9-11

[RoadRaven]

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.

[Tri Girl]

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.

[ny biker]

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.

[TsPoet]

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.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

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.

[TsPoet]

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.
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.