Where were you on 9/11

[Jennasis]

I worked at a local news station on Long Island (NY). I had to be at work at 9 that day. When I saw the news while I was getting ready I left as soon as I could because I knew that it was going to be a busy day... I stayed there for the next 2 weeks. It was a strange place to be but there was no where else I wanted to be.

We lost a photographer and a good friend that day. He was a videographer for the NYPD.

NO WAY! I was with you! Literally. I'm PM'ing you to find out who you are IRL but I worked at the news station with you that day. I was in the live truck all night.

I was home in the am when it happened. I saw everything unfold live and remember calling my boss to see if they wanted me in early at the station. They were so freaked out there he actually told me to come in at regular time (2pm) since they were so jammed up with stuff happeneing and didn't know what to do with me. I could hear yelling and screaming in the background...it was awful.

 

[Blueeyes101817]

i was in ENglish class, during my junior year of high school. The principal made an announcment saying that a plane had crashed into the WTC, but no details.
Our teacher wouldnt stop teaching to turn on the tv, so i made up an excuse to get to the nurse and find out what was going on. the nurses office was full of people just listening to the radio--i had to leave to check in with my next c lass, and as i was walking there, i saw my dad in the hallway (hes a firefighter and he may have been called to go to NY--he didnt go though)..Once i saw him , i knew something was really wrong..He just came to say he loved my brother and i , and he left..The rest of the day was spent sitting in the nurse's office with the other firemans kids and watching the tv in class..
School was locked down for awhlie, as we live 15 minutes from a air force base and the base kids had to leave school--took them over an hour to get back on base because of the security..i remmeber just going home and sitting in front of the tv

 

[LBAK]

I was on my way to work about 10 miles from the city when I heard it on the radio. I happened to look up and I could see the smoke in the distance. My DH was frantically trying to get out of downtown NY and my 2 DD's were at school in lock down. Oldest DD was a sophmore in HS and 7 of her friends lost parents that day. Her close friend lost both parents, one in each tower. Definitely the worst day of my life being a mom and having to help her cope with this. Very sad. Her friends are now in college and have adjusted fairly well and are trying to move on with their life.

 

[Gary M]

DW, my mother and I were at the AKL on 9/11/01. We arrived on 9/10 and got back home early the next Sat. morning 9/15. The plane schedules and MCO was a real mess.

 

[Am_I_There_Yet]

I was clueless about it, until right before the first building fell.

Back then I was on AOL, and on the front page there was a 1"x1" picture and a news blub about a plane hitting the WTC. From the looks of the picture, I assumed it was a small plane, like a Cessna.

It wasn't until my ex-DH called and realized that I wasn't acting any differently, that I found out. He was like, "You don't know what's happened, do you?"

Seconds after I turned the TV on, the first building fell. That day and that moment will be forever burned into my memory.

 

[lindalinda]

I was at work. I remember every second. I was working in the tower at SDF airport. A controller came upstairs and told us a plane hit the WTC tower. We thought it must be a small private plane. He said no. it was an airliner. I said "no way. if it was an airliner I'd have gotten a stop message to NewYork" I will never forget as I was saying it, the message printed on the computer...stop all traffic to new york and surrounding areas. This in inself is an odd message, usually these are specific to airports, not areas. Then the phone rang. The previous mentioned controller picked it up and said "another plane just hit the other tower" It was immediate recognition. Stop all departure traffic messages came out. By the time I got a break and went downstairs, the first tower had already fallen. When the reports came out that a plane was headed toward DC I got worried and started making phone calls. My dad and brother both sometimes work at the pentagon. I did get contact with them and was relieved. We got a message soon after that all aircraft were to land at the nearest airport. At first, the pilots were arguing with us, not knowing what was going on. But very quickly they got all the info and were in a near panic to get on the ground as soon as possible. All the regular rules for lining up the traffic in an orderly manner were out the window. They came in very high and very fast. BY now I was working in the tower, clearing them to land. You all remember it was a beautiful day, and they didnt need instruments to fly, they were all over the place, coming in on dogleg angles and high and fast. Many of them wouldnt even taxi to the gate, they asked for immediate de-boarding as soon as they were off the runway. It was over very fast. About an hour and a half and no planes were in the sky. It was eerie. In all my years I have never seen a blank radar scope, not even in the middle of the night. And silence. Silence in a radar room or control tower is also very eerie. We didnt know what to do. We just sat there. Looking at our scopes, totally blank, talking to no one.

 

[T1130]

My dd was 4 weeks old and finally sleeping after a long night. When my Dh called at 8:50 a.m. I was furious at him for waking the baby. After I finished yelling at him for waking the baby he asked if I had the news on. He told me he just saw a plane fly into the WTC. He works in Jersey City and saw it happen.

It was a long day for us. My dh lost a good friend. My Aunt was on the 38th floor and made it out. We did not here from my Aunt till about 3:00. It was a long and agonzing wait. I can not imagine how family members felt for relatives they never heard from again.

 

[pearlieq]

I was at work in Chicago. I hadn't checked the news that morning, so I didn't hear until the second plane crashed. They put CNN on in our cafeteria, and I alternated between running up there and trying to get news online. DH and I were having a lot of trouble getting in touch with each other.

My company dismissed everyone, as did DH's. We met up around 2pm that afternoon and took the train back home for the day.

 

[my4kids]

I was walking home with my preschool aged dd and baby Ds after dropping my oldest off at morning kindergarten. As we were walking up the street, Dh was on his way to work and stopped the car and leaned out to say "when you get home, turn on the TV, a plane in the WTC. I just heard it on the radio" This kind of didn't even register with me, I was thinking small piper one passenger plane, probable suicide, just the pilot dead perhaps. When we got home I turned on the TV and Nick was on and "It Itsy Bitsy Time" came on and me and my preschoolers started dancing to the music and being silly and watching the show. Had I turned on the news right away, I would have seen the second plane hit, but I didn't. I didn't even think about it. My mother called upset, because her sister had called her, and when she turned on the TV she saw the second plane hit, and realized it was not an accident. I turned on the TV and then called my husband at work. I was talking to him the whole time, telling him what was happening and was on the phone with him when the Pentagon was hit. He works outside of DC and we are in Maryland, so it felt very eerie. I remember watching a shot of the 1st Tower and Katie Couric voice was on and I saw the Tower shake or jolt, or do something slight, but unnatural, and I said to my husband, "Its gonna fall, the people haven't had enough time to get all the way down yet" and before I was done my sentence, it was falling, and it was the most surreal thing, Katie Courics voice was so calm, and she said very calmly, "You are watching a live shot of the World Trade Center collapsing" - women in the neighborhood were running to the school to get their kids. I remember for the whole week, my kids coming in the kitchen, and saying "Mommy, why are you still crying?"

 

[mom2kazkids]

We were one week to the day from leaving to go to Kazakhstan to adopt our two children. I had the day off of work, and the night before my DH worked until 2am, so I stayed up getting things ready to go and did not go to bed until he got home (after 3am on 9/11). Sometime as it was all starting I received a phone call from a infant formula rep that I had contacted about getting single serving size infant formula packets to take with us when we travelled saying that he would fedex me a case for free. So I called my mom to share the news with her, and when I spoke with her I could tell that something was wrong. She asked if I had the TV on, and I told no that I had just gotten out of bed due to the phone call. She then told me what had happened, so I turned the TV on. A little while later as the second tower was colapsing our door bell rang and it was the Fedex man bringing our passports with our Kazakhstan visas, of course then I was wondering if I would even be getting to use them.

I did not have to go to work until Thursday, and on the way to work heard Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA. Needless to say with all the news coverage of the events, I got to work and was an complete basket case, so I told my boss that there was no way that I could stay, so I came home and went to bed. I did go back to work on Friday, but refused to care for patients as I did not want to be in the patient rooms with the TV's on. So I watched the monitors, and coordinated the unit. Our hospital played a tribute song at noon that day, I am remember being on the phone with one of the floors getting report on a patient and crying my eyes out.

I spent most of my free time at home trying to avoid TV, on the Saturday before we were to travel for the adoption, I told my DH that I was NOT going. It was even to the point that I called our coordinator and told her that I did not think that we were going to carry thru with the adoption. Later that day my parents came over and talked me into going.

So one week after the events we left for Kazakhstan and came back with our two precious children.

Barb

 

[DisneyCP2002]

I was in an elevator on my way to my math class. I called my mom the second I got off that elevator to find out what had happened. Our math teacher let us sit around and just talk about what was going on. The worst part was when we heard a low flying airplane fly over our building half way through class, that was very scary. After that she basically just sent us all home. My other 2 classes were cancelled for the day so I was happy to oblige. I remember my mom asking me later that afternoon if I was still going to Disney at Christmas and I was like oh yes. I wasn't about to let what happened stop me from returning to the place I love 16 years later. It was a very sad day in the history of the USA.

 

[budbeerlady]

I was at work (Dh was golfing) it came on the radio that a plane had hit, my co-worker and I thought it bumped the tv antena off or something pretty minor. But I logged onto Cnn at my desk, I might have yelled some obsinety and ran to our confrence room with 5 co-workers on my heels. We turned it on to see the 2nd plane fly in.

That was how we spent the rest of the day, sitting at the tables in the confrence room staring in disbelief. The only time the phone ran in our normally busy office was our families calling us. Around 3pm we all took turns running to the gas station up the road as prices started to sky rocket!

I had the rest of the week off on vacation, dh and I went up north but it was so surreal! We crossed over 2 bridges that had full swat type uniformed officers standing on them just watching the cars go by. Every where we went everyone had tvs on in the stores, at their campsites, you name it. Horrible day.

 

[Alex2kMommy]

I used to start work at 6am, so I was alone in the office working away on my computer when one of my best friends/coworkers called from our Georgia office. She was very upset, saying that a plane had just hit the WTC in NY. I thought it was a horrible accident, but she was really upset, and I was just trying to calm her down and figure out why. While we were on the phone the 2nd plane hit, and when she told me, I just got chills. I scrambled to find a radio on a coworkers desk, and turned it to a news station.

Some people didn't come into work that day, others came in but of course that was all anyone could talk about. Someone found a TV and put it in the conference room and left it on all day. People would wander in and watch throughout the day.

The person I carpooled with had a DD, DSIL and DGD near the WTC, and she was frantic because she hadn't been able to reach them. After a few days she found out they were fine. Even in Seattle it seems everyone had relatives or friends in NYC that were affected.

At the time my first child had just turned 1yo, and I remember coming home and holding him tight, nursing him, watching the news and just sobbing endless tears, every night.

 

[castleview]

I live in southern CT where I was at a Mommy & Me gymnastics class with my 2 year old. I was 8 months pregnant and got a hold of my sister who told me one of the towers came down. I couldn't believe it. When I returned home, there was a message from my cousin's husband. My cousin had taken off out of NY en route to Tampa. They landed in Raleigh. My cousin heard from her, but couldn't call NJ from where he was because of the reception. I ended up calling the husband of the woman sitting next to my cousin to let him know where his wife was.

I really couldn't get a hold of DH because he's a high school teacher and the phones were off the hook. The school was on lock down, but at the same time there were kids whose parents worked in the financial district who wanted to get home. Not a day I ever want to relive...God Bless the people who lost someone.

 

[vetrik]

There are some amazing stories here.

It was my senior year of college, and I was running very late for a 9:15 am class. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth with the radio on when the dj said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I ran into my bedroom and logged onto CNN to see a picture - like many people, I just assumed it was a small plane and was caused by pilot error or something like that. Then I had to run since I was so late.

I had the radio on in the car driving to class when they broke into a song and announced that a second plane had hit. I knew immediately it was not a mistake. I made it to campus, and sat in my car with the radio on. I got out of the car and walked to the computer center on campus, but all the websites were overloaded and I couldn't get any information that way - so I went to the campus center to see if they had a tv set up with the news, but there wasn't (there was later in the week, but not that day). I ended up walking back to the car and driving back home with the radio on. Once I got home I turned on the news, but I most clearly remember turning my computer monitor back on and the CNN homepage was still loaded with the 1 smoking tower. It was strange to think of how much had changed in the few hours in between - that the towers were now gone.

 

[cabloom]

We were backpacking in Glacier Nat'l Park. Basically, we missed the whole thing. We did meet people on the trail that told us what had happened, but by the time we got back to "the real world", they weren't showing the news footage on tv all of the time. We bought newspapers and magazines and read what we could afterwards, but we never did really experience the horror that people that were watching it unfold did. It was all very surreal to us. I'm actually pretty glad we missed all the terrible video of it - it was bad enough anyway.

 

[punkin712]

I was in the lobby of my office building (Chase Manhattan Plaza) about 2 blocks away. I commuted from NJ on the PATH and planned to go shopping at the J. Crew store in the World Trade Center (I was going to look for something for DH's birthday). After about 5 minutes, I remembered that I had a staff meeting at 9am and decided to get to the office a little early so I could check my emails and voicemail before the meeting. It took me less than 5 minutes to walk to my building and get inside, so had I stayed to shop...well, let's just say my guardian angel was at the top of her game that day.

My window overlooked Wall Street and when the 2nd plane hit I saw hundreds of people running in the street looking for cover. I just happened to be on the phone with a friend of mine who worked with my husband in midtown and when I saw the commotion I said "I think the World Trade Center just collapsed." Pretty creepy to think about now.

I remember everything like it happened yesterday. The ride up the escalator from the PATH...the vendors on the sidewalk outside WTC...the smoke coming from the building...the paper, carpet, furniture, etc. falling from the sky in front of my window...the smell...it was surreal.

We weren't allowed to leave our building until almost 2pm that day. A large group of us were on a floor with a working television so we were watching the events unfold on TV as it happened right outside our windows. When each tower fell, we felt the building shake and then everything outside went completely black.

It breaks my heart to think about the innocent people who died that day and all the lives that were changed as a result of this senseless attack.

 

[100 acre wood]

I remember this like it was yesterday. My youngest ds had been born weeks before and I was at the mall getting a new baptism outfit. Oldest was off at Kindergarden. Dh called and told me a plane had hit the WTC,,,I thought it must be a small sight seeing type of plane, I thought. As I was coming home from the mall, I listened to the radio and realized how horribly wrong I was. Rushed home, afraid of any overhead planes and wondering if I should pick up my oldest from school early. My mom left in a rush to drive home and I was in complete and horrible shock...add the events of 9/11 to a very hormonal postpartum mommy and it wasn't too pretty. An awful awful time.

 

[JimB.]

I had just gotten off shift as a firefighter, &, believe it or not, was at home cruising the DIS looking up some DCL info.

I did not have the TV on, so I was surprised when I stopped by the CB & saw some posts about the WTC having collapsed.

I went & turned the TV on and saw the horrible aftermath of the second tower collapsing, then saw the video replays of the aircraft striking the towers.

Then the news of the Pentagon. Then an erroneous report about Camp David having been struck (I guess this was actually the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania).

 

[lclark0621]

DH & I lived in Manhattan. DH had many clients in the towers.

I was in our apartment getting ready to head out to work, DH had already left. DH was on his way to a meeting in the towers (he was supposed to be there all day at different clients). He was supposed to be there at 8:00am for his first meeting but he had been running late all morning & called to reschedule it for 9:00am.

When the first plane hit, he saw it. He called me & I could hardly hear him. But I do remember his words clear as a bell.

"Get the dogs & get the f*** out of the city NOW! Head to your Mom's."

I had no idea what he was talking about, and I told him I was going to be late.

"Get out of the city now! A plane has hit one of the Twin Towers & I dont think it was an accident."

I asked him to call me as often as he could, told him I loved him & dropped the phone.

I got out of the city as quick as I could & was lucky. I found DH at Hoboken Path Station.

My DH was supposed to be in the tower when the plane hit. But just by luck, he was running late that day. I remember him pounding around the apartment that morning grumbling about how he was late & he was so annoyed he had to reschedule his first meeting.

I was never more thankful my DH was in a bad mood (he was REALLY cranky) then that morning. His being late, saved his life.

Someone was looking out for him that day, and I am forever grateful.

DH & I lost a lot of friends & coworkers that day. We were a couple of the lucky ones.