It was the night of the 11th here, we’re 11 hours ahead of New York this time of year, and we were still living in our previous place outside of Bangkok. I was reading the news on our laptop computer at home when I saw something about a plane hitting a WTC tower. I thought it must have been something like that incident in the 1930s or so when a small plane hit the Empire State Building. Then I read another plane hit the other building and that it was looking like a coordinated attack. Turned on the TV and watched the live coverage on all the local channels all night (did not subscribe to cable).
I heard about the towers falling on the radio on the way to school. I think I was in the 7th grade. I didn’t really understand the significance at the time.
I was an assistant county prosecutor at the time, handling pretrials in a judge’s outer office. That morning someone said a small plane had hit one of the WTC towers and I thought, “Oh, jeez, that’s too bad,” and went on with what I was doing. Then I heard that a second plane had hit the other tower. Someone then brought out a portable TV and we all watched the news in horror. A deputy sheriff came by and said the courthouse was closing, and because (I still don’t know why) the elevators were shut down by then, I had to walk down 20-some flights of stairs to get out of the building. I drove home and hugged my wife and kids, and after they were in bed that night we caught up with the news. An awful, awful day.
Siam Sam, it was later than that, and a bomber: 1945 Empire State Building B-25 crash - Wikipedia
I found out right here. Sort of. I had slept late, and was checking out the boards while waking up. There were a lot of weird threads like “NY Dopers Check In.” After a little while, I turned on the TV to see what everybody was talking about.
And I thought they were showing a promo for some movie where the towers fall down.
I figured it out shortly thereafter.
I had just been laid off so I was home at the time. We were living in Staten Island in a neighborhood right near water’s edge. My husband came home in the morning unexpectedly with the worst look on his face. He pulled me outside wordlessly to stare at downtown Manhattan from our backyard. He saw the second plane hit from the Staten Island ferry. The ferry did not dock. Instead it pulled out and went back to Staten Island.
We spent the next week basically just crying and staring. I think I slept maybe an hour at a time. You couldn’t leave Staten Island for a week afterwards. All three bridges were closed off and the ferry wasn’t running. Every night we’d hear the sounds of sirens nearby because they thought one of the suspects was on the island.
I didn’t get into Manhattan for a month. When I finally took the bus into the city, the first sight that popped up in front of me was an obvious remnant of the tower. It was eerie beyond belief. At one point a few months later I had a temp job near the Empire State building. None of us wanted to be near the building because we thought it was next on the hit list.
I was in college. Had an 11 a.m. class so I wasn’t ezzactly up early. Stumbled out to the living room and plopped down on the couch to watch some TV. We had just gotten cable, so the remote was unfamiliar to me. I sat there for some time, fiddling with buttons, trying to remember how to make Animal Planet or Cartoon Network come on. Eventually, it dawned on me what was on the screen. Then, it further dawned on me that I wasn’t watching footage of some foreign country’s war. (I saw the Pentagon coverage first.)
I immediately called my then-newly-ex-boyfriend, whose father was (is?) a pilot for American. It seemed more important than our relationship drama.
rolled out of bed and got on my favorite chatsite at the time, chatphiles. after a bit of disjointed chat someone told me to just turn on my damn tv, and BOOM! there it was. i kenw people that worked in NYC so i called out sick to work to follow what was going on. One of the guys on the site that had always claimed to be some kind of govt agent started dropping names of suspects and groups hours before they were hitting the news.
Fortuanately i DID call out of work though, i worked at a gas station that started price gouging and got in some pretty deep crap for it.
The planes hit while I was in the subway on my way to work, about 3 blocks form the Sears Tower. When I got to the office, everyone was glued to the TV in the lobby next to the elevators. I didn’t really think about why, just hopped on the elevator and went upstairs. Everyone in the office was glued to the TV in the conference room, and I saw one of the towers and for a little while was convinced that it was a side view, and that’s why I didn’t see the other tower…until everyone explained, and they re-ran footage of the first tower collapsing.
We all kind of sat there in a daze for a while. Then one co-worker, whose husband was a structural engineer, came in and said her husband predicted the second tower would collapse within the hour because of the heat, etc. - he timed it almost to the minute. We continued sitting there in a daze. Until the managing partner, who was Israeli-born, decided that the Sears Tower could be a likely target, and sent us all home.
When I got home, I started hitting the phone trying to reach my family in NY and northern NJ, and a college friend who works in lower Manhattan (my dad lives there, and worked for the Transit Authority at the time - when the first WTC bombing happened, he had to be on-site for the various transit agency safety inspections). I couldn’t get through on the phones to anyone, so I sprawled on the couch compulsively watching the news and feeling helpless. Then Mayor Giuliani came on TV and said that one thing people could do to help was to go donate blood. Somehow I latched onto that as a fabulous idea, though donating blood usually makes me quite ill for a couple of days afterward even though there’s nothing really wrong with me, so I hopped back on the train downtown and waited in line for like 4 hours to donate blood. My then-boyfriend had to escort me home afterward, because I was feeling so dizzy. I spent the next couple of days in kind of a fog from the stupid blood donation, and finally caught up with Dad, etc., who were all fine (well, except for the asthma exacerbation from all the crap in the air after that).
One of my co-workers was in charge of the United Airlines account, and that day was her weekly on-site client meeting day at United HQ. It was really creepy even to hear her describe afterward what it was like there as the day’s events unfolded.
I’m also still amazed to this day that more people weren’t killed. I walked past the site 3 months later after my grandfather’s funeral, and it blew me away. You could still smell…I don’t know what, exaclty, but you could still smell it.
Ah yes, thanks. That’s the exact incident I was thinking of. Was too rushed to look it up yesterday.
I was at work - I live in Oregon, but I was an inside sales rep for NYC at the time, so I always came in before 5:30am, along with about 10 or so other east coast reps.
Right after I came in, one of my colleagues had mentioned something about an airplane hitting one of the towers, and, thinking (like most everyone else at the time) that it was a Cessna or something, I went to CNN’s live web feed. About 15 minutes later, we all saw WTC2 just explode, and we were all dumbstruck. Then came an agonizing hour of watching people (some of whom I may well have known as business acquaintances) jump from the upper floors to escape the flames, and then hearing that the Pentagon (“No, the White House! No, the Capitol!”) was struck by another plane, all the while listening to talking heads speculate over what the fuck was happening.
Then WTC2 fell, and a few minutes later, feeling raw and numb at the same time, I packed up my shit and headed home, listening to the constant drone of F-16s buzzing the greater Portland area, and hearing on the radio that a fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania (some dipshit calling into the radio station said they flew it into downtown Philadelphia). I honestly thought that this was the beginning of a massive, coordinated attack, and I felt I should be home to protect my family as best I could, or at least be with them as long as possible.
I was a junior in high school, and luckily I had AP history first hour, for 90 minutes (block scheduling, 4 classes a day). Our teacher turned on the tv and we watched it happening live on the news, since everyone knew it was history in the making. Then I had band second hour, and we watched the news reports after the fact.
If I’d been in AP English when it all started, my teacher wouldn’t have turned it on (she was a well-known hardass). But I think pretty much every other classroom was watching the news all day.
I saw the original plane hit… but at that time we just thought it was some idiot pilot. My then wife was at the car dealership… i changed back to “Clifford the Big Red Dog” for the kids… One the way to daycare she called and told me… and the radio on sports station in KC just changed to abc radio.
Everyone was asking me questions at day care… but i’m just a local cop who was on injury duty at the time. They called me into work and we blockaded downtown KC… Later we learned that assholes in North KC and further up were charging 5bucks a gallon for gas…
Also i remember that people wrote things on Sept 12th and Sept 13th that i surely bet they wouldn’t like to see reprinted… One Ms Coulter who stated that all Muslim should convert of be killed… And of course the Palestinian men passing out candy to children in celebration of the event…
I was living in Seattle at the time, about 3 months pregnant with my first baby. My mom called from the east coast and woke me up, probably right after the second tower was hit. She told me to turn on the news, so I did, and sat there in horror watching for the next few hours. I remember seeing the first tower collapse and not really understanding what I’d seen at first, thinking that a piece of something had fallen off the top, or there had been another explosion. I just couldn’t comprehend that the entire tower had come down. Then when I did, I looked at my fiancé and said, “I think there had to have still been people in there.”
My mom thought I shouldn’t go to work because I worked in Redmond and she was worried that the Microsoft campus would get bombed. I went to work anyway, but I should have just stayed home, because all I did was watch streaming news coverage on my work computer.
Crazy days.
I was getting pleasantly drunk after a long shift. It was around 11pm in eastern Australia, IIRC.
So I’m playing guitar and watching TV. That documentary about Ali and the rumble in the jungle was on. On the bottom of the screen a message comes up that two planes have hit the WTC, and I figure that some transponders have failed, or something like that. But then I realise that what I know of “transponders” doesn’t quite grok with two planes hitting the WTC.
I ignore it for a few moments, but out of curiosity I change the channel. It’s about 40 seconds after the second plane hit. That message that I saw must have come up quick, because I see the first aftermath of the second plane.
My main memory of that night is seeing the South Tower go down. That moment when I was hoping that the cloud of debris didn’t mean it had gone down, but then the slow motion replay showed the top of the tower falling through the smoke…
I was kind of in the thick of it for a few days.
Find myself wishing I could track down the Dr. who let me sleep at his house. My Google-fu is pretty good, but he’s off the radar. Perhaps he left the country at some point. Pity, that. I owe him a sincere thank-you.
Rough week, this.
I was working overnights at the time and had just gotten home. I turned on the TV and saw the image of the burning hole in the first tower, and I could hear Matt Lauer and Katie Couric talking but my initial thought was, “Why is NBC showing an action movie at 9 in the morning?” but mid-thought the second plane hit the other tower. They pulled out to a wider shot and I realized it actually was the Today show and I was looking at a live image. I spent the rest of the day watching the news.
And I’ve got to tell you, and I’m not trying to be insensitive here, I sincerely feel for the victims and their families and everything, but honestly, from a totally objective POV I’ve got to say that it was, without question, the MOST SPECTACULAR THING I’VE EVER SEEN ON TV. Seriously NOTHING is ever going to top that.
Sorry. I had to get that out.
With all due respect and aware of what forum we’re in, I find it very sad that man walking on the moon is superceded by the terrorist attacks.
Can’t speak for DCinDC but I wasn’t around to watch the moon landing on TV. If I had, I might feel differently.
Exactly. I wasn’t alive for the moon landing. It was old news by the time I came around.
I know what you mean.
I hope to god that I never see anything like that again in my lifetime. But it was truly captivating, for want of a better word.