We were at Disney World. We had just checked in to one of the hotels on the property. An employee told us a plane had hit the WTC. We assumed a small plane had hit by accident. We got up to our room and turned on the television and saw what was happening. Our two children were 2 1/2 and almost 5. We didn’t want them to see what was happening on television so we went to the park. I think we went on two rides before they evacuated Disney World. Rumors were going around that it was the next target. We went back to the hotel and went out to the pool, but that ended up being closed because of a thunderstorm. Everything Disney was closed, we were stuck in a hotel room with two little children. As much as we wanted to watch the television reports of what had happened we did not want the children to see what was happening. The parks opened up the next day, but it was practically empty. No one could fly into Orlando to go to the parks, a tropical storm was crossing central Florida bringing constant rain, and no one was sure if Disney World was a safe place. We spent a couple of days waiting for flights to resume, and decided to drive our rental car back home to New England. We haven’t been back to the Disney parks since.
And thanks for prayers in behalf of our neighbor from when we lived in Denver, Captain Jason , and his first wife and son.
Driving to work on a beautiful fall morning and heard the report of the first plane while parking my car, when it was being reported that it was a commuter plane accident. Got into work and people were gathered in a conference room watching the news. I don’t remember if I saw the second plane hit but we definitely all saw the towers collapse and were in shock. I had a direct report on a flight at O’Hare that morning but she had called and indicated she was ground-stopped and was fine - inconvenienced but fine. I called my spouse to let him know; he was with patients and told the receptionist to tell me that I must have misunderstood - there’s no way the towers were down. I told the staff to turn on the news but keep it away from patients.
My kids were in third grade; their teachers told them in the afternoon. We all got home early and just sat on the couch and watched the footage in horror. I remember brushing my daughter’s hair while we watched.
I did not know anyone personally but I had a client whose wife was in one of the towers (but escaped). She was kind of never the same since emotionally.
I drive past O’Hare on my way to work and it was very eerie how quiet it was til flights resumed.
I just flew today on 9-11 (Prague to Frankfurt to O’Hare).
My brother flies on business every year on 9-11. He says it is cheaper, he is coming in from Europe today.
Been watching the CNN 9/11 special on the documentary that was being filmed in one of the fire stations, that became a documentary of the event. They are showing the photos of all the firefighters who died. An incredible #. The pictures just keep coming and coming. I just saw the picture of my friend’s brother. I recognized it from her Facebook updates. Its very upsetting. But, that said, they commented that firefighters saved 20,000 lives that day. That is comforting. 20,000. Wow.
^They also emphasize that at the 9/11museum tour. Over 20,000 lives were SAVED mostly by the FDNY and NYPD.
I will share my story here also.
My husband worked in the trade center. On 9/11 he took his normal commuter train into Hoboken with a friend. When they got to the PATH station our friend crushed into a crowded train and my husband waited for the next one. When my husband got off PATH at the trade center he saw security people taking the steps to get out. Having been there for the 93 bombing he figured he should follow them and get out. When he left the building he saw some debris on the ground and looked up and saw a gaping hole in the building. He figured it was a bomb and he wanted to get far away. He started looking for a pay phone to let me know he was ok (no cell back then) and walked east - then the second plane hit (he didn’t actually see it but saw the debris). He walked all the way uptown to a times square office his company had and then finally took a commuter train home when they started running again later that day. I was at my daughter’s school that day and didn’t know what was happening – eventually heard something had happened in NYC and called home to find a message from my husband saying he was OK.
The sad part is that our friend who took the first train was killed (he was most likely in an elevator when the plane hit but he worked on a top floor where most did not survive.) We had another friend (father of my daughter’s friend) who also died that day.
Sometimes it still feels like it only happened yesterday. It only feels like 15 years when I see how my daughter and the daughters of my friends whose fathers died have grown up.
“My brother flies on business every year on 9-11. He says it is cheaper, he is coming in from Europe today.”
I’ve never heard of differential pricing on 9-11. We redeemed miles for our ticket, but there was no difference in the miles we had to redeem on 9-11 vs the day before or after. All the airports seemed normal-busy to me.
Lots of people will not fly on 9-11. We have a family rule that no one flies on July 4th or 9-11. We did go to Disney in early January after 9-11 and never had to wait in line more than a few minutes.
I didn’t think twice. It just happened to be what suited our schedule. It’s not like the terrorists would have any more of a “gotcha” if they struck on 9-11 vs 9-10; horrible is horrible either way.
agreed it would be horrible anyway but some people, especially people out for martyrdom and attention for their evil acts like symbolism. If the original attack would have been on 9-10 we would not fly on 9-10. We only travel by air a few times a years so it’s easy for our family to avoid those dates. I have a friend that lives in DC and both her and her dh travel extensively. After 9-11 booth agreed they would never fly on the same flight (even for family vacations) because if God forbid something happened they wanted one parent not to be on that flight. Each to there own, it worked for them.
H was traveling back East, something he did a LOT, and I vaguely knew his plans of Atlanta and then NYC. Tried calling him, but this was back in the days when people didn’t carry phones religiously. No answer. Couldn’t contact his assistant out here, as it was still early on West Coast and nobody was in office. Then my phone started ringing like crazy with calls from all of our family and friends in the Midwest…adding to my panic as I watched the towers go down. H finally called (had been on golf course with clients), still in Atlanta–he had a flight scheduled to NYC that night. At that time, I knew enough that flights weren’t happening, so H and two colleagues started driving back to CA. He arrived days later at 10pm on our 18th anniversary. Lots of tears unleashed upon seeing him.
He was scheduled to be in his NYC office on 9/11, hotel reservations at the Marriott WTC. His company lost over 200 employees in tower 2.
A lovely young neighbor was on United 93.
Thank you, sybbie, for sharing.
I grew up in NYC and had a summer job close to the WTC, and walked over there often. In the 90s my family would frequently stay at the hotels at/near them, because they were cheap on weekends.
I was teaching in a HS in New England on 911. I was the only one from NY; I explained to a lot of classes the geography of NY and where the towers were. Every social studies class was watching the TV coverage. Meanwhile, I was frantically calling one of my closest friends, who worked in one of the towers. Finally got through to his brother and learned with relief that he ran late that day so missed the attack. Then my husband, who was on a business trip, called and told me that a former coworker and friend worked at Cantor Fitzgerald – we eventually learned he died. It was hard to be a teacher while worrying about the people I knew who worked there.
I remember feeling numb. I wanted to watch TV but had to either be in school or be a parent. I called just about everyone I knew from NY to make sure they were OK. I read every single bio the NYTimes wrote about the victims. I haven’t been to,the museum yet, but have visited the site and found the name of the friend who,died.
I was in 5th grade in a small school. They didn’t tell us what was going on but probably about half of my class got pulled out by their parents.
I remember my dad picking me up from school and telling me that terrorists flew planes into the twin towers. Being a 10 year old in Michigan, I had no idea what terrorists or the twin towers were.
By the time I got home, my mom was in tears watching the tv. She had worked at a bank and they gave the employees the option to go home early and she took it.
My parents explained it several times but nothing about it really sank in or hit me. I was too young and too detached to understand it. I also don’t really remember a pre-9/11 time. Of course, I have memories of life before I was 10 years old but it feels like my entire life has been lived in a post-9/11 world.
My brother in law was killed in Iraq 3 years later. It wasn’t really until then that any intense emotions hit me.
I’ve still never been to NY and I will never go beyond about the 10th floor in a building- if that high. I have an extremely intense fear of heights and I don’t know if that is because of 9/11 or not, but I’m sure it didn’t help.
ETA: My sister was home from school, too. I don’t remember if she was sick or they just didn’t have school that day for whatever reason. She lived with her mom, not us, but she remembers watching it thinking that it was a movie. It wasn’t until her mom came and checked on her that her mom figured out what was going on. She remembers much more vividly than I do.
I just caught the early reports while getting my 5 year old ready for a play date. At first it seemed horrific but like many others I was thinking a small plane, an accident. We continued getting ready and drove to a park to meet a friend and her daughter. Both mothers had heard enough on the car radio to know this was a very big deal but we went on with watching our girls on the playground. We had no smartphones back then so we were left wondering.
At some point a high school girl came by and tried to interview us about our feelings about what was happening for the school paper. The brief info we got from her was alarming. I remember saying I couldn’t comment because we didn’t really know what was happening. But the very fact that she was there questioning us hinted at what a terrible, historic thing was happening.
After the play date I took daughter home to get ready for PM kindergarten. At the bus stop parents were all kind of stunned and talked in hushed tones–not wanting to talk about it in front of the kids. That beautiful sky–how could anything bad happen?
I did nothing but watch the coverage until daughter came home from school. Then I forced myself to turn the TV off. From then on I obsessively watched coverage whenever daughter wasn’t around, shielding her from any info about it. Or so I thought.
A few days later we were driving to a local store. As we pulled in the lot my daughter said, “I have something to tell you Mommy. Do you see the flags flying low? Something very bad has happened at the twin towers and that is why the flags are like that”
Her voice was so sweet–trying to break the news to me gently and only five years old!
I am a contractor on a Navy base where I was working that day.
I was driving into work when the first plane hit and heard brief reports on the radio during my drive, but as several others have mentioned my initial thoughts were it was a small, private plane and an accident.
A few moments later another co-worker arrived and as he walked in the door said ‘We’re under attack’ and that we had to turn on a TV.
Our small group sat and watched the TV footage for most of the morning.
When I decided to make an effort to be strong and return to my job, I quickly discovered there was no significant work that was going to be accomplished that day.
The base had a small cohort that was working on a PhD program that was at the Pentagon that day and I later learned that to evacuate they had cross the area where the plane had hit. All survived without significant injuries.
There were also many others travelling in various parts of the country and the priority was to make sure all were safe, but secondary was with the rerouting of planes, determining where they all now were and either finding them a place to stay or alternative transportation.
There was also significant paranoia that military targets could be next.
Base closed to all non-essential personnel in the middle of that day and remained closed the following day. When it reopened on 9/13, there was a significant increase in security (and many of those changes still exist today).
My son was 7 and in 2nd grade at the time. Although I left work mid-day when the base closed, I left him in school because I wanted his routine to be as normal as possible. When he came home, I sheltered him from the TV coverage. Even now, I’m not certain if he’s seen any actual footage from that day.
He views that day like I view the attack on Perl Harbor. He doesn’t have the emotions or the images embedded in his memory like our generation. I’m glad.
The stories of many of you are stunning. Mine is much simpler. We don’t live near NYC and don’t know anyone who was directly affected by the attacks.
My daughter had just started kindergarten a week earlier and I had resumed going for morning walks.
The morning of 9/11, I had just returned from my walk and plopped myself down on the carpet in front of the TV to stretch and rehydrate, and was dumbfounded at what I saw-- the second plane had just gone in. I phoned my mother in Florida to tell her to turn on the TV, and spent the morning glued to the TV myself.
When our daughter got home, it was clear she knew something of what had happened and was ready to discuss it. It didn’t seem to upset her in any personal way-- that is, she wasn’t made afraid by it-- so we watched the news as a family and talked about it.
But I stopped going for morning walks, and my H and I worried that schools might be targeted next. I don’t think it’s possible to be unaffected by such events. It changed life for all of us.
I was in grade 3 when JFK was assassinated, and in junior high when Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were.
I was 30 when the Challenger blew up.
I really, really don’t want to see any more events happen in my lifetime of which people later ask, “Where were you when…?”
I saw Come From Away yesterday – it’s the musical about the small community in Newfoundland that temporarily hosted people from more than 50 planes after U.S. airspace was closed on 9/11. I didn’t particularly seek to see it on the eleventh. It just turned out that way.
It’s an excellent play and quite upbeat (as you would expect from a story that’s about Canadians acting like Canadians). But you also see the shadows – a mother stranded in Newfoundland who spends the whole play worrying about her firefighter son in NYC, a pilot who loves flying above all else and who is devastated that the planes she loves were used as instruments of destruction, a couple who meet and fall in love but feel guilty that this happened as a result of a massive tragedy, a second couple who break up under the strain of their extraordinary experiences. And all of them are based on real people, three of whom were in the audience yesterday.
You also see the uncertainty and the horror that were so much a part of 9/11 (and 9/12, 9/13, etc). The people on the flights that landed in Newfoundland spent a day or more on their planes on the ground with little contact with the outside world (although they obviously realized that something horrible had happened). Then they were taken to hotels, shelters, or private homes where they were able to watch TV and see what had happened. You see this happen through their eyes, and you understand why what they wanted the most – more than food, more than blankets, more than clean underwear – is access to telephones so that they could talk to their families.
If you happen to be in the DC area in the next few weeks or in Toronto or NYC when the play arrives there, you might want to see it. It’s worth the price.
But sadly, this is part of our lives now, especially with the ease of transmission of news through regular and social media, and the state of the world. I was in 5th grade when Kennedy was shot and remember vividly where I was (on a school bus returning from a field trip, and listening to the teachers whispering up front). Hopefully we can also do the “where were you” for good things-- like when Armstrong stepped on the moon (I was with a friend and her family on Cape Cod) . I remember when John Glenn orbited the earth, but don’t recall where I was. I do remember watching Princess Di’s wedding (in my apartment in my current city) but sadly also remember when she died, and watching it (in my current home).
May the next one be far, far off.