What were you doing when you found out about the WTC?

I was sitting here at my desk when I saw the ILE threads. Rather ironic, seeing as I work for a top news organisation. Mind you, within two minutes the building went bonkers.

The most bone chilling thing was finally checking out www.cnn.com. The very minimal page saying "AMERICA UNDER ATTACK" was something even more scary than a loud resonating Emergency Broadcast tone or Air Raid alarm. At that point, I nearly passed out. My roommate, Mary, had the TV on in the living room, when she normally would be at work.

I somehow was enough in shock to still go about my daily routine to get ready to go to work. Oddly enough, that morning in Seattle was never more beautiful, brisk, clear, and peaceful. Very very surreal. My head was spinning into an alternate universe, yet my eyes saw nothing more stable.

I went to work, and everyone was watching the coverage the entire day. I was surprised they weren't as freaked as I was, but it was obvious not much work was going to get done that day.

I didn't know what was happening, so I watched for a few minutes, then wandered off to sit down and read while I waited for my plane to board. A boy came running over and shouted at us "Another plane has hit the other tower! This is some sort of attack!" I ran back over to the window and saw both towers on fire.

People on mobile phones and with radios started talking about hijacking. Then there was an announcement that the airport was closing for an hour. There were all kinds of rumours and things buzzing around, there were about 4 or 5 conflicting stories. After the tower fell down, our flight was cancelled and we were asked to leave the departure lounge - and then we were chased out of the terminal by police with rifles and dogs.

Even though we were right in the middle of it, it was impossible to get any sort of news. It wasn't until HOURS later, when someone managed to find a portable TV and set it up by where we were all camped, that we found out the whole story of what had happened.

The owner had his radio tuned to BBC 5-live, not really listening I half-wondered why, then I started to listen.....absolutely stunned, cold shivers etc. The owner filled me in, only he got carried away telling me London was in the process of being evacuated! We rushed to the station to get the train home.

I had a long distance block on my phone at the time and I couldn't get in touch with any of my NYC friends So off to work I went. Everyone was worried that there would be attacks on other American cities, set to coincide with the start of the work day.

Got home home at 7pm, turned on the TV. FUUUUUUUUCK.

Messages had been left telling me that my friends were okay- this hadn't even crossed my mind, what would they be doing there? Found out later that some of them should have been that day. Watched the news intensely for a while to figure out exactly what had happened and became increasingly scared. Ran up to check ILE before running out to go and get drunk again.

I ran up onto the roof and sure enough there was an apocalyptic fire raging in the northern tower. There were helicopters hovering around it. I was wondering how they'd put this inferno out when I saw what I assumed was some sort of police plane flying low between the buildings. My view of it was blocked by Confucius Mansions, but it never emerged from the gap. Instead there was a huge explosion and a mushroom cloud above the southern tower.

I saw things falling from the tower -- I now realise they were people. Ran outside to watch from Division Street, ran back inside, where I learned from TV that the Pentagon had been hit and the White House evacuated, ran back onto the roof in time to see a pillar of smoke where one of the towers had been.

I was just going 'Jesus! Jesus!'

Playback finished (why didn't we just turn it off?), turned sound up. C4 showing vast column of smoke where second tower had been, BBC1 still showing one tower standing - momentary confusion. Pinefox and I watched for fully 20 minutes before anyone mentioned the Pentagon (Ceefax brought us up to speed on that). Then we saw the USAF plane(s) sent to intercept the 4th jet.

Went to Safeway and then, somehow, continued to record.

I think I would have felt a lot worse...quite a lot worse...if I had just been at home all day or had a TV at work. Perversely, it reduces the experience to text in my head for the most part, and yet that might be a good thing in the long run.

When I got to irc, I talked to some friends in the NYC area. After I'd finished talking to them, I shook all the way to Chancery Lane. Gee.

After that I travelled over to Greenwich, shitting myself as we passed under canary wharf.

Then watched football, while thinking about new york. Got home and fell asleep in front of cnn.

I'll be in Manhattan next month and I refuse to go there specifically to see it. I am not going to wallow in the pain of others for some sort of catharsis.

I was riveted to the TV set from that moment on. Didn't go to school that day.

Later on, when I found out the Pentagon too had been hit, I thought, "No, no, no, no, this can't be true, this can't be." Because I have a close cousin who worked at the Pentagon, see. But finally, after I found out he was all the way over in San Francisco visiting his parents, we all breathed a huge sigh of relief. And then were saddened by the thought that so many thousands of people lost their lives.

And I just kept on watching and reading (from websites), watching and reading.

I lost my shit altogether when I realized those little dots on the screen were people leaping from the top-story windows. I was having panic attacks too, Chris, but unlike almost every other panic attack I've ever had instead of becoming twitchy and fidgety, with these all I could do was sit and stare and attempt to comprehend...except I was shivering like mad.

The enrollment of that class jumped from 4 to 20 by the next week, and basically turned into a class on Afghan history.

My mom would never call that early unless it was something bad, and I assumed my elderly grandmother had passed. In fact, that last time I think my mother had called early morning was probably 6 years prior when my grandfather passed.

When I played the message she said something like "I just wanted to make sure you're ok, and how you're coping with all the insanity in the world this morning." So then, I was thinking "Oh, great - now what did Israel and Palentine do to each other?" Assuming some terrible loss of life in the middle east.

I went to the TV to see the image of the two towers in flames and just completely lost it. Just could not believe what I was witnessing.

Rest of day spent rapt in front of the TV, visiting message boards, shattered, trying to contact friends in NYC...

My wife and several of her office-mates mercifully flooded in shortly, and our apartment became a make-shift waystation from stranded Brooklynites in Manhattan. Spent the next few hours trying to contact my friends further downtown, then went reported for duty at the office for easily the most rigorous night I'd experienced.

We tape all our shows, and I still have that tape. I listened to it once, a year ago.

We were all so absorbed in the TV coverage that we didn't realize the Pentagon also had been hit until a commentator reported that. The smoke plume was visible from our offices.

At midnight I left work and went outside to be picked up by two friends who'd planned on coming over to my house (one of whom is now my current boyfriend) to watch "frontline" (a news satire comedy) on video. They'd been in transit to meet me so hadn't heard anything, so I babbled what I knew at them.

We drove home with JJJ playing "Pyramid Song" by Radiohead after a minutes silence, which was very sobering. I remember everyone smoking and saying nothing and me thinking "this is world war 3, I feel scared".

Got home, barged in, shouted to my flatmate "are you watching TV?" (she wasnt). We turned the TV on to see the news showing the plane hitting the tower (they kept repeating all the footage, and that of people leaping from buildings, which was sickening).

We were watching live as each tower fell. I felt so helpless, I kept saying "oh my god" over and over. It all felt so horrible and unreal. The most surreal thing was after several hours of the same footage over and over we felt awful so we started watching Frontline, which is a cynical satire about a newsroom, and flicking between that and live feeds of CNN was doing our heads in.

Nick was a great comfort that night, it was good to have someone to hang on to. It took another 2 years, but we ended up together after all :)

Watching it on TV was surreal, and I still have a hard time feeling any kind of emotional connection to the events or aftermath. My reaction was quite similar to Momus and nickalicious, minus the post-coital glow.

I have never felt so frightened in my life as I did the rest of that afternoon. I was on my own at home, and I couldn't get through to Neil on the phone at his work. It was only six weeks after we bought the house, so I didn't know any of the neighbours. When the second tower collapsed I phoned my boss and told him to put the radio on (we don't have a telly) - his boss was staying about three blocks away as he was visiting our head office in Manhattan on business - and he said he wouldn't bother as he didn't want my colleagues distracted, and laughed at me - "are you crying". I was like "but no-one is going to be working. This is HUGE" etc etc and he was all "yeah, right, whatever". (note, we work for a huge American-based company that would have been massively affected by this)

I wish I'd known about ILX then. It would have helped a lot. As it was, I had no real sense of people's reactions, other than wildly speculating media folks and what was on the TV.

when i found out, both towers had already collapsed. i still perhaps do not appreciate how i may be fortunate in that i did NOT get to witness the whole terrifying process unveil live on TV. nope, i sat there bitching about why BBCi was taking so long to load up - then the news page appeared. THEN i turned on the TV (about 3pm BST) and freaked.

when the disaster happened, i was flying over america in a plane with my photographer, en route to LA (my first ever trip there) to interview Sum 41 for NME. we found out when the captain came over the tannoy, telling us he had perhaps the most important information we'd ever hear, and that we should wake up the passengers around us if they were asleep. he then told us, matter-of-fact-ly, that American airspace was now closed, because two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, and that we would now be landing in Edmonton, Canada.

there was muted pandemonium on the plane, nervousness, confusion. my photog, who is generally a white-knuckle flyer who'll willingly take a train to scotland over a plane, was calm, though, and we started talking to the air hostess, who we'd already befriended. she told us there were planes still unaccounted for, that we'd been escorted out of American airspace by fighter jets. we landed in edmonton but were held on the tarmac for about two hours - we were the last plane to land there, and there were hundreds of passengers from other planes ahead of us.

on the grounded plane, there was a flurry of nervous action. everyone flicked on their mobile phones, if they had tri-band ones. the press agent accompanying us on the trip came down to where we were sitting (she'd gotten an upgrade to business) and told us of the text messsages she was being sent from friends in london, telling her their were thirteen planes unaccounted for. we called our families to tell them we're safe, and then sat and waited to get through customs.

we were led off the plane and went through naturalisation - i'll never forget this, because the guy cheecking passports gave me the kind of third degree i'd expect from someone at US customs suspicious that I was entering the country illegally to work - kept asking me why I'd come to Edmonton. It seemed too stupid and obvious to say, because we had to. My photog and I were stunned, talking about possible retaliation, honestly expected to see rockets and missiles in the sky. We knew nothing of the scale of the disaster, but we knew that two planes hitting the building meant an attack. the press agent was mostly worried about us not getting to interview sum 41, or getting paired off to a dingy hotel - i think she was still in shock. her altered perspective helped us, however - she browbeat the lady assigning hotels into giving us a room at a four star hotel.

we clambered into a minivan to take us to our hotel. we picked up a free paper that had a photo of the WTC in flames as its front and back covers, like it were a centerfold. but it still didn't seem real; the minivan took us to our hotel, we made some stilted small talk with our fellow passengers. the three of us would be sharing one double room. we flicked on CNN and ordered room service and started to watch the footage - i don't think i have said 'fuck' that much. it was horrible. after about two hours, we couldn't stand it anymore, and went out into town to a deserted steak restaurant, where we had a very liquid, shell-shocked dinner.

we were stuck in canada for a whole week. it was a crazy, nasty time, and we spent the whole week pretty much drunk and in shock, trying to get back home, and trying not to think that our original plan to come to LA - flying into mainland USA on the 10th and taking a domestic flight to LA on the 11th - might've placed us on one of those tragic planes.

first thing i thought when i saw what happened was muslim terrorists, because i remembered the previous WTC bombing. i also thought of osama bin laden. i remembered seeing a 60 minutes segment about how the NSA was being swamped and overwhelmed with information and it was increasingly hard to track terrorists like bin laden.

like a lot of others i was also worried about what the effects this would have on the muslims living in the US, and just how what all this would do to the country, not to mention the world.

i was depressed and angry for several days. to get my mind off of it i went out and bought a bunch of CDs.

There was something about a crash on a website and when I ran to turn on the TV (I don't generally turn it on before 6) the BBC were already live with it. I think it was before the second plane crashed. Sat there taking it in for five minutes, unable to get through to Minneapolis on phone, had a panic about Nick being so far downtown, mailed him, he mailed back sharpish to say he was all right. Phoned my American friend Randy in West London, told him to switch on telly; he's from Staten Island so freaked. Told him about the police cordon and that I would be over as soon as I could get there.

Went on ILX and had HUGE dialup bill. Didn't speak to my mom until I got to Randy's and heard the first of many vengeful, conservative voices baying for revenge.

I don't remember much about the morning, it was pretty uneventful and much like every other day I went to work. I don't remember anybody saying anything on the subway or much out of the ordinary. When I got to work, I went to the downstairs cafeteria and got a bagel and cofee, as always. At the checkout register, some guy in front of me said something about the WTC that I didn't overhear to the lady who I always chatted with. The lady and I kinda looked at each other funny, like "what is this guy talking about?"

Got up to my office, and noticed a really hushed tone among the people on the floor. I think some people were listening to the radio, but I couldn't hear why. Logged on to the computer (took forever), and tried to open up various news sites (as is my morning routine anyway), but nothing would come up. After a few minutes, when I figured things out and the first thoughts of panic were sinking in, my boss (who worked on a different part of the floor) came by and told me to go home, and not come back for a couple days. The other people on the floor, who coordinated communications to employees in the building, started talking about how this was the first time in forever that the bank would close (it didn't even close during the big Loop flood a couple of years before).

So I packed up and went back to the subway. By this point the CTA was running for free, they weren't taking any fares off the cars. The train was crowded, but not too bad, and there was a weird hush, except for a smelly homeless guy, who was laughing uncontrollably and sort of pushing his contempt in everybody's face. Got back home, turned on the news, and started trying to call everyone I knew in NYC, including my girlfriend. Couldn't reach anybody, except for my friend Eve in Brooklyn, who was freaked out because our friend Lisa worked right next to Ground Zero (incidentally, this is the office I work in now). Got in touch with parents to let them know nothing had happened in Chicago (though the rumors were that the Sears Tower was next).

Spent all day indoors, alone and paranoid (though it was a beautiful day). Later in the evening I drove out to the suburb where my dad and stepmom were staying with my Great Uncle's family, and we sat around the television, just sort of blankly staring at the news for a while. Then we decided to get dinner. The next day, dad and stepmom rented a car and drove all the way back to Alabama.

Finally heard from girlfriend within a day or two. She told me about seeing the WTC in flames on her way into Manhattan, and the lines to give blood, and the overall crazy feeling and how everybody she knew was just getting super-plastered drunk or doing hellacious amounts of drugs. Her business trip was a disaster to begin with, I thought, since her tight-ass ad agency (though one of the biggest in Chicago) wouldn't put her up in a hotel. She had to stay with a friend of hers who worked for Morgan Stanley, who despite having been moved to Midtown was in WTC 2 that day to retrieve some stuff - luckily she got out okay. Girlfriend's boss rented a car to drive back to Chicago, but didn't offer girlfriend a ride (the selfish bastard). She took Amtrak back to Chicago that weekend - I remember waiting for her - after picking her up - while she went into the Dominicks on Roosevelt to shop for food, looking up at the Sears Tower on another beautiful day without a cloud or plane in the sky, and hearing "Isn't It a Pity" by George Harrison on the radio and crying.

So, by the time I found out, eveyone else was getting back to work. I had about 10 minutes to deal with it before I felt like I had to act busy.

The weirdest thing about the day was how beautiful it was. Nature was taunting us. I remember looking out of my window and seeing a bird nest in a tree and realizing just how little we mattered in the grand scheme. The day was just stunning in its beauty.

I'll never forget the smell of the city. I still catch whiffs of it. Electrical fire, death, burning nostrils. It's still with me to this day.

And for some reason I've never washed the shirt I was wearing that day. There is still ash on it.

We marched in formation to and from lunch that day to keep people from freaking out or trying to run off or something. Lots of MPs running around with hot rifles.

if i hadnt gotten sick, i would've stayed the night in NY city somewhere. as it was, when we were driving through my friend wanted to stop because i was sick, but i just wanted to push on and get home to my bed.

Whilst looking for a spot to put the car, the news came on and said that two planes had crashed into the WTC. I went in to our flat and told Madeline and her parents (who were helping us move) what was happening . We had no TV or radio and so had no real idea as to the scale of what was happening and moved boxes into our flat.

I was still working night shifts then, so I went to work at 5, and it wasn't until watching the TV in the corner of the office that it struck me how serious the attacks were.

We all got the news right after the first plane hit, and given that we were a video company, we were all glued to various news channels (CNN, BBC, CBC, CTV mostly). And now we had the confusion about the event - would it be cancelled? There were lots of phone calls of the 'what the hell do we do now?' variety. In the end, Sting agreed to go ahead with the webcast, but only performed one song (Fragile), and made a little statement about the days events. Given all the increased web traffic in general, bandwidth was a major problem. Somehow, our server/network seemed to hold (surprisingly we still got a lot of traffic).

We were all a little freaked out in the office, and heard that they were evacuating the major office buildings in the downtown core (we were just west of this). We decided to call it a day, although some of us stuck around just to keep up with the news. My best friend & roommate James (who worked near by) came by my office. We made the curious decision to go up onto the roof of our building, since it has a nice terrace and it was a sunny day. No-one was up there (understandably) and the peace and quiet was a big help given the madness going on. We chatted about the day and life in general, and after a while figured we should move on. We went right to the beer store, and then went home and smoked a lot of weed with friends. Conspiracy theories abounded, as you can imagine.

To this day I still find it weird how people seem to only talk about the WTC, and ignore the Pentagon and the other plane that was Washington-bound as well (which seemed more freaky to us at the time).

Anyway, I put the TV on, checked ILX and saw the thread just getting bigger and bigger. Obviously you were all just names on a screen now, but the panic among the NYCers and their friends really hit me. God knows what state I'd be in if an event on that scale was to happen now.

Then I checked another forum and was suddenly informed that a friend of mine worked in the second tower to be hit. Sudden numb blind panic really - a message posted by her before leaving the house confirmed what time she'd left for work, but we weren't sure if she'd got all the way in. Spent the next two hours frantically checking the forum, it turned out she hadn't even left for work. It was horrible, but the feeling of relief was immense. She's in London this week, funnily enough. I will be drinking with her without a doubt.

Anytime you turn on the TV at nine in the morning and see Peter Jennings, you know that it's going to be a bad day.

I could write another fifty paragraphs, but that's what I was doing when I found out about the World Trade Center being destroyed.

But yeah. The sky was so blue with not a chemtrail inside it.

A couple days later I went to Hoboken for a gig to get out of the house. I'm not sure what band I saw, it might have been the Clean, but I got detoured due to the Holland Tunnel closing on my drive there. I remember driving over the Pulaski Skyway on the 1/9 and seeing the hole where the towers used to be and almost crashing my car.

I got up and had a few IMs waiting that all said something to the effect of "holy shit", one with a link to CNN. Since the page was still loading after about 30 seconds, I knew it something absolutely devastating had happened and the website was being bombarded with hits. When the page loaded, my stomach felt awful. Classes were cancelled and most of the day was spent talking to friends and family about the events. Strangely, what I remember most about the day were those anxious 30 seconds of knowing something had happened but not what.

I had to check with my boss about the actual events (I was at work) because I couldn't remember what we had watched & what we hadn't. In the aftermath the media showed the planes crashing & the towers falling so many times, that I could not separate what we had seen in real time & what we hadn't. We got an email from our finance office in Boston. This was after the second plane had crashed. The tv was switched on at work & lots of ppl were in there watching. I went in there for a moment, but it was just too much to bear with everyone else in the room. I went back to my office to watch the footage via the internet. various pcs were on different news sites. The planes kept flying into the buildings. I must admit, I really had no thought for repurcussions or the wider scheme of things, although I realised how horrifying the scene I was watching was. I don't even think to this day I am able to comprehend the amount of ppl that died & the amount of ppl directly affected by it. We then watched both towers fall. utter disbelief is the only way to describe it. Then I left work & went to a friends house. She had had a baby 2 weeks prior to this event (my godson) & she had been watching it all unfold. needless to say I gave my godson a big hug.

Reports about the planes in D.C. and Pennsylvania began to filter through. The head of my company called an all-staff meeting in the lobby and said that anyone who wanted to go home could go home. My first reaction was, "Does he think we're unsafe here? Do people actually think the terrorists are going to strike Evanston, Illinois?" (Although at the time, we thought the plane in Pennsylvania, which hadn't crashed yet, might have been heading for Chicago.) Only later did I realize that he was sending us home so we could grieve and contact friends and relatives on the East Coast.

I decided to stay at work for a couple more hours. We made coffee and went upstairs to watch TV in the editorial conference room. I made a morbid joke about the spectacle of it all, something to the effect that we should have been making popcorn. I went home a little after noon and watched TV for the rest of the afternoon, craving more information. I didn't really do much that night. I sat by my kitchen window smoking a cigarette and writing in my journal.

I felt guilty that I wasn't feeling it as much as some people were. It still seemed sort of abstract to me. I think it affected me less on an emotional level and more on a "wow, I'm living through a hugely historic event" level. Still, about a week later, I had a dream that Chicago was attacked, and I had to outrun the smoke and poisonous gases that were spreading from downtown. I'd never had a dream like that before.

i emailed a friend who worked in the borders bookstore at the base of the wtc. i emailed my friends in cairo, because i assumed that the usa would shortly be bombing the shit out of some arab country. our bookstore closed at noon. i couldn't see any smoke from the pentagon. i had just driven past it the night before. i walked home, steadfastly left the television off, turned some music up very loud (happily i don't remember what it was) and rapidly got very drunk while playing freecell/hearts/anything that would pass the time and not involve thinking.

my friend at the wtc borders e-mailed me in the early evening--she had been in the subway in lower manhattan when it happened, and spent the rest of the day walking home to park slope via the queensboro bridge. the worst that ended up happening to my friends in cairo was that people would cheer when the footage was shown.

Flipped to another channel and they were showing the same "fire". And another channel. Same thing. I was still half-asleep.

Finally, one channel had a caption "WTC collapse". I still didn't get it (still half-asleep). Next thought : "OK, so where are the buildings now? What do you mean they're not there?".

It's interesting that you had the immediate premonition of "war" - I admit I didn't see it in those terms until several days later, after our elected representatives had defined it that way.

on a side note, i'm surprised how many people here were unemployed at the time.

I felt that way immediately, as soon as I heard. By the time I got the news, the second tower had been hit, and the words "terrorist attack" were already being tossed around, and someone said "Afghanistan," and I knew. I could just see hot nuclear war in the near future, Afghanistan turned into a sheet of glass. I don't know what hit me harder -- the fear of that possibility, or the fact that it didn't morally bother me as much as I knew it should have.

I had been laid off from my job that July and the WTC was where I got out every morning around 9:45. I worked on Canal and Varick and used to love the walk to work.

So everyone watched TV and I mostly listened while I IM-ed my girlfriend and sent emails to a message board and refreshed the New York Times webpage like mad. A co-worker leaned over my shoulder and asked why I was reading the New York Times. This confused me -- it seemed like the most logical thing in the world. A few minutes later I realized what he had meant -- in a time of war, I had no right to be reading a liberal newspaper.

I kept thinking about Kevin. "I hope Kevin's okay." He was in New York, and I knew he was at work, and I hoped to hell that his building was in Midtown. I called for hours. Finally I got through around 7pm, and he told me his story. He was downtown. He was as confused as everyone else. He was one of the thousands of ash-covered refugees that trudged up FDR Drive to his East Village apartment. He was upset, and he didn't want to talk about it, because he didn't know what to say. Poor guy spent the next year in a heightened state of paranoia, purchasing survival kits with sarin antidotes and such, playing out grim survival scenarios in his head. He always was wound too tight, and I thought that he was the one person I knew who I *least* wished that disaster on.

I was in the exact same place I'm in now, reading the exact same board as I was reading when it happened.

and i'm surprised how many of us are no longer with our partners at the time...

To this day, I'm still shocked that "only" 4000 people perished. That's still an awful loss that has left my spirit bruised to this day, but I remember going to sleep that night thinking that 50,000 were gone.

I am! I guess that makes us a regular couple now. Three years.

I was sat at home, after lunch, feeling a bit bored, so I decided to check my email. On the local Linux Users' Group list, someone had posted "a plane has crashed into the WTC - looks like it's toast". Imagining a light aircraft, I put the TV on to see if there was anything on Ceefax about it. The first thing I registered was that BBC1 had been taken off-air and replaced with News 24. The next thing I saw was footage of one of the towers collapsing.

And now look at us. (not ILM/us, but the collective world us.)

I've really been sickened by that lately.

The apartment I had then was in Carroll Gardens, nestled right down by Hamilton Ave. and the entrance to the Battery Tunnel, and thus right in the path of all the debris that was blowing over from Manhattan. Our roof was positively showered with stuff -- burned up organizer pages, blank letterhead, phone book pages. Eerie in the extreme. While we were collecting up some of that, all the sudden you could hear what I can still recall as this slight but definitive groan, and then the first tower came down. At that point, the shower of smoke and debris got really bad, and we went back down into the apartment.

Looking out our windows, it was like some sort of strange gray blizzard for about 15 or 20 minutes. Bits of paper stuck to our fire escape and windowsills, which we also collected. So by then we were left with all this stuff, and realizing what it meant -- that the people whose desks this stuff was on an hour ago were in all likelihood gone now -- we couldn't bring ourselves to throw it away. Eventually we did, of course, but I always felt weirdly bad about not keeping it.

I also kept the shirt I had on that day, and have never washed it. It's covered on the shoulders in this fine, gray soot.

There were a few political volunteers out on the street corners on Avenue B handing out flyers to remind people to vote in the mayoral primaries that day. I made a mental note to vote that evening after work. I took the cross-town bus to Union Square without incident. On the 4 train south to Wall St., a man was talking in a loud voice that two planes had struck the WTC. People on the train seemed kind of afraid. I felt the first pangs of fear. I looked around at the other passengers, but no one seemed to know anything. Another man spoke up and said that he was glad that he wasn't getting off until Brooklyn, because he didn't want to be downtown at a time like this. I began questioning whether I should get off at my regular stop.

After the Brooklyn Bridge stop, the conductor announced that the train would be skipping Fulton St., due to "an incident". There was no further explanation. (Note that this is the stop closest to the WTC on that line.) As we passed slowly through the Fulton St. station we could see that all of the platforms were empty. The station had apparently been evacuated. However, the train stopped as usual at the Wall St. stop, and hesitating for half a second, I got off the train.

When I came out onto Broadway, I immediately noticed lots of strange things going on. There were no cars on Broadway. Instead the street was full of people looking up in the direction of the WTC and taking pictures. There were lots of little pieces of paper floating in the air, like confetti. There were long lines at the payphones. I looked up at the south WTC tower and saw black smoke coming out of the uppermost windows. I decided that the best thing to do would be to go into the office where I could get more news about what was going on.

I started walking down Wall St. I was about a block down the street when I heard people behind me start screaming. Then I heard this loud rumbling noise - sort of what I'd imagine an avalanche to sound like. Looking back, I saw that everyone was running towards me. Not having the slightest clue what was happening, I started running too. All I could think is that we were being attacked somehow. I was trying to decide whether I'd be better off running into a building or continuing towards the East River when I was suddenly engulfed in an enormous cloud of dust.

Visibility immediately dropped to about three feet. The street went eerily silent. Obviously people had to stop running, because you couldn't see a thing. I couldn't see anyone or anything except for the asphalt beneath my feet and a parking sign a few feet in front of me. I still had no clue what was happening. My first thought, as irrational as it may have been, was that maybe there had been a nuclear explosion. What else could cause an enormous dust cloud to engulf lower Manhattan? It certainly seemed like a scene out of "The Day After". The change in my surroundings had been so instantaneous and so unexpected, combined with the eery silence and inability to see, that I froze in panic.

Meanwhile I found that I was getting dust in my nose, throat and eyes, and I was starting to have difficulty breathing. I began to fear that I would run out of oxygen (again probably irrational). It was at this time that luckily I heard someone banging on the door of a nearby building, trying to get in. Then I heard someone unlock the door and let them in. "Anyone else out here?" they called. "I am", I said. I slowly made my way towards the direction of the voice, and suddenly found myself being let into the lobby of a hotel.

In the hotel they made us all go down to the basement, where they had gathered the guests. I went into the restroom and washed the dust off of my face and out of my eyes. I was covered from head to toe in white dust. I looked like a ghost. In the basement, we listened to the news reports on the radio and there I finally put together the pieces to figure out what I had just experienced. I was able to call my gf at the time and let her know that I was okay. A few hours later, they let us walk home.

WORLD TRADE CENTER [Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 1]
NEWSFLASH World Trade Centre NYC is on fire [Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 2]
Terrorist action 11/9/2001 - Thread 3
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 4
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 5
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 6
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 7
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 8
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 9
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 10
Has there been any good/informed commentary yet?

It sort of seems like a million years ago now.

I'm so glad someone else mentioned this (Yancey). It was indeed an unseasonably stunning day, which made the proceedings that much more jarring (if such were possible).

It's so strange that it's already three years ago. At times it still feels like it happened last week. I still stare south from University Place practically every day at the big blank space where the towers stood.

i still have trouble reading those threads chris just linked to.

I remember getting to my wit's end at one point. At two o'clock in the afternoon, they showed a clip of the second plane hitting from a different, previously unseen angle. One of our sales guys went "Holy shit! They hit another one!", thinking that it was a live shot. I went ape shit on him for his stupidity, and I still feel guilty about it even though his happy-go-lucky ass has long forgotten about it.

I'd flown in to the States about a week or so before, and security was as tight as it had ever been, and in fact as tight as it has ever been since. I called my wife then from the Frankfurt airport to say "I think something's up." On the morning of the 11th, my brother (who was also crashing at Kevin's) went out to a pay phone (land line and cells were dead; we saw people queing for a pay phone outside of a bodega that seemed to still be working) to call our parents, and I asked him to make sure they called my wife. They did, although I didn't know if she knew I was ok until five days later, about the same time I found out that Mike Daddino was OK.

We alternated between the roof and the tv for most of the morning. I saw the first tower fall on tv, and registered it much faster than the morons doing the television coverage. I was in the shower when the second one went down. We went for lunch and played music (poorly) for most of the afternoon.

I remember that the weather was gorgeous, and that people were talking to each other seriously, trying to comprehend it. After Kevin and my brother and I finished playing music, we stood by the river in a large, silent crowd and looked at the smoke rising from where the buildings had been.

The day before, I had given my brother a copy of the "Berlin Babylon" soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten. "Die neue Tempel haben schon Risse / künftige Ruinen / einst wächst Gras auch über diese Stadt /
über ihrer letzten Schicht."

fwiw I remember reading how he completely stole that from another 9/11 film, I believe by Italian or French filmmakers.

We get to the home of Tiye (Mama) Zena's and she opens the door saying "the US just got hit". We walk in and see the replay of the first tower being hit. Sit down and see the second tower collapse.

Both of us are former New Yorkers. We have friends who used to work there and one of our closest friends is back in NYC having meetings at the WTC on a daily basis (her old office, she was there in the '93 bombing). I hear the Pentagon news - I have a cousin working there.

I feel horror, pain, fear. I blow my money on long distance calls and interenet bills trying to check everyone is ok. Most everyone is fine, ppl were real lucky. Thanks to the phones collapsing in NYC, one of my best friends has the odd experience of his first 3 calls to ask if he's ok coming from Brazil, Israel & Ethiopia. Noone there can get through. I find out his gf is trapped in a building collapse. Hours later, thru e-mail, I find out she is ok. I then have to ask him to call a friend's cell to check if he's ok - find out he's in Boston and fine (by that point all the phone lines have given out)

I have never felt as powerless, at a loss or as thankful for e-mail as I did over those few days. I hate being reminded of them as well.

Not much later I get a call from my best friend in Los Angeles, whose brother lives in Brooklyn, telling me that his brother was OK. Since so many of my friends use cell phones exclusively, and since those lines were pretty much dead, a lot of them were incommunicado for a while, and I admit I was worried. Another friend on the upper west side woke up to a message on his answering machine asking him if he was OK. It took him until 11 or so to realize what was going on.

When my wife finally got back from downtown, we watched TV together for a long while. Then we decided to walk to the local blood bank to donate. It was a beautiful day, just gorgeous. There was a big line at the blood bank, and we had to queue up for a future donation day.

A couple of weeks later, I got a package my wife had given me to send to New York returned. The address was smack in the middle of Ground Zero. It took me a while before I could throw the package out.

I also vividly remember flying into New York at night less than a month later. Ground Zero was lit up like a baseball stadium. Everybody craned their necks over to the right side of the plane. The guy next to me just muttered to himself, "will you look at that."

While we were eating, I noticed that the radio had become sub-audible and was now all newsy. Maybe I heard a few key words and got a feeling that something very tragic had happened. When the waitress came by again, I asked her what whas on the news. Her response was "IT'S HAPPENING" and she explained the towers and the Pentagon with another plane on it's way to DC and perhaps the Whitehouse.

I don't remember finishing the meal. We were so blackened with grief that we drove back home. I couldn't bring myself to turn on the TV, but instead listened to the radio for a few hours, sitting on my back porch and really have no other recollections of the day.

We live in Vermont and usually see the contrails of many jets on international routes to and from NYC. That day there were none.

In the aftermath, I discovered that a good friend of ours lost an aunt and uncle who were on one of the planes.

i get off at the WTC PATH station and walk from there to broadway for work every weekday. if it weren't for all of the rubbernecking tourists, i wouldn't give it that much thought. still, every now and then before i go back down the PATH station to home every evening, i try to mentally recreate where various stuff at the old WTC was (and isn't there anymore). like, where was the old borders? the old dean & deluca's where i had coffee numerous times?

People suck.

-- me threatening to beat up some jerk in a hoboken coffee-shop who was ranting on about rounding up and deporting muslims (this was just before the 2d tower fell, and responsibility for the act was not clear). ran into the same jerk 2 days later, who shouted at me about palestinians allegedly dancing and partying it up in the streets on the west bank; followed by me calling him a racist scum and threatening to beat him up again.

-- watching the same footage on channel 2, with this old guy (in early 60s) covered from head to foot in soot and telling the camera-man that he worked around the towers and despite his age how he ran like a mofo.

-- my younger sister (who lives in hanover, PA) calling me at 11 AM, to find out how i was (she told me that she'd been trying to reach me for an hour) and telling me the reports about the plane that went down that day in PA (she said that the initial reports were that it was shot down).

-- wondering why my parents hadn't tried to call me. later found out that mom was in philadelphia that day w/ a family friend, and that it took an inordinate amount of time for them to get home to central NJ (she didn't have a cellphone then) and that besides that she didn't call sooner b/c my sister left a message saying that she'd spoken to me and that i was OK.

Was that the film that was originally started as a fly-on-the-wall-doc about the life of ordinary New York firemen, and its makers just happened to be filming on September 11th? I've seen that, and it's very good; I can't remember a bit with no picture, just sound, but I'm fairly sure that I have seen that before somewhere.

or maybe that's the anti-inflammatory medication. i don't know.

it's very powerful to read this thread, on a personal level, as well as a political level. i have survived worse, i will get through this, too.

The day before my Dutch friends had taken a train to DC. They were staying with a friend in Arlington, right near the Pentagon. They were supposed to fly that morning from DC to Seattle. I received phone calls from their worried friends in Holland and tried to call the number where they were staying. A couple of days earlier, we had walked through Philly trying to find the tallest building we could to get an aerial view of the city, but it was a Sunday and the tallest buildings were closed. I finally managed to reach my friends in Arlington.

The next day I went to the Red Cross to give blood, but was turned away. They had too many donors. The horror was that they didn't really need blood because there was nobody left to save.

I'm back working in the office that I was in before that day. Before the attack, sometimes I'd ride the extra stop to Chambers on the A (coming from Brooklyn) on really hot, really wet or really cold days, so I could walk through the mall and the bridges over West St. to the World Financial Center, getting me to work entirely indoors. Now I just get off at Fulton everyday. A few times as I've mucked around G.Z., down Church and then over on Liberty St., in a steady rain or through soupy humidity, I've caught myself trying to map that old indoor route in my head.

I think Sept. 11 should be a national "no fly day". Prolly a lot of people don't like to fly that day anyway, but I think it would be such a great way to memorialize the day -- to have the skies quiet and clear one day a year.

Was that the film that was originally started as a fly-on-the-wall-doc about the life of ordinary New York firemen, and its makers just happened to be filming on September 11th? I've seen that, and it's very good; I can't remember a bit with no picture, just sound, but I'm fairly sure that I have seen that before somewhere.

This is a complete sidetrack, but it's gotta be addressed. This film was shown on CBS in early 2002, and although the filmmakers don't show the attack or the buildings falling, to say that Moore ripped them off is completely false. Unlike Moore, who just uses audio, this film has footage from inside the WTC with the firemen, and obv. the soundtrack is some of the same stuff (the airplanes hitting the building, people jumping, the towers falling), but I don't remember the screen being black.

I got an eye infection, from the dust. My boyfriend at the time used it as an excuse to move in with me, which in retrospect made little sense but at the time it just seemed like that was what people would do, none of us questioned how odd that was. The first person in our office to find out that a friend of hers had definitely died was my friend, M4n0n, and we thought she was having a nervous breakdown. I spent the entire day organizing, no one in the office seemed to be thinking about the fact that they had no place to stay, no way out of the city, and we were missing at least 10 coworkers (the people who worked down there). They were all just staring at the tv.

The funny thing was, they really didn't have to stare at the tv because running outside and trying to figure out things going on and trying to see if anyone's cell phone was working that I could pay them to use to locate one of my coworkers, you could see it from where we were just by going outside. Straight view downtown to the collapse.

I have a mixed reaction to cop/fireman funerals. On one hand they are very nice in some ways; my grandfather got one when he died, but he didn't die in duty, he died of cancer, years later. It seemed like a repetetive, cruel cermony in other situations.

An eager beaver, he.

OTM. It was inescapable. It was an all-sensory experience that was impossible to get away from.

My bad, it wasn't the french film, it was one of the shorts on "11'09''01 - September 11" done by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

I don't recall the reason she gave for being late when she finally arrived. She said "well...you're safe now" and I countered with "nobody's safe" which I knew was pretentious bullcrap but it felt important to say.

After I arrived back home and signaled my positive existence to the world, I was confused and didn't really know what to think or feel -- I wondered if I was now out of a job (I wasn't) and if anybody I worked with died (nobody did) -- but I sort of didn't care, because I knew sooner or latter the 'correct' feelings would assert themselves against my will. I was so giddy, even giggly, I couldn't do much of anything worthwile so I got up and walked into what little there is of a town in Bay Shore just to walk.

Most of the stores were closed. The ones that inexplicably were I went in, just to wander. There was a lamp store that was not completely empty (one of the salespeople said hi, nervously) and a paint store that was almost completely empty except for the salesmen arguing, grimly. I took some paint strips (green, orange) because I was keen to paint the UES apartment I was in the process of buying.

I went to a church and talked to God. It was also empty, except for a woman clear across, sobbing.

I could hear the voices of newscasters coming from the cars as I walked by, and I don't know why I remember this detail but I was struck by the fact that I knew exactly what they were talking about. I looked up at the sky and there were no clouds and no planes.

When I got home I turned I fell asleep to Why Patterns? Before I woke I had a very clear dream of being down at the World Trade Center, the corner of Liberty and Trinity, filled with people on their lunch hour. The rest of the day I remember nothing of, at all, though I'm sure it was filled with ILx and MST3K (comfort food).

I remember doing a lot of that too. A lot of "things will never be the same!", said ominously. I'm surprised no one slapped me.

I went to work - late - and none of us did anything all morning, it was eerily quiet in the building and out on the streets. Hardly any cars were out, and the silence from the loss of air traffic was deafening. We were all pretty scared, no one knew where those missing planes were, and the word on the street was Chicago was next, then Los Angeles, probably Houston or Dallas... They let us leave early and for whatever lame-o reason, I went to the grocery store - which was packed with people buying up emergency supplies, then went home, turned on the television and sat there into the wee hours of the morning, occasionally fielding phone calls, bouts of tears - fuck, it was the not knowing what had happened to friends, friends of friends, the people they thought might still be alive...

I went to bed about 2 am, and about half an hour later heard a plane fly by - and it scared the living hell out of me, cause all the planes had been grounded, right? I guess it was a military jet of some kind, but wow, was my heart pounding.

I've never felt that horror before, in the pit of my stomach, a hole in my heart - and I hope to never feel it again.

We spent the next hour laughing and joking about it, but it was only when I got home and saw the news reports on TV that I discovered it was a terrorist attack, that the buildings were occupied (not empty as I had thought), and that both buildings had collapsed.

It was such a sad, cruel thing to happen. One of the guys on the first plane was from Shropshire, my home county, and was the son of someone my aunt used to work with. That brought the tragedy closer to home.

September 11 is this Saturday. Strange.

When we were satisfied that there wasn't going to be another attack (or any more news besides hysteria), I went back to my room to bed and slept. The next morning I was late to school, and my teacher wasn't particularly impressed by my explanation. I just stared blankly, not comprehending the suggestion that witnessing this event is less important than 20 minutes of Physics.

alex, i know what you mean, i'd like to know more.

How do you mean Alex?

How do you mean Alex?

Well, what happened to building 7? Where's the debris from the plane at the Pentagon? Etc. Etc.

I'm not really a big conspiracy theorist, but I do find them interesting. For a site that touches on many (and some of them are ludicrous....i.e. UFO sightings at the moment of the attack on the WTC), check out this site and scroll down.

Well, what happened to building 7?

y'know about the diesel tank, right?

Does anyone remember early reports that a car had been blown up outside of a government building in D.C.? This was never repeated anywhere after the first day or two.

The redwoods were a great place to be on that day. I wasn't totally bombarded and overwhelmed by news media and pictures all day. Instead, I was surrounded by enormous trees up to a thousand years old. As a result, I think I was somewhat less traumatized by the event than most Americans were.

y'know about the diesel tank, right?

I don't, actually -- please elaborate.

Has anyone seen the documentary Loose Change?

Thanks, Keith!

I'm iffy on the possible shootdown of Flight 93. ANG/USAF fighters were scrambled to intercept but the Discovery Channel sez they were still 150 miles away when the plane went down. Simply put, air to air missile systems don't exist that can engage and travel that far and SAMs wouldn't have made such a clean hit. Even with a PAC-3 the plane would have wound up scattered over a much wider area.

office of emergency management. coincidentally, wtc landlord larry silverstein was a big contributor to giuliani's various mayoral campaigns. that probably has something to do with the asinine idea of placing the oem in a building which was part of a complex already targeted and hit by terrorists 8 years earlier.

C-SPAN has released 160,000 hours of archive footage stretching back to 1987. Here's their coverage of the WTC attacks -

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/165959-2

I am strangely comforted by other ppl's need to view footage & re-read the 9/11 threads. I do this every now & again & I wish I knew why.

^^^^^ on this

I read the threads but I never view the footage. It's like a couple of stills - the second plane, falling man - have become shorthand for the whole event, and seeing one is enough to ackowledge the deep, still well of feeling; I don't actually want to go further and unlock the whole horror, it would feel gratuitous and voyeuristic even though it's my own memory and psyche.

I found out via a television shop window. One plane had hit and there was the footage of rising smoke with caption 'plane hits world trade center'. No sound. A couple of old women had stopped with me and I remember them straight away muttering 'bloody suicide bombers'. I'd first been to New York three or four weeks previously and had gone up the south tower - I'd been telling friends how it was the best thing and I wished I'd done it in daylight. There was a board in the Empire State Building, I remember, showing the military plane that had crashed into it in WWII, and there was no scale to this footage, so I let my head rule my heart and thought 'this is the kind of thing that sometimes happens', and went to the library as per my original plan.

When I got to the car I switched on the radio to find the coverage in chaos. I drove home as fast as I could. I remember the news of the first tower falling actually breaking as an aside: "did I mention that one of the towers has collapsed?". I fastened myself to the television for the next thirty-six hours until I couldn't watch any more. I've seen new bits from time to time, but I've never felt the need to seek out the footage since.

I enjoyed the Man On Wire film so much. The unspoken pleasure of it is that it gave me an image of the towers arguably even stronger, for the humanity of it, than so many of the ones from that day. Now fire and nihilism aren't necessarily what come to mind any more. The footage with actual people hoping and suffering and loving, that will never be superseded. That's the part of it that I don't want to go back to.

I think of those old women from time to time. Like, how did they know? Well it was kind of obvious that this is what it would be, especially in retrospect. I guess that when you have something that horrible and unprecedented there's a tendency to try to outthink your instincts. But gut feeling is more likely to be right. I think of them every time I hear a public figure here say it had been inconceivable beforehand that the London attacks were by young Britons. Why? That was exactly what I thought straight away - it was much more surprising that the second attacks weren't. Everyone's instincts - revulsion, togetherness, sympathy - were right on September 11, except for those too stupid to understand what they were looking at. Seeing Palestinians celebrate was pretty vile. Of course I started to try to outthink myself once the shock had faded - what did we do to make them do this, etc - what a lot of rubbish. We got it right on the day.

i never want to read accounts or watch footage. if i pick up a book and read on the back that it's supposed to be a response to 9/11, i put it back down. i'm not offended, i just don't want to go there.

the morning it happened, i slept in a little. just before 9:00, i got up and walked out to the living room where my housemate, D., was watching the news. he was always watching the news. i could tell from the announcer's voices that something monumental and terrible had happened. i told D. i didn't want to know, and went back to bed. about an hour later i got up again and spent the rest of the day catching up on the news and talking to friends/family.

i couldn't then and still can't really feel the event. i wasn't angry or sad and even now don't know what i feel. there's a quality of resigned despair, but it's bruisy and dull, not acute. i think that when things become overwhelming, they also become oddly vacant, at least for me, like my mind and emotions simply can't process past a certain point. so i shut down, turn away, flee the implications of awareness.

Looking back:

A sudden thought -- thanks to my work schedule, I think I was (in a much different scale of things) fortunate. While I saw some of the initial coverage, catching both towers burning, the collapse of the first and the Pentagon impact, I first had to get ready to go to work and then actually go to work -- and after that time, a few moments aside on campus, I was away from the TV, which I think was all the better for me. I wasn't...well, fixed to the ground, and all my worry was focused on Mike Daddino -- and since I couldn't do anything for him, I just went to work where I could concentrate on it there on-line.

I think I would have felt a lot worse...quite a lot worse...if I had just been at home all day or had a TV at work. Perversely, it reduces the experience to text in my head for the most part, and yet that might be a good thing in the long run.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, September 12, 2001 5:00 PM (8 years ago)

...I was right.

I agree, Ned. My wife and I were camping at the time. I first learned of the attack from another man who walked into the bathroom at Jedediah Smith State Park and informed me. I turned on the car radio long enough to hear a few confused reports on NPR, turned it off and then told my wife.

I deliberately kept us away from television as much as I could that day. When, in the next few days, it became evident that everyone in the whole country seemed to be acting crazy and traumatized, I was glad of the decision. I was able to be informed of what happened, without having all the trauma of seeing the worst footage endlessly looped for several hours while simultaneously hearing news reporters agonize over it, like a constant bruising of my brain.

I already knew, from living through 1968, what watching it on the television would be like. (shudders)

I had just moved to a new town, where my girlfriend was going to school. I was heading out the door on my way to a job interview, when my neighbor came across the street: "Well, we're in a war," he said. "Them Arabs blew up the World Trade Center." I cancelled my job interview (at Blockbuster, which I was eventually hired for and stayed for a month) and went inside to try to call my family. I was terrified all day that something would happen to them and of course I couldn't get through. I couldn't get in touch with my girlfriend at her school either. Apparently, she had gone off to donate blood with her new, secret boyfriend. Lol, what a shitty year. I didn't have TV, so I just sat there all day listening to the reports on my clock radio and watching the shadows move across my wall.

Was having teeth drilled in dentists chair when second plane hit and they realized the first one was not merely an accident(he had the radio on). Since it was a relatively major procedure, i remained under the drill until the towers fell. I remember the radio reporters (I believe it was WABC 770 in NYC) had no clue what was going on, and were reporting all sorts of rumors like the White House was on fire, terroists stopped with van full of explosives on the GWB, etc. I now tend to avoid all discussion, journalism, writing and film about 9/11 or even tangentially related to it.

Good Christ.

I had spent all night online, and woke up at about 1 PM. I was in the middle of the six-month period between quitting my H0me D@pot job and going to school for my CNA. I turned the TV on, and there it was. The first thing I did was call my husband, who was up at my parent's house undergoing some cockamamie homemade treatment for alcoholism. I keep thinking that I wasn't on ILX then, but I've found posts from me from August of that year, so I dunno.

I was on a flight returning from a holiday in Rome when the first plane hit. We had to transfer in Amsterdam to get back to Manchester and I heard someone in the queue behind us there saying something about a crash. Once we were on the homebound flight the pilot made a cryptic announcement that there had been an "incident" but I had no real idea what was going on until we got back to M/cr and the taxi driver had his radio on with constant news updates. Once we got home I watched the TV news for the rest of the day and most of the night.

Before the attacks I'd always wanted to visit America and never had, but the year after my girlfriend (now wife) and I went to Chicago on holiday; the trip coincided with the first anniversary of 9/11 and on the day itself we decided to go to the top of the Sears Tower. Unsurprisingly, it was a quiet day for visitors and I remember looking out at that beautiful city in vivid autumnal sunshine and seeing military helicopters in a stationary hovering pattern surrounding the tower. It's a long time ago now but I'm sure I felt the same mixture of anger and sadness that I had the year before.

I was working at Hanford - it was the last day of a two-week-long trip there. I went in early to clean up stuff before I left that afternoon and kept wondering off and on through the morning why no one else had come in yet. I rationalized everyone was in a meeting. Hours later, people started turning up to secure things, as the whole place was under lockdown, and they told me what had happened. My stepson and his gf were to be flying out of NY that day, to Philadelphia. Got on the phone to Mr. Jaq, who hadn't heard from him and didn't know what flight etc. Drove home to Seattle, worrying the whole way; we didn't hear from him until 5 or 6 days later.

I had just moved to nyc about a week or so before 9/11. That morning the phone woke me up, it was the store where my roommate worked telling him not to come in. I said "OK". They said, "you know what happened right?" I said, "No". "A plane flew into the World Trade Center." I hung up the phone and looked out the window and could see the towers and the smoke coming out. I spent the rest of the morning watching tv with my roommates discusssing whether or not we should try to get out of town. We decided against it. We went to the hospital across the street to give blood and they sent us to the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn. We waited in line for a while and watched as people from the site wandered through, covered in dust, some with bandages on. I remember it being very quiet. Dust from the WTC swirled outside our building for a few days.

I was working at my office at the time, which as you can see was spitting distance from the Pentagon. One of my co-workers came out of his office and said, "Howard Stern said a plane just hit the World Trade Center." Then, of course, the news got worse from there. We closed our office and everyone went over to our boss's house, which was about 5 minutes from there, to watch the coverage, and we saw the live footage of the towers falling. My wife drove out from Fairfax to Arlington to pick me up, which took her about 3 hours. It took us another 2 to get home from there to Alexandria. Driving down Glebe Rd -- since all routes immediately surrounding the Pentagon were closed -- and seeing armed soldiers and Humvees every few intersections, esp. in front of government buildings and schools, was surreal. I mean, I grew up an Army brat and even I had never seen so much armed military.

I can't stand to see the footage anymore, or read the accounts, or see photos. The idea of that much trauma happening to that many people at once is just too much for me.

I was sitting in class - one of my first days of high school. I remember walking home with a friend and a particularly loony acquaintance of ours was already rattling off bogus "facts" by mid-afternoon.

My roommate woke me up saying, "Hey dude, someone's bombing the pentagon!" and then watched 5 or 10 minutes of the TV footage about all the crazy stuff. For some reason I went to my college classes (which were cancelled of course) and then got back home and spent the day hanging out w friends, going bowling, etc. I was convinced we were gonna nuke someone in the next few days.

Yeah I had almost the exact same thing - college housemate woke me up with that sort of incredulous but not genuinely upset tone.

Two of my housemates and I sort of grudgingly decided to go buy some bottled water at the grocery store, which is funny because even at the moment I don't think any of us felt very afraid, but it seemed sort of like a way of interacting with the moment.

i had just returned home after dropping off our son on his first day of kindergarden. my wife went on to her office in downtown manhattan. a few minutes after 9:00 she called: "turn on the TV..." she was standing on lower 5th avenue when the second plane flew overhead and then hit the tower.

I was in French class, and my professor looked out the window of the classroom door and saw some people with shocked looks on their faces. He went into the hall, and then came back in, said, "Maintenant, nous parlons anglais," or something like that, and told us to pack up our things and go to the assembly hall. We were told what was going on and that classes were cancelled for the rest of the day.

Right after the assembly let out, I said to my friend Eliza, "Great, we're gonna start a war with Palestine or Iraq."

I will admit, too, that I was almost immediately suspicious that the whole thing was an inside job. I still have my doubts.

I was still living in Melbourne when it happened. Phone rang early early morning, like 1 or 2am, and my best friend was saying "Sharon! Turn on the tv right now. There's been a terrorist attack in New York, it's awful..." and something about towers and I was sooooo tired I wanted to hang up on her but I trundled downstairs and turned on the tv. Fire, people falling, smoke...I stayed on the phone with her until she went back to bed, and I stayed in the living room til I had to go to work...I don't think I could have slept if I wanted to. All the way into work I was listening to ABC radio...at work my friends and I were just kind of shellshocked, scouring the new sites trying to find out what was going on, not really sure what to do. As far away as we were, it made the world seem incredibly small that day. As soon as I got to work I emailed Mr Veg (who back then was still my fiancee, living in Sacramento)...and we were both just holy shit, holy shit. He told me what was going on at his office, fed me news stories and we just tried not to freak right out.

What was weird for me was that a) he was coming to visit in October, so he went through all the weirdness of immediate post 9/11 flying...plastic knives on the tray table, confiscated knitting needles, all that stuff...and I was at the tailend of my visa process & getting pretty close to approval, so people were constantly saying, "Are you still going to go?" or "Why are you still going over there?" Part of me didn't know the answer, I mean...it does seem crazy. Because seeing all of that happen, with me being on one continent and him being on another, it just made me that much more certain that I was doing the right thing, that if that ever happened again, I wanted to do whatever I could to make sure we were at least in the same place together.

To this day I still can't watch footage without crying. I just can't absorb that level of carnage.

One sidenote: a few years ago my work did a 9/11 rememberance thing on the intranet, asking for people's memories of the day, kind of like this...and I had relayed a bit of my story and how it had affected me. People talked about it with each other as well, and I have to say that it kind of bothered me that some people I worked with were actually eyebrows-raised surprised that it affected Australia at all. I don't know, maybe they were surprised we had tv's or electricity or something, but it was kind of odd. But then some of my coworkers are maroons of the highest order, so yknow...

i was being fired from my women's clinic job for something i didn't have anything to do with, sadly.

I was at work all day at the university, helping students register for fall semester courses. Some vague talk during the morning session about there having been some kind of big accident. I think by noon I knew that a plane had crashed into the WTC, maybe even two planes, but not that it had collapsed. Found out at lunchtime more or less the whole story. Then back to work for the afternoon. To be honest, people behaved as normal, didn't talk about it much, there was no discussion of cancelling anything, the students were mainly focused on picking out their courses. But we were down in central NJ so in some sense I think it registered for people as "faraway disaster," at least at first.

i was in class, a teacher came into the room and told us to turn on the tv, we watched, lots of kids went home, i thought it was kind of bs

i was at home, from college, days away from flying to europe for a couple weeks of travel before a term in dublin. my mom woke me up and told me some stuff was happening. we sat and watched for a while, and then i think i either went back to bed or just went upstairs for breakfast or something. i can't actually remember if i saw anything happen in real time, nor do i care to.

one of the friends i was to meet in london was on the very last plane out of jfk, and saw the tower on fire from the plane. the pilot didn't tell them what had happened until they arrived.

i remember now, shamefully, being irritated with her for a few weeks because all she would talk about was how "the skyline would never look the same!". then again, she went to stuyvesant and her family knew ppl that worked in the towers (they were all fine). i feel bad about it now. lol being twenty :-/

was just getting up to go to work, buddy called to tell me "turn on your TV, we're at war". saw some footage, went to work but of course everything was closed. came back home, watched more news, held impromptu BBQ with friends

i'm young. i was in grade 10 math class when a kid walked in and said "yo somebody bombed america." oh canadian bros. you are morons. i went to the art room to watch tv via antenna (fact). i don't think we even got the day off.

Heard it on NPR while driving to work in Evanston, IL. Spent the first hour at work gathered in people's offices and cubicles listening to the radio and refreshing CNN.com. Took a while for it to sink in that the towers were not just damaged but destroyed. When a meeting was held at which we were told we could go home, my first (stupid) thought was "Why? Do they think there are planes headed here?" I stuck around for a little while after, watching TV with coworkers in a conference room, before driving back home and watching more TV with my brother.

i still wonder why we had the day after off from school. hmmm.

I've felt appallingly perverse or something for having once or twice re-read the 9/11 and London bombings threads, so it's good to know that other people do it in a way that doesn't seem perverse. I'm still not sure quite what the impetus is, though.

I had taken the day off of school (I was 16 at the time, and also I am in the UK) to visit a prospective university, so was home earlier than usual. There was a newsflash on Channel 4 about a plane hitting the first tower but then they went on with their broadcasting - I changed over to ITV and the first thing I saw was the second plane hit. I spent a few hours watching that, woke my brother (who was working nightshift) to tell him, and checked that internet acquaintances were okay. Then that evening was my school's prizegiving ceremony - which in an odd atmosphere went on pretty much as it would've in normal circumstances, besides a couple of opening remarks. Then I went home to watch more news coverage. In the early stages I was coming up with all sorts of bizarre rationalizations that didn't involve a terrorist attack - I guess trying to wrestle with my disbelief that anyone would choose to do it.

At the time it was a shocking, sure, but felt kind of distant. Now I remember that day with a clarity matched only by that of the day my dad died, and begin to well up if overexposed to the footage and past threads and such.

I was working at a small weekly paper at the time as the only paginator. It was a Tuesday, which was our busiest/most stressful day by a long shot since the paper came out on Wednesday. When I woke up in the morning, my mom was watching it on TV. Then at work, everyone had brought in a TV from home, so there were five TVs in our very, very small office. One of my coworkers had bad hearing so hers was on really loud. It was just oppressive, so draining. When I went to the burrito place for lunch, they had a TV, too, showing the news. We took a picture of the flag at half mast at the city's car dealership (it had the biggest flag), and had it fill half the front page. That was one of the longest workdays I've ever had.

Like a few others, I was in college (freshmen year, just a few weeks into it) and was woken up by my doofus roommate with "dude. Dude! America us under attack!" I was very, very confused. Whatever station we were watching, they forgot to occasionally step back and tell new viewers what the hell was going on. Then again, I guess no one really knew what was going on, so the coverage reflected that. I knew it was a big deal, but I got changed, brushed my teeth, and trudged off to a class that was canceled. While I was out the second plane hit, so when I got back I was even more confused.

I was out in my portable, waiting for the French teacher to arrive. When she got there, she seemed very surprised I didn't know what had happened. I'd been teaching all morning, so I'm not sure how she expected that I would know.

i woke up that morning totally stoked because it was my 17th birthday and had planned on celebrating it by going out to dinner w/ a huge group of friends to my favorite restaurant that night.

halfway through 3rd period US history my classmate announced that a plane had hit one of the towers. i had remembered the 1993 WTC incident and thought to myself 'well, guess we'll be hearing a bunch about this for a couple of weeks' and didn't think much of it.

by 4th period honors geometry we had learned that the second tower had fallen. the hallways between classes were incredibly quiet. i went to HS in north jersey and lots of kids' parents worked in downtown nyc or in north jersey. i remember hearing people whisper about "doesn't so-and-so's dad work in the WTC?" my dad worked in jersey city at the time and i later learned that he saw everything happen from his office window.

i walked home from school that day and i remember looking up at the sky the entire time. i was told from that from the garden state parkway you could see the black smoke in the distance.

when i got home my mom asked me if i heard what had happened. she gave me my birthday present: a telephone.

i did not go out to dinner that night.

Reading this thread has given me that same sick feeling again.

I was in 9th grade and eating in the lunchroom with some people in my class when I heard about a plane crashing into the building and later sort of excitedly joking with friends in class about "being bombed". I went home after school and upon opening the door saw my mom sitting at the edge of the couch with the TV in the living room on. The video on the news showed one of the towers on fire, and I thought "oh God", then it collapsed on itself and I felt like throwing up. I stayed up all night watching the news and went to school the next morning in a daze.

did anyone else who was in HS at the time have teachers who were expressly told not to turn on the news by the principal/superintendent? this happened at my school. my english teacher (and i suspect there were many others) didn't comply; he had the radio going the whole class but made sure all of us had our books on our desks in the event that anyone knocked on the door so that he could switch the radio off and pretend he'd been teaching the whole time.

Went back and watched some of the TV footage a few weeks ago - I distinctly remember watching video that day of one of the planes hitting, but nothing before or after that - nor do I even know when I saw that (was it before they had actually fallen?).

I don't remember anything about the rest of the day until I had to go to work at Texas Roadhouse that evening, and how mad I was at the racist comments I was hearing from co-workers and customers, and how disconnected I felt from all the people who were taking it like they expected a shitty little restaurant in Dallas to be next on the list.

I remember being in class (8th grade) and around 10AM or so seeing the teacher coming in to class in tears, trying to explain what happened (but was a bit flustered): A plane had hit the towers and the pentagon (I remember being much more alarmed about the pentagon, given that this meant it was an explicit act of terrorism), and that all of downtown New York "was on fire". Some kids (and I take consolation in the fact that they probably remember and regret this now) were making a lot of jokes and laughing hysterically about this, "oh here comes the fire this way" etc. that I imagine were only possible because they didn't get/get the scope of what had happened. I remember walking home, sobered by the fact but not devastated (hadn't seen footage yet), while groups of kids talked about how now there's going to be a war (or conversely laughing and joking about how there's going to be a war), before going home to watch the news for the next 6 or so hours straight.

In retrospect, reading this thread and thinking about that short sliver of time between first hearing about it and seeing it, and then the incredible oversaturation of media and culture with that footage and the hecticity of everything that's happened since, that I realize how much I (and most all others) have been desensitized to it. It's only remembering that initial gut feeling, of that prior to being filtered through almost 10 years of what's become known as "NINE-ELEVEN" that I can recall any sort of hint of what it means for those towers to have fell. Now it feels like it's barely a fact.

I was at a safe remove in Toronto, so obviously I didn't experience it the way Americans did (and doubly obviously, as New Yorkers did). But, responding to the question about teachers, I'm having a hard time remembering if we were told not to say anything to students (I'm in a middle school). I know a newsletter went home that day...I think, or possibly the next day...and I have to believe I would have said something to my own students the day of, since I talk about pretty much whatever's on my mind at any given moment.

i was working at a bookstore in dc. i had to deliver the cash deposit from the previous day's sales to the bank before we opened (not the greatest idea really) and the bank tellers said that a plane had flown into the wtc and that there was a car bomb at the state department, which was not far away.

when i got back to the store one of my colleagues was trying to get cnn to refresh. we heard about the pentagon from customers, then closed around noon. i believe the government was encouraging people to get out of the district as no one knew what was next and they didn't want to have a chaotic evacuation should it become necessary.

i biked home and got drunk and did not watch television. found out in the evening that my friend who worked at the bookstore in the world trade center was okay.

my best friend at the time was born on 9/11 -- we were 13 at the time so i don't think we really fully grasped exactly what was going on so his parents still took us out for dinner

i still remember not exactly understanding why someone would want to take out the WTC and not, like, the capitol

sidebar

has anyone noticed an uptick in people pronouncing "911" as "nine-eleven" since 9/11? as in "dial 9/11"? or just me?

In a weird, potentially depressing epilogue to my tale, I just Google-streetviewed the room I was renting and my neighbor's house (the guy who told me about the attacks) is gone. Just a vacant lot. I guess it's been a decade and any number of things could have happened, but given the context my mind is gravitating towards some kind of bad scenario.

I kind of cringe at the thought of what the conversations would be like had 9/11 happened around now in the development of the internet/24 hour news. How debased, disrespectful, and racially charged some of the claims would be. For instance nowadays we have public figures claiming the Russians or Environmentalists sunk the Deepwater Horizon. It would be like the previous 10 years of 9/11-Truthers compacted into a matter of weeks.

Though I suppose 9/11 was largely instrumental in shaping it all in the first place, so perhaps that's a futile thought exercise.

I was at a safe remove in Toronto, so obviously I didn't experience it the way Americans did (and doubly obviously, as New Yorkers did). But, responding to the question about teachers, I'm having a hard time remembering if we were told not to say anything to students (I'm in a middle school). I know a newsletter went home that day...I think, or possibly the next day...and I have to believe I would have said something to my own students the day of, since I talk about pretty much whatever's on my mind at any given moment.

― clemenza, Thursday, July 22, 2010 12:16 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

For what it's worth my experience, from a middle school in Toronto, teachers told people, and the rest of the school day went on normally.

I kind of cringe at the thought of what the conversations would be like had 9/11 happened around now in the development of the internet/24 hour news. How debased, disrespectful, and racially charged some of the claims would be.

Wait, what? It WAS like that - CNN et al ran with it for something like 2 or 3 days non stop, even in Australia we werent getting regular TV, just CNN feeds over and over and over.

And Usenet, god, you should have seen the tinfoil conspiracies pop up immediately after it happened. All kinds of scary, weird shit. Look up Xinoehpoel on google groups. Its weird shit.

...or am I missing some sarcasm?

I got laid off on 9/10/2001. I was planning on doing some job hunting the next day, but woke up instead to panicked DJs on the clock radio. My wife also started her internship at Chez Panisse that day. I think they sent her home.

DG tells everyone on all the 9/11 threads to go to this other thread that I can't find, because the link is broken:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=006LWv

Does anyone have a good link to that thread?

I arbitrarily picked September 11, 2001 as the day I would set off on my road trip... to New York.

I was shaving in a shared dorm bathroom and someone came in and told me. I went and watched some of the news and headed off to class only to find it had been cancelled. I remember being ignorant and unsympathetic when I was talking about it with a stranger on the bus and spouted "at least class is cancalled". I don't think I knew any building fell down but that's no excuse to be heartless. Maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought because I only remember the worst things I said and I know we had a full conversation without her getting upset with me.

Later on I was heartless again but I was misinterpreted. I was watching the news that night with a friend I said something like "I can't stand seeing this terrible fireman footage, I don't want to watch this". It wasn't meant to sound heartless but I didn't want to watch anymore of the sad news and I said the wrong thing and made my friend angry and he left and went to his room. My sadness just came out as me acting irritated that night.

I taught an 8 am composition class which ended at 9:15, so I was in a news vacuum. I had to return a couple of videos and buy the new Dylan album. At the deserted video store (it was empty, whether due to the early hour or the event, I'm not sure) the employee was watching the footage. While browsing I heard Peter Jennings confirm it was a terrorist attack. I asked the guy for an update. "You mean you don't know?" he said incredulously, and updated me. I drove to Best Buy, listening to NPR the whole way, and bought Love and Theft. At the gas station my mom called and told me to get home (I still lived at home at the time).

Also what contenderizer said about being "oddly vacant" is pretty much how I felt too (you would have to read his whole post at the top of this revive)

Yeah. I didn't feel anything for a couple of days, until I returned to the college paper of which I was the adviser and, at the behest of the students, wrote a column whose thesis was "Holy shit: it's going to be a terrible few years." I sensed the hysteria.

Yeah, Trayce, you got a good point.

Still, I feel political discourse has devolved in the years since....

my mom called and woke me up. i was hungover from a white stripes show the night before. i'm all fuzzy-headed and only half paying attention while she's kind of freaking out about somebody "bombing" the WTC. she wanted me to drive home to Mississippi, b/c i guess who the hell is going to attack MS? i remember kind of thinking "yeah mom settle down already, this happened like 10 years ago; it's just a thing, you know"

then i dragged myself out of bed and turned on the tv. ugh. i had class that morning and when i got to campus i could tell by the looks on peoples faces who knew and who didn't.

Adam: oh I totally agree, it has only gotten worse since.

My story isn't that interesting, but I will share it anyway: I was in Greensboro, NC in a professional writing class which was held in a computer lab. Someone was online and said that a plane hit the WTC. I thought it was a small prop plane b/c I had heard about that happening to another building in NYC not too long before. Class went on, and after a few minutes a girl got up and ran out, crying. She had read that the Pentagon was hit, and some of her family members worked there.

Class went on, but no one was paying attention. I walked to the next class and people were acting really weird. I saw construction workers watching a small TV on the back of a pick up. In my next class we talked about what was happening and decided to cancel class. I went home and watched the mess on CNN.

It has always bothered me that I wasn't upset then. I was in a dark period of my life, I was in relationship with a guy who partied a lot, so I was often drunk or high or hung over, and generally very depressed and detached from life. I didn't feel much of anything except fascination and shock.

I remember that morning I thought about how we were so super-fucked because GWB was president.

When classes resumed the next week, my late 20th century novels class was spent mostly talking about how we would carry on thinking and talking about art and literature and how in terrible times art still very important. I'm very happy that we had that talk. It was a valuable lesson.

I woke up at around 8am to go to the first day of my "Central Asian History: The Stans" class at NYU, but I went back to sleep. Really, the first day of class is basically getting the class-outline and meeting the professor, yawn. My mom called me when the first plane hit and I stumbled to the TV and turned on CNN. Then ran outside in my pajamas to see if I could see anything.
The enrollment of that class jumped from 4 to 20 by the next week, and basically turned into a class on Afghan history.

― phil-two (phil-two), Friday, September 12, 2003 4:46 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

I remember the night before it was raining really hard, and I was on the way to meet some #sinister friends at I think some Onion party at Bowery Ballroom. I was 21, so yeah anything with an open bar, I was there. It was open bar on Cosmopolitans - hey, it was 2001... And I almost got into a fight because some middle-aged over the hill rocker dude was giving me a hard time at the bar for tipping just $1 per drink when I got a round of pre-made cosmos poured into plastic cups. I was wearing a floral print shirt from H&M.

Then the next day, well, I wrote about it 6 years ago, but then I remember walking out onto my street, which was Prospect Avenue in south Park Slope Brooklyn, and I could see a stream of ash and embers floating from the direction of the WTC onto my street. Some smoldering papers. I saved one that was some sort of business memo, but I don't know where it is now. I probably lost it in an apartment move... My houseguest at the time was sleeping on the futon still, woke up with the news, but seemed uninterested in what was going on other than how his flight home to Seattle was probably going to be cancelled.

My roommate headed into the city to join a candlelight vigil at Washington Square Park where he said a young black man starting singing "We Shall Overcome" and everyone cried. The houseguest was in the backyard relaying all the news from Wolf Blitzer to his friends/family back in Seattle as if he were an on-the-ground journalist and they didn't have fucking CNN back home. He was so proud to be a part of it all, and I wanted to strangle him.

I stayed at home watching the news with my next door neighbors who were also sisters. The footage of the people jumping off the burning towers came on. My neighbor's fiance died a few months earlier after an accidental fall of a building. I left her to be alone with her sister.

A few years later, I was talking to my 3rd roommate and I mentioned not having cried in a really long time, maybe since I saw the ending of Cool Runnings when the Jamaican bobsledders carried their overturned sled over the finish line... He brought up seeing me crying that night on 9/11, but I don't really remember that.

A week later, the houseguest was still on the futon. He made a snippy comment about not being able to fly home because of terrorists. I told him I was going out to get some lunch and he should leave the keys on the table and better not be there when I got home.

Graduated NYU a few months later, then spent the next few years mostly under-employed, waiting tables, and getting drunk & high every night.

Ah yes, They Might Be Giants was the entertainment at The Onion party....

Wait, no, it was a brown Western'ish looking shirt from H&M...

i was at the office when an associate urged me to come upstairs and see what was happening. i got there a few minutes after the first plane hit the tower. we were just glued to the coverage. people in my conference room were guessing it was some horrible air-traffic error. then, the second plane knifed onto the tv screen.

i ran to call colleages from my former firm, who had connections to the nyc main-office. my wife's friend worked close to the wtc; she spent a lot of time that day trying to locate him (he was fine, but shaken). i remember peter jennings saying, "we have more bad news. another plane has been taken over the seattle area" (erroneous report, obv.). the most horrifying images -- the videos of the people jumping from the towers -- are largely gone now, erased from public memories and polite conversation. as comedian rick reynolds said in a different context, the images "were too important to talk about at the time, and too ugly to bring up now."

for a few days after the attack, i surfed ebay and other sites for gas masks that would fit my 10-month old daughter, just in case. crazy times. everything was so quiet in the 90s.

Same story as a lot of people my age, I was in class, sophomore year of high school, we all just watched CNN all day, changing rooms ever hour or so. I remember thinking it was terrible, but that our reaction was going to be worse, and talking about that idea with my grandma (the fiery liberal one).

Woke up a bit before 8 a.m., turned on the TV, saw that what looked like a private plane had crashed into the WTC, took a shower. When I got out of the shower, checked e-mail, then looked at the Drudge Report and saw the headline with two sirens WHO DID THIS?, turned back on the TV and saw that a second plane had hit the other tower.

Had a former girlfriend who worked as a headhunter on the 75th floor. Didn't find out for a few days that she had been laid off in August 2001 and was doing fine. Assumed that morning that she was gone.

ET's first post on this revive is so freaking spot on.

I was at my place of work in central London. A colleague popped his head into the studio and told us to turn on the tv and work took a dead stop. I remember later that day after it had time to sink in and people at work were getting edgy, looking out of a window at the CentrePoint building and wondering what would happen if the same thing happened to it.

looking back at the revive post made me think of this recent story.

Since it was in the morning I think not many of us have much to say about where we were.

I do remember later that day I went to a lebanese cafe and watched some of the coverage since we didn't have a tv. I think I wrote a very soul-searching journal entry. I also later wrote an op-ed piece for the college paper I worked for but never turned it in; the gist was that we "couldn't afford to have knee-jerk liberal reactions when the nation was under attack" or something. I was sort of embarrassed by it later.

I was at my place of work in central London.

Same here. No TV so we were looking at the BBC News website and it's tiny 30 second RealPlayer clips.

This thread is fascinating. I don't think I've ever seen it before.

phil-two your last post is tremendous!

schwantz I've looked for that 9/11 thread before and wound up hitting the same wall as you. I don't know how to access it.

Since it was in the morning I think not many of us have much to say about where we were.

Er, I guess this is sort of an amero-centric statement.

Me, I was shaving, despite being unemployed. I had a meeting at 10am that might have led to some work.

I lived in the basement floor of what was in retrospect a freaking gigantic apartment on 4th Ave in Brooklyn. My roommate yelled downstairs that "the Word Trade Center is on fire". He had been out walking his dog and overheard some people saying so. So we both immediately went up to the roof. I was so impatient to get up there that I put my shoes on without any socks. They stayed like that all day.

My upstairs neighbors came down to ask if they could watch our TV - they didn't have cable. Normal TV channels were just snow. The antennas had been on the top of the WTC.

I made eggs and bacon and home fries for everybody, mainly so that I had something to fucking DO. That was the worst feeling, that there was nothing you could DO. And I don't mean go get the bad guys. It's hard to remember now, but there was an almost total lack of vengefulness in New York. The next day I heard John McCain say "This is an act of war!" on TV and it sounded so utterly WRONG to me that my stomach wrenched. There was an intense feeling of solidarity in New York, but it wasn't reactionary. The story above about hearing a man in Union Square sing "We Shall Overcome" strikes the ear strangely now - in retrospect it sounds over the top - but that's the sort of togetherness people felt.

The other hard thing to remember is that for an hour or so, the whole story was that the World Trade Center was on fire. That's it. No one had ANY IDEA that it would collapse. It was totally unimaginable. Two planes appeared to have crashed into it. Nothing more was known. Pretty fucked up, but gotta go to work right? Then one tower came down. Even after that, it didn't even enter my head that the other one would, too.

Just a quick post: I had just woke up and was dialing in (lol 00s) to work network and noticed that interwebs were acting janx0red. I went to a couple of the major sites (like CNN/yahoo) which were not loading so I tried ILX and saw the WTC thread. If anything, I can thank ILX for keeping me informed throughout the 9/11 intensity as it was going down.

disappointed that you weren't biking through Japan on your way to some fancy restaurant tbh

schwantz I've looked for that 9/11 thread before and wound up hitting the same wall as you. I don't know how to access it.

These should be all the chief ones listed below:

WORLD TRADE CENTER (Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 1)
NEWSFLASH World Trade Centre NYC is on fire (Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 2)
Terrorist action 11/9/2001 - Thread 3
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 4
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 5
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 6
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 7
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 8
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 9
Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 10
Has there been any good/informed commentary yet?

11/9 never forget

Oh, I do also remember that when I left my house with my housemates that morning one of them said "Everyone is thinking the exact same thing right now." And it did have this eerie quality to it, because there were other college students also walking out of there college houses, and nothing about the scene looked any different than any other morning except that it was intensely colored by that knowledge of what everyone was thinking.

I also wound up in bed with my ex that night but then she expressed some misgivings about hooking up and I felt weird about the whole thing to begin with so we just went to sleep.

I was nearing the end of my summer back in England between stints working in Italy as an EFL teacher. I was working at a language school in central London in the afternoons, commuting up from my parents' place in Sussex. I had three lessons a day with a general English class and then had to do an hour one-to-one with an 'executive' business student. She was a dour and humourless Serbian. That day I was supposed to be teaching her something about marketing, despite knowing almost nothing about it, and I had nothing planned in advance. There were breaks of 10 or 15 minutes between each of my lessons and I was desperately hoping I would be able to cobble something together for this final lesson during the breaks.

I was down in the staffroom in the break between my first and second lesson - this would have been between 2.30 and 2.45pm I think - when a colleague/friend of mine (who sometimes posts here) got a text message and suddenly looked like he'd had an electric shock. He said something about a plane hitting the World Trade Centre and everybody ran to the solitary computer to get on the internet, but the internet wouldn't load. I didn't know what the WTC was. The bell rang to tell us it was time for the next lesson. I went off to my class, taught for 50 minutes, and somehow managed to forget all about the news.

Back to the staffroom in the next break and colleagues (who had finished teaching for the day) were open-mouthed saying "we've seen the towers falling down live on TV". My head was spinning a bit, but I still had to try to conjure up some kind of lesson for the business student. Then the bell rang again and I had to teach my class. A Brazilian woman came back to class late and breathlessly said "Sorry, I'm late but have you seen the news? It's very important!" - I quietened her down. For some reason I didn't want my students to know what was going on, I just wanted everything to carry on as normal.

When I went up to teach the one-to-one lesson everyone in that area was just glued to a TV. All lessons were cancelled. The boss of the business section was saying maybe 50,000 people had been killed and there were more important things to worry about than business lessons right now. My Serbian student was babbling "next they will come for the communications centres and bomb them - this is what happened in Belgrade" and I thought "shut the fuck up, it's not the same thing at all." But I didn't say this, obviously.

Then I left work, turned on my phone and got a deluge of texts. When I got home I saw the TV images of the people trapped at the top of the towers, desperately waving from the broken windows, before the whole thing went down, and I felt numb.

The next day I tried to explain what was going on to my students and answer any questions they had (all flights were stopped, this was a major international situation, they were in a foreign country and might be struggling to understand what was going on). I was struck by how unconcerned some of them were and how openly happy and anti-American one of them was (a Korean, fwiw).

It's weird that I've never posted to this thread, unless I just scanned right by myself without noticing?

I was running late at work after not getting home til 6am. Very hung over, I could barely drag my ratty ass out of bed.

So funny, Ally said that ^^ 9 years ago and that's exactly what I did that morning, as well. And my day also dove-tails with phil-two's story since we were out at the same events the night before. I didn't know about the hit, I was late for work because vodka, I walked right across Manhattan to get to my office and didn't twig that anything was going on, got all the way IN TO WORK and eventually someone had the radio on or something. Couldn't get home to NJ so I stayed in an NYU dorm with Julie, both of us still hungover as shit iirc, and her slowly understanding that her birthday being on September 10 was going to suck for a few years, being a reminder of how helpless and terrified she felt as it all developed.

I...didn't feel anything. I still don't. Have never felt sick or scared or had anything notable happen in the pit of my stomach, or any feelings about it at all except a mild disbelief that I would never take a cab to the WTC PATH station again. Spent years not telling anyone that in case it made me broken somehow or was a sign of such appalling self-absorption that even self-absorbed people were freaking out around me and I still didn't have any emotional response.

Julie and I finally left her building late that night and walked as far downtown as we could get. On 3rd St, we accidentally ran into occasional ilxor antexit, who told us that someone had tried to mug him at knifepoint on his way there. We went to some bar and had one round, I think that's all the money we had among us. Wish I'd known laurenp in those days, would have joined her.

I remember phil's houseguest and how he almost got his ass handed to him by possibly the most peaceful, mild-mannered person on this planet.

I...didn't feel anything. I still don't. Have never felt sick or scared or had anything notable happen in the pit of my stomach, or any feelings about it at all except a mild disbelief that I would never take a cab to the WTC PATH station again. Spent years not telling anyone that in case it made me broken somehow or was a sign of such appalling self-absorption that even self-absorbed people were freaking out around me and I still didn't have any emotional response.

This, for too, until last week. On 9/11 I watched CNN all day long and all I felt was sort of awe at the World Trade Center Towers collapsing. It was like a magic trick.

Since then only I cried once when I was drunk and watching a video about 9/11 on Youtube, until suddenly one morning last week during an NPR story about that day, I started sobbing while brushing my teeth, and that broke the seal. And then again last night, when I was watching the video for Portishead's "The Rip," a pretty depressing animation that features a lot of falling bodies, people on hang gliders buzzing skyscrapers (and some onion domes that I mistook for minarets).

I suppose huge, terrible events like that can be too much to take in.

As for where I was, I may have already posted in this thread, but: I was in a professional writing class in a computer lab (9:00 a.m. Eastern time) and I thought maybe it was single engine plane. Everyone was reading news - Yahoo News was loading very slowly - ignoring the professor, who pushed on. Later, a girl made a noise and shoved her chair back and ran out of the room, starting to sob. Someone said that the Pentagon was also hit and that the girl had family who worked there. The professor was all business, and she stayed on plan for the whole class.

While I didn't cry or feel much of anything after 9/11, I stopped attending classes without withdrawing, meaning I got straight F's that semester, and I went whole hog into a diet of drugs and booze. Then a couple months later, I got fired from my job - for the first and only time in my life - for some pretty flagrant misbehavior. Basically, I totally gave up doing anything worthwhile for about a year. So, while there were other factors, and while I used to think it was a cop-out or a trite or pat connection to say 9/11 caused my withdrawal from life, I think it really did speed up or intensify my breakdown.

I was washing up in the bathroom at a campground in Jedediah Smith State Park in the northern California redwoods. A man came into the bathroom and told me that the WTC had been struck by a jet and was on fire. I went back to my car and turned on the radio. The reports at that time were still quite confused. I turned off the radio and warned my wife that something very crazy was happening.

I consider it very lucky that we didn't have access to a television most of that day. Much of the morning was spent hiking in the redwoods. That afternoon we visited a friend and we walked on the beach. However, he'd been glued to the tv and was quite agitated, so it wasn't a very calming walk. That night we arrived at the cabin we'd rented and caught up more fully on what had happened. By then they had stopped showing video clips of people leaping out of the towers, so the most upseting footage we never had to see.

camping at yellowstone, my buddy called his mom and she explained, but with lots of misinformation. i didn't understand until two days later that the buildings had actually fallen down, it was incomprehensible and i had no info. we ate mushrooms that didn't work and went on a hike. the big pack people we passed on the trail, i thought 'they don't know yet do they. i'm not going to tell them.'

11 years. Any newer posters care to add to this?

i was 9 at the time, in 3rd grade on the upper east side. parents started to pick their kids up from school one by one around 10am, and the more kids that left the more obvious something was wrong. the moment i began to realize how serious whatever was happening was, was when someone asked my teacher and she said "there are some fires going on downtown..." immediately i panicked in my head because I was the only kid in my class who lived downtown. my mom, dad, and brother lived in Tribeca, only six blocks away from the WTC. Eventually my two uncles picked us up from school. I don't remember the moment when they told us what had happened, in fact the first thing I remember clearly is seeing the North Tower on fire on TV. too shocked to even begin to process it. to this day the whole thing feels like an awful nightmare i can't wake up out of. thankfully my parents got to my uncle's apartment shortly thereafter, unharmed and with reassurance that our building was OK. up until this point my uncles wouldn't say outright if my building would be destroyed or if my parents were OK. no wonder I don't remember anything before that. total stress induced blur. the rest of the day was miserable. by the time we were caught up, the towers were already gone. we weren't allowed to return to our apartment for two weeks, and for several months afterwards we couldn't drive past Canal street downtown. tanks were outside my building for months, lots of stuff covered in ash and debris. the smell of burning steel, ash, bodies always around. walls and walls of missing persons posters and memorials and flowers everywhere you looked. an enormous dread and sadness over the whole city, especially my area. nothing was ever the same...

also, something we usually forget, but on 9/12/01, EVERYONE was SURE another attack was imminent. maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but we were POSITIVE this wasn't the last of it. living with that life or death anxiety, every day, for years, even after I moved out of NYC...

Thanks -- great thoughts, it honestly hadn't occurred to me that we'd be getting memories like this now, but obviously that's going to be the case more and more.

the first thing my friend said when he called me at five a.m. (eleven a.m. nyc time) was "we don't have school today". kids.

we didn't have tv at the time so my dad and i went to a bar/grill and the thing i remember was that a guy came up to us and said, sorry, he'd gotten confused, how many planes were there, and my dad held up three fingers, and i said no no four, there was united 93, and i was still young enough for it to be sobering that things were so chaotic and unusual that my dad was not completely on top of them.

(rather lower stakes, there, but i am from the provinces.)

i was a freshman in high school, sitting in class in a computer lab. someone came in and told our teacher to put the news on TV, which she did and then sat watching from her desk at the back of the class, i don't remember seeing any visible emotional reaction from any adults until hours later. the class buzzed with the notion that something big was happening, but no one comprehended it at all. i just sat rapt staring at the news with the distinct feeling that i was watching an important historic moment unfold. the most memorable part of that first hour or so, though, was a girl who announced with what i'm guessing was a nihilistic stab at irreverent humor, "this is boring, can we change the channel?" i always wonder if she remembers that comment with the burning shame that i would if i had said something so stupid. it also makes me think about the extent to which people need to be told how to react to momentous horrific events like this, how the appropriate emotional response flows around like the wave at a baseball game.

i woke up to the new dylan single from love and theft on the rock station -- the album was released that day. after it ended, the dj announced that a plane had hit part of the tower, but nobody really knew anything yet, whether it was a terrorist attack or an accident. i got dressed and went outside -- i had a class to go to, but i decided to walk toward the brooklyn heights promenade instead of the subway. people were standing there gawking, taking pictures and video. then i found out the mta was shutting down the subway until further notice, so i wouldn't be getting to my class in midtown manhattan that day. i walked home and heard the noise of the second tower being hit. the smoke and debris hadn't fully accumulated in the air yet, so there were still lots of onlookers outside. but once the air got bad, people were covering their mouths and running for cover. i stayed home and watched the news in a dark room, wondering if these attacks were over with or if there was something bigger and even worse planned.

i was in a bad relationship at the time, a rebound thing, and the guy ended up spending the day with his ex-gf and their bffs instead of making sure i was all right.

i was in the office of my first job. my manager poked her head in my cube and said someone had flown a plane into the world trade center. i didn't quite get what she meant; i figured it was a disaster or accident, but it was out of the ordinary for her to talk about news with me. before looking at anything, my mind made a picture of a drunk or crazy dude off course in his cessna. i remember looking at the bbc website because the others were sketchy and slow.

then the other plane hit and everything got very serious. they wheeled a tv in. at around lunchtime our director allowed anybody to leave to take care of anything they needed to. if i recall it was mid-afternoon when opinion began to coalesce around Al Qaeda. being a newsjunkie i was familiar with that name from the cole and khobar towers bombings -- this piece in my beloved suck.com was still in my head [http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/10/30/].

i most remember the bus ride on the way home. all the faces seemed suddenly very familiar, and they were all very quiet and somber. i think you could feel history grind to a halt. you could feel that the country and the world had been on a particular track, maybe blindly, and that soon things would motor up again in a very different direction.

Careful with 'and the world', there.

considering what was done with the event as justification, i'd say it's accurate.

i was sleeping. my sister came in and said "jets have destroyed the wtc and attacked the pentagon" and i jumped out of bed thinking WTF?!??!

i was trying to figure out if it was russians, north koreans, iranians, etc, who the fuck would be crazy enough to sent a squadron to attack NYC and how the fuck did they get past NORAD

then i saw it was terrorists and i was like "oh. you said jets attacked the pentagon. this is not jets attacking anything. this is just some shit that was bound to happen, thank god they didn't blow up a nuke in nyc".

my sister gave me a look like i was insane, then we watched the news until about 1 pm when i had to go in to work.

she kept talking "oh the humanity" type of stuff, i think i was in a lot of shock and/or denial and/or also coming out of a college-age period of deep anti-americanism and so i was mainly impressed w/ the audacity of al-qaeda and the simplicity of the plan.

i also remember realizing - and i still think this today - that the tradeoff of living in a dense, interconnected society is that a few crazy people can fuck it up bad for everyone, and that this type of shit is only going to "worse" in the future.

"oh. you said jets attacked the pentagon. this is not jets attacking anything.

Yes. Like when my neighbor said "we're at war", I was somewhat panicked until I realized it was a terrorist attack. After that, I was still bugging out quite a bit, but "war" was an altogether different context.

considering what was done with the event as justification, i'd say it's accurate.

Fair enough, though I'd saw that mostly changed when the scale and direction of the reaction from the US became clear - there was a few days while the world held its breath. I was more talking about the 'blindly' line - the rest of the world wasn't as shocked by the existence of terrorism as the US seemed to be.

I remember being in line at a downtown McDonald's later in the day and standing in line near some men who were saying how willing they'd be to kill some "towel-heads." I think they may have been the same people who tried to order "fah-jit-uhs" off the menu?

god, i remember at the time having been very conscious of the 2001 world racism conference in durban, despite not being very conscious of anything else in terms of political or current events at all. when usa and israel had walked out of the conference earlier that year (in a refusal to officially declare zionism a form of racism) I thought "ok, that's it. we`re going to be attacked by terrorists again." no other background on terrorism or the middle east, mind you. and so when the sept 11 attacks rolled around, that's where my mind went. later that night, once I'd finally found some people to hang with and a tv to huddle around, I nodded sagely to myself and said something like "anyone could have seen this coming when we walked out of durban."

Got to the office shortly after 9am EST and was informed by a co-worker about a terror attack on the WTC. Said co-worker was a bit of a gossip and I had work to do anyways, so I just shrugged her off with something like a "Really, again? My God", thinking it was another bomb. Word filtered around the office over the next couple of hours: Not a bomb but jet planes. It wasn't until sometime after 11am that it occurred to me to check the details online (internet access through our desktop computers was a recent addition and still a novelty) and realize the full horror - towers collapsed, Pentagon hit, other planes still unaccounted for. I remember feeling nauseated and shaky through much of the day. It was impossible not to feel a personal connection since our office was located essentially across the road from the grounds of Toronto's Pearson Airport, where planes were audibly being diverted throughout the day.

Got home that evening and watched all the usual footage for several hours till I got too depressed. (The networks had already quit broadcasting clips of people jumping from windows, otherwise I'd have tuned out earlier.) I turned my TV off and fulfilled a vague urge to put a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan CD on.

To tell this story, I need to start a week or so before the attacks, because I can't separate these events.

My Great-Grandmother died on the cusp of Labor Day weekend at the age of 100; her funeral was September 5th. I was in only my second week of Community College then, and had to miss my first-ever class to attend the service. That weekend (Sunday the 9th to be exact) me and my dad had some free time so we went into Houston so I could pre-order a copy of Dylan's Love and Theft at Cactus Music & Video. Columbia had set up a deal w/Indie shops where you could get a free 7-Inch single if you preordered. I remember it took a near act of congress to get the thing from the clerk. At first he pled ignorance about the deal before getting help from a coworker, who located the box of singles and gave me one. I still can recall the the first clerk hemming & hawing about how stupid it was that they were giving away VINYL nobody could listen to, and that a cd single would have made much more sense as a premium (yeah, that guy really had a bright future in Indie Music retailing ahead of him). I then went next door to Bookstop and bought some magazines, including the new Alternative Press with a cover story on Tori Amos' forthcoming Strange Little Girls project, which I discussed briefly with their clerk.

Because of the video store, at that time Cactus would stay open Monday nights til 12:30 AM so you could be the first to purchase new releases. I hadn't intended to go in that early, figuring I could drop in Tuesday afternoon after classes to pick my DELUXE edition. But as it happened, I ended up in the store with Mom and sister getting the album and also a copy of Rock'n'Roll High School which had just been reissued on VHS. Back home, I listen to the first half of the album before going to bed; I had an Algebra class @ 9:30 that coming morning.

Tuesday The 11th. I get up, do my usual stuff and watch the "Today Show" as I'm eating breakfast in my room (don't ask). They'd just had an interview w/Jack Welch about his memoir (which I seen posters for that weekend at Bookstop, leading me then to wonder who the hell Jack Welch was, and why did he have to write a book). Suddenly they broke in during a commercial with a bulletin that a plane had somehow crashed into the WTC. They went to a camera feed showing the burning building and were discussing in voiceover what had to be an accident when the second plane came into frame and hit the other tower. Shortly thereafter news came about the Pentagon and IIRC by then we may also have known about the fourth plane going down in Pennsylvania. But I had to go off to school.

I was late for my class, but our professor was later. Waiting for him to show up, those who'd came carried on a loose discussion. As spazzmatazz pointed out, it felt like another round of attacks was imminent, and what local news we could get seemed to point that the logical next step for the terrorist was to turn our chunk of the Gulf Coast (and all it's energy plants, refineries et al.) into a massive smouldering crater. Finally our professor--a middle-aged Arab fellow, prone to speaking rapidly during lessons (turning a 90 minute class into 45 or less 90% of the time), and punctuating random sentences of his lessons with the word "What" as if we the pupils were in a dialogue that we could keep up and were engaged with him--and never had a I seen a more nervous person in front of me. He gave us a few remarks along the lines of it making no sense to hold class today, and we were dismissed.

I stuck around the building waiting for my next class to happen, but soon it came down that the whole campus was shutting down. A bunch of us without cars hung out in lobby of the Tech building watching the news while waiting on rides. Eventually I got home, ordered a pizza, watched the news, and at some point later that evening, finally got around to rest of the Dylan album and watching Rock'n'Roll High School before picking up the news again.

i was in moose jaw, saskatchewan. i woke up for school. first class was biology. i had skipped a few days because we were dissecting these fucked up fetal pigs with color coded hardened plastics injected into their veins and arteries and it was okay the first day but by the second day, despite whatever they were preserved in, they began to decompose. my parter and i had agreed in advance to skip the previous two days (maybe only the monday, because i just checked and it was a tuesday). as i was leaving, my mom told me that a plane crashed into the world trade center and i tried to picture what that would look like. i pictured a little prop plane crashing into something that looked like the empire state building. i didn't know what the world trade center looked like. i got into my first car, my 1991 toyota camry that i later totaled while driving to winnipeg in a snowstorm. i listened to a cassette tape of london calling and when i got to athabasca st i turned on the radio 1 news. when i knew my mom had gone to work, i drove home and spent the day feeling way too freaked out and chatting on irc (#shroomery, before it had its own irc server and was still on webchat).

Shopping in Tesco's, I came up to the meat counter and heard the staff talking about a plane crashing into the WTC. I thought it was a new film being talked about, having recently seen Swordfish which comes somewhat close in some respects.
Got told it was the real thing, went home and watched the news on tv for hours I think.

I actually watched the "people falling" footage for I think the first time last night. It was really upsetting obviously. I mean, I think I had seen a clip of one or two people falling/jumping, but not all those fucking people. And all those people who were clinging to the side of the building because there was too much smoke and fire inside but they weren't desperate enough to jump yet. Goddamn it.

I had surgery on that day. My brother picked me up from the hospital, in the car he asked me if I heard what had happened in America. I hadn't as there wasn't a TV in the outpatient ward. I was delirious from the morphine so couldn't really comprehend what he was saying to me. I spent the next couple of days convalescing at my mother's house, alone, in front of the looping video footage and sound bites. As the time went on the pain killers were wearing off and I was transfixed on the scale of the attack. A surreal time.

I was at an demonstration outside the Excel Centre in Docklands, where there was an arms manufacturers conference on. Bruce Kent from CND announced that a plane had flown in the WTC, and lots of people cheered. (I think they thought it was a miniature biplane or something, driven by a mad protestor, who didn't die.)

i've never watched that people-falling footage and don't think I could manage it.

In my memory I heard about it somewhere near the sixth form common room, after an English a-level class (20th century american literature paper), but I can't remember what time it was. Must have been near the end of the school day. I wrote some kind of lj reaction-and-hope-you-guys-are-ok post at 5pm and I guess that would have been in the school computer room (and then like an hour later I wrote some hectoring bit of piety about how the US had to make sure they went after the real culprits of they'd be no better than terrorists, etc etc etc). I kept the Guardian G2 from the next day, I don't really know why.

I misssd a program yesterday on a guy who'd somehow managed to surf ruble or something down 20 odd stories. So not sure how he did it.
It was called WTC's Luckiest Survivor or something.

Revive, if any newer posters would like to add to this.

Tomorrow being almost here, perhaps time for a revive, again if any newer posters would like to contribute.

This link meantime goes to the post upthread where I linked to the original threads on the day.

What were you doing when you found out about the WTC?

Those links can also be found here along with my own extended thoughts ten years on were posted at the start of this thread:

9/11 on ILX, ten years on

Love you ned but this smacks of solicitation for some future deep thought piece on 911 so I’ll pass

i found out about it right here on ilx

someone asked "has anyone heard anything of tadeusz, is he ok?"
& working backwards from there i figured out what had happened - this was in the morning (nz time), it wasn't until that evening that i saw tv footage & got an idea how horrific it was.

I had my own business and should have been up, but I was going through a depression and was sleeping when my mom called me shortly after plane #2 hit

I had dropped out of high school near the end of the 00-01 school year. I was registering for continuing education courses at The New School in downtown Manhattan that morning. I was actually in the registrar's office when the first plane hit and overheard one of the assistants announcing a plane had crashed into the wtc, he was hysterical and talking about dropping acid on a rooptop to ride out the apocalypse, but it sounded like an accident at this point. A couple of minutes later I walked outside and, facing south, there was a distant cloud of smoke and debris and a mass exodus of people walking north. I tried repeatedly to get the subway home. I'd descend the stairs, pay my fare, wait on the platform for what seemed like an eternity until I head an announcemrnt that no trains were running. After this happened three or four times across multiple subway lines, I gave up and decided the best course of action was to join the mass exodus walk the 30 blocks to my dad's job in midtown so we could get the subway home together. Every electronics shop along the way, with televisions in the windows tuned to the news had crowds of people gathered around. Lots of people were sitting in their cars blaring news radio with the doors open, as a public service. By this time a second plane had hit the other tower- it wasn't an accident. At that time my dad worked in an office on a pretty high floor of a highrise with a clear view of the towers. They were smoking but still standing. Nobody really knew what to do or how they were going to get home. The building management came by each office saying they may evacuate, and to be prepared. I don't think that happened in the end. They had a conference room with southfacing windows, and after I'd been there a while we saw the towers collapse from the window. It was really shocking and one of dad's co-workers was completely hysterical and crying and screaming. A couple of people in his office who lived in Queens headed home when they learned they'd have to walk across the 59th street bridge. We eventually walked the 80 blocks home to morningside heights.

wow, that makes it feel very immediate for me

The subway platforms were all deserted, it was like I was the only person who didn't get the memo, didn't realize straight away that this was a major catastrophic event - i remember being irked at having to pay mutiple fares for trains that never arrived!!

That morning was the last time the 9 train ran, I still called it the 1/9 line for years afterwards out of habit and i don't remember when i stopped thinking of it as the 1/9.

The creepy "united we stand" posters with the statue of liberty went up everywhere overnight. At the time it really creeped me out that someone had got it together so fast but they were obviously held in reserve to be deployed instantly in the event of a non-specified Pearl Harbor type of disaster.

The way I've always remembered it is that the magnitude of it was revealed incrimentally over the course of some hours, as I described- but now that i think about it, seems like everyone else 'got it' straight away and I just didn't have a clue.

This sound collage features real-time clips of TV and radio starting before the attacks, nothing else I've heard evokes the world of pre-9/11 2001 so well. the original seems to have disappeared from the internet, but after half an hour looking I found this copy on archive dot org.

https://archive.org/details/again-the-never-came

I was on Constantine Beach in Cornwall, nursing a hangover and reading Chaos by James Gleick (I know that sounds too good to be true, but it is. I've got the copy with my notes in it to confirm). I walked into a little cafe and found everyone gathered around the TVs. I remember thinking that there must be a football match I'd forgotten about but it quickly became apparent that it was something else. I'm pretty sure I walked in between the two planes hitting but I could be remembering that wrong.

That sound collage was very compelling until they got to the 911 call from someone in one of the towers who I assume died while on the phone. No more, thanks.

Love you ned but this smacks of solicitation for some future deep thought piece on 911 so I’ll pass

I was in Toronto at work (which started at quarter to 8). Just before a staff meeting at 9, I was listening to Howard Stern talking about Pamela Anderson when his producer announced that a single plane had hit the building, which Howard ignored. I assume everyone in the meeting was unaware of what was going on when we left the meeting at 10; a bunch of people were gathered around the only computer on the floor that had the internet, which seemed odd.
I put on Stern again and heard them all yelling about the towers and the Pentagon: complete chaos, and everything seemed to be under attack. I went for my break at 1015 and walked by a Toronto Sun newspaper box with a picture of Heather Graham at TIFF. I thought, "that's not going to be the headline tomorrow".

I had just graduated college in june and started my first job the week before 9/11. my adult life literally began with 9/11. been quite a ride.

Looking at the meat counter in Tescos. I thought that the staff were talking about a recent film. I thought there was a similar scenario in Swordfish.
I got home and saw the footage on my tv a few times.

Woke up slightly hungover from seeing the White Stripes the night before. Prolly the last tour they could play small clubs. My mom was calling on landline to tell me that “we’ve been attacked. they’ve attacked the WTC. Maybe you should come home” (an hour away in small town Mississippi). I was a little out of it and kind of waved it off like yeah that seems a little OTT, this is just going to happen every so often (eg 1993 bombing). Turned on the TV to see the first tower smoking and then watched in real time as the second plane hit.

Got dressed and went to class anyway and when I got to campus it really seemed like you could tell who knew and who didn’t by their faces.

I had just moved to a new town, where my girlfriend was going to school. I was heading out the door on my way to a job interview, when my neighbor came across the street: "Well, we're in a war," he said. "Them Arabs blew up the World Trade Center." I cancelled my job interview (at Blockbuster, which I was eventually hired for and stayed for a month) and went inside to try to call my family. I was terrified all day that something would happen to them and of course I couldn't get through. I couldn't get in touch with my girlfriend at her school either. Apparently, she had gone off to donate blood with her new, secret boyfriend. Lol, what a shitty year. I didn't have TV, so I just sat there all day listening to the reports on my clock radio and watching the shadows move across my wall.

― grab you by the boo-boo and don't let go (kkvgz), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 2:29 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Would like to add that I had ironed my best shirt from Gadzooks for that interview.

rip gadzooks

I remember a friend joking about it being a store for guys wearing goggles and we walked into the mall store and saw, no kidding, a classmate working there and wearing goggles around his neck like an anime character