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9/11 20 years on

canonman

pfm Member
20 years ago, one of the most horrendous events ever in world history occurred.

I was lucky enough to have dinner there a few times in the tower restaurant 'Windows on the world' whitch was a spectacular location and so felt a particular empathy.

That day I popped into my local TV shop and saw the owner, a friend of mine, just staring at the screens in disbelief but at that time the full horror had not even been realised and it was thought that a light aircraft had crashed into one of the towers.

Any thoughts or memories?
 
I was at work and had popped into the canteen for an afternoon coffee. I was MD of the company at the time. The 'event' was in progress and the production manager was listening to radio reports coming in. I said something like 'that can't happen, you can't believe what you are hearing'. I was well wrong on that one.

About 4 years ago I was in NY for a weekend and went to the 9/11 museum. It was harrowing (and so big!) that I eventually gave up early and waited ages outside for the wife to complete her visit. Not much to say after that.

What astonished me is the detailed research. Like a scrap of paper found floating in the air a couple of miles away, had been traced to the very desk of the very person who wrote it. Memorable too, the complete fire truck that had been badly damaged in the collapse, and here it was, mangled with dust and all still intact. Voice recordings of air traffic and military control rooms is also played - people could not believe what was unfolding.
 
I was engaged on a spectacularly well.paid contract, and received a call of a friend who said to put a telly on, as it was like summat out of die hard.

Never been to NY, but that contract did confirm that I was both greedy and corruptible, hence why I would never go for any role in public office!

S
 
I was in our City office. Was on the phone with a colleague in our midtown office by Penn Station as he saw the second plane hit out of his office window. Another colleague was in close proximity, survived but had serious mental health problems afterwards. Horrendous. I missed the 7/7 bomb at Edgware Road by 10 minutes.
 
I was at work at HQ 1 Gp RAF High Wycombe when my then partner 'phoned me (desite being told to NEVER 'phone me at work unless it was an emergency). He asked me to turn on the TV. I and 3 other Sqn Ldrs watched in horror as the second jet hit the second tower.

What scared us was that there was a madman in the White House and we had no idea how he would act.
 
I was working as a technical trainer in a Liverpool ISP call centre at the time and wondered where the hell everyone was and why the phone queues were going crazy. Everyone was crowded around the TV in the coffee room staring in disbelief. A very strange day. I remember a friend popping round to my city centre flat later that day and watching people jumping, the towers collapse etc on the 4/3 21” Trinitron CRT I still have sitting across the room for retro computer gaming. I mention the friend as he had been to NY, been up the WTC etc as a tourist, so he had a sense of place/perspective. That day is still well etched into my memory.

A horrific and still totally incomprehensible event. A reality check in many ways, not least of which being the remarkably poorly timed western political failure in Afghanistan, plus Iraq, Syria etc, but also a dark look into human nature itself. It doesn’t get any more understandable with time. pfm didn’t exist as a forum for another 8 months or so, so no content to recall or anything. Hope no one here lost anyone.
 
I was in a van on the way to play a gig in Paris.

My GF at the time sent a text saying the first plane had gone into the building, and I relayed it to the guys in the van, but it was so surreal/obviously just a tragic accident that, as awful as even an accident would have been, it didn’t really register.

Then she sent another text shortly afterwards saying the second one had gone into the other tower. That struck us, but we were still a bit uncomprehending. Then another text came in to someone else which just said ‘World War 3 just started’.

Cut off from home and with no real way of getting more info, it was impossible not to think things were even worse than they actually were. A torturous afternoon followed trying and mostly failing to find news coverage. Two things stuck in my mind - one, seeing a woman begging with an exposed, burned breast and wondering how many more people would receive similar wounds that day, and two, that we were so fearful that Bush would overreact that I said on stage to the audience that night that they may as well make sure they lived it up at the show, because we might all be dead tomorrow when the bombs started to drop.

Then 12 or so of us crammed into a cheap hotel room staring quietly at a tiny TV in the corner of the room with what seemed like an endless loop of plane-building-plane-building.
 
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.
 
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.

And, of course, the mastermind behind the attack was Saudi as well.

On the morning of 9/11, I heard the news while driving to work in Minneapolis. Back then, I knew quite a few co-workers from our lower Manhattan office, but I wasn’t exactly sure where that office was relative to the towers. When I got to work, I saw about 15 of my colleagues crowded around a television. Many were staring dumbfounded, and several more were crying. It took a while to understand what was going on. The scariest thing was that nobody knew when the attacks would end. We all decided that remaining in a high-rise building might not be the smartest thing to do, so I left for home immediately, and spent the rest of the day with Mrs. Hook watching events unfold.

Hard to believe it’s been 20 years!
 
My undergrad classmate plus my 2nd cousin died in the WTC attack.

PS- I have an orange ticket of the WTC observation deck (11 years old/6th grade/1982'ish) on my refrigerator.
 
Little more than a week before the attack, my oldest daughter called me from New York, where she was staying with a cousin of my wife, after a second Summer working for Camp America went badly wrong. She asked me to guess where she was. I replied 'New York'.. She then told me she was on top of the WTC and 'could see the curvature of the Earth'. I wasn't sure about that, but since she was severely visually impaired, (her eyesight continues to deteriorate.)and eager to see what she could while she still could.. I didn't question her. She was home before the attack.

When the attack happened I was working in a Career Guidance Centre for Adults. I don't recall there being a TV there.. but it was the first time I witnessed the internet being broken. All we could get were frozen images of the towers..smoking... So it wasn''t until I got home later that the full horror emerged.

As an aside, my daughter later left Madrid shortly before the bombings there.. and then decided to skip the Thailand leg of a round the World trip with a Uni friend, to save a few quid..going instead, direct to Australia, and missiing the Boxing Day Tsunami. Mercifully her friends who went to Thailand were unaffected by the Tsunami.

What seems to be little talked about now..is the extended time where it was thought there just might be survivors under the rubble..and the longer time when the rubble was literallly 'sifted' in an attempt to find the remains of almost 3000 people....

Why does Saudi Arabia still exist?
 
Why does Saudi Arabia still exist?

Because they have money.

On Sept. 11 2001, I woke up, turned on my computer, and logged onto a news hub to see what was happening in the world. The first tower had already been hit, so I turned on the TV just in time to see the report of the second plane. Prior to the second hit I had assumed it to be just a horrible accident, like the time a B25 hit the Empire State Building. With the second strike I thought it was Pearl Harbor.
 
My undergrad classmate plus my 2nd cousin died in the WTC attack.

PS- I have an orange ticket of the WTC observation deck (11 years old/6th grade/1982'ish) on my refrigerator.
I still have a menu from the restaurant somewhere
 
I was at a wine tasting in the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall when it happened. I remember walking up Whitehall and getting the tube, and subsequently learning that someone who knew me saw me there. I must gave picked up that something was going on on the journey home, of snippets of information, and the Internet going down in the office, and the mobile networks collapsing. There was some talk at the time that there had been a plan to put a plane on the Houses of Parliament too, which, had it happened, would have changed my day a bit.

There were other things too, which I can only vaguely remember. Someone I knew who had been in Windows, I think the day before, and had had a clear premonition of looking out and momentarily seeing an aeroplane, of someone else who should have been in a meeting there, but missed it, and if the awful panic of his wife, who couldn't get in touch because if the collapse of the networks.

I've never been able to watch the footage since. I caught the tail end of the recent documentary, which was very moving.
 
Everyone remembers what they were doing when it happened. I was on my way home. I saw the horror live.
 
I'm sure I read yesterday that either one or two more people have just been identified from the tiny scraps of remains that were sifted out of the wreckage on that island where it was all taken. Extraordinary.
 
I was in New York in December/January 2001, my wife had an old school friend there & we had been over the previous year also. We went to a NYE party at someone’s apartment, quite a few expats who worked in the area, remember chatting with one girl who subsequently died in the attack.

I really love NYC, always have, been 4 times & would happily go every year. The new ‘freedom’ towers are stunning & the newly imagined area is wonderful.

I remember being on the phone to a client as it happened & being unable to watch all media coverage. Think I listened to a lot of music that night. My wife, was in class all day so didn’t even hear about it until I told her.
 


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