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9/11 20 years on

Day off work. The investment bank I was working for had offices in the towers. Lots of stories from colleagues who said they changed their routine that day to stop off for coffee or whatever and that's what saved them.

The business was up and running out of Jersey almost immediately. Business Continuity which had sometimes been a bit of a check box exercise became very serious.

A few months later I moved to another firm whose NY office had been in the towers. Lots of similar stories. A developer told me he was watching it live on the news trying to copy data off a server. When the second plane hit the transfer stopped. Sounds stupid bit it still gives me the chills.
 
I must have been on a half day or something, or just took the afternoon off (I was management so could do what I liked to some degree) as I definitely remember being at home when each of the two main towers fell, but as mentioned upthread I was at work when the planes hit. To be honest I can’t remember, we may have shut up shop and sent the call centre staff home. There was nothing much we could realistically do to fix anyone’s internet that day, and no one would have been focused on anything else. The memories of the towers falling, people jumping etc are etched in my mind on my Sony CRT TV at home in my living room.
 
I was driving back from installing a monitoring system in Dagenham for HS1 and was on the M25 when I heard a light aircraft hat hit the tower. I was going home anyway, so when I got in, I switched on the TV just about when the second plane hit. It’s the only time my mouth has dropped open while watching anything. I remember it clearly as if it was yesterday.
The following day, I flew to Greece through an incredibly empty Terminal 4.
 
paulfromcamden said:
The business was up and running out of Jersey almost immediately. Business Continuity which had sometimes been a bit of a check box exercise became very serious.
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The human loss was unimaginable and anything else secondary.
It did prove the reassuringly expensive SRDF technology we provided to the banks etc (yours was probably one of them) effectively salvaged their businesses. Considering that was 20 years ago, it was quite astonishing and would now be taken for granted.
 
tones said:
During the Second World War, a B-25 Mitchell bomber flew into the Empire State Building in conditions of thick fog, resulting in a fire, considerable damage and a number of deaths. However, the structure of the building was not compromised.
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Old style ‘skyscrapers’ like the Empire State were built the same way as low rise construction, IIRC, which limits their ultimate height but also makes them difficult to demolish. More modern towers, like WTC have a concrete core that the lightweight outer structure ‘hangs’ off, and are designed to collapse within their own footprint when demolished. Also, of course, the mass and velocity of the B25 would have been much smaller, so an energy of collision probably at least an order of magnitude smaller.
 
paulfromcamden said:
Of course. Mention it purely because the resourcefulness and resilience shown by my colleagues was astounding.
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Absolutely. I think our techies were working 24/7 for a good while. People see all the incredible service men and women risking and sacrificing their lives but there were armies of others flat out ensuring some sort of continuity.
 
I recall starting my drive to work, switching on the radio for the morning news thinking that there hadn't ben much of interest on the news the past few days, then of course heard of the events occurring in NY.
 
It has a personal note for me as my dad had a heart attack the next day and died 2 days after that... so kinda the 20th anniversary of losing my dad for me...

It certainly doesn't seem like 20 years ago! but nothing does I guess. The discord between the human a priori sensation of time and actual measured time always does my head in!

I saw it from the instant it had any mention in the UK and watching it unfurl was the last thing dad and I did together I guess.

I had walked into the living room with a cup of coffee I'd just made and some daytime soap or similar was just starting, which made myself and dad go "bag a shite, that can go off" almost as one... as I lent over the TV to switch it off NEWS FLASH came up on the screen... then it cut to the picture of the first tower with smoke coming from it , and then to the newsroom, we all know how it went after that... the appearance that it was a light plane and a terrible accident at first etc etc.
 
Arkless Electronics said:
It has a personal note for me as my dad had a heart attack the next day and died 2 days after that... so kinda the 20th anniversary of losing my dad for me...

It certainly doesn't seem like 20 years ago! but nothing does I guess. The discord between the human a priori sensation of time and actual measured time always does my head in!

I saw it from the instant it had any mention in the UK and watching it unfurl was the last thing dad and I did together I guess.

I had walked into the living room with a cup of coffee I'd just made and some daytime soap or similar was just starting, which made myself and dad go "bag a shite, that can go off" almost as one... as I lent over the TV to switch it off NEWS FLASH came up on the screen... then it cut to the picture of the first tower with smoke coming from it , and then to the newsroom we all know how it went after that... the appearance that it was a light plane and a terrible accident at first etc etc.
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A very poignant and sad time for you.:(
 
On holiday in Samos. Got back to the hotel 5pm - 10am - NY time? One plane had hit, the other to follow shortly. There was a Dutch guy watching, I asked if this was real.... With just Greek TV, no personal internet in 2001, had to find an internet cafe the next morning to read up on the BBC website. At the airport the following week the queue was hours long and folks were still carrying knives, scissors etc in hand-luggage.

Eighteen months earlier we'd been stood under the Towers taking photos; I declined to enter and take in the view from the top.
 
I was a budding engineer working on one of my first projects, debugging some wireless alarm control interfaces, things weren’t going my way and as my colleague and mentor came my way, I started having a rant about them, panicking that the end of my shift was upon us and I’d got nowhere that day… he stopped me and said “don’t worry about it, there’s worse stuff going on, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Centre”. He had a dry and sometimes dark sense of humour and for a brief moment, I thought he was joking. It soon became clear that he wasn’t, and we went into a boardroom where we had a TV. Half the workforce were crammed in the room and around the doorway watching, then the second plane hit, there were a mixture of gasps, screams and crying… I remained silent but literally felt cold all over, and my face went numb, probably the first and last time I’ve ever been completely lost for words. One colleague, a lady who worked in the stores on another shift lost two relatives that day, she never returned to work in the time I worked there.
 
There were a couple of tv’s in the trading room of the UK import part of the business. These broadcast exchange rates. One of the traders had heard that a plane had hit a tower and we all assumed that it was a light aircraft.

The tv’s were switched to a news channel and we all watched the horror unfold. The financial markets were in meltdown and nobody really knew what was happening. I remember giving the head of trading and the CFO an icy stare when they suggested taking a currency position. This was not the time to make money from misery.

After seeing the planes crash and the towers demolished we were all in a state of shock. Somebody then remarked that as we were on the 27th floor of one of the tallest buildings in London we could be a target. Shortly after, an alarm sounded in the building and we had to evacuate.

Just over a year later I was in the NY office which was in the corner of the floor in the Empire State Building which was hit by the B25. I made sure that I visited Ground Zero. A very humbling experience.
 
TheDecameron said:
The very recent BBC documentary with interviews with survivors, relatives, eye witnesses etc was excellent. It’s taken this long for me to stomach watching the images again. 15 of the 19 attackers were from Saudi Arabia and it puzzles me why the country escaped attention, their diplomats and wealthy individuals allowed to fly out of America while every other flight was grounded.
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Because the Saudi's back then owned about a quarter of America.
 
matt j said:
Well I couldn't have been driving home then as I didn't finish work until 2.30pm, I think I must have heard it on the radio on the way home, I'm not sure now. I don't really remember much about it, just the constant loop of it all happening and the extensive TV coverage.
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It was earlier than 1.45 pm UK time.

I was going to a job in East Kilbride to check on a faulty central heating programmer and had left my own house just about 12.55pm and heard the whole thing start on the radio when I got to the job in EK the customer had the TV on and we both watched it happen live, this would have been no later than 1.30pm.

I can still remember the customer and his flat, he was a young guy about 30, we both watched the TV in stunned silence, think I left after about half an hour and went home to return later that week on to sort the programmer issue.
 
I was in my office in the RHQ of the Kings & Cheshire Regiment when the CO and Adjutant came barrelling in and told me to turn on my TV, very shortly followed by the Trg Major, RAO, QM, RSM, RQMS and a couple of ORs and we watched the looped footage of the 2nd plane hitting the South Tower.

The CO said, “Well, we’re going to war, and it’ll be ****ing nasty, better get the lads ready for it…”
 
I was on a training course at SAP’s office near Heathrow. We’d just returned from lunch when the course was interrupted to inform us what happened. The course continued but nobody was listening….we sat there in disbelief.

In 2002 I visited NY for the first time. Reading the weather beaten ‘missing’ posters that family members had pinned around ground zero was a harrowing experience. Cannot believe it was 20 years ago.

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the two recent documentaries I encourage you to do so, despite them being traumatic viewing at times.
 
brumjam said:
For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the two recent documentaries I encourage you to do so, despite them being traumatic viewing at times.
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Which documentaries are you referring to? I’ve not watched anything recent, though will if it sheds any new light.
 
It was $12 to go to the observation deck of the WTC , I was there a couple of years previously.

The restaurant level had a glass floor allowing for a better view of the ants below. There was a definite sense of the movement of the building as the wind at that altitude moved it around.

It was not a place for anyone with vertigo.
 
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