Surreal for me and the one memory that sticks out like no other. I live on the west coast so I started watching it just before the first tower collapsed. I remember distinctly buttoning my shirt as I watched Peter Jennings (I think it was Peter Jennings) talking to someone, not really paying attention when suddenly the building just started to pancake. I said to nobody in particular, “Holy crap! I think that building just collapsed.” It just boggled my mind at the time (still does) that something so massive and seemingly so permanent was disappearing before my eyes and the TV anchor had no idea what was going on right over his shoulder.
On 9/11, I was temping at the main office of a local construction company. Not long after the second plane hit, somebody set up a TV in the conference room and people starting hanging around in there watching the coverage. I think we watched CBS. Once we could see how the towers were burning, one of the men in the room just said, “Those buildings are going to collapse.” He was some kind of an engineer (it was a construction company) and he had studied the design of the WTC in college. He explained how and why the towers would likely collapse due to the heat and damage, and even drew a little diagram, so it wasn’t a surprise when they fell – it was a horrible waiting game. I remember staring at the live fed of the burning buildings, thinking about all the people in there, and all the emergency personnel who kept coming to them, and how they were all about to get vaporized. I was surprised by how unexpected it was by the people on TV when the first tower fell. It seemed like – if we knew it was going to happen, why didn’t they?
No engineers in the studio. It’s something I noticed, too…the first hour of coverage had virtually no expert opinion support – no one from the FAA, the Pentagon, the city of NY, pilots, engineers, nobody; probably because they were all occupied doing their jobs. So the networks had to rely on eyewitnesses on the street.
Exactly, and I realized that eventually. It was just such a striking feeling at the time; I’m not used to knowing more than the news anchor about something happening live in New York City.
Wow thanks a lot for posting the link. I am not an overly sentimental or patriotic guy but that gave me goosebumps.
I would also like to add that I agree on the comments about the lack of experts in the studio, it seemed to pepetuate a lot of confusion. As I mentioned earlier the presence of John Miller, who is now the Assistant Director for Public Affairs for the FBI, really made ABC’s coverage a step above the others. Miller is a native New Yorker who was tapped into the local agencies and politics of that city, and also was one of the few western Journalists to interview Osama Bin Laden. He seemed to add context to the situation as it developed that the other networks didn’t. This has been a very interesting thread.
M3 T00 (except I’m at home). I had heard of it at the time but hadn’t seen it before. It’s the reaction of the crowd that gets to me most, I think - sure, some of them are probably Americans, either expats living in London or tourists who happened to be there. But the bulk of that crowd is just ordinary Londoners who heard about the tribute and just decided to be there.