9/11, what did you do that day? How did you find out?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I was having a lazy day here in the UK. I had a pop music station on the radio and aound ten past two it was interupted for a news bulletin about a plane crashing into a skyscraper. I decided it was time to get dressed and go downstairs but I wasn’t particularly thinking this was something I wanted to find out more about.

I switched on the telly and they were showing live news. I remember the news team saying we’re getting feed from a camera somewhere else. It’s not New York… and after a few seconds one of them recognised Washington. At that point I phoned my mate round the corner and she put her telly on. She only had a black and white, and was saying she’d come round to watch mine but not getting round to it. Then the first tower fell.

It’s hard to write about my state of mind at that time. Up until that point I think I was watching it as a spectacle. The full seriousness of the situation hadn’t sunk in. And we were seeing people escaping and rescuers moving in, the bad thing had happened and this was the aftermath. Then hundreds of people died on live TV. I went cold. I rang my friend back and she came round straight away. neither of us wanted to be alone.

At some point I’d phoned another mate who didn’t have a telly. He arrived shortly afterwards. His wife is American. He rang her at work from my house. Her boss had called her into the office and let her watch his TV. She rang her parents in Michigan and was the first with the news.

I remember being transfixed by the tv coverage. At one point, when they were repeating the earlier footage for the third time or so, I got up to go to the kitchen. I got as far as the door when something new came over live and I just stood there for another half an hour.

My most vivid memories aside from the planes hitting and the towers falling were the people, all those poor people, running from the dust clouds, struggling to get home.

I hadn’t, to be honest, ever paid that much attention to the New York skyline before that day. I knew there were these big towers, a mate had gone up to the top of one just three weeks before, but I couldn’t have drawn a picture from memory or anything. Afterwards they seemed to crop up everywhere: in a Christmas catalogue, and especially on old TV, in the wing mirror of Tony Soprano’s car in the opening credits (they blurred the picture in the next series but we were behind the US). I know them now.

42

I was sleeping in that morning - I can’t even remember why. I’d quit my job in July, taking a year off to spend more time with the kids before they decided I was moronic (they were 11 and 12). My husband called from work and told me to turn on the TV. I spent the entire day glued to the set with my computer beside me trying desperately to reach friends in NY.

Closest call we had was a friend who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. He was also sleeping in that morning making him late for work and saving his life. After 9/11 he spent a year working for Cantor’s new charity and then took the next year off to follow Dave Matthews on tour. We lost touch during his tour year.

43

I taught a lab, just like I was scheduled to. And I found out about it right here: Someone had a thread titled something like “Terrorist attack on the WTC”, and I wondered why anyone was asking about that, since it was such old news (thinking it was referring to the bomb in the basement attack from several years prior).

44

I had some extended time off from work that late summer, and had been in Denver the weekend before, at a 3-day music festival, where I had been bending my elbow pretty steadily for the whole time; I flew home late on monday 9/10, hungover as a hoodoo, and promptly crashed hard, just as soon as my head hit the pillow…

The next thing I knew it was around 9am on tuesday morning, and the phone was ringing, with a friend asking me if I knew what the heck was going on. I stumbled to the TV (I was still pretty worked from the weekend before, and I had several drinks on the flight home which didn’t help) and I remember it was like watching a surreal, disjointed movie instead of seeing actual footage of Manhattan, a place where I had spend a lot of time over the years. (I had visited the WTC several times, doing the typical tourist thing)

I basically watched various television coverage for 3 or 4 days straight, drinking slowly but steadily the whole time, I suppose as a defense mechanism or a form of an anesthetic. To this day the events of the days after 9/11 are a blur, and in many ways I am grateful for that…

45

It was my oldest sister’s day off. She was watching the television in our family’s kitchen, and she was the one who told me the WTC had been hit. I had microbiology class that morning. Though our town is a major hub for Fedex and several other airlines, there was no question, college was in session.

I’ll always remember Sept 11th was my grandmother’s birthday. Thankfully she died several years before the attacks. She’d have taken it as a personal affront.

46

I woke up, got ready for work, flicked on the TV, though to myself “that looks sooooo fake”, flicked off the TV before finding out what I was looking at, went to work.

47

Any channel.. no kidding.

One thing I remember about that day…*all *the channels were running newsfeeds about what had happened. ALL of them.
I think Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network were still showing their usual programming, but stations like USA, TBS, MTV, SciFi, Home & Garden were all running a newsfeed from one of the major outlets, like ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox or MSNBC.
I remember flipping through the channels and seeing one of the home shopping channels just had a placard up saying something like, “Due to today’s events, we are suspending programming until 9:00 am tomorrow.”
Just a weird thing that’s stuck with me.

48

I was working that day. Someone said a plane hit the WTC. Like a lot of people I thought it was an accident but then the second one hit. No accident.

At work we didn’t have access to a television but did have a radio. We knew what was happening was pretty bad but the impact of it all didn’t hit me until my family gathered at my mothers place that night and I saw the images. I was talking to my friend at work who worked for National Defence (CDN) he was telling me that he never saw high ranking desk generals frantically run up and down the halls before. I worked 3 blocks from Parliament Hill downtown Ottawa by noon they told us to go home.

What I’ll always remember while watching the coverage that night at my mothers was comforting my sister while she cried because she couldn’t understand why people were jumping.

49

I don’t remember much. I had transfered to a new department at work, and was super busy.

I remember the receptionist saying a plane crashed into a building, and me thinking it was probably some small single engined plane or something.

I don’t recall seeing any of the news footage.

I really can’t believe it’s been 10 years.

50

I was getting ready for work. I turned on the news like I usually do. They were showing one of the Towers on fire. I listened as I buttoned up my blouse. Hmm, I thought, plane crash, well you know, one time back in the forties, a plane crashed into the Empire State Building…

There was a wisp of movement behind the towers, and then an explosion. A stunned silence between myself and the television.

Then the anchorman said, “A second plane has just flown into the other Tower…”

I knew then that this was no ordinary day.

51

I was off work that day, so I got up around 9 and went next door to ask my neighbor if she wanted to ride with me to take my son to daycare (he got therapies there, so went even on my days off) and go get coffee. We’re in the car, and I keep changing the radio stations because everyone was just talking and I wanted to listen to music. Finally, I just gave up and turned the radio off without having listened to anything they were saying. I get to daycare and go in and a couple of workers were freaking out and saying “They attacked the White House! We’re all going to die!!1” So I leave my son there and get back in the car, where I turn to my neighbor and ask if she knew anything about this whole thing that was going on. She said that oh yeah, she was up early and watched the whole thing happen live, she knew all about it. I’m like, “You couldn’t have said anything??!”

52

It was my anniversary.

We had been married 2 years, and went to Reno for the week. We woke up Tuesday morning in out hotel room, my wife turned on the TV, and we knew instantly that something wasn’t right, and it took a few seconds to realize exactly what it was. We spent the rest of our trip determined not to let it ruin our anniversary, so we ignored the candlelight vigils, the news, and the zombie faces of passersby. We got it all when we got back home.

53

I was at work. I’d gone down the hall from my office to ask a co-worker some question and a third person said, “Did you hear? A second plane just hit the World Trade Center!” and I said something like, “I didn’t hear that one plane did.” My first thought was that it was an accident along the lines of that airplane that hit the Empire State Building back in the '30s, and it took a couple of minutes for what she’d said to really sink in. When I got back to my desk, I started to look for news. I read the Straight Dope thread about it.

Unless you’re in the DC area, you may not remember that there were lots of wild stories about other attacks on Federal buildings that morning–car bombs at the White House and the State Dept, for example. I have friends downtown in the gov’t, and was frightened for them. I had one co-worker who also used to serve at the Pentagon for her reserve duty, but luckily wasn’t there that day.

Since the place I worked was part of a gov’t agency, they closed the building and sent us home just after the first tower collapsed. I heard about the second tower collapsing on the car radio on my way home.

When I got home, I turned on the TV and the first thing I saw was footage of the second tower just before it fell, with people at the windows, expecting to be rescued. I couldn’t bear to think about what happened next, or watch it happen, so I shut the TV back off and went upstairs to finish painting the guestroom I’d been working on over the holiday weekend.

54

Could someone please link to the “as it was happening” thread?

55

I remember getting a call or email from a coworker who said she was watching GMA before she came to work and a plane had hit the WTC. Like a lot of people, when I heard “plane” at first I thought it was a little prop job, not a fully loaded airliner. And I don’t think the second plane had hit yet. I remember trying to get more info online and couldn’t because all the news sites were swamped. I wound up going over to the coworker’s office because she had a radio in there with the news on. I didn’t see any video until I came home for lunch.

Just the week before we’d had a coworker - one of the nicest women you’d ever meet - accidentally OD on her meds, and we were still trying to recover from the shock of that death when 9/11 happened.

One other thing that really stands out for me about that day was a stupid decision I made early in the day. I needed to fill up my car but since I was running late I decided I’d fill up at lunch time. :smack: Obviously that didn’t happen. (I’m sure everyone remembers the long lines at the gas pumps that day.) And then after work I needed to give my stepdaughter a ride to work because her car was in the shop, which meant driving across town to get her and back across town to drop her off and then home. I thought for sure I was going to run out of gas before I got home, but I made it. (And was able to fill up later in the evening, about 8pm, without having to wait at the pump!)

56

I had a co-worker die that night. He was at work on the 11th, then didn’t show up on the 12th. He was buried on the 14th. Apparently he had a heart attack. Very emotionally draining week at our office. And being a weekly newspaper, we were working overtime to basically re-do the entire front section six in three hours to accomodate the breaking news, and we also had to throw together a mini-tribute to the co-worker (a very popular local theater critic) who died.

57

I was asleep, and my then-husband came and shook me awake and said, “You need to come see this. The World Trade Center tower just came down. It’s bad news.”

I was still half-asleep, so as I made my way to the TV, I was thinking about the derelict skyscraper in downtown Fort Worth that was rumored to be slated for implosion soon. People often referred to that building as “the tower”, so when he said a tower was coming down, I just assumed he was wrong about the “World Trade Center” part of what he was telling me, and I figured I was about to watch the demolition of the aforementioned tower.

He pointed to the TV and said, “See? the World Trade Center. That’s where the plane hit.”

I said, “That’s not the World Trade Center. There are TWO of those. It’s two towers. And it’s in New York.” By now I was starting to wake up a little bit and starting to realize what was going on, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it fully. I was trying to listen to him, going on about airplanes and hijackers, and the Pentagon, but it was just a blur as I was looking at that tower with the big smoking hole at the top. Finally I managed to blurt out, in true Captain Obvious style,

“Oh my god. There are people in there. It’s Monday morning, there’s thousands of people in there!”

The second tower fell, right about the time I got that sentence out. I sat on the sofa most of the day, crying. Eventually we decided to run some errands, and drove the 30 miles to go visit both our parents. We both just really wanted to be with our families. What really creeped me out was the utter lack of traffic, and the dead silence in the skies.

I was pretty surprised, as the death tolls became better known, that ONLY 3000 people died in that attack. With that many people working in the towers every day, I had been steeling myself to hear that the death toll would be much, much higher. I had been picturing two towers packed full of people (a lot managed to evacuate themselves) and four full jetliners (they were mostly empty) and almost every fireman in NYC (that was horrifyingly close to the truth) all dead. I was initially thinking that the total would be closer to 15,000 or 20,000.

58

World Trade Center Plane Crash

WTC Attack Thread 2

59

I watched it on the news - including plane two flying into tower two. Then I hopped on the intarwebz to a now-defunct message board.

Kind of made for a sucky day. My dad was stranded in downtown NYC at the time. (Not at the WtC - he was about two blocks away).

60

I was already deployed to Kuwait for SOUTHERN WATCH. Things got a little . . . hectic that day.

Tripler
. . . real hectic.