If anyone’s interested, here’s a link to the thread which was started on this message board after the first plane hit.
As for me, I was at work on what I thought was going to be a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. A coworker heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. We thought it was an accident until the second plane hit. My office was in downtown Pittsburgh. We learned flight 93 was in the air somewhere over Pennsylvania, but no one knew where. Because of that, downtown Pittsburgh was evacuated.
I still remember how blue the sky was that morning and the contrast of that perfect autumn morning with the horror going on around us.
I was at work, in a little shared office at ‘the old building’ that we moved out of a few years ago.
I distinctly remember my project partner at the time coming in a little after nine and asking “Have you heard?” I hadn’t - I’d actually been working and hadn’t been browsing news sites or listening to the radio. He was the first one to mention it. (He’d had the radio on during his long drive in to work.)
One thing that was eerie about that day, and the next, and most of the next, was that there was no other programming. Just nonstop news on every channel. Well, I remember flipping past a shopping network, but since those are manned by a chicken pecking a keyboard with its beak, I suppose they weren’t able to go to a news feed. I suppose it was like that when JFK was shot, but with three channels and maybe some UHF, it wouldn’t have been as noticeable.
But in this case it was. The Spanish channel, the Korean channel, and the Russian channel all had all news all the time. IIRC, Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi channel and the History channel had news. Everything was news until Thursday, when WWF (or was it WWE?) Smackdown went on as scheduled, but not as planned.
The entire Federation walked out to the end of the runway, and a woman whose name I don’t remember sang a very defiant SSB. Then they did one match, intercut with video tributes to the fallen. This was in, I think, Dallas, and I said at the time that I’d never thought I’d see a Texan holding up a sign that said “I [heart] New York”.
I was at school. When the first students told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, I assumed they meant a LITTLE plane. So when they told me that the tower was falling down, I reassured them that even a plane crashing right into the tower wouldn’t make it fall down, though it might look scary.
It wasn’t until an hour later, when my school media person hooked up a news feed to the in-house television network, when I saw what was really happening. We turned on the TV just in time to watch the first tower go down, and my students and I sat there in stunned silence together.
Ay my desk, at work, in Midtown. Word started spreading via e-mail when the first plane hit, and we all suspected it wasn’t an accident (we remembered the '93 bombing). By the time the second plane hit, we were looking out the window, which faced downtown, and we could see it (we also had the TV on). When we got word about the Pentagon and saw Tower 2 fall, they made us evacuate the building, because we were right near Grand Central and the UN. So they booted us out on the street and I walked all the way uptown to stay with friends at Roverside and 113th, as you couldn’t get off the island back to Jersey. Even though I was in Midtown, I had The Dust on my clothing, so I can’t even imagine how bad it must have been further downtown.
I was at work, in a training meeting learning about 529 accounts & other ways to finance college educations. Everyone in the class knew the trainer fairly well, and as he was a joker, when he left the room for a moment and returned to say that the country was under attack and the World Trade Center had been hit with planes, no on believed him.
I was at work (Target), and when I first started hearing things, they didn’t make much sense–I’m not sure I understood that the planes were large commercial airliners for quite a while, perhaps lunchtime–which would be when I was able to see it on television.
I was right here at my desk. I was the first one here except my co-worker who was out on accounts. When she came back she said, “Val, a plane hit the WTC,” and we flipped on the small TV we had in our back room at the time. As we stood there watching, the second plane hit. That little TV stayed on the rest of the day … and most of the rest of the week. I had the fun job of calling some of the local high-profile people to get their reactions and write a story, all the while hearing the events unfold on TV.
I was at work, separating a stack of bills that had to get paid that day. The phone rang, a friend wanting some information on Broadway. I was talking with him when John came in and went to his desk. John’s line rang, he picked it up as I was hanging up. He told me “Turn on the radio, the World Center has been hit by an airplane.”
I had just gotten up and gone into my home office. I sat down, fired up the Dope, saw the thread Siege linked to, and flipped on the TV. Only a couple of minutes later the second plane hit the towers. I didn’t really get any work done that day.
I was home, I didn’t have to work that day. I had just turned on the morning news shows for some background noise when they started getting the pictures of the first tower burning. I think I might have glanced away when the second plane hit so I wasn’t sure what happened until they slowed it down. Then I started getting my uniform together and packed my bags. I spent a good portion of the day in a National Guard armory waiting for the call. It never came. We could have been there a lot quicker than the New York guard (nothing against the NY guard, the units in the city had the same transportation problems as everyone else caught on the island and the upstate units were further away) with trucks and personnel but they wouldn’t let us go.
The rest of the day is filled with odd memories of things I never expected to see. NJ troopers closing off Rt 440 into Staten Island. A cloud of smoke from downtown. Empty sky were buildings used to be. An empty Garden State Parkway. Toll booth collectors waving me through for free when they saw the uniform.
While watching the news feed before I left one interview I saw will be with me for the rest of my life. One of the morning shows was able to grab several people who got out of the towers. This was the first interview I saw of survivors, I think it was before either tower came down. Each person was relating their story then they got to one lady who mentioned she was worried about the firemen because when she was going down the stairs they were going up. It was the first time I thought about it and it gave me chills.
I was at home. I had accidentally shut a door on my finger, so I sat down on the couch to have myself a little pity party and turned on the TV.
My mother called me once it became clear that the flights had been hijacked. My grandmother was travelling that day and it was rumored that one of the hijacked planes had taken off from a city in my state-- the airport my grandmother uses most frequently. “Where is your grandmother?” she demanded.
“I don’t know!” I said. My stomach was twisting itself in knots. I kept telling myself that no, she hadn’t flown that day but I wasn’t sure. She wasn’t answering her cell phone. It was a long, anxious time before we found out where she was and that she was okay. I kept having horrible visions of her, terrified, on one of those planes.
Though logically I knew that the terrorists weren’t going to strike a piss-ant town in the rural Midwest, I wanted my husband to come home. He wouldn’t-- they sent home all non-essential personell and locked down the prison in which he works. I was irritated. “You aren’t essential to anyone but me! Come home!” He calmed me as best he could but gently refused my summons. He’s chief of security-- he had to stay.
He told me that some of the inmates laughed and cheered while watching the footage.
I went into work that day feeling unwell (Later turns out I had Strep throat). I was getting ready to go back home when a co worker told me her heard a plane hit the one of the Towers.
I remember how nice a day it was outside (in Toronto) and thinking it couldn’t be much different in New York. The first thought I had was that it was just like when a plane struck the Empire State building years ago. By teh time I had closed my system I heard the news mention that a second plane had struck. It was at that point that I had the nagging feeling there was no way that could have been an accident. Still… you didn’t want to believe that was possible.
On the Drive home I heard the pentegon had been struck and I felt my first sense of terror. It sounded like the end of the world. There were odd conflicting reports of more planes and bombs going off in Washington (which turned out to be wild rumours) and then they announced The American congress and workers were evacuating. I got home in time to watch the first tower fall. I was stunned. It was all so surreal.
I called my friend at work to ask him what he had heard. While speaking the second fell. He was so freak3ed out as I was yelling “It’s falling!” over and over again, that he had to hang up.
The rest of the day I was bundled up on my couch with a high fever just watching and wondering who did that to all those people.
Which really means, I was getting paid under the table while working as a landscaper. We were working at this rich lady’s house and she called us all in to watch the TV after a plane hit the first tower. I think we were about to go back to work when the second one hit. We thought it was a replay for a while.
The boss let us go home before lunch. We weren’t getting anything done anyway.
I was in my car driving to work listening to Mancow, who used to be a big time morning radio guy here. One of the bits that day was that they were going to play a prank on the people who didn’t get up early and they were going to make up a story that people listening early would know was a joke. They said they would annouce it at the top of the hour, which would have been 8:00am CST. They came back from commercial with news that a plane had hit one of the World Trade towers in New York.
I remember thinking that Mancow wasn’t really as funny as he thinks he is and that was in exceedingly poor taste. Since Mancow has been watched like a hawk by the FCC, and repeatedly sued and fined I knew they weren’t joking when the second plane hit and his sidekick Turd yelled in the backgroud “Oh holy shit a second plane just hit the other tower!”
But I did start out the first few minutes thinking that it was a prank. It was just really poor timing on Cow’s part.
At work, cleaning up a project that had just finished. Work was at 2 World Financial Center, directly across the street from the World Trade Center, which I had walked across that morning. I was in an interior conference room, alone, listening to NPR, when the collision occured. From our vantage point on the ninth floor, we could see the fire and smoke (and many other very bad things). NPR was giving the best reports. We were told to remain put immediately after the first collision, but were evacuated after the second. I remember, as we took the long way around the Towers to get uptown, looking at the hole and thinking the top would sheer off. I certainly didn’t think it would collapse in on itself (but then, I’m no engineer).
I was at work, temping at RPI. Someone was kind enough to come and get me, and we watched it on this huge TV they had in the central room. I watched from right after the first tower fell to the second tower falling, and for some time after that. Later that day we were sent home early.