I am still in utter shock when I see footage of 9/11, and like everybody I can remember where I was when I saw the attack unfold.
May all the victims rest in peace.
It had quite a major impact on my day which I remember very well. Myself and my colleages were in our usual lunch spot (a central london pub) and the landlord put the news on the big screen, pub was pretty empty at this point and we watched as the second tower was hit. Within minutes all our pagers went off, back to the office we went straight into a senior meeting. If you remember at the point at least one other aircraft was missing and our boss had been told by a senior member of London's Major Incident team that it was considered the missing plane could be heading for the Houses of Parliament. I worked in the IT dept of the (then) largest NHS Trust which happened to be located directly across the River Thames from the Houses of Parliament. I remember every northern hempishere news website was jammed and we had to get most of our news from Australian site. We made the descision to shut down the IT dept, and relocate to our underground DR bunker (yes, we had one) which means legally the hospital can no longer admit patients. The hospital went into full Major Incident mode and no longer admitted A&E patients. To be honest, sad though it is to say, 9/11 was probably the most interesting and challenging day of my working life.
I visitied ground zero just a short five months after, and even then families paced up and down posting pictures and messges on the public spaces around the area, reaching out for any news of their loved ones. One of the sadest sites I have even seen.
