Where Were You 9/11/01?

Off Topic
21

I was on the trading floor in Chicago. The Equities weren’t open yet, but currencies and interest rates were. The electronic markets broke when the first plane hit, then came all the way back.

Once the second plane hit, it was total pandemonium. Banks were refusing to make prices, most of the traders were watching what was unfolding on the TVs overhead, for a while you couldn’t buy or sell any currency at any price.

The floors closed soon thereafter, and I spent the rest of the morning with friends in a bar across the street. A couple guys had been on the phones with Cantor Fitz traders…it was brutal.

22

Sitting in a Roadway Inn getting the free breakfast, exhausted, after training soldiers how to free rock climb at the nearby national park with gear & weapons the four previous days then drinking with them each night.

We trained normal that day, but they kept calling in, expecting orders.

That night they all got really, really, drunk and really, really mad drunk and were punching holes in walls, just fucking pissed and raging.

Cops came, of course.

I kept their Lt. out of prison by appealing to the cops patriotism, which is good, because 6 months later he was my Captain, and I was his Lt., and I never let him forget that.

23

I had seen the first plane hit before leaving for school, and then when I got to school, I heard that there had been a second plane. I was like holy fuck!!

24

On 911 I just got out of jail I spent the night in lock up for a bar fight. When I walked home my roomate said he check this out some dumb ass flew into the world trade center. Then the 2nd plane hit live and then shit got real. I remember telling everyone that day shit would never be the same. I even took a picture of the gas station which had $0.99 gas and told everyone this will never happen again… I also told everyone we will be at war with the mid east for decades now…So far I’ve been right

25

Now, the real question is, Push, what were you doing when they bombed Pearl Harbor.

26

I was in 2nd year of university and had just walked into a student lounge after my first class of the day and a friend came in out of breath and said 2 planes had just flown into the WTC. We turned on the TV and I remember sitting there and watching the smoke pour out of the towers and thinking to myself that somehow this was not real. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I still can’t wrap my head around it.

I remember going home and literally not turning the TV off for the next 3 days. More than anything, I remember feeling a sense of rage. The part of Canada that I live in is 20 mins from the New York border and most of us in this area just look at ourselves as semi-Americans (except when it comes to hockey); lots of families in this area straddle the border, so there was this sense locally that we were attacked just as much as our friends/relatives on the other side.

I remember long lines to give blood at stations on campus and then, the sinking feeling when it became apparent in the next few days that there were very few survivors who were going to be found to use the blood on.

When I look back today at that moment, it is crazy just how big of a turning point it turned out to be in the Western world. I’d always heard older people say the 2 things they always remembered were where they were when they heard JFK was shot and where they were when the Challenger space shuttle blew up. However, I’d argue that 9/11 was a much more significant event in the repercussions and change in the world that it begot, much moreso than Kennedy’s assassination.

27

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:
Now, the real question is, Push, what were you doing when they bombed Pearl Harbor.[/quote]
lol

28

Just got out of college and working a construction job. We first heard about it from drivers passing by. It was terrible because we were only getting bits and pieces until we got a radio going.

I remember the long, long lines for gas that day and thinking - holy shit, society is collapsing.

Much respect to all the heroes that day and the days that have followed…

29

I was at work when they announced the first plane hitting and watched the second one hit on the breakroom TV.

30

I was at work out on Long Island and going down to our cafeteria to get coffee. The guy at the register tells me that a plane ran into the Trade Towers. I figure its a Cessna or something small. I head back up to tell people in my offfice. I had to pass one of the TVs that are always on by the lobby, people were all standing around and I saw the 2nd plane hit. No Cessna for sure…

We tried to catch the news on the internet but all the news stations were so busy everything was at a crawl. I called my wife, she had a PTA meeting that got canceled (all the kids were sent home) and she gave me a play-by-play on the news she was watching.

“One of the towers just collapsed”… I was like, wut… the top floors? She said… no the whole thing. This was followed by the other shortly.

At work we went up to the roof above the 3rd floor and we cloud see the smoke plume 35 miles away. I tried to call a few people that worked in NYC, but there was no cell service. At home, I had people my wife’s sister worked with staying with us for a couple of days, they couldn’t get back into Manhattan. Freaky as hell. The only thing flying was fighter jets. I went to work the next day and go past Republic Airport. There was a tanker plane landing and it had the drogue trailing behind it. A very surrealistic few days.

Rob

31

I was laying in bed with my gf (at the time)in our aprt, which was about 1500 feet from the WTC. Our aprt building shook (when the first plane hit) and my gf immediatly said OMG, the WTC. She had been around for the previous bombing attempt, and immediately knew what happened. We went downstairs to a friends aprt and starting watching things on TV. It was crazy to see it live on TV and then also to be a few minute walk away.

No one in a million years thought the buildings would come down, even after the second plane. Some of my friends ran over and were taking pictures and made it back just before the buildings came down. When they did there was basically zero visibility and everything was covered in about 6" of debris and dust. We were pulling people into our lobby off the street, you couldn’t see anything out there and it was total chaos.

We had people in our lobby that had just made it off the 50th, 60th floor of the WTC like a minute before the buildings came down. People looked like someone had taken a dumptruck worth of ash/debris and literally just dumped it over their head. I don’t even know WTF we were all breathing in.

There was a steady stream of people leaving the area all day, obviously all utilities were down, we were eventually evacuated later in the day and had to catch a ferry over to brooklyn, where we crashed on a friends aprt floor for a week until we could come back.

I preface the following story by saying thank god we were OK, so many people lost loved ones, so I really can’t complain about anything, but still, it was a crazy scene…
My gf freaked out and couldn’t take it (I wanted to stay), so we put all our shit in our car and drove straight to CA (where I’m from). I remember the first day, we were hauling ass in our car, stuffed to the ceiling, probably both looked insane, got pulled over by a cop for speeding.

I was like dude, we have just been through hell, we are trying to get somewhere safe, he totally let us go. Our entire fking exhaust system failed on the car part way across the country (probably because of all the debris/ash/whatever that fell on the car) and so it was venting exhaust into the car while we were driving. We had to roll the windows down and drive with both our heads sticking out the window. What a total clusterfuck.

Finally we got a honda dealer, it was like a few thousand dollar repair, but we explained what just happened, the sales guy was like you know what, Honda is going to take care of this one. They fixed the entire car and sent us on our way without paying a dime. Never been so grateful.

We got to CA and the moving company we hired basically ran a scam on us where they give you a really lowball quote ($1500) pick up all your shit, and then hold it ransom unless you pay them the new quote ($6000). Turns out all kinds of people, including this moving company, were running scams on people from that area, fking bastards. We had mountains of paperwork, with FEMA, Victims Comp, Unemployment, for years.

Between losing my job (the company went under, our primary investor was flying into NYC that day (9/11) from London, never made it, ended up pulling the funding for the entire project), losing last month and security on the aprt ($15K) on and on and on, probably lost $50-$60K that week.

Anyhow, just money, again, can’t really complain. Feel terrible for the people who lost loved ones that day. I was messed up in the head for years about the whole thing, it was really really really different being there in person. There’s really no comparison to the trauma of witnessing things first hand, I didn’t really realize that at first.

I’m still part of the ongoing health monitoring program for people in the impact zone, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we all turn out OK, I think we probably will. Because we left after 7-10 days or so, didn’t get the same kind of exposure for people that were there for extended periods.

The last thing that still freaks me out is the company I worked for (dot com startup) had looked at two office locations. One was the top floors of the WTC and the other was Rock Plaza in mid town. One of the partners was like no fking way I’m working in the top of this building, so they went with rock plaza (amazing office, had view over the ice skating rink/fountain). The other partner wanted to go with the WTC, and if they had, good chance we would all be dead.

I really hope people all over the world pull their heads out of their asses and stop pulling this kind of insane, destructive, outrageous bullshit on each other. Fking hell.

32

[quote]bgrisso wrote:
I was laying in bed with my gf (at the time)in our aprt, which was about 1500 feet from the WTC. Our aprt building shook (when the first plane hit) and my gf immediatly said OMG, the WTC. She had been around for the previous bombing attempt, and immediately knew what happened. We went downstairs to a friends aprt and starting watching things on TV. It was crazy to see it live on TV and then also to be a few minute walk away.

No one in a million years thought the buildings would come down, even after the second plane. Some of my friends ran over and were taking pictures and made it back just before the buildings came down. When they did there was basically zero visibility and everything was covered in about 6" of debris and dust. We were pulling people into our lobby off the street, you couldn’t see anything out there and it was total chaos.

We had people in our lobby that had just made it off the 50th, 60th floor of the WTC like a minute before the buildings came down. People looked like someone had taken a dumptruck worth of ash/debris and literally just dumped it over their head. I don’t even know WTF we were all breathing in.

There was a steady stream of people leaving the area all day, obviously all utilities were down, we were eventually evacuated later in the day and had to catch a ferry over to brooklyn, where we crashed on a friends aprt floor for a week until we could come back.

I preface the following story by saying thank god we were OK, so many people lost loved ones, so I really can’t complain about anything, but still, it was a crazy scene…
My gf freaked out and couldn’t take it (I wanted to stay), so we put all our shit in our car and drove straight to CA (where I’m from). I remember the first day, we were hauling ass in our car, stuffed to the ceiling, probably both looked insane, got pulled over by a cop for speeding.

I was like dude, we have just been through hell, we are trying to get somewhere safe, he totally let us go. Our entire fking exhaust system failed on the car part way across the country (probably because of all the debris/ash/whatever that fell on the car) and so it was venting exhaust into the car while we were driving. We had to roll the windows down and drive with both our heads sticking out the window. What a total clusterfuck.

Finally we got a honda dealer, it was like a few thousand dollar repair, but we explained what just happened, the sales guy was like you know what, Honda is going to take care of this one. They fixed the entire car and sent us on our way without paying a dime. Never been so grateful.

We got to CA and the moving company we hired basically ran a scam on us where they give you a really lowball quote ($1500) pick up all your shit, and then hold it ransom unless you pay them the new quote ($6000). Turns out all kinds of people, including this moving company, were running scams on people from that area, fking bastards. We had mountains of paperwork, with FEMA, Victims Comp, Unemployment, for years.

Between losing my job (the company went under, our primary investor was flying into NYC that day (9/11) from London, never made it, ended up pulling the funding for the entire project), losing last month and security on the aprt ($15K) on and on and on, probably lost $50-$60K that week.

Anyhow, just money, again, can’t really complain. Feel terrible for the people who lost loved ones that day. I was messed up in the head for years about the whole thing, it was really really really different being there in person. There’s really no comparison to the trauma of witnessing things first hand, I didn’t really realize that at first.

I’m still part of the ongoing health monitoring program for people in the impact zone, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we all turn out OK, I think we probably will. Because we left after 7-10 days or so, didn’t get the same kind of exposure for people that were there for extended periods.

The last thing that still freaks me out is the company I worked for (dot com startup) had looked at two office locations. One was the top floors of the WTC and the other was Rock Plaza in mid town. One of the partners was like no fking way I’m working in the top of this building, so they went with rock plaza (amazing office, had view over the ice skating rink/fountain). The other partner wanted to go with the WTC, and if they had, good chance we would all be dead.

I really hope people all over the world pull their heads out of their asses and stop pulling this kind of insane, destructive, outrageous bullshit on each other. Fking hell.[/quote]

That’s an amazing story…

33

My birthday is on the 10th…so I woke up with a pounding hangover, and about 30 missed calls and texts.

I thought everybody was fucking with me so I went back to bed.

It was a very surreal day.

34

I was in 10th grade in high school , its hard to believe its been 12 years. Never forget.

35

627×960 140 KB

I always thought the cover to this comic book tribute was especially touching.

S

36

Well, I was in Japan at the time, so if memory serves it had actually been September 12 for about half an hour.

I was with three co-workers and a couple of Sony execs in a restaurant owned by one of my friends in Shinjuku. We were talking and laughing and drinking, when my American co-worker got a call on his cell phone. A plane had collided with one of the World Trade Center towers. We didn’t think much of it except, “gosh, that’s unprecedented. What a stupid pilot” and went back to our meal.

Then the next call came. The second tower had been hit. The mood changed. All of us realized that this was no accident. Over the next hour he got new information: some of it accurate, some not. Missiles had hit the Capitol building and the Pentagon. A bomb had gone off in the White House. Another plane had kamikaze’d the Washington Mall.

It wasn’t until I got home and watched the coverage of the plane crashes and the towers falling that I understood the whole magnitude of the event. I turned off the TV and cried.

Funny thing was, I had been in Washington just two months previously, and as soon as the plane touched down I had the most awful premonition: like what would I do to get out of Washington with the two Japanese women I was accompanying to a Sony conference of there was a serious terrorist incident. Premonition was correct, just a couple months early.

The other funny thing is that a year earlier, I had been offered a very nice job at Merrill Lynch. The money was great, the job seemed very interesting, and it would have involved six months in Tokyo, six months in Hong Hong, then on to Headquarters. For some reason I had a strong feeling that I should not take the job. Had I taken it, there is little doubt where I would have been on that particular day.

37

I was at my house in Edison, NJ.

Interviewed in the towers the week before on a new job.

38

I was working 2nd shift as a diesel mechanic at the time and my brother and I shared a house in southern Illinois.
I hadn’t been asleep for very long when he burst into my bedroom and told me that the trade center had been hit.
I remember watching it on the news in complete disbelief and going to the gym that day I kept going back to the T.V. as the towers fell.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for those who lived in the area.

39

I was getting ready for work with the TV on in the background. It’s funny, the thing I remember the most is what a nice day it was. The sky was clear as a bell and the temperature was just right, not too hot, not too cold. Things at work and at home were going well, and I was in a particularly good mood. When I heard the TV commentator announce that a plane had flown into the WTC, my first and immediate thought was, “They got us!” I recalled the earlier bombing and immediately assumed that terrorists had made a second, successful attempt. Even now, I think of the images of that dark smoke against that beautiful, blue sky; what an irony. I live very far away from NYC and DC, but the sense of foreboding was so heavy here, I can’t imagine what it was like for people there. I don’t think I have ever recovered the complete sense of well-being that I had right before that announcement. Three years later we were hit with Katrina, and the economy has been in the shitter for several years now, and Obamacare is becoming a reality, adding more stress and uncertainty to my life.

40

My wife and I were living in Karakol, on the south shore of Lake Issyk Kul in eastern Kyrgyzstan, where Jenny was working for a Swiss development NGO. It would have been about 6:45 PM local time on September 11, when the first plane hit. I had just returned to Karakol that morning, from a quick trip back to Toronto to get my younger son registered for school.

I remember that we had satellite TV service and had the TV on to watch a very lively dinner-time Russian game show “Pole Chudes” or “Field of Dreams”. The broadcast was interrupted regularly with updates from various news bureaus and talking heads, and then when the second plane hit all the regular programming was interrupted for non-stop news coverage. It was pretty surreal. Our next door neighbour, an Iranian woman who we rented our house from, came over to ask us what was going on. Frankly, we were, at least initially, pretty clueless. I remember Marzi (the neighbour) speculating that it was an elaborate, US-sponsored hoax and that it might serve as an excuse for an attack on Iran.

Well, just one year later, feeling the need to hit back at something, and substituting Iraq as proxy for Iran, she wasn’t completely wrong. Sorry, didn’t intend to get all PWI here.