Where were you when you heard?
What did you do?
How has it affected you?
(Rest in peace, Robert)
Dates
· UTC
11 September 2001
Archived15 replies · 840 views
This is an archived legacy thread. Replies are closed, but the discussion is preserved.
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16 posts
I was driving home from work...guy on the radio said a plane had flown into the WTC..of course, I was assuming he meant something small...like a cessna or whatnot...raced home to turn on CNN, and got there a couple of minutes before the second plane hit...
certainly one of those days that you will always remember where you...Space Shuttle explosion is another one for me...I don't know if that one touched non-US citizens as much as WTC...
I had just gotten settle at my desk at work, I was going to the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee when I pass one of my co-workers. She had the look on her face. I asked what was wrong thinking something was going on with her personally, totally not expecting what I was going to see next. She said go to the conference room immediatly. Everyone was gathered around the room watching the TV. As I walk in I saw the second pland hit. It seriously seem like a movie at that moment. I think it affected me as much as everyone else in the country. I just felt so cold I didn't know what to think of the sitiuation. Right now I am just hoping our leaders try to be smart about handling this situation. I've haven't been too please with Bush in the last few weeks.
Embarrassingly enough I was playing on Microsoft Flight Simulator at the time. I didn't really get the full impact, so to speak, until the next morning and I saw all the newspapers.
It's made me even more paranoid than I was before.
I was checking on a job site when my dad called me to see if I'd seen the plane crash into the WTC. Like Jeff, my first thought was that of a private plane doing the crashing.....not an airliner full of innocent (except for the black hearted, murderous terrorist) souls.
I ran back to my truck to drive home and get in front of a television. As I was driving, news of the attack on the Pentagon came down. Then the second WTC attack. Then the plane that went down in the field in Pennsylvania. On that plane were the real martyrs. Those four men will be the ones sitting at the right hand of the Father.
Then the towers started coming down. My God. All those firemen, police, EMS, moms, dads, children, husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriedns, grandparents, coworkers......friends.
The pain and fear that was able to be caused by a handful of misguided, weak minded zealots is almost beyond comprehension.
In a small way, I now have empathy for those that live in Northern Ireland and Isreal. How do they cope on a daily basis? How does Isreal show such retraint in the face of constant attacks on it's people, it's sovereignty, it's right to exist? How does the average Green or Orange family living in Northern Ireland, who only wants to live in peace and worship as they see fit, deal with "the Troubles"?
It's a messy, messy time to be alive in this world.
At work, and we've got Reuters terminals everywhere so was pretty much up to speed as soon as the thing happened and watched the entire thing unfold. Funnily enough, the day before we'd been expecting markets to crash big time, but things had levelled off okay. And then Tuesday happened...
Only real shock was that my Mum phoned to say my sister was okay - my sister was in New York, unbeknown to me, and is an air hostess. She saw the 2nd plane hit from the 30th floor of the McArthur(? I think) hotel - obviously everyone was drawn to their windows after the first plane hit assuming it was an accident. My sister then queued for 3hrs to give blood, only to be refused because of ... foot and mouth. Only in America. She also crewed on the first BA flight out of New York maybe five/six days later and said the entire journey was hellish, with tensions running very high.
Someone in the office got a phone call about the tragedy after the first plane hit & for the next few hours pretty much everyone was camped in the staff room watching the news bulletins. Our Managing Director had worked in the WTC a few years previously and told us the following day how he had been on the phone all through the night making contact with friends & colleagues from his time in NY. Some of them hadn't made it.
As Shug described perfectly, the next few weeks were very unsettling with intense media focus on what had happened.My office is only 100 metres from the US Embassy in London so the Police presence was huge which was a constant reminder to what had happened. There are still road blocks near the Embassy & after the recent arrest of the terrorist in Sweden the Police profile has stepped up noticably again.
Everyone in the Office joined the US Embassy workers for the 2 mins silence outside the front of their building and under the gaze of the President Eisenhower statue. For 2 minutes central London stood still. No taxi horns, no buses, no police cars, no street trader shouts, no mobile phones, no nothing. Just the wind blowing through the trees. It was the eeriest moment I can ever remember, but also a very moving one.
From a personal perspective, there were vivid memories of the WTC. I'd paid the Twin Towers a visit on 11th August, 1 month before hand to the day, & admired the amazing views from the observation deck. This was part of an extended trip to see NO play the Area:One shows. I could clearly recall the guy who worked in the lift/elevator who took us up to the top floor. He had a little speech prepared that told us lots of stuff about the building and was incredibly well rehearsed. He barely paused for breath during his talk & finished a mere fraction of a second before the lift pinged to tell us we'd reached our destination. The whole lift burst into applause for the guy. I hope he made it.
It was very early out here on the West Coast, and as Tuesday is a freight receiving day, I was there at 5:30 in the morning waiting for the first truck to arrive ( we hadn't turned the warehouse radio on yet).
The driver pulls in about 5:45 and wants to know why we aren't listening to the news. What news?, we ask. A plane has hit the WTC. Well, we figured that it surely must've been a small plane that had mechanical problems. We then tuned in to the radio, and look for the network radio affilitates of either ABC, NBC, or CBS for some more information. They had nothing at that point, and the first report about anything that we heard was on the Howard Stern show, so we kept the dial there and listened to him and his staff provide information about what was going on in NY (by that time the second plane had hit, and it was clear that something was dangerously amiss), and then when the rumours started swirling about how many planes were hijacked and where were they going, etc., Howard did an excellent job in reporting and commenting on the news.
Unfortunately, even though it was a time of a great national tragedy, there was still some work to be done, so it was with very heavy hearts that we resumed our tasks, with one ear always on the radio for the latest developments.
Nobody I know was personally affected, the closest report I got was from my uncle Ron's mom, who lived across the river in New Jersey. The event has made me keenly aware of how blessed I am, and not to worry about my comparative trifles of problems, for here once again was madness of a ghastly nature.
i was in bed at the time as i was on nights that week, i woke up and went to the bathroom, my wife who was off work at the time heard me and shouted me to come downstairs , at this point the first plane had just hit the tower and nobody had realised exactly what was happening.... i was still half asleep and trying to come round, then next thing the second plane hit... after that it was just sheer disbelief at what was happening at the time we (like many others )said that if it was the storyline to a film you would have said it was too farfetched
I was in Biology class when the attacks happened, we had no clue because no one came by to say anything. I got online, but didn't notice anything about the attacks. When I got to my history class, the teacher said, "Well, as you've probably heard, the WTC is gone, two planes crashed into it and leveled it. One has flown into the Pentagon...". I'll never forget how I thought, "Man, she's just messing with us." We had been assigned to write about two historical events in the form of a newspaper article a few weeks earlier, and the first thought I had was "She's just saying this to show how to go about it, if something like that actually happened. Right?" Oh, if only I had been...
It's affected me in that I fear for the course our nation has taken in the past year. It seems that the tolerance and goodwill we once had has been replaced by fear of the unknown and a willingness to sacrifice our rights as citizens in order to protect our "security". If we close ourselves off from the world, are we really any more secure? I'm also angry at relgious fanatics of any ilk using the name of God to justify their own moral crusade, and I feel in my heart of hearts that no such zealots have a place in the heavenly afterworld they aspire to reach if they abuse others in the name of God. America may survive, but we may be the worse for wear....
i was in politics class when the trade towers hit, and no one was aware when it happened. in fact, our teacher gave us this assignment to watch canadian and american news and compare and contrast how they report politics. little did she know we couldn't escape the tv news even if we wanted to.
i was at school, eating lunch around 12:30 when i heard about it. i was eating and my friends were busy finishing homework. one of the teachers on lunch duty came to our table and told us that the pentagon and world trade towers were bombed. at the time, we really didn't really take it seriously, cuz we were too busy finishing homework. i didn't know what the trade towers were, i imagined them to be a bunch of bridges from the sound of the name. so i was more interested in the pentagon, cuz i knew what that was. the teacher told me that they were more concerned over the trade towers in new york since there was so many people killed. that didn't make sense to me cuz i thought it was just a bridge and it didn't seem fatal to me. silly me, huh?
it wasn't until after lunch in drama class when i realised how serious it was when i saw the reactions from other classmates. some where absolutely horrified and scared, one guy even thought it was a sign of an acolypse, and that god or something was gonna end the world.
when i was walking home, i was shocked that it happened. and i imagined a new york sky line drastically altered. suddenly, old postcards of NY would have special meaning or something. it was such a shock and unreal until i went home and saw the diaster. it was like a movie. i'm sorry to say, but i thought the fall of the towers and the distruction was fascinating. there were so little survivors and we didn't see them like we did in the okahoma bombings, that it was hard to believe that people lost their lives. it was more like the missing people just vanished instead of being crushed.
i still find it hard to believe that 9/11 has passed and the one year anivsery is comming up. it seems like yesterday. but i guess the intial shock has faded somewhat and i'm now tired about hearing about 9/11 and fire fighters. the tragedy part seems to have subsided and now replaced by bush's rants about a crusade and al quada and afghanistan. in fact, whatever happened to the plans to reform afghanistan? the interim gov't? what happened to them?
Had meetings all day, then skipped out of a meeting for a quick smoke and rang the wife, she told me what had happened and i thought she was making it up (it seemed like a Hollywood plot, not real life) Went back to meeting (by now everybody knew about it) and remember one of the suppliers saying how he was meant to be at The Windows on the World restaurant today with his wife but had been unable to board the flight because his passport was 2 months out of date.
I was stuck in a traffic jam on the way to work, when they were reporting that a plan has crash into the WTC.. so I tought hum.. accident of course...
Then a second place, I was still in that traffic jam, it was surreal..! when I arrived at work, I was trying to go to cnn.com (good luck) and was listening to the radio...
There were so many rumours about other planes that it was almost like being paranoid. I was of course, unable to work that day, how can you !
Sure, that was unbelievable on TV, even in Hollywood movies, nobody would have done that! but you know, we've seen so many movies, that it didn't affect me at all until a few days later when I saw on TV the people around the WTC ruines with pictures of their family members.. this is the exact moment I understood what happened, and how big that was.. I, litteraly started crying in front of the TV, unable to be indifferent to those people camping outside in hope to find their loved ones.
Montreal is 6-7 hours from NYC, so it's always scary when you see things like this, who would have tought the building would collapse like that, that's unbelievable!
RIP.
oh yeah. the next day in our politics class, we found ourselves talking about whether or not the people responsible for the crashes would come after us in toronto, and brought up some cold war fears along with it.
what's really the measure of tragedy and the unrealness of it all was that when it happened, there were hospitals in toronto ready to take in any patients from the WTC who couldn't get care in NYC, and there were many blood donations in toronto. and there was no need for the extra assistance since there were so few survivors from the actual crash and burn of the WTC, most of the injured were firefighters. that was just sad and unreal.
I was installing ITV Digital for a neighbour and was just flicking channels to see if it was working just as they switched coverage and then showed the second plane hit. I have a horrible feeling that London might get targeted this year, but let's hope not.
I was installing ITV Digital for a neighbour and was just flicking channels to see if it was working just as they switched coverage and then showed the second plane hit. I have a horrible feeling that London might get targeted this year, but let's hope not.
