I was at work. Watched the news in the evening that day. When I first heard about the first plane, I thought immediately it was a terrorist attack and would have ordered jet fighters or attack helicopters to shoot down any other planes getting ready to hit buildings. Then 15 minutes or so later, my suspicions were confirmed. I thought our leader wasn't too bright.
He did get all flights shut down after that though.
The white house would have been next but for whatever reason, they chose to hit the pentagon. Maybe the flight from Pennsylvania was the one that was supposed to hit the white house.
The whole thing could have been prevented if they had searched passengers for weapons like box cutters and kept the pilots locked in so planes could not be easily taken over.
I haven't heard about any plane hijacks in a long time except with Malaysia airlines. Their safety standards must be really third country.
Towers falling....I saw buildings falling in a near free-fall demolition
Jet crashes into Pentagon....where was the jet?
Jet crashes at Shanksville.....a 20 ft hole and some trees on fire. Where the hell is the jet?
Video of Later on...jet crashing into Pentagon.....Since when do jetliners have flames?
Building 7 collapsing without anything hitting it didn't make sense to me at all.
Then of course I read about a number of other suspicious activities including the buildings being heavily insured, drills being conducted for such a scenario or something similar. I was surprised to see tall buildings fall straight down as they do in a demolition. I was surprised to hear that steel could easily melt from a plane crashing into it. I guess no one ever thought about spraying starlite material on it to insulate it unless that type of insulation never got released for commercial use.
I was teaching a class in Atlanta at the time. Principal got on the PA with an "everything's going to be alright" type message. I was clueless - my first thought was that something happened to the president. I went to the office after class like I always do and then I saw the news and realized what happened. I didn't have another class for three hours so I spent the time watching the news and helping out around campus (we had quite a few people who knew people in the affected places). Taught the remainder of my classes and then went home to follow everything on the news and my new PC that came in the mail the day before.
Did anything make sense: I guess...I still had a very superficial view of politics and all, so I didn't question anything. Honestly, I didn't really understand the scope of the tragedy at first. If it would've hapepened two years later, my reaction and thoughts would have been very different.
My initial impression was that it had to be an accident. I couldn't imagine people being so evil as to do that intentionally. Of course, today such evil seems commonplace. That's why I now own guns and know how to use them.
I happened to be in Florida at the time. I was watching The Today Show so pretty much saw the whole thing unfold. They first reported a small plane had hit the WTC. They were thinking it was just a Cessna that had an accident.
Coming home several days later, I was flying on one of the first days flights resumed. I was on a big Delta plane from Orlando to Atlanta and you could count the number of passengers on 2 hands. It was a weird flight.
The fact that he buildings collapsed completely seemed strange. I also thought it odd that the Pentagon was targeted when there would seem to be much more lucrative targets in DC.
Have you guys been to the 9/11 memorial? If not everyone should visit it: it's incredibly powerful.
Finally was surprised there were only around 3,000 fatalities.
One thing I don't like is the new WTC. It seems like a token effort. They should have replaced those towers with a couple even taller to send a big F you message. Also all the work that went into it being able to withstand exactly the same type of attacks (and its impact on the overall design) shows how scared they made us. Come on folks that's not NYC style.
I worked overnight then (still do). I got up, saw what was on TV, and made some excuse to go over to Bellevue, NE, about 10 miles from home and a massive number of cars were on the road there. Turned out Bush was at Offutt AFB. Also remember the lines at the gas stations. It was a panic. I was glad I wasn't stuck in DC for vacation then, as that was the year I went there. I can see how they could crash a plane into the Pentagon as you fly right over it going towards the DC airport. Of course who knows what the real story was. I suspect Bush, Cheney and friends are guilty of something.
How little damage there was to the Pentagon was interesting. I can't say "surprised" though because you would expect a building like that to be specially engineers to be resilient to damage. The real shocker though was the it could have been hit at all. Would think there would be a million SAMs protecting it 24/7.
I was at work and at first thought it was an accident. One of my co-workers came into my office and said "we're under attack" and I thought, "Dude, you're crazy". Then the next plane hit and I realized he was right. The skyline looked so strange for such a long period of time without those buildings there.
At first I thought it was an accident, but as the news reports of the other planes and the second tower was it, it was pretty obvious it was an attack. I was working a block from the Sears Tower on the 23rd floor and we all started looking out the window a lot. By late morning (early afternoon?) we closed the office and went home.
My wife worked for AON on the 102nd floor of the second tower, but was in Chicago that week. I still have the WTC security phone # in my cell phone contacts list as a souveneir. I've not dialed it...
People have wondered why steel melted when the kerosene flames burned at 1800 F and steel doesn't melt until 2700 F.
Answer 1: It didn't have to melt. Structural steel strength peaks at about 400F and then starts to fall, reaching 30% at about 1200F and ~18% at 1300F. At 1800F, the strength would be basically O.
Answer 2: The WTC was covered with aluminum, the planes were made largely of aluminum and there was certainly a lot more in the buildings. Aluminum will ignite at about 1200F and burns at about 6700F.
A lot of us watched the attacks unfold in our office in Pittsburgh. I remember making the comment that I hoped that the police and fire departments weren't sending people into the buildings because I was certain that they were coming down. I wish I had been wrong.
My daughter had been in college for three weeks in Glen Cove on the north shore of Long Island was on the roof of their dorm and watched it all unfold in real time.
A coworker who worked in our head office on the 15th floor of WTC2 was in the train station below the WTC and felt and heard the impact. He got out safely. All the employees who worked there had either not arrived or were able to get out ahead of the collapse. Company records, including ship designs, dating back to 1957 were lost - a pitifully tiny price compared to the thousands lost!
Another friend from the Pittsburgh office was on the front steps of the Pentagon when that plane came in. Again, he was safe. Another friend had an office in the Pentagon that was at the center of the impact. Luckily, that whole section of the building was under renovation and his office had been relocated.
I remember thinking that there was going to be a lot of killing in our future. I frankly rejoiced when that butcher Bin Laden was finally killed.
I was on vacation from my job in flight operations for a major U.S. airline. I had driven to Memphis the night before and in the morning I went to the Hollywood casino in Tunica MS to do some gambling. I went straight to the bar to get a Bloody Mary and saw what was unfolding on their big screen behind the bar but I couldn't hear what was going on because of the din from the slot machines behind me. I still can't believe that people were still playing the slots while this was going on. I immediately left and went back to my hotel room in Memphis and stayed glued to the TV all day.
That night I went to the Platinum Plus. It was packed with stranded air travelers but it was a very somber atmosphere. I talked to 1 stripper for an hour and she never even asked for a dance. I cut my vacation short and drove home the next day to be on call if I was needed.
That was terrible watching people jump off the buildings on the news. There are a few events of the day even the news media doesn't replay. If you could choose to die by jumping or burning alive, I think I might jump too.
Like a lot of people I was at work that day, once the first plane hit the tower we all stopped work and watched the horror unfold. No work was done for the rest of the day and the mood was very sombre for days afterwards.
Seeing those people jump will forever be burnt into my memory.
I was the principal of a 1000 pupil high school. A colleague stopped in my office after the first plane hit and I went to the school library to see it on TV. I was watching as the second plane hit and it was clear what was happening. I directed the librarian to set up a 20 foot projection TV in the cafeteria and went to all social studies teachers to tell them to bring their students to the cafeteria to see history in the making. I asked the cafeteria manager to modify the menu to accommodate an influx of extra students and within 15 minutes almost all students and faculty were in the cafeteria with 375 chairs and hundreds sitting on the carpet and the stairs. One of the teachers got a microphone and kept updating and explaining what was going on. I lost a few kids out the side doors but the very large majority sat fascinated by what was unfolding before them.
Exactly one year earlier (9/11/2000) the school suffered a major fire causing more than $5,000,000 damage. I stayed at the school all night, rescheduled all classes and reopened at 8:00 am the next day.
Exactly one year later (9/11/2002) my wife, my children, and their spouses, left to fly to Ireland for a 2 week vacation to celebrate my retirement.
I first learned of the news when I sauntered over to a bookstore with a lot of "wildlife pics" reading material. Upon walking in I saw a burning WTC on the portable TV. I heard someone say something about terrorists crashing a plane into WTC. My initial thought was that they'd rented a couple of light planes loaded with a homemade bomb,to crash into the WTC. Then I thought "wait a minute, this seems like too large a fire to be started by a small plane. It took a while to sink in what had happened. Like many others, it was incomprehensible that terrorists would takeover multiple airliners to deliberately crash into targeted large buildings. No more as subsequent shoe bomber and underwear bomber incidents showed.
22 comments
He did get all flights shut down after that though.
The white house would have been next but for whatever reason, they chose to hit the pentagon. Maybe the flight from Pennsylvania was the one that was supposed to hit the white house.
The whole thing could have been prevented if they had searched passengers for weapons like box cutters and kept the pilots locked in so planes could not be easily taken over.
I haven't heard about any plane hijacks in a long time except with Malaysia airlines. Their safety standards must be really third country.
Towers falling....I saw buildings falling in a near free-fall demolition
Jet crashes into Pentagon....where was the jet?
Jet crashes at Shanksville.....a 20 ft hole and some trees on fire. Where the hell is the jet?
Video of Later on...jet crashing into Pentagon.....Since when do jetliners have flames?
Then of course I read about a number of other suspicious activities including the buildings being heavily insured, drills being conducted for such a scenario or something similar. I was surprised to see tall buildings fall straight down as they do in a demolition. I was surprised to hear that steel could easily melt from a plane crashing into it. I guess no one ever thought about spraying starlite material on it to insulate it unless that type of insulation never got released for commercial use.
Did anything make sense: I guess...I still had a very superficial view of politics and all, so I didn't question anything. Honestly, I didn't really understand the scope of the tragedy at first. If it would've hapepened two years later, my reaction and thoughts would have been very different.
Coming home several days later, I was flying on one of the first days flights resumed. I was on a big Delta plane from Orlando to Atlanta and you could count the number of passengers on 2 hands. It was a weird flight.
Have you guys been to the 9/11 memorial? If not everyone should visit it: it's incredibly powerful.
Finally was surprised there were only around 3,000 fatalities.
My wife worked for AON on the 102nd floor of the second tower, but was in Chicago that week. I still have the WTC security phone # in my cell phone contacts list as a souveneir. I've not dialed it...
Answer 1: It didn't have to melt. Structural steel strength peaks at about 400F and then starts to fall, reaching 30% at about 1200F and ~18% at 1300F. At 1800F, the strength would be basically O.
Answer 2: The WTC was covered with aluminum, the planes were made largely of aluminum and there was certainly a lot more in the buildings. Aluminum will ignite at about 1200F and burns at about 6700F.
A lot of us watched the attacks unfold in our office in Pittsburgh. I remember making the comment that I hoped that the police and fire departments weren't sending people into the buildings because I was certain that they were coming down. I wish I had been wrong.
My daughter had been in college for three weeks in Glen Cove on the north shore of Long Island was on the roof of their dorm and watched it all unfold in real time.
A coworker who worked in our head office on the 15th floor of WTC2 was in the train station below the WTC and felt and heard the impact. He got out safely. All the employees who worked there had either not arrived or were able to get out ahead of the collapse. Company records, including ship designs, dating back to 1957 were lost - a pitifully tiny price compared to the thousands lost!
Another friend from the Pittsburgh office was on the front steps of the Pentagon when that plane came in. Again, he was safe. Another friend had an office in the Pentagon that was at the center of the impact. Luckily, that whole section of the building was under renovation and his office had been relocated.
I remember thinking that there was going to be a lot of killing in our future. I frankly rejoiced when that butcher Bin Laden was finally killed.
That night I went to the Platinum Plus. It was packed with stranded air travelers but it was a very somber atmosphere. I talked to 1 stripper for an hour and she never even asked for a dance. I cut my vacation short and drove home the next day to be on call if I was needed.
Seeing those people jump will forever be burnt into my memory.
Once all flights were grounded, it was strange to look up at the sky and not see an airplane.
Exactly one year earlier (9/11/2000) the school suffered a major fire causing more than $5,000,000 damage. I stayed at the school all night, rescheduled all classes and reopened at 8:00 am the next day.
Exactly one year later (9/11/2002) my wife, my children, and their spouses, left to fly to Ireland for a 2 week vacation to celebrate my retirement.