Where were you on 911?

[Jitter]

Is twenty years long enough to be history? Do you remember 911? Where we you? Were you scared?

I was in Finland so it was afternoon, about 4 pm when the first plane hit. I was hanging on IRC a the time so got news quicker than most in Finland. In 2001, websites were not as important news outlets, and the quickest coverage would have been on TV, but we were at work and didn’t have a TV. An old colleague just called yesterday (because today is Saturday) and reminisced how he heard from me what was unfolding. I also remember several other colleagues talking in the hallway, joking and laughing and I was mad at them. In retrospect I understand that some people react to a scary situation like that, but I remember telling them off: everything is going to hell and you are just laughing about it.

The first plane was a shock but of course thought to be a terrible accident. The second plane revealed that Things Are Very Bad. The scariest for me was the hit on the Pentagon. Information was of course unclear, and at some point the word via IRC was that the entire Pentagon is destroyed or on the way of becoming so. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking about the repercussions. The worst rumor was that US bombers are in the air, headed for Pakistan (I don’t know why it was supposed to be Pakistan) and that they may be carrying nuclear warheads. For a while I thought this is it, we are all going to die now.

The death toll was and continues to be staggering, and my heart weeps thinking about it still. And I’m not even an American. It didn’t touch me personally, and yet it remains one of the absolute worst days in my life. It wasn’t literally the end of the world, but for a moment it surely seemed like it might be.

[Jitter]

Two further points. Firstly I know many of you weren’t even born at the time I would actually be especially interested in hearing how those of you, who were children, felt about it and what you understood.

Secondly I intended this thread for remembering the one historical event. If we wish to discuss the longer term consequences it will probably be better suited for the Politics thread.

[tehta]

I was in the US, studying at Berkeley. (I am semi-old.) I was asleep during the first Towers impact, and found out because my parents called me from Poland to tell me they had heard more planes were hijacked and hitting all over the US. I do not remember worrying about my own safety (why would anyone hit an off-campus apartment?) but there was a sense that things would never be the same.
I ended up watching the news all day with classmates, including the hearbreaking footage of people jumping. I remember that we were very hopeful that some of the firefighters who went in would come back out...

[Opaque]

I think I was in history class when I first heard of the attack. It was maybe an hour or two after everything went down. It was... hard to describe.  Fear may not be the right word. Tense maybe? I could feel the seriousness of the situation through my whole body. The history teacher tried his best to keep an even tone in his voice while he told the class what happened and what might happen later but he was obviously barely holding it together. The whole school was very quiet the rest of the day.
I felt sick for weeks after hearing about the first responders dying while trying to rescue people from the rubble. They pulled out so many bodies from all around the areas. Never seen so much devastation. Everything just became terrible so quickly.
It's kind of silly but South Park aired an episode soon after. It was dumb and nonsensical but it made people laugh which helped some people cope with the tragedy. I know it made my brother and I feel better about it. I can see why laughing can be seen as disrespectful but like you said some people use laughter as a coping mechanism.

[Jitter]

Opaque how old were you at the time? If you don’t want to say, that’s obviously fully ok!

We had just bought our first own apartment and were about to renovate the kitchen. We had to go there and do the demo on the old kitchen and I remember thinking at that point (when the first fear of all out nuclear war was past) that we are screwed, there will be global recession and the apartment we just bought expensive would have an immediate price crash. But that didn’t happen either. So many things changed so much, while some things I thought would have changed a lot, didn’t.

[JoB]

Do you remember 911? Where we you?

Working as an external consultant at a bank in Luxembourg. The brokers, with TVs running in their offices all day long, passed the word around, and the IT dpt I was with got one set up in ours shortly - we watched the towers go down effectively in real time. We all kept working, but I sent a couple short e-mails to the staff of my own employer in case they hadn't heard, and by the end of the day, I had fact sheets on the towers, pentagon, and the airplane models involved pinned to the wall. (I'm kind of a "get to know the layout" guy whenever I chance onto a place/area of interest.)

Were you scared?

... if I compare my memories to what other people tell of theirs, apparently not. I do not remember what meal I had that day (the bank had its own canteen, so I'm pretty sure where I had it) or what clothes I was wearing. I suppose that remembering earlier instances of terrorism both in the USA and around myself, not to mention the Cold War, provided some perspective - and on the other hand, I don't think that anyone I talked to in those days foresaw the WoT resulting from the event.

[Opaque]

Um, I want to say twelve? Maybe? It was so long ago it's hard to remember. Much of my school years are very faded and fuzzy.

[Jitter]

... if I compare my memories to what other people tell of theirs, apparently not. I do not remember what meal I had that day (the bank had its own canteen, so I'm pretty sure where I had it) or what clothes I was wearing. I suppose that remembering earlier instances of terrorism both in the USA and around myself, not to mention the Cold War, provided some perspective - and on the other hand, I don't think that anyone I talked to in those days foresaw the WoT resulting from the event.

It’s weird what you remember, or not. I am sure I have talked on the phone with my husband (or possibly on the IRC) but I have no recollection of any of those talks. Neither does he (I asked because I started wondering). We both remember being at work and wandering the hallways talking to people, but not to each other. I don’t remember the colleagues or know them any more, but the fact that we were physically in the same place sticks to mind.

[LooNEY_DAC]

I arrived at work at my usual early hour that morning to find the break room TV on; the local station which was the only one we could get was simulcasting CNN's coverage of the first impact's aftermath, so after that, I and the ever-growing crowd of my co-workers as they arrived followed events in real time until the towers fell.

After some stunned silence, one of the managers said, "We need to get back to work; this sitting around is exactly what the enemy wants us to do." He was right.

You see, I was an enlisted man in the United States Air Force, stationed at McChord Air Force Base near Lakewood, Washington, and we were at war.

Within the space of less than an hour, every military installation in CONUS was at the highest possible level of alert.

It wasn't until much later that I learned that I had actually known one of the passengers of the lost planes: she was a friend of my 3 great-aunts' from Long Beach, CA, coming home from visiting family.

Of course, I was nowhere near alone in this; many of the officers at my base knew one or more of those who had been killed at the Pentagon.

It still gets to me though.

[Róisín]

Sympathy. I lost a cousin, an Irish-American engineer who was visiting one of the towers at the time.
As to where I was myself: Echunga, a little town in the Adelaide hills where we then lived, when I was woken by a phone call from a friend down in Adelaide telling me to most urgently turn on the television. And be braced for disaster. I did, and saw history in the making and the clear beginning of the end of the American Empire. I didn’t find out until a week later that I had lost a kinsman.

[Vulpes]

I was in Ottawa, where I was attending Carleton University as a PhD student. I had recently moved into a new place, and was in a small shopping mall getting a spare key made. I walked past Radio Shack, which hadn't opened yet, and wondered why there was a crowd of people in front of it. I figured there was a hot sale, and they were waiting for it to open. At the key cutting place, the clerk had a TV on above the desk. She said a plane had flown into one of the towers. I goggled at the footage on TV, and said something along the lines of, "How could anyone make such a mistake?" She continued, saying another one had flown into the other tower, at which point it dawned on me that this was not an accident. It also explained the crowd outside of Radio Shack - there was a TV on display inside, on and tuned to a news channel.

I don't remember feeling scared, exactly - Canada is sufficiently dull that even though I was in the captial, I didn't think anybody would bother flying a plane into, say, Parliament. Plus Carleton is a fair distance from there. But I did have a sense that This Changes Everything. I went to our lab and talked to my fellow students; nobody got much productive work done that day. I let my significant other who was in New Brunswick know that I was fine, and that nothing seemed amiss, but neither of us was terribly worried. It never occurred to me to try to go home. More information trickled in during the day, and it was soon clear that the crisis was over, but nobody knew how it would ultimately affect the world.

I realised this week with all the 20th anniversary coverage that the students in the 4th year course I'm teaching were all infants at the time, and that this is ancient history to them. I also realised that they have no concept of how important those TVs were, that people weren't hearing instantaneously on their news feeds or social media. I remember thinking at the time that it was amazing to hear about the attacks so fast!

I do remember being a little jumpy about things for a while. One day a few weeks after the attacks I was walking along a busy street and noticed someone pull up, get out of their car, take something out of the back, and drop it in a trash can. Then he got in his car and drove away. I actually crossed the street to stay as far from the trash can as possible, and wondered if I should call police. I wasn't the only one feeling a little unsafe; a staff member on campus who lived near the Ottawa airport mentioned that whenever a plane flew over low, he'd get his binoculars and check whether its landing gear was down for landing! Not sure what he thought he could do if it wasn't...

[midwestmutt]

I was at work in my small hometown Post Office. For reasons I can't recall the Postmaster was out of the office that morning. The rural carrier and I saw the 2nd tower collapse on a small TV the office had for watching VCR training tapes. I remember the picture was pretty fuzzy since we only had rabbit ears for reception. When the PM called in soon after she got mad and told us to get back to work and not be watching TV on the clock because that's the way she rolled.

[viola]

I was in canada at school and it was on the tv when I got home. They didn't tell us about it at school, I was pretty young. I was not normally allowed to watch or hear about things but I remember it was pretty much the only thing on TV and I ended up watching some of it. I remember being really curious and also while I didn't understand the full gravity, it was the first time I really learned that really bad things happen in the world.

Members of my family ran into problems with discrimination after it happened (my dad is from the middle east), especially at airports and at immigration points.

[Lenny]

I don't remember the day at all - I know my mother found out about it on the radio, but that was about it. I know I was in school that day because she told me. Was in Australia at the time. It didn't affect my life at all at that stage, and only much later did I get to know that all the protests against the Afghanistan war (which I did notice - there were some physical protests and posters all over in our relatively small town) and much later the fall of Osama Bin Laden was related to that. And, apparently, the restrictions on international air travel. And, now, as well as for a long time before now, influx of refugees (and the simultaneous influx of racists voicing their opinion about it - which would be nicer if they did it without trashing the place and setting stuff on fire).

I remember thinking as a child learning about it that it was sad, but later being incredibly shocked that people were upset enough about it to start the War on Terror and the entire war in Afghanistan (I'd thought for a very long time that the two were unrelated to 911). I didn't get it then, and to an extent still don't now. But that's for another discussion.

[wavewright62]

Late to the party, but here goes.
The events happened in the wee hours NZ time, early enough that the morning paper could feature a photo and preliminary details.  My husband came down the drive holding the paper with a puzzled expression on his face, and started blathering something about a plane hitting the Twin Towers and collapsing.  I was naturally horrified but asked him which one? to which he replied that it seemed to be both.  I scoffed - what, one plane had hit both? and then they both just, fell down?  Like, the top sheared off and fell down?  What?
I didn't get an answer because he was already on the phone, trying to reach his brother (it took him 5 hours to finally get a hold of him). 
We still had a TV at that stage, so I tuned in for a few minutes but tore myself away to go to work.  I was heavily pregnant at the time and doing temp work (I'd been job-hunting when I fell pregnant), this was to be my last week before stopping.  The people at my temp job were very solicitous of me in my dazed state and asked if I wanted to go home, but I refused since I knew there wasn't a blessed thing I could do there. 

My brother-in-law had a software company catering to the financial industry, with offices in a side street just off WTC Square, the Twin Towers visible from their office windows.  He was running late that morning and saw the first tower on fire from his ferry, but hadn't seen the actual plane strike.  A rumour was going around that a plane had hit it, and the assumption was that it must have been a private plane gone wrong or something, but the fire seemed too large for that.  The ferry turned around and went back to New Jersey, and like everybody else there he was on the phone trying to reach colleagues, when the second plane hit.  His office building was protected behind a taller one right on the square that had huge rents in it from falling debris, and by chance none of his people were on site with their clients in the Towers quite yet; they all escaped. 

Spoiler: body horror • show

But weeks later, when he could finally enter his premises and retrieve his servers, they were too clogged with the ubiquitous dust that lay a foot deep on everything.  They had to be interred with the other debris that contained pulverised unidentifiable human remains.

I lost none of my friends and family that day, but all the ones living and/or working in the city all had a tale - of trying to get home with the transport system down, clogged streets, clogged phone lines desperately trying to contact people, near-misses, people they'd lost, impromptu acts of community.