Our flight home was scheduled after the flight ban was lifted, but it was still pretty surreal. Getting on the plane was an incredible hassle. They had all these hastily improvised security checkpoints we had to pass through. And when we got off the plane in SFO, the airport was almost totally empty. It was creepy as hell. Never seen an airport that size with so few people in it.
I was at work, in northern Virginia, when an email buddy sent a horrified message to a list we were on.
A bit later that morning, I heard a loud WHOOSH noise and sent a joking message saying that I was so jumpy, that noise really scared me. Then I looked out the northern windows of our office suite and saw the pillar of black smoke from the Pentagon - the sound I heard was either the plane flying overhead (office near the path the plane took, though a couple miles south of the actual Pentagon) or the actual impact / explosion.
I went home shortly after that, picked the kids up at their school (I was far from the only parent to do so), got them a stack of videos and junk food, and told 'em we were going to have a fun day playing hooky. Didn’t turn on the TV (except to watch the videos) the rest of the day. We did phone various relatives to check on them (Typo Knig had family in NJ) and to let them know we were fine (they didn’t know how close to the Pentagon either of our offices was).
I was in Seattle and didn’t even know about it until after the fact because I don’t want TV or listen to the radio in the morning. But my cousin, a New York costume designer, was on a flight out of Newark to LA. She said they had just taken off when they circled back around and the pilot put the plane back on the ground in Newark. They knew something was wrong but did not know what. They then were held on the tarmac for 3 hours, with few people having cell phones back then and the few who did unable to use them due to traffic. So she was fine but her family was hysterical, unable to reach her and not knowing if she was okay or if she was dead in a field in Pennsylvania.
After they were allowed off the plane and out of the airport, she could not get back into the City. She spent the night at a airport hotel, finally reached family about 8 pm, and didn’t get back to Manhattan until afternoon the next day.
Glory, very interesting story. Personally, I have always been grateful for the immediate and unquestioning way Canada opened its airports to our flights, with no way to know if they were safe or not.
And right in the midst of it, someone bumped a lesbian erotica thread. I feel skeevy just saying that, but they did, and on September 11, not the day after or the next day. I forget who the poster was, and the thread was immediately locked. All I can figure is, someone was really really drunk or really really high.
Cat Whisperer: Wha? Does Cartooniverse have respiratory failure because of that? If so, sorry to hear it.
Also, as far as “There’s never nothing in the temp world,” I didn’t go back on the books until the following Monday, and I did get something right away. A call center. For muscular dystrophy. They gave us a situational script, knowing that most if not all of our contacts would be tapped out. Me, I just resigned myself to dialing for the sake of dialing, and finished out the week.
gigi: I didn’t consciously avoid video of it, but after the second tower fell, I chose to follow the story on the net, with the TV on in another room so I could hear but not see it. As such, I never saw anyone jump from the burning towers, or not that day, anyway. Either Mr. Rilch or BIL called up to me at one point that he’d seen a man and a woman jump holding hands, but I never saw such a thing on live TV.
At work, phone rings at a nearby desk - wife calling husband “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre”. What? Try to get to a news page - the BBC has an initial report, CNN isn’t reachable, soon the BBC isn’t reachable either. By this time the big TV has been rolled out and tuned in. The second tower has already been hit and then it is “What. The. Fuck!!!”. The only sites I knew of back then that stayed up were snopes and Popbitch of all things - some of the Popbitch editors have archives of the posts but I doubt the posts will ever see the light of day again - there were lot of real names and phone numbers. Someone suggested trying the CNN robots site and that worked for a while.
A lot of us bailed out mid-afternoon (This is in Scotland) to a pub - a pub with satellite screens - and the place was full of US tourists, mostly young backpackers in a state of shock, being shown small kindnesses by locals. Folk were taking small groups away to their nearby houses and flats to use their phones to call home and stuff, and the bar staff just kept pouring drinks for whoever needed one and making coffee and the kitchen staff kept going round with plates of snacks. It must have been awful for those youngsters off on a great trip and then have something so terrible happen back home. Big lumps of laddies and their girlfriends just crying and wanting to hug their mothers, but being thousands of miles away.
Here’s Leonard Slatkin conducting Barber’s adagio for strings on the 15th September 2001 in London for the BBC Proms- the video contains footage from a later ABC programme:
I live on the west coast so by the time I found out, the attacks had already happened and the towers fell.
I was woken up at 7 or 8 by my work who told me that today’s training was canceled so I should stay home. I groggily said ok, thanking my luck that I didnt have to in. I got up and brushed and did the usual morning routine, never knowing what had been going on. At about 8:30 am pac time, I was playing Starcraft when my mom burst into the room and told me to turn on the TV. I spent the next 5 hours glued to CNN.
I found out when I arrived at work. My first thought was, ‘Terrorists?’ because of when they’d tried to knock it down in 93 with the Ryder. I hoped I was wrong, but the second tower confirmed it.
The surprise for me wasn’t that it fell, but that it fell so fast once it started falling. I figured the lower floors would support it, but falter and lose ground every few minutes until I realized, ‘Duh, ten floors or more above the impact, and once that weight picks up speed…’
It was almost unspeakably tragic of course. Still, it seemed to me that there were a lot of commentators that waxed poetic, that day and shortly after, but a surprising number of sentiments rang false.
E.g. some newscaster said that nobody ever anticipated what might happen if a plane hit a major structure. Uh, what about test crashes of planes to see if nukes would fall apart?
E.g. Dan Rather, on Letterman: “O beautiful, for patriot dream/That sees beyond the years/Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears!” He then said, “We can never sing that song again, that way,” and began to sob.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,37256,00.html
I wondered how the people in Oklahoma City felt about that comment. Granted McVeigh’s attack was much smaller in scale but so is the city and what precedent did they have?
I found myself disagreeing with or questioning a number of things I was hearing. Maybe I was more sensitive than usual, given that I figured we would be going to war. Hell, Muslims in the US were targets of hate crime almost immediately.
It was also at this time that I realized when CNN shows a human interest story, it means they have no further factual details to report. They run a story about a woman whose husband was in the tower and is missing etc. Well, fine, it’s a piece of the story. But after you’ve seen it cycle three times without any new facts (beyond speculation of experts), it’s time to turn the channel. If you can.
And wasn’t it Giuliani who came on saying, “Hey, you want to help? Come to New York and shop!” (or words to that effect)? It just struck me as really tacky. I had underestimated the impact on their economy and the ripple effect that this was going to cause in our economy but the victims weren’t even cold yet.
And then the music marathon to raise money…to this day, I cannot hear You Can Be My Hero by Enrique Iglesias without tearing up. That and *Amazing Grace *on bagpipes…I can only imagine how many times that was played at firefighters’ and police officers’ funerals.
It was the day I was to start work as one of the new cooks at KFC. I was supposed to start at ten or so, so I was out the door right at nine. As I got on my bike, my mom (whom I was living with at the time) came out of the house and told me two planes crashed into the WTC. We talked about how that just couldn’t be hugely coincidental and how there was probably no way it was an accident. I had no idea about actual terrorists doing it (or about the Pentagon or PA planes) until I got home from work later that evening. Only then did I finally see how huge/big it was because it was on all the news channels.
I was walking into math class when I passed two freshmen in the hall saying something about “plane crashs and the government being destroyed”. I didn’t think anything of it. I thought they were talking about a video game. Then math class started as normal. About 15 minutes one of the secretaries came in and said something (we couldn’t hear) in our teacher’s ear. Her eyes got really wide. She turned the class into a study hall and then let us go next door to a room with a TV (this was not teacher who strayed from her lesson plans). We didn’t go home early, but I don’t remember having a single actual class that day. We just sat in different class rooms watching TV. Eventually they set up the big screen in the auditorium in case teachers wanted to send their students there.
I remember one of our social studies teachers (the oldest one) kept telling us boys to pay very close attention to what’s happening and nothing else was important then what was happenign that day. He was very specifically addressing the boys. to us It only took a couple seconds for me to realize he was thinking of the draft being reinstated, but some of my classmates were really dense. Actually conscription came up alot in class that year (for awhile we were really afraid the draft might be reinstated). Then I went home and watched different news channels (it seemed like everthing except Nick & Disney was either off air or broadcasting news). Mostly I settled on CBC Newsworld. Very boring compared to other dopers stories.
Does anybody have a link to the Onion-style headlines thread? I remember that thread as being very theraputic at the time.
(Sorry if it’s already been linked…I skimmed the thread and didn’t see it.)
There is a really good documentary on the History channel right now…
I was working at the city here, and someone must have gotten the news because they turned on the TV in the assistant directors’ office and we all were glued to it for the first part of the day. I have a sister who lives in TriBeCa and we couldn’t get through to her at first, I remember being worried about her.
I don’t remember if it was that day, or the next day, but I remember everyone wanted to put a yellow ribbon on their vehicle. A couple of us went looking but all the stores were sold out. I went to Party City and got a couple of yellow table cloths; I took them down to the maintenance shop and started cutting them into strips. I worked on that for hours. All the guys started coming by the shop to get one or two ribbons. That was very powerful to me - these big burly guys, a lot of them who didn’t speak much, probably didn’t have a high school education and would never show tears in front of anyone, filing in quietly to stretch out their callused hands for a shred of fabric.
In the end, every city vehicle and all the personal vehicles had their yellow ribbons. I took a picture of all the dozens of City trucks on the lot, lined up with the ribbons fluttering in the breeze.
I still have that photo.
Found it myself. Whaddya know.
Thanks for linking to that first thread. I got teary just reading it. I see the video of the crashes over and over again due to my line of work (stock footage, in fact today we had another order for the impact footage), so one gets the feeling of being desensitized to it all, but reading that thread as it happened really brings back how real it all was.
When the first plane hit, I can remember *feeling *the impact in my apartment. I was in the shower at the time, as it was the first week of classes at NYU, when all of a sudden I heard what registered in my mind as a sonic boom and a weird vibration. The thought that immediately jumped into my head was “I think a car just drove into my building.” I grabbed a towel and ran out to ask my roommates what happened and they told me to just look out the window. It was so unbelievable that I didn’t know how to react. It was like something out of a movie, this couldn’t be happening for real!
What seems so weird now but made sense then was that a bit after the second plane hit, I still went to my early class! No one had any sense that the buildings were going to come down, and I did not want to spend hours just staring and watching it burn. There were many other people in the class as well, so I think others had the same idea. Of course, once the towers came down that changed everything. Classes were canceled and the school remained closed for the rest of the week. My friends and I went uptown to a location where they said to go to donate blood, only to find that there were *so many volunteers *that they were turning people away.
I remember the eerie feeling of walking on Broadway at 3 in the afternoon and having the street totally deserted. Not one car, very few people, most of whom wore bandannas over their mouths because of the dust. That night I went to a candlelight vigil in Washington Square Park. It was so quiet. Hundreds of people, barely making a sound, as small paper boats carrying lit candles were floated in the fountain.
I was in Vancouver BC for the week teaching.
That morning before work I had not had the radio or TV on. When I got to the school I went to pull a car out of the shop. the radio came on and two people (DJs?) about a plane trying to crash into the White House. I only heard maybe 30 seconds out of context. I thought Yeah, sure like that would ever happen.
:smack:
About 1/2 later the instructor from Toronto called me and was almost yelling “They are crashing planes into the world trade center”
Huh?
So I logged onto dial up and found out what had happened.
We were supposed to shut down world wide that day. I gave the students a choice and they said teach so I did.
I told them that this was a day that they would always remember where they were.
About 2 years ago one of my students from that day came to me and told me I was right.
While teaching I found myself spacing ever so often. My mind just went blank. I would have to stop and gather my wits before I could continue. I was told later it was not obvious, but I can tell you from my end it was strange. Very strange.
Anyway after class I drove by the Vancouver International Airport. One entire runway was widebody jets parked wing tip to wing tip as far as the eye could see.
Much has been made about what happened in Gander with the people that landed, I think that Vancouver BC got the short shift. The citizen from BC stepped up just like their fellow citizens on the east coast of Canada.
Some things I observed during that week.
They had to close the road to the airport, for a time, so many people were showing up to volunteer rooms and beds for the people. 
I met some one that put up in the Hilton in Richmond BC. I asked about the food. PB and J sandwiches? Nope was the reply, Prime rib, Turkey all the fixing. four start stuff. They told me that it was the opinion of the people staying there that the manager had told the chef he did not want anyone leaving there with a poor opinion of the food.
I saw an interview with someone at a church that was cooking for a bunch of stranded people. "If I run short on butter I make a phone call and in 20 minutes three supermarkets are delivering butter.
The weekend after 9/11 I was still there. I could not get a flight until Monday. So that weekend I took a car and drove up the Coast on Highway 1. I was maybe an hour or an hour and a half north of Horseshoe Bay and I got off the highway to get a cup of coffee. Here was a little tiny village. Driving though the village to find a place for a cup I see a Canadian Post office. flying over that post office at half staff is an American flag. Flying above the Canadian flag. I was blown away. I had to pull over until the tears stopped. Now this town is so small they have to share their horse with the next town over. Yet they found an American Flag and put it up over their government building.
I am tearing up as I type this, I am still so blown away by this gesture.
At the time of 9/11 the dope and Fathom were blocked by my IT people. I was staying up half the night in a cyber cafe to read the dope and Fathom. These message boards really did help me make it though that crazy week.
Today was a day like Sept. 11, 2001 – a beautiful, clear September day. It wasn’t “crisp,” like you’d describe an October day, when leaves are changing colors. It wasn’t a hot summer day, with haze and humidity. It was a September day, with a gorgeous blue sky. I think of 9/11/01 every year on a day like today, whether it’s the anniversary or not.
I remember hearing the news and speculating that it was the act of a “saboteur.” That was the best word I could come up with.
It was one of those rare days we got to sleep in, so my SO and I were asleep as it all happened.
However, we had German visitors at the time who always got up really early, made coffee and watched television. When I finally got out of bed to go into the living room to see how they were, they both had looks on their faces that I will never, ever forget.
Without them uttering a single word, I knew something REALLY bad had happened.
The rest of the day was a blur.
BTW, the German visitors had to extend their stay a week, due to the cancellation of flights.
My immediate reflexive thought upon seeing the news of the attacks was “I can’t believe that Bush actually did it.” Not that I actually think he was behind it, mind; while I have little doubt he and his fellow Republicans would cheerfully had inflicted a hundred 9-11s to get their way, but they’d never be able to pull it off. But my immediate intuition was that it was staged for whipping up right wing hysteria. And they certainly didn’t hesitate to take advantage of that hysteria.