[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[facedown]

As Tuesday is trash day, I was collecting trash, bottles, cans etc. to put out at the curb. As always I had the tv on in the background. A bit belatedly the news of the first tower came on Fox News. At that time they were saying that they thought a small private airplane had lost it's course and crashed into the tower. I was very doubtful based on the size of the whole in the side of the building.

I immediately called my wife who, along with her cohorts, was cubicle-bound at a large corporation. As I was describing what was going on the second plane hit right before my eyes. It was then clear that this was no accident and there would probably be more.

As FR, and the rest of the internet for that matter, had melted down, for the rest of that morning I was the eyes and ears for my wife and her coworkers. The Pentagon, the crash in Pennsylvania, the collapse of one and then the other tower...

What a terrible day.

[montag813]

On September 11, I was tired after spending a day working on the outskirts of the Holy City of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

That city is "holy" only to worshippers of Satan. The day when Israeli jets turn it to ashes will be a day long remembered in glory.

[ChynaMdsn]

Was standing in the lobby at work watching everything unfold. One of the Korean managers said "get back to your desk, this doesn't concern you". Can't post my further response to that.

[Made In The USA]

We can not forget where we were that day, the shock, what we felt, and how we felt as we better understood the source of the terrorism. As painful as it can be, I'd encourage everyone to watch at least one of the 9-11 documentaries showing this week to relive the horror. We need to remain just as angry, just as shocked, and just as focused on justice as we were on 9-11.

[KevinDavis]

I first about it when I was on the way to work. I was listening to Mancow. I knew what it was a terrorist attack. My first reaction that there was going to be martial law. When I go to work, a lot of meetings was cancelled, nobody was working that day.