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I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought it was a joke when we first heard about it. I still feel a little guilty about laughing :(
In a reversal of our usual roles, I'd slept in and DH was up early watching TV. I rolled out of bed and he told me what happened. We watched the second tower fall together :(
North of the 49th parallel on 9-11:
I was working in my dept. (a library) for one of the big 5 international (now big 3) accounting firms in downtown Toronto, when a staff member who started work at 9:00 am, rushed into work horrified at seeing tv news monitor while going up our office building elevator, one of the towers hit by a plane.
Didn't actually see the news tv footage until I got home at 2:00 pm. and visited a neighbour who had a tv to watch. Office tower (over 40 stories high) was evacuated because people were genuinely afraid...it is in the financial heart of Canada where all head offices are located. The subway station was jammed with tons of office employees from other buildings plus government employees from provincial legislative offices. They too were advised to leave work early after lunch.
Durint that morning at work, news from various folks who surreptiously watched a tv somewhere in the building, we got snippets. Quiet, reflective. We tried phoning a sister library within our firm's NYC office. Later we found out she was fine.
Next day, company emailed across all our North American offices (there are 5,000 employees in Canada, over 50,000 in the U.S.), that 3 U.S. employees died onboard in the flights that hit the towers and the Pentagon. The 4th was a son accompanying his father-employee. Simultaneously the company rolled out a Lotus Notes database (easy to replicate the structure since this firm had tons of different Lotus Notes databases worldwide) where it was exclusively to express condolences, whatever. Messages were quite American-patriotic or religious.
And shortly after that email, we received an international internal directive that business travel was suspended for certain country destinations. The restrictions were relaxed a month later or so. Jeez, still gotta make money by seeing biz clients first. Then they changed the life insurance policy for business travel...
My partner was cycling across Canada himself. On that day, he wondered why the roads were quiet and walked into a bar in town of White River , northern Ontario. Everyone was glued to the tv screen on 9-11. Found out even the little charter planes up there were not flying.
If you get this in time, please go by the tribute center and take a tour. The tours are led by volunteers, and they are all people who had some personal connection to 9/11. I take the tour every time I'm there and I always come away with a different perspective, depending on who leads the tour. It's a very moving thing, and IMO very important piece of history being preserved by volunteers telling their story.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuckervill
The tribute center is very moving as well. I can't walk out without shedding more than a few tears.
Oh- and please don't give the huckster street vendors a dime! Trying to make a living off of a tragedy. Go to the church and the tribute center. Those places are where you will really feel what happened.
Also when there take time to look around at all the buildings in the immediate area. Many of them have visible blemishes where chunks were taken out of their facades in the collapse. Century 21 had big chunks taken out of it.
Also remember that the burger king on the corner served as a morgue. I remember going there in 02 and "Morgue" was still spray painted on the window. Eerie that it's open again. ugh.
I was on the left coast (NoCal) working in a fish pathology lab. Heard the news when I was heading in to work - and thought it was "just" a small plane that hit the towers, not a jet. Like everyone, we were numb. Still had to do the work in the wet-lab. For some reason we were having electrical problems, so we had the van down there to provide the electricty to run the centrifuge. We'd get bits of news while we were spinning down fish blood.
Meanwhile at my house I had a contractor coming to cut a hole in my livingroom wall to install a new window.
Boss let us go home after the experiment was run, and I found my contractor at work. He'd started the hole when he got the news, so he was doing what he had to do to install the window so I'd be safe, then he'd come back in a day or do to the finish work.
Later I found out I knew one of the guys on Flight 93. :( He was the refuge manager at Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge (and was one of the law enforcement types on the plane).
I lived in the flight path for our local small airport, and the lack of air traffic for several days was eery.
I live in Canada. I work for gov't and we were in the office when the communications officer (she always has her TV on), started to shout "a plane just hit the TT building". Everybody ran to her office to watch when all of a sudden, the other plane hit. Everybody started to panick, wondering what was going on in USA. We just couldn't believe it.
I was in high school at the time in one of the suburban areas outside Baltimore/DC. I heard about it right before lunch from someone and thought it was a joke. It couldn't possibly be real. I also still feel guilty for laughing at the time, for my disbelief.
After lunch I went up to the foreign language department to do my grading, I was an aide, and found out quickly what had happened. They let me call my Mom, who often works in DC, but the line was busy. At least I knew she was at home. The teachers and I all moved to one of the classrooms to watch the news coverage. I remember the Spanish teacher crying and I remember trying very hard to focus on grading papers but just giving up after awhile. The media/television teacher came running in after awhile. He was so angry. I'd never heard any of my teachers lose it like he did. Apparently he had put televisions out in the library so students could watch the coverage and the principal told him to take them out and that he didn't want any student watching the live coverage. I guess for awhile I was one of the only kids getting any real information.
After that I went to my psych class and shared what I knew with them and we were soon sent home early. When I pulled up into the driveway at home I remember the garage door opening before I stopped the car. My Mom had run down and was crying and we just stood in the driveway hugging and crying. School was closed for a few days after. We put out our American flag. I remember hearing the Lee Greenwood song and getting chills.
Thanks for this thread, it was actually kind of comforting to me to read everyone else's memories.
I was working the midnight shift as a 911 dispatcher that morning and it was really weird. All morning I felt very tense and on-edge. Just had that something is wrong feeling. I got out of work at 0800 (EST) and I felt so out of sorts, I did something that I almost never do, I went straight to the barn where I kept my horse. For some reason, all I could think about was that I needed to hug my horse... Spent some time at the barn and finally felt better, like this huge weight had lifted off of me.
So I went home and walked in the door just a bit after 0900. A few minutes after I got home the phone rang and it was my husband telling me to turn on the TV. As tired as I was, I was glued to the TV all morning and talking with other people on another bulletin board that I go to Chronicle of the Horse. Many of the people posting there didn't have access to a TV so people like myself were the ones keeping them updated on what happened.
9/11 was a huge blow to both my husband and myself as we are both in Public Safety. We lost too many brothers and sisters that day.
I was out of the office when I heard.
When I returned to my office, I remember our investment banker who was visting from Sandler O'Neill (he would have been on the top floor if he wasn't with us) sitting in the conference room with his face in his hands realizing that he had lost ALL his co-workers.
I remember we had a beautiful sunset that night, but the only trails in the sky were from military jets:(
While we had no personal connection, I remember the story of a young woman from nearby in Corydon Indiana whose office was in the WTC. She called her mom in Corydon to say she loved her. For weeks, her mom held out hope that she was alive somewhere...and the press followed her for weeks as she came to the realization and her hope passed...it was very sad.:( and I was angered that they made a spectacle of her going through the stages of grief publically:mad:
I was at work and a coworker heard about it on the radio on her way in. She turned on the TV and we saw the second bldg get hit, then both towers come down. I'll never forget her saying, "it's gone" after the first one went down. After the Pentagon was hit, they decided to evacuate all "non-essentials" (I'm a feddie). Driving home was surreal, as the radio kept saying another plane was headed toward DC, the same direction I was going.
The plane that hit the Pentagon likely flew over my house (we are a couple miles west) and many of the injured were brought to the hospital which is a couple blocks from us. Could hear sirens and helicopters most of the day.
I'm planning to see the new memorial at the Pentagon soon. After dark, when it is lit up.
We even "felt" it in New Zealand...
My sister in law rang us at about 6 in the morning on the 12th of September. I turned the telly on and made the children's school lunches as tears rolled down my cheeks... watching the two towers explode over and over again.
I rarely have the TV on in the morning, so my little children were keen to watch too, and then horrified when they realised what we were seeing.
I was teaching that day and the whole campus was sad and stunned.
New Zealand stopped that day too as our hearts went out to those involved.
This was interesting reading all of your stories of where you were on "that day." It's one that was felt by all the world.
Tuckervill, I watched that History channel documentary. I cried the whole time. It seems so long ago, yet just like yesterday. It still makes me sad to think of all the families who lost loved ones. So sad.
I was teaching 5th graders. A teacher across the hall knocked on my door and told me that the country was under attack and NYC had been hit. I was in the middle of Math, so I just said "um, OK," and went back to teaching. It didn't sink in what she had said until my break when I went to the office and saw the t.v. Parents started withdrawing their kids from school for the day shortly after.
A woman who I worked with lost her son. It was heartbreaking to watch her and her husband go through what they did. His younger brother has since gone into politics to try and make this a better and safer place to live.
I was living in DC at the time, at the very northern tip of the city near the MD border, and working across the river in Arlington, VA. I was at home getting ready for work with the Weather Channel on in the background, and I heard Mark Mancuso say that "something has happened at the World Trade Center and all the airports in the country are closed." So I went into the bathroom to dry my hair and after a few seconds I thought, wait, what did he just say? So I went back into the living room and turned on CNN. It was only minutes after the plane hit the Pentagon at that point.
They had a reporter live near the Pentagon and it looked like cars were moving on the road behind him so I left for work, on my usual route which goes nowhere near downtown DC or the Pentagon. (At this point I still didn't realize the scope of what was going on.) But I ran into traffic caused by roadwork so it took a long time to get to the office. When I got there, it was deserted. The management had decided it was best to send everyone home.
I tried to call my boss on his cell but couldn't reach him, because as it turns out, you couldn't make any cell phone calls that day (which is why I still pay Verizon for a landline at home). I went into the Holiday Inn next door and asked at the desk if they knew if the federal government had been closed. Since I work on a project for the Postal Service, we usually follow the feds when it comes to closing due to bad weather and stuff. They said it was, so I hung around watching the TV in their lobby for a few minutes and then got in my car to head home.
I knew I couldn't take my usual route because of all the roadwork, so I started off in a different direction. And I sat in traffic, and sat and sat and sat. Until finally I reached an intersection where they told us the road ahead was blocked. I tried another route and the same thing happened. It turned out that all the bridges between DC and Virginia were all lanes outbound. So I pulled over and asked someone who was directing traffic if she knew how I could get home, and she told me to get on the interstate (66) going west, then pick up the beltway north and swing around in a big circle to the area I lived in. I expected traffic on that route to be a mess but actually it was moving fine. Once I exited off the beltway, onto Connecticut Ave which is a major north/south thoroughfare, I was heading south into DC, but traffic going north out of the city was barely moving because so many people were trying to get out of the city to go home.
Once home I was afraid to turn on the tv. I'd had the radio on in the car so I knew what was going on, but I didn't want to see it. To this day, I will not watch any tv footage of it. Eventually I did turn on the tv and watched the news all day. At one point all the members of Congress stood on the steps of the Capital and sang together, at which point I lost it.
Meanwhile...my family lives on Long Island and at the time my father worked in northern New Jersey. My father had to stay with a co-worker overnight because he couldn't get home. My brother-in-law is a volunteer firefighter on Long Island, and he and his FD went into Queens to a staging area. My sister said later that when they left she truly thought she would never see him again. She was busy trying to explain to the kids what was going on.
My brother-in-law's fire department didn't go into Manhattan that day but they did go in the next day to help with the search. Over the next few months he went to a lot of memorial services for firefighters who had died.
I have several cousins who work in contruction in NYC, and one of them worked in lower Manhatten in the days that followed, trying to get utilities working again. He wound up on the local TV news when a reporter saw him get upset with people who were walking around taking pictures like it was some kind of tourist attraction.
Another cousin is a crane operator, and he's currently working on one of the cranes at the Freedom Tower construction site.
I did my first century in 2003, and I decided it would be the NYC Century because I wanted to go back and spend some tourist dollars in the city. Although I'd been to Long Island various times in the previous two years, it was my first trip to the city. I wound up staying in the Marriot Hotel that is right next to Ground Zero, and my room overlooked it.
In the fall of 2001 I did a TNT inline skating race down in Atlanta. The day before the race we had a big luncheon for all the TNT teams that were there. One of the speakers was the coach of the NYC team, who talked about the team members he had lost because they had been in the towers that day, and he also told us about the NYFD chaplain who he had taught to skate after meeting him one day in Central Park. The next day I saw him at the end of the race and took a picture of him.
I also remember the first time I drove past the Pentagon after it happened, which was a month or so later, on my way to a bridal shower. I was so shocked by the big black gaping hole that I almost drove off the road.
My parents are coming to Virginia in a couple of months, so I'm going to see if they want to visit the new memorial when they're here.
I still work at the same job in the same office building, although now I live only four miles away from it in Arlington. We're on the ninth floor of a ten-story building. Last week they draped a giant flag off the roof and it covered the windows near my cube.
I wore a white golf shirt and black pants that day. Never wore them again, because of the memories. Eventually I donated them to Good Will.
My brother, father, and mother and I took off from Regan Airport at 8:05 am that morning. We were going to leave out of Dulles, but something came up and we switched airports.
Our flight landed about 2 hr early, just after 9 am. no one said a thing, except prepare for landing. No one knew why, but we all knew we weren't "there" yet. When we landed, we sat out on the tarmac in an unknown airport and watched them push planes away from the terminal. Finally, after about an hour we slowly pulled into one of the many many open jet ways and the pilot came on - I'll never forget what he said, just because the whole thing was so odd - "Due to an airport emergency, please disembark the plane and leave the airport immediately. You will not be able to claim your luggage." We all thought a couple of taxiing planes had run into each other. For some reason, that was the conclusion we all were drawn to. When we got into the airport, we found out we were in Minneapolis-St. Paul and we were greeted by FBI agents, who escorted us through an empty airport, all TVs were off and no one said anything. It was incredibly surreal. I've been in the Seattle airport at 2 am, and it wasn't this eerily empty and terrifyingly still. Many of the passengers started to cry, we didn't even know why, but we knew crying was appropriate. We got escorted to the baggage claim area, where everyone was - there were so many people you couldn't move. People kept figuring out how to turn on TV monitors and we'd watch and/or hear snippets of news until some security person would come and turn it off.
Three days later when I was finally flying home, I flew on the friendliest and most old-fashioned American flight. All of the people on the flight were immediate friends, we talked about our lives and families and fears.
TsPoet-
How strange! Very disconcerting to think of how so many people were purposely not told what was going on or where they were being deposited, and were not allowed to watch the news. :(
I assume it was someone's idea of security? They either didn't want us all to panic, or they were afraid someone in the airport was a terrorist? As it was, we landed between the 2 tower attacks, so much of the information was not quite correct, anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by BleeckerSt_Girl
My brother found us a place to stay and he also found our luggage, they just dumped huge piles of luggage around the baggage claim area. We were supposed to leave without hotel reservations or luggage or anything. If it had been me, we would have, I have a tendency to be a sheep. But, my brother refused to leave without at least hotel reservations. We stayed in Inver Groves - a corner with a gas station, an Applebees and a hotel.
Other than being trapped no where with nothing, we had it fine compared to those in NYC. All of the people stranded at this hotel were in the same boat and we all made the best of it, sort of like a dysfunctional family.
Oddly, by day 3, we all got shuttled to the "Mall of the America", which is where everyone else was, too - the place was absolutely full of people, not like the baggage claim, but more busy than any mall I've seen.
Why was that odd? Because it's supposedly owned by one of Osama's brothers.