9/11 - Where Were You?

Worked a block away from the Merchandise Mart. People were nervous afterward, let my staff go home and I stayed to finish signing off on payroll before leaving just after 1:30 PM. Downtown Chicago was a ghost-town by that point.

 

Thanks all for the memories. There are tears in my eyes as I type this...the pain is still there after all these years.

 

On a training mission. We were recalled to our base and all expected to go to combat soon.

 

Sitting at the table eating breakfast with the kids. Sent them off to school, went to the office and watched the TV almost all day. We got very few phone calls... we we mesmerized.

 

Got home from work at 1am the night before, starting my days off. The apartment we had before we bought this house. I had a hair appointment, a doctor's appointment for an allergy shot and I was meeting a friend for lunch and shopping/watever. My husband was working part of the day. I got up at like, 930am and there were messages on my phone (landline) from various people. I called my friend back and she told me what happened. I turned on the tv and they were replaying the buildings collapsing. Diverted planes were landing at our airport (London Ontario) and stuff like that. The family doc at that time used to shut down her office a lot and went out of practice soon after, she closed for the week. I called my hair dresser and she said people were cancelling but if I still wanted to come in she would stick around. So, I went. No tv in there, blessedly. We talked about what we thought would happen next. Then went out with my friend. It was pretty quiet everywhere, we were avoiding tv's as much as we could. My husband joined us after work and we went to a movie. They were so empty the manager said we could go watch another movie if we wanted but we were pretty tired by then. I remember what a beautiful day it was in terms of weather.

 

I was in California but my wife was a flight attendant working a flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver, Canada. She was in the air over the Pacific when one of the passengers somehow got a notice of the attacks. She then went to the cockpit and alerted the pilots who then pasted together what was happening. The flight attendants were asked by the pilots to report any suspicious activity with the passengers of which there was none. By then many of the passengers were on the very expensive Air Phones to call families.

All flights into the USA were ordered to land right away and many were diverted to Canada. When my wife's flight arrived, the planes were so crowded at Vancouver many were parking on the grass. I called the crew hotel and was told repeatedly my wife had checked in but she did not answer the phone. I guess the front desk just assigned rooms and considered them occupied even though my wife was still on the grass near the tarmac.

After four hours a swat team got to their plane and supervised unloading. She went to the regular crew hotel but it was so crowded that some flight attendants were double and triple bunked when it was normal to have one per room. No one was complaining and just became glued to the TV. The plane spent a week there before it flew out again.

 

I heard of the first plane hitting on radio that morning, when they reported a second one had hit, I turned on the tv. I was glued to it for awhile.

I called a friend to see if she was watching this. She told me her FIL was on a plane that left Newark that morning and nobody could get a hold of him. Luckily his plane was diverted to Chicago where he could spend time with family until planes started flying again and he could fly to his home in Oregon.

My brother lives in Brooklyn and worked at the time in Manhattan. He has his own story of making it home that day.

We live outside of Chicago and it was seriously eerie not to hear planes in the air. When we did finally hear one it was even more eerie to know it was a military plane flying air coverage over Chicago.

I'll never forget that day. Watching people down at the remains of the WTC looking for their loved ones was truly awful. Each story seemed to sadder than the last one. I hope they have managed to find some peace.

 

At work, watching the Bloomberg market monitors.

Then the world stopped. Within 30 minutes, evacuation to Grant Park across the street. I didn't know the full impact of what happened untl I got home that afternoon and saw the footage. My God, I was so scared.

Our company lost 176 colleagues at the WTC that day.

 

I was at Disney World. We were getting ready to head over to the Animal Kingdom. After watching the nightmare on TV for a couple of hours, we decided to go to the AK. We arrived and they decided to shut it down. At that time, it was the only 2nd time they had shutdown DW. We spent most of the reminder of the day Wilderness Lodge at the bar watching things unfold. Later that week we were on the first flight to land back in Reagan. There were 13 of us on the plane and no one was allowed to move at all during the flight. It was the most creepy thing we ever experienced.

 

I was in an operating room in York Pa.
30 minutes into the 2 hour case , one of the staff nurses ran in and told us what happened after the first plane hit.
Then we were getting 10 minute updates from the staff.
We could not see anything but we were told about the second plane.
A very weird feeling to know we were being attacked but have no access to the news.

 

I was home...about six blocks from the Pentagon. My balcony faced that direction, and I just saw an otherworldly amount of smoke. My father called. He'd been trying to get through but lines were jammed. He urged me to come home (Buffalo). Seeing the infinite line of cars, I knew it was impossible. I just held tight and gathered as much information on television as I could.

 

7th grade history class. I remember we all went to the gym and watched the news on TV.

 

Everyone was hammering away on the "usual suspect" news sites such as CNN and USA Today but they were all jammed and would not show. I was trying the various local NYC papers and TV stations that I knew but again, nothing. I finally thought of Newsday, the Long Island daily, and that one popped right in and had more current info than on network TV.

 

Teaching my first grade students. A colleague showed up at my door to tell me. She was as white as a sheet.

During prep, lunch, and recesses teachers who didn't have supervision would stop in the office where a TV had been set up.

The days to follow were spent talking about it and reassuring our students that we were there for them and that they were loved and safe.

All honor to the innocents who lost their lives in and around the Towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93, including the first responders and citizens who ran into the danger to try to help others.

RICHARD

 

Sitting in the office at AT&T (Tampa, down on MLK blvd, across from what used to be Tampa Bay Center mall). I had a small TV in my office, and there were about a dozen of us wedged in there watching events unfold. One person raised the idea that we might have to work around the clock on this disaster (we were in the telecommunications network business), and I pointed out that - under these circumstances, no one is going to be placing orders...it's all just stringin' wires at this point. We got cut loose a few hours later, as there would be no work getting done anyway. When I got home, the wife, who was out sick, had just woken up and was wondering why the TV was showing footage of the previous Twin Towers bombing. I explained to her that this was happening right now, not a recap.

 

On the phone with a customer in NY. He said find out what just happened. Turned on CNN to see the horror. Couldn’t get back in touch and proceeded to the bank for max atm withdrawal.

 

I was working at Nellis AFB, retired as of 2012, on my way to work is when both the WTC towers were hit. I was unaware of it until I arrived at the building I worked in, which happened to be the base air traffic control facility.

Experienced my first ever and only real world FPCON Delta, started off as Alpha and quickly escalated through Bravo and Charlie so rapidly that we didn’t even have time to complete one checklist for each condition before we had to move on to the next.

Watched the events unfold on TV as well as updates through the base information systems. The eerie part was when all aircraft were ordered to land. We watched the controllers go through a routine like nothing they have done before. By the end of the day all the radar screens were totally blank, not a single identifiable aircraft in the air.

It was surreal driving home at the end of that day looking up in the skies knowing that there isn’t a single aircraft flying at the time. It almost felt like Armageddon was on the horizon, with no aircraft in the air it was like the world had came to a stop and the next event would be the rapture.

 

I was with my wife, son and his friend flying from Providence to Lós Angles on American Airlines. Originally we were to go to Pittsburgh and change planes there but we were offered a bump and the new flight was to go to Charlotte and change planes there. We were north of NYC when the pilot came over the intercom and said that there was a fire in the World Trades Center and if you looked out the left side you could see the smoke. After that announcement, there were nothing else said by the pilot until we landed in Charlotte. I still don’t know why we flew all the way to Charlotte because I learned later that all planes were ordered to land at the nearest airport. When we landed in Charlotte we learned what had occurred. We were stuck in Charlotte for 4 or 5 days until we were able to get a flight to LA

 

I was in New York City that morning, but safely in midtown a few miles from the WTC.

16 years later, I was in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, but safely at the Paris hotel a few miles from the Route 91 Harvest festival.