocking, as the cameras were just rolling, they edited the film for later broadcasts.