Where were you when the towers fell?

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My wife and I had been sleeping late, when a friend called to tell me that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center. I remember turning on the TV and watching mesmerized by the huge plume of smoke gushing out of the tower, when after several minutes, I told my wife what had happened. Soon after she came into the living room, the second plane hit.

Repost from last year

I am from Long Island and was working at a small computer solutions establishment in a residential part of eastern part of the New York City borough of Queens 15 miles downtown Manhattan in September 2001.

A week and a half before the attack I was visiting downtown and hung out at the site. I had been there on occasion several times before.

Pre attack I remember seeing all this traffic and thinking to myself how much more traffic there is after the Labor Day which in the USA is the informal end of summer. I thought about how most people in all those cars were probably wishing they were still on vacation because it really was a perfect day. I arrived early at my place of work and waited outside the office as I did not have a key. My boss did not trust me with keys because he knew I was a klutz and would lose it and then he would have to go through all the trouble and expense of ordering new keys. One of my co-workers arrived and mentioned something about streaming video. It seemed a really strange statement and I asked him why. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought seeing the clear day was terrorism. Without going into to much detail it had been epidemic around the world for several decades and I had long felt it would inevitably happen in the U.S. and be huge. Apparently I was one of the few that had that original thought and after a few days and enough strange looks I stopped mentioning this. But back to 9/11 we had a radio in the other room but no TV. A customer actually came in to pick up his system at 11AM that day. As we all know things spiraled out of control fast. While I was not surprised about us being attacked big or by planes I was flabbergasted when the Towers went down. For hours on end we heard the sirens of all the volunteer fire companies travailing from Long Island to Manhattan. The internet news sights were frozen. The first picture of events that were occurring just 15 miles away that I saw was from the BBC website at around 1PM. My father was in the hospital for precautions so after work I visited him we ate at a diner then when I got home put on the TV and saw for the first time, 13 hours after the fact the now infamous video of the second plane that most people saw live. It was another demonstration that pictures or in this case video is worth a thousand words. My brother emerged from the subway just a few blocks away as the second plane hit. If the building had collapsed a certain way immediately it could have been his end. I also knew a couple of people that worked there and survived and a firefighter who was one half a blocks away for one of the collapses and survived.

While Manhattan was shut down on 9/12 it was deemed people with jobs in the outer boroughs of New York City go to work and figuring the British did that in much worse conditions during WWII that?s what I did. We had just installed a brand new system for a client the Friday before the attack and the new system was not working smoothly leading to a lot of frustration, and one pissed off person who happened to pay may check and one unhappy client who paid his checks. While of course we knew about and discussed the events surrounding the attack?s aftermath, but the problems with the new system meant a lot of overtime and thus I was too busy to process the event to the degree others were.

Baseball?s New York Mets who unfortunately I am a fan of resumed play in Pittsburgh and while I fully appreciated the support of fans around the country it felt very strange and unreal as New York teams are usually dispised. The first regular season sporting event in New York occurred September 22 at Shea Stadium. At first people did not know how to react or if they should be in a public place but it turned very emotional and cathartic. I attended a Mets game at Shea Stadium two days later and the feelings from two nights earlier night still were in full effect. But the world had not completely changed, the Mets blew the game.

As i mentioned in another thread I felt I had to visit the site. History is one thing, history even if it was the last history I would ever wanted to see happen, it was still history that was just a train ride away and was something I felt compelled not to ignore. Also I thought it might be a way of dealing with things I was to busy to deal with earlier. I felt during September that it was just to early to go because I would only be in the way of people who had much more important reasons to be there. On the other hand if I waiting to long I would not see the full effect of how bad it was. I went at the end of October. I am not a overtly emotional person and I do not like to share it publicly. But I fully expected to burst into tears when arriving at the sight. It did not happen that way. Like I said I had been there enough times to know my way around but arriving there the only way to describe it was discombobulating. I did not know what street I was on. Not crying or releasing bothered me for years but now I realize it was a very Aspie reaction. While there was a lot of somber reflection a couple was getting married in a church nearby and girls were having their picture taken with cops just not quite what I expecting with the building and lets face it people still smoldering.

The weeks and months that followed featured nearly continuous stops to let funeral processions go by.

As far as post traumatic stress syndrome seeing a plane defiantly put a chill in me. Living in right in the pathway to one of the main Kennedy airport runways I guess that helped me get over that. While there was determination to live my life as before so the ?terrorists don?t win? there was also some lack of concentration and depression and also walking in Manhattan looking at the buildings and saying to myself I better take a good look at them because they might not be there tomorrow. New Years Eve 2002 seemed to help as the event was now last year. Sometimes I freeze a second or two when I see a clock displaying 9:11

I was at school in choir when I discovered the towers were missing. All we did in that class was watch the news on the TV set and my aide had to take me back to the resource room because I was starting to freak out when the girls were talking about World War III starting.

Last edited by League_Girl on 12 Sep 2014, 12:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

Honestly, I can't even remember. I would have been 7 years old at the time, and normally my memory of that time in my life is quite good, but I don't specifically remember where I was on 9/11.

I was sitting at home watching late night TV drinking a Boddingtons. Al Qaeda ruined my quiet night in front of the telly.

In a delivery Truck at the companies' terminal in Charlotte, NC planning out the days' delivery route for office products when the first reports came in over the radio. There was nothing other than this and it's ramifications on the news all day.

I was in front of my computer. I had dropped off my daughter at kindergarten in midtown and walked home. It was really a beautiful day, clear and mild. Around 845 AM I saw a blog post that there was a fire at the world trade center. There's always an emergency somewhere in the city so it didn't seem unusual. Once it started to look bad I turned on the TV and watched it like everybody else. Tried calling my daughter's school and all the lines were jammed so eventually I just went to pick her up. The next few days were constant sirens, a flow of pedestrians because all the trains shut,, warplanes patrolling overhead, the stench of burning concrete metal and wiring, and watching TV for news even though nothing new was really happening. "Missing posters" were appearing all over Manhattan but sadly almost none of those people were ever found. Everybody was trying to reach each other by phone so it was impossible to get a connection. Supposedly SMS was working but at that time I didn't have a cellphone. My parents didn't even have email.

At the time it seemed like the whole world had changed. Fortunately it hasn't really turned out that way. The bad guys didn't change the world. They killed 3000 people and that's it.

On the way to the hospital to see my new sister.

Your description is evocative. It certainly brought all the memories back. The only thing I would add was the extraordinary silence not just from the lack of traffic but from the shock that gripped everyone in the city.

As for the changed world: I have to disagree.

All the hard won checks on abuses by the secret services painstakingly created in the past (e.g., the work of the Church Committee) were swept away. The cold war order was replaced with the disaster of the swaggering Bush-Cheney descent into the dark side--extra-judicial detention, torture and execution or murder around the world, the half baked prosecution of the war in Afghanistan and corrupt lies of the invasion of Iraq.

The world has changed in so many profound ways. The structure of the UK/US alliance gave Tony Blair no choice but to fully support Bush, even when his criminal nonsense was at it's worst, and the recognition that the UK really was reduced to America's lap dog has played a real part in the push for Scottish independence.

The effects of 9/11 keep rippling outward in unexpected ways. The homeland security programs that are militarizing local police are another consequence. MRAPs and grenade launchers for school police! Pre-9/11 such a notion would have been preposterous, now it's just part of the new normal.

The Islamic State is a result. This is probably going to mean decades of war to come. Things really did change globally and locally.

I think I was on my way to visit my mother, and I found her in tears.

I was at my MIL's house, watching it on TV and also online reading stuff about it and in an AOL chatroom that I used to go to all the time. Strange thing too, all the guys that I had talked to in that chatroom for months and months who had never, ever mentioned being in the reserves or the guard were suddenly talking about how they are actually in the guard or reserves, were being called up as we typed, and every single one of them was some sort of special forces. Wow. Who knew?

ETA; They all ended up going to war and every single one of them managed to have the exact same amount of internet access to chat in the chatroom, while fighting the war. Technology is amazing, huh?

I was in photography class in my junior year of high school. They turned on the TV and we watched the news broadcasts. Next hour in drafting class, we were watching the clips of the planes hitting the towers and there were other students actually laughing and saying "That was awesome!"

Seriously. WTF???

teens. they must have not known the real weight of all the s**t that would unfold from that days events, it was just two planes crashing into a building and destroying it, like in a movie. i bet if they thought about what they said now they'd feel like the worst people alive.
i certainly would have.

I was walking along Cross Street in Central Manchester. Some young bloke ran into the road, jumping up and down and shouting (evidently with approval) what had happened.

I went home and watched it on the TV news. It didn't seem 100% real.

I was in France for the summer and was packing my stuff to fly back to the USA in 3 days, so I could go back to school.
It was early in the afternoon (6 hours ahead with New-York) and I drove to my dad's office to print some documents, and there one of my dad's employee's told us that on the radio they announce a plane hit the WTC and where saying it's a tourist plane. In my mind it was no big deal, these things have happened before not causing much damage.
Then I drove back to the house and turned the radio in the car, and they where saying it was a jet airliner that hit the first tower and apparently a 2nd plane had just hit.
Got back home, turned on the TV, and they where talking about a major terrorist attack, and from there I called my dad at the office and told him, and he didn't beleive me and said I was making this up. And from there I stayed in front of the TV until 2am.
When my dad came back home around 5:30PM (what is early for him) he asked what was going on and then discovered the reality on TV.
Sadly the day after I tried to call the USA, but it was almost impossible to get a call in for 1 week.
And me, who was suppose to go back to the US for school, couldn't and ended up flying back 14 days later and went back to school late.

Truth is, I think everyone remembers what they where doing that day and can say in every detail how their day went down.

I was in the garden planting lettuce. When I came in the house, my roommate said, "Look at this!", and there it was on TV. Spent the rest of the day watching the clips of the falling towers over and over, though they did not play it in subsequent days, as I began to wonder how two buildings could come down at free-fall speed into their own footprint from being hit by planes. I timed it and did the math. It really bothered me. It still does.