I was on a plane with Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari. Rough day…
The morning of 9/11/01, I drove to the CPA firm in Albany, NY where I was working at the time, taking 787 South from Troy, NY, which follows the Hudson River (to be relevant later).
I was perusing The Dope, where I read the news about a plane hitting one of the buildings. My first thought was that it was an accident, as was a lot of others’ thoughts, but for some reason, I didn’t see it as big of a deal as I should have, accident or not. The DHL guy came in and was frantic about it and by that time, I was unable to get on CNN’s website.
A coworker went in to the conference room and turned the TV on. By the time we all filed in there, the second plane had hit.
My mother called and said my cousin works in a building across the street from the towers. The 8 of us at work were huddled in the dark, in shock, watching it all unfold. It was surreal.
I heard from my mother again a couple of hours later, saying that my aunt had finally heard from my cousin. He wasn’t across the street after all. He worked for Lehman Bros. in the south tower of the WTC. Since he was on the 17th floor, he made it out before it collapsed. But they had been told to stay were they were and his boss’ reaction was “Fuck that!” and they all left. Hearing about that was the first time I cried about it. I was so relieved.
So, we all left work around noon and I went home and stayed glued to the TV for the next week. One of the creepiest things about the details that had come out was the path one of the planes took from Boston. The hijackers made their turn somewhere near the Capital District and followed the Hudson River down to NYC.
There’s something that happened the next day that has stayed with me as well. I drove to work, which was very close to the airport in Albany. As I came to a red light near work, there was a plane coming in for a landing at the airport, so it was pretty low, of course. Right after I noticed it, I saw someone standing on the corner, looking up at the plane, too. At that point, I wondered if we were both thinkng the same thing and I wondered how long it would be until I my stomach wouldn’t jump at the sight of a low-flying plane.
Well, my birthday is September 10th. My then-wife had taken me to a resort hotel in Park City, Utah for my birthday - just a one night getaway. We woke up in the morning (on 9/11) to utter shock at the breaking news on the hotel room TV.
I had taken the day off of work, so I spent most of the day just watching the news in a rather subdued manner. That night, my band was scheduled to play at a local venue. The idea of canceling didn’t ever really occur to us. We played, mentioned briefly that our thoughts and prayers were with the victims and their families, and just had a good general release of tension, which we sorely needed. It was a well-attended and energetic show, too, so apparently a lot of local kids felt the same way. It wasn’t until days later that we realized you were “supposed” to drop everything that day and sit in sackcloth and ashes. 
Holy crap.
I missed that post last time around. Glad you were OK.
I had a run-in with a weird-acting middle-eastern guy two nights ago who started saying “you’ll hear about me in six months’ time. Everything will be different in six months!” and it really disturbed me. However, in this case I suspect he was a bullshitter. In your case, with the real mofos, I can’t imagine how disturbed I’d have been.
I was in Vancouver BC on business that morning. I was scheduled there that week, home one week and then back to BC for more business.
The morning of 9/11 I did not turn on the TV or radio while I got ready for work. I went straight in (2 blocks) so I did not hear any radio in the car.
When I went to move cars out of the shop, one of them had the radio on, and the DJs were talking about someone trying to crash a plane into the White House. This is all I heard, as I turned the car off before I could hear more. I recall thinking Yeah, right, like someone could crash a plane into the WH. Good luck with that. Little did I know. I did notice that the air seemed awfully quiet that morning. (My office is on the landing path for YVR.)
Anyway about 8:15 I got a call from my counterpart in Toronto, asking if I had heard the news. What news? I will never forget his reply “They are crashing planes into the World Trade Center.”
Then my students started coming in, and I was notified that my company was shutting down world wide that day.
I put it up to the class, and they said teach. So I taught. Maybe the worst class of my life. I would be talking about fuel injection and my mind would go the events of the day, and I would draw a complete blank. I told my students that 9/11 was this generations JFK and they would always know just where they where when they heard the news. Several of them have since told me I was right.
After class (we knocked off early) I went and extended my hotel reservation to cover the following week, and the week when I was coming back, as I had no idea when I would be able to get home again.
The reason I quoted your post Glory was that I need to mention how the citizens of Vancouver responded to having something like 36 widebody airliners show up unannounced. Much has been written about how the Canadians on the East coast stepped up to help, but little has been written about the people in BC.
Well let me tell you Canadians rock. Canadians from BC rock even harder.
I drove by the airport that afternoon, and there were jumbo jets parked wing tip to wing tip down the length of the South runway. I swear to OG it looked like Friendly Bob’s used airplane lot.
At one point in the afternoon, the police had to close the approach road to the airport. It seems that when the word got out that there were all these stranded passengers, people started showing up at the airport offering to take in stranded travelers. The locals where throwing open their homes to people they had never met.
On the local news that evening they interviewed some people cooking for a bunch of stranded passengers at a church. I recall the lady saying that if they needed butter all they had to do was call and a truck would deliver everything they needed. No charge.
At the time, the dope was blocked on my work 'puter so I was using a cyber cafe to keep in touch both here and at Fathom. I met a stranded passenger there, and spoke with her about where she was staying and her experience. She was being put up in the Hilton in a ballroom that had been turned into a ladies dorm. Another ballroom was the guy’s dorm. She said they were feeding her three meals a day at no charge. I said what PB&J sandwiches? Nope, prime rib, turkey, cooked to order omelets in the AM, etc. According to her the scuttlebutt around the stranded passengers was that the Hilton manager must have told the chef that he did not want anybody leaving BC with a poor opinion of the food.
I was finally able to ship my students home to other parts of Canada on Friday, and I got to go home on Monday night. During the weekend, I drove north along Canada’s highway 1. A couple of hours north of town I came to a small community where I stopped for a soda. In this little tiny, no stoplight town, there was a Canadian Post Office. Flying on top of it next to the flag of Canada was the stars and stripes. Both flags were at half mast.
Think about this for a second. Here I am in the middle of nowhere. Some Canadian scrounged up an American flag, and hoisted it along side the Canadian flag on a Sunday. I cried when I saw that, and I am crying again now as I recall it.
Did I mention that Canadians rock? Well they do.
Kicker to the story. When I went to fly back to BC a week later, one of the flight attendants had worked my flight home 5 days before. She greeted me like a long lost friend, and came and sat with me during the flight (there were only 7 of us on a 737)
If you want to feel lonely try being out of the country when something like 9/11 happens. Every Canadian I met that week made me feel better and less lonely.
Canadians rock, they really do.
I worked at a television design center at the time–large screen. Think of a floor loaded with 45" to 65" televisions tuned to various channels. Only that day, they all showing the same picture. I registered the fact explaining the tuning with a need to tuned all the sets to a single channel for whatever reason using a “high-powered” remote we used at work (and for practical jokes).
As I walked from my cubical to the other side to get a part, I looked up and noticed an aerial shot of one of the WTC buildings on fire. My first impression was, “Wow, they let that office fire get out of control–how come the sprinklers don’t work? Hmm, I bet somebody must have paid somebody off, when the building were constructed.”
I stopped off to ask a bunch of befuddled workers gathered around one of the sets what had happened. The reply was that a commuter aircraft had hit the building.
I was thinking: a small jet did that!? The size of the hole made me realize no sprinkler system could handle that kind of damage.
Then, second plane hit the other tower.
First thing that popped into my mind was Osama Bin Mohammed bin Laden and Al Qaeda were behind the attack and we were going to bomb the crap out of the Taliban in the next few weeks, and hunt down and kill the SOB.
Watching the buildings collapse, hearing about the Pentagon being hit, a false report of a car bomb going off near the State Department(?). It was a horrible, horrible day.
The irony now is that it’s off of most people’s radar screen from what I can see. Certainly the war with Iraq is of more pressing concern. Although, some feel Iran is next
As for the rest of the day? They gave us the option of going home. I didn’t, because for what little I could do, I figured this was my little way of giving bin Laden the finger. But afterwords, my wife and I went to a church service and watched the TV late into the night…
My wife was supposed to fly to Europe on 9-11 to give a major professional paper. She was actually be supposed to leave the day before but her flight out of North Carolina was cancelled by bad weather. But, luckily we’d built some slack into her schedule. We congratulated ourselves on how clever we’d been.
I went off to swim laps at the YMCA while she ran some last-minute errands with the kids. As I pulled into the Y parking lot I heard the very first news reports that a plane had hit the WTC. Initially it was reported like it was a little private plane. By the time I finished swimming and got back in the car the reports were talking about two jetliners. I called my wife on her cell and told her what was going on. Then I raced home and turned on the TV, just in time to see the second tower collapse.
My wife’s flight was cancelled of course. And her hated rival read her paper at the conference in her absence. At the time my wife was convinced it was the end of her career. But who could she complain to? Her personal disappointment was so trivial compared to the magnitude of the tragedy.
Maybe I’m paranoid, dude, but if I were you, I’d call the FBI about this ASAP. Don’t take the chance that you misread him.
I was in junior high school. Surprisingly enough, I made it through all of my morning classes without hearing a thing. At around 11am, my lunch hour, I was standing by my locker when my best friend ran up to me, saying, “Terrorists attacked the World Trade Centers! They’ve been destroyed!” to which I said, “Did you see this in a movie or something?”
She said “No, it’s real!” and we continued yammering in this matter, with that same sort of “distant excitement”, for quite some time. I think it took quite a while for the full impact and implications of the attack to sink in.
I got a phone call from my boyfriend saying that a plane had hit the WTC. He didn’t know much beyond that, and my French II class was about to start, so we hung up. That was my only class that day, and I drove home irritated that the only thing on the radio was news about the crash. I got home and turned on the TV to see what the fuss was about…that’s when it really hit me that this was a *very * big deal. I watched the news for another half hour and then shut it off. Did homework, took a nap, got ready for work.
I worked at Applebee’s then, as a hostess. Tuesdays were already slow nights, but it was dead. Absolutely dead. The 3 people or so at the bar were glued to the TV, and eventually most of the staff was too. I got off early and went to bed.
It was the first week of my first year of law school.
As I was (at that time) a west coast girl, it all happened quite early in my morning.
My then-boyfriend woke me up giggling like a fiend about it, filled with glee and hilarity that someone crashed a plane into the WTC, not once but twice. Seriously. He thought it was all the funniest thing ever.
Once I’d determined that he was telling the truth, I broke up with him. Very firmly.
Then I went to class.
At some point, I heard about the Pentagon as well as the WTC and abandoned attempting to learn the finer points of contract law and started trying to call my sister in DC. Then I called my mommy (on the grounds she might have heard from my sister). Then I alternated.
Eventually, we heard from my sister.
Even later, we heard from my aunt who lived in NYC. Still later yet, we learned that one of my cousins who worked in the WTC was missing. As it’s now nearly 6 years later and we still haven’t heard from him, we assume he didn’t make it.
The whole experience did succeed in making me drastically rethink my priorities in life. I finished law school, but I do not practice law. The time I would have to give up to successfully practice is time I would prefer to spend with my friends and family. I might have less of it than I think.
I was at work. First I heard of it, in fact, was shortly after the second plane hit, when a friend emailed a mailing list I was on.
Shortly after that, I heard a “whoosh” sound that turns out to have been the Pentagon plane. I stood at the large windows in our office area and watched the smoke billowing (office was five-ish miles from the Pentagon). When I heard a random loud boom shortly after that, I decided to bag it (never did figure out what that was - may have been someone upstairs dropping something). Unfortunately for Typo Knig, the email I dashed off when I was leaving was rather alarming :smack: : “Loud boom, leaving, will call when I get the chance” so for all he knew I was in mortal peril since cell phones weren’t working and he had no way to get hold of me. :eek: Oops! :smack: :smack:
So I headed out of the office and picked both kids up at their schools - Dweezil in 2nd grade, Moon Unit in preschool. I was not the only parent to do so - the person who had signed out a kid just ahead of me put down as the reason “Armageddon”.
I told the kids we were playing hooky for the day. We stopped at the grocery store and bought junk food, and the video store for movies, and I had them watching videos the rest of the day while I was glued to my laptop in another room. We did not turn on the broadcast TV until 9 PM or so, when the kids were in bed.
I left for work without turning on the TV. I also didn’t have a radio in my car. So the first thing I heard about them was at the local deli, which was already broadcasting the collapse of both buildings. Since I was just in for a minute (and they had the volume off), it didn’t quite sink in.
When I get to work, I got the full story, and essentially spent all day on the internet. Arriving home, I spent all night watching the TV news (something I never ordinarily do outside of election day). 
It’s strange to think about 9/11 now, now that the more personal armageddon (good word, Mama Zappa) of Hurricane Katrina has affected me and mine.
My husband and I were living in our old crappy duplex. I had a job interview at 11:30 that morning. My hub was getting ready to go to work and woke me up around 8:30am saying, “You might want to get up and watch the news. Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center.” He was doing his maniacal laughter thing when something is really disturbing and serious, but he finds it funny. I was like, “What, like a small plane? What are you talking about?” and I can hear CNN in the background downstairs, and can sort of pick up the urgency of the announcers’ voices. He was like, “No, a friggin’ jetliner. Like terrorists or something.” [maniacal laughter] So I tear up out of bed and downstairs and start watching. I know I saw the second plane hit. I know I warned my husband to temper his maniacal laughter at work because people wouldn’t understand his weird way of coping. I know at some point I called my mother to tell her what was happening and get her to turn on her television. I know I went to the job interview. I know that I called friends.
I remember it was a beautiful day. I remember how quiet the skies were for days and days afterward. I remember shopping a day or two afterward and jumping out of my skin every time the PA system in the store clicked on for an announcement.
September 11 memorial with all victims.
Sep 11, 2001 was an important day in New York – it was an election primary day.
I had moved to a new address the year before, but had never changed my voter registration. So, before heading into work that day, I trooped over to a public school near my old address, pulled the lever for one of the candidates and headed for the train.
The relevance of all this will be made clear later.
My train pulled into the Fulton Street station at about 9:05 am, just after the second plane struck. No one on my train (or at least no one in my car) was aware that anything was amiss that morning. I got out of the train and climbed the steps from the subway level to the “middle level” (the level below street level, where the token booths are located).
I started walking through the tunnel to get to the stairs up to the street. After about ten steps or so, I saw that there were a bunch of people running toward me at full speed. My first thought was that there was a shooting/stabbing by the token booth. Not wanting to get trampled by the crowd, I ran with them for a few steps until they passed. Then I started making my way toward the token booths.
As I got close, I didn’t see anyone laying on the ground, as if they had been shot or stabbed. There were, however, people crying. One woman was bleeding from her hand. I tried to ask several people what was going on, but no one was able to do more than manage a cry. After trying two people, I gave up and began walking up the stairs to the street level. Then I emerged onto Fulton Street (right by Broadway).
It looked like a war zone.
There was broken glass and dust and God-knows-what-else strewn about all over the street. It was a surreal scene I had never expected to see. I knew that something was terribly wrong. I had not yet thought to look up toward the sky.
I began walking and turned onto Broadway and headed up to Park Row, where I worked. At the junction of Broadway, Park Row and Vesey Streets, there was a crowd of people looking up. That was when it dawned on me to look up as well – and that was when I first saw the Towers that day.
From my position, I could only see the North Tower (the one that was struck first and higher up). I was able to see the smoke and the impact site and the people at the windows above the crash zone. I consider myself exceptionally fortunate that I didn’t see anyone jump/fall that day. I asked someone in the crowd what happened. They informed me that two airplanes had struck the World Trade Center. I didn’t quite believe what I heard, but the evidence was right in front of me. Just for clarification, I asked if both hit the same tower or did one strike each. I was told that one plane had struck each tower. As I moved around the crowd, I was able to get a better view of the South Tower and saw the smoke from it as well.
After staying with the crowd for a few minutes, I eventually went into the building where I worked on Park Row, right off of Broadway and Vesey (about a block and a half from the North Tower). I tried calling my wife to let her know that I was OK, but I wasn’t able to get a good line out of the building. Eventually, I managed to get through to my sister and asked her to tell people that I was OK.
There was no way that any work was getting done that day. I watched from the window of my building on the seventh floor. I couldn’t see the southern tower at all and of the northern tower I could only see from about twenty floors below the crash site to about five floors above it. I saw people waving towels from the broken windows, trying to get the attention of firefighters and rescue workers. I was able to see how the steel in the outside frame was being stressed and how the area that was “burned” was growing larger.
After a while we heard a large, loud, and low rumbling sound that shook the entire area. Since we couldn’t see the South Tower falling from where we were, we weren’t sure what it was. We did, however, manage to see a large cloud of dust rolling down Vesey Street right towards us. Thinking quickly, we managed to close all the windows on the side of the building facing the Towers before the dust cloud arrived (except in one room where we just closed the door before too much dust got in. Sure enough, that was the room with all the expensive A/V stuff in it). We watched as the day outside of our seventh floor windows turned to night. Almost like the biblical plague of darkness, the blackness of the dirt, smoke and debris from the collapsed tower just rolled over our windows until it was pitch black outside.
We turned on a TV in the office to try to get some news. All that was on was Channel 2 (all the other channels were off the air) and even then, the reception was pretty bad. That was when we learned that the South Tower had collapsed. We were hearing all sorts of rumors that day – there were eight planes in the sky that had been hijacked, there was a bomb at the Pentagon, someone has blown up the State Department, and on and on. It was a wild and wacky news day.
After a while the dust outside subsided somewhat and we were able to see outside of the windows again. When we looked, the section of the North Tower that we could see looked very different. I could clearly see the steel buckling. Sure enough, shortly thereafter, the other tower fell and another cloud of dust and debris rolled down Vesey Street and darkened our windows yet again.
At that point, there was really little to do but wait. We reasoned that the streets must be madhouses and that going down there would be unsafe. So we waited.
At about 12 o’clock, the police came by and evacuated us. We left the building and began the long walk home. There was a layer of dust several inches thick everywhere. It was in the air. It got on our clothing.
There was no hope of taking a subway home – every subway line in the city was out. As we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge toward Brooklyn, I kept scanning the skies hoping that there wasn’t another plane heading straight for the bridge. I got off the bridge, walked down Flatbush Avenue, hoping to find a bus that was going in my direction. Every bus was full.
All up and down Flatbush Avenue, there were people of all types offering food, water and juice to those of us hiking away from Manhattan. There were people who offered comfort and aid and a shoulder to cry on.
Eventually I got to Grand Army Plaza and entered Prospect Park. While in the park, I met a man who was crying. He explained to me that his brother was in the towers and he didn’t know what to do. He was beside himself with grief. I tried to comfort him by telling him that I had heard that most of the people got away from the towers (I didn’t know this for a fact, of course. It was just a rumor – among many that day. But what else was I going to tell him?). I offered whatever comfort I could and continued on my way. Eventually, I arrived home: shocked, tired, numb and not sure what was going to be tomorrow.
Now, to return to the beginning of my post. Because I didn’t change my voter registration, I went to my old neighborhood to vote. As a result, I took the nearest subway (the F train) to work. I transferred to the A train at Jay Street and got out at Fulton Street.
Had I changed my registration and voted near my house, I would have taken the D train and transferred for the N/R at DeKalb. The D is an express train, while the F is local, and the trip is about three to four minutes shorter. Furthermore, the A lets out on Fulton Street, about a block and a half from the towers. The N/R lets out at Cortlandt Street, right across the street. Had I taken the D to the N/R, I would have gotten out at Cortlandt Street right about 9:01 or 9:02 – and could easily have found myself in a place where airplane parts, fuel and falling bodies were raining down on me. Because I didn’t change my voter registration, I ended up in a much safer location that day.
Zev Steinhardt
I was in class when the principal came over the PA system and advised all teachers to turn on the TV to CNN. I watched in fascination for about 10 minutes, then set up a betting pool with my classmates on what landmark/city/government building would get hit by a plane next. I actually got about 100 bets in from students and teachers alike.
Yeah I know, hell is going to be a warm place, but I made about $50 for only having to pay out for “pentagon”. Damn you Mr. Powers and your good guessing.
Wow, Zev. Just wow.
We had just picked up our daughter, who had returned from New York City. She had been on a tour of the World Trade Center the afternoon before.
Our neighbor called us that morning, after the first plane hit, and wanted to know if our daughter was home yet, and told me what was going on.
We then turned on the tv, and watched in horror as this event unfolded.
We cried for the victims, and also cried because we were so happy our daughter was home, safe and sound, and wasn’t one of the victims that day.
They had moved up the departure for the trip, and were scheduled to take that tour of the World Trade Center on September 11th, but one of the people that was with the tour group had gotten ill, so they moved up the tour, and left a day early.
You have no idea how, even today, I get the cold-chills when I think about what could have happened to our daughter.