Where Were You on 9/11?

My wife and I were homeless in lower Manhattan.We were sleeping at the time on the E train that terminates and goes back from W.T.C. at the moment rerouted that night to Astoria,Queens.I intended to get off at 8 A.M. at W.T.C. To go to the bathroom there but I fell asleep. We had intended to do our wash at the end stop in Astoria and before we arrived at the elevated station out of the tunnel from Manhattan at Queensboro Plaza I had awoken. I looked toward the city and saw the tower smoking.This is 7 miles away.I told my wife and as we made the turn on the track we saw the second tower smoking and we knew this was not an accident! Later at the Laundromat we saw the tower collapse and it was very frightening.Had we done our laundry on Weds.we would have been begging a block away in front of historic St.Paul's Chapel on Tuesday and been in the midst of this tragic event!

I was at home on the way to the airport for vacation. Was to be my first really long distance Cessna flight. Texas - Florida. Was running late so to save some time I called an automated info service. This is what I heard ...

Austin Bergstrom International Airport information zulu (or whatever the sequence name was) Winds blah blah blah. Temperature blah blah blah. Pressure blah blah blah. Due to a national emergency the FAA has ordered all aircraft to land immediately at the nearest available airport.

Heck of a wake up call.

New London, CT.  I saw news first tower hit.  Maybe a a a pilot mistake?  2nd tower hit- this is war.
I was driving on I-95 going over bridge, thought if war this bridge will be dropped for strategic reason if major player involved. Glad when I cleared bridge. Gas’ed up quickly

I took time to think out who is doing this. Is it an auto-coup to seize power?  Don’t think it was. Drove to my job at hospital thinking we would receive patients to open up beds closer to NYC. The patients never came.

I remember hearing on the radio all NYC firefighters , including retired were all immediately called to report to duty and I knew it was bad.

I saw the second plane on tv while it was happening. Was in my house.

My employees were scheduled to finish a job at Central Texas College. They couldnt get to it. It was the first time in my memory that Ft Hood closed the base (checking people coming in). The hiway was backed up for miles from people trying to get there. We had to abandon going to the college. No way to get there. Pretty chaotic.

The base is still closed today.  You have to get a permit to enter.

Another oddity, i think my memory is right. Forgive me if i am wrong. At south padre island, a ship hit the main bridge. It knocked a section off. People drove to their death into the water. Very little was mentioned as it happened the same day. Any other day and it would have got national coverage.

We had planned to go on a cruise that November. We still went, although a lot of people cancelled. It's hard for people today to understand. People were scared to get on the cruise ship. We went. Everything was fine. What i remember is the escort out of the bay. We had coast guard with rifles in their arms, following next to us in their boat. I doubt that happened prior to 9-11.

I was at work, and all of a sudden we get the TV's on, and see the planes crash into the buildings......   Then.....


After we see the planes crash it was the exact same day a squirrel decided to commit suicide and jump on the transformer taking out the electricity to our building.


After that, they just sent people home, we were are a wreck not knowing which way to go or what to expect next.

I was at Red Bank Veterinary Hospital (New Jersey) with a referral patient, watching Animal Planet when a vet tech ran into the room and changed the TV channel just in time to see the airplane plunge into the second tower. It literally dropped me to my knees.

9/11 was the impetus that resulted in my retiring early and moving the Hawaii to create a homestead farm and build my own house. It really hit home that one could die at any moment. I realized that I could die without ever getting the chance to retire, and worse yet, I was never going to do what I really wanted to do in life. I had always wanted to be a farmer since I was in the 6th grade but was never allowed to go that route. After 9/11 I decided I was going to change my life and become that farmer I had always wanted to be. I sold everything and bought 20 acres. Life progressed from there.

I was at school

I was a Jr Higher, eating my breakfast cereal a O'dark thirty in the morning before school started. My mom had the TV news on, when the reporters started showing pictures of the smoking building...and as they were airing the live footage, I watched the second tower get crashed into. I remember standing at the bus stop, waiting for the bus, not knowing what was happening, and rumors flying as to what buildings had been hit. Some teachers tried to teach, other's just brought in TVs, or took us to the library to watch the footage (which was, by that point, was pretty much just them repeating the same news over and over).

I was at school. The teachers stopped the lesson to tell us a plane had gone into the first tower, we made comments like 'you're meant to fly around the building'- not understanding the severity of the situation, nor that it wasn't an accident (or indeed the size of the aircraft involved!). It wasn't until a few hours later when I got home that we got to see the news and realise what has happened.

I was teaching at a prep school in Providence, RI. My kids came into homeroom talking about something happening and we got NPR on the radio and just sat there listening until it was decided to bring all the kids together in the large auditorium and put the school on lockdown-- the plane that went down in PA was a terrifying question mark and military aircraft were flying over the whole morning (fighters coming from the base on Cape Cod down to NYC passed right overhead). Nobody knew where that last plane was going to come down and the kids were terrified, not least of all because they were afraid the military would shoot down an airliner.

Many kids' parents commuted into NYC (and as I recall at least 10 died when all was over), many kids' parents worked at the navy base in Middletown or the military production facilities in eastern CT, and it was a very stressful day. Phones were down, the internet was down, and all everyone was thinking about was getting home to make sure their families were safe. My twins were 2 years old and at daycare about 30 min away, and over the next few days I realized that the place had been right under the flight path into Providence. It was so, so quiet the next few days.

Like SuBa said, it was a wake up call. My life was a mess (twin toddlers, one gravely ill, I had just separated from my spouse, no family support, living hand to mouth) and I made some changes that eventually ended up with me leaving the US and pursuing a life more focused on things I care about.

I was working at an oil refinery in Billings.  Owners pulled us into a break room to see.  They sent us all home for the day.  I had meant to fuel up my car that morning at 6 am before work …   around noon that day when they sent us home gas price was $1 per gallon more ! Talk about gouging!  100 yards from the refinery in Billings Montana , thousands of miles from NYC .  Sad thing is they never got in trouble for it.
Prier to that day the refinery was wide open to anybody, just drive on in...  Now there are security guards, fences ,electronic gates , bomb and drug dogs are routinely walked thru the craft parking area's.
It took a national attack to make them realize a small coordinated attack on our infrastructure, country wide could bring us to our knees in a day.  It really is not, 1950 anymore... crawling under your school desk was never a good plan.

I was also at school, in the basement of my high school, waiting for my French Immersion language class to start. People who had seen the first news reports about the first plane were talking about it, and about thirty seconds later, we were all told to go to homeroom.

The teachers were all upset, and we all thought it was out of proportion. I was yelled at for logically deconstructing the idea that there could be a Third World War because of it, because my homeroom teacher wasn't prepared to handle reason at that time.

There was a shock among people that we didn't understand, I suppose because our worldviews were more malleable than adult ones. Many of us were saddened, but nobody at school had family there at the time, so there was also a disconnection.

We stayed in school for the rest of the day, leaving to find a television screen on our spares and lunch breaks. I remember having a very interesting and distracting discussion in history class with our Israeli history teacher (something of a rarity in a Catholic boys' school; also, he was fascinating, and something of a genius, I think) about potentially congruent events throughout history.

-CK

My wife and I were homeless for the previous two years most of which we begged by St.Paul's Chapel and lived rough at night by a building half a block away. We were in Queens doing our wash that morning. In previous message I spoke of this. We could not go back to the area below Canal St. for two weeks.Then they lifted the ban barrier and we saw the unbelievable destruction! For the next month we checked the streets and other homeless places for the friends we knew.Everyone was safe and everyone spoke to us of explosions.George begged right across from that site."Boom,boom,boom,boom, boom! " He said.Our friend Dave who always stayed across by the street plaza was dazed.Dino moved his spot where he slept at night at the World Trade Plaza to the Chamber 's St. Station. He also recalled the series of explosions he heard and tried to run.No one spoke of planes.But the t.v.showed them.
So many twisted,melted beams! Our St.Peter's Church had a big roof tear. There was dust everywhere and police cars from as far away as Kansas and firemen too.A guy we knew used his restored firefighter boat to pump water when there were flames.The bombed site smoked for weeks and weeks the fire was so intense.Another guy who we met owned a since renowned Labrador Golden Retriever and told us after a few days they were banned from the site.He was very upset and said his dog was too! The air
we found out was poisonous.We wore masks. I have a non-cancerous melanoma on my temple that I believe has come from this mess.    Now when we enjoy the beautiful Butterfly Oculus Building I have a sense of guilt.So many people used to lay on the WTC Plaza and photograph the two towers and I would whisper to my wife "God will knock down the Towers of their Pride!" But at the time we were really struggling to survive by begging and few helped.