9/11 - what sticks with you the most?

[KenAdams]

I remember what I thought was them replaying footage of the attack. It was in fact the second plane hitting the second tower

Just watching the whole thing live - it was the year that I started work on a grad scheme and DSis was going to uni, so we both happened to be at home. Neighbours finished, one of us didn't turn the TV off quickly enough and we saw it all as breaking news, to the extent that I think we actually saw the second plane crash live- when it first broke it was just about the first plane. I remember phoning DDad and DH (not that he was H at the time!) and telling them to turn on the TV because it was just so unbelievable.

And also, bizarrely, watching Kirsty Young interviewing her husband. He was in NY and she was clearly struggling with the need to interview him vs just wanting him to get out. All very surreal and for some reason that bit sticks with me.

Accountant i do remember that, it really upset me, i was only 10 and didn't understand why they were being so cruel.

I also remember the news footage of George Bush in that classroom being told what had happened.

I remember being in primary school and another teacher coming in to tell our teacher. They put the TV on. Then i went home and there were no childrens programmes, just the news on every channel.

My gran watching it on telly and crying. How the papers the day before were all about different stuff on the front pages and the day after there was only one story.

As my dh is a fireman, the realisation that hundreds of his American counterparts had died that day trying to help people. All heading into a building where people were so desperate to get out that some were jumping.

It will never leave me. I find it as harrowing now as I did the first time I saw the images.

I didn't watch more than a few minutes of the footage (I loathe watching that sort of thing and can't understand why other people do it) but I remember reading something years later which did stay with me: it was an account (in a book about disasters and emergencies) from someone who escaped down the stairs. The person reported seeing piles and piles of high-heeled shoes, kicked off and abandoned on the staircases.

We were sent home early from work, and I remember sitting on the sofa with my jacket and shoes still on and my bag on my lap watching the news when DH got home who just sat with me.

The phone messages. Desperately sad. Heartbreaking messages from people knowing they were facing certain death in the most appalling manner and trying to find a way to convey that to their loved ones.

I’ve been to the memorial museum in NYC - it’s the only museum I’ve ever been to where there was almost complete silence everywhere you turned and just such a sense of sadness and loss .

I just remember feeling that the world had just changed forever.

Half expected ww3 to start.

There was a ‘live for the moment’ feeling in the days after.

Someone who I worked with's husband ringing up to tell his wife that a plane had crashed in to the first tower & while he was on the phone the second plane crashed in to the other tower. There weren't any smart phones then so nobody got chance to watch it until we got home.

Knowing my friend (NYPD) was among g the veryfirst responders and speaking to her husband who was crying over the phone as he didn't know if she was alive andhearing his emotions as he watched "his city burn".

I was only 10. I remember so clearly my mum coming home from work and asking if we were watching a disaster movie. The look on her face when I said 'no, it's the news' made me realise just how serious it was.

I was at work and the news channels internet crashed because Tom many people were trying to find out what was going on. One of my colleagues managed to get live footage on his computer and the whole office was clustered around the one screen watching in shock as the second plane hit.

I remember being really scared as I worked in a city centre in a high rise office building and I was scared it was going to happen in the UK too.

accountant there was celebrations it was horrible.

I was in the middle East and it was surreal. At an American company we were all horrified as were our local co-workers. That evening there were celebrations and burning of the US flag on the streets. It was a terrifying time. A know a colleague who spent many hours trying to find out if her brother was OK as he worked in the area.
The whole thing is burnt into my brain watching the second plane hit. So terrible.

The people jumping, I think that will always stay with me.

Working crazy hours in the City many people went home but I was so swotty I worked until 2am (normal then) then went home and watched what happened slightly delirious with tiredness. Felt like it was our counterparts that had died as working with bankers. Remember my lovely work friend was so upset. She died a few years later herself from breast cancer

In my job at that time, we had multiple tv screens with rolling news coverage. Watching the second plane hit. The silence in the room.

I remember walking to the bus after work and Town was so quiet. Not a single person was talking. The bus was silent, the streets were deserted as everyone was inside watching the news.

Office in London, media based. TV screen in one office with 40 people squeezed in. Sobbing.

Office was on Tottenham Court Road, a couple of hundred meters from the American Church in London.
We all walked there and sat in silence for what seemed like hours, but was probably 20 minutes before blindly leaving work and going home.

I will never get over the footage live that day.

The photo of that firefighter walking UP the same flight of stairs that hundreds of people were fleeing DOWN.
I think I read that he survived.

This gave my chills reading your post. I was a teen when it happened and recalled watching that exact moment you mentioned. Still makes me tear up now at how many innocent lives were taken. I just remember seeing so much smoke, people who looked lost and the ones looking for loved ones. It's an image you'll never erase. This is just from television. Awful. Just awful.

I think perhaps part of the reason it is such a big deal to so many people is that it is one of the first major incidents to have had such constant, overwhelming news coverage. Also, a lot of the people posting on the threads about it on MN are relatively young and were pretty young at the time. I'm in my mid-50s and remember (a bit vaguely, on the whole) the IRA bombings in the 1970s and 1980s, and then later disasters like the Herald of Free Enterprise and the Kings Cross fire.
I actually have a very clear memory of running madly down a corridor at university when the IRA bombed the Tory party conference in 1985 or thereabouts: people were laughing and cheering about it and I was desperate to get to a payphone, because my dad was a local Tory councillor and I didn't know whether he had been there or not.

Looking back on the Twin Towers attacks, and the subsequent worries that there might be a worldwide war, I sometimes wonder how much those attacks contributed to the state we are in now - though I wondered at the time how much they had to do with the US government having repeatedly meddled where it had no business.

I’m American, lived 60 miles east of NYC on 9/11/01 (still do) and remember it all like it was yesterday. I’d found out a week earlier that I was pregnant, and I wondering what kind of a world I was bringing my child into. For years I couldn’t watch anything related to 9/11 – I still have a hard time every year on this day and generally avoid news programs and The History Channel.

Two things stick with me.

The people jumping. How bad did it have to be up there to make the choice to jump 80 stories to certain death? Who among them imagined that they would have to choose the way they’d die that day?

In the days and weeks afterward, every night CNN would broadcast reporters by a wall near the zone, a wall with pictures of people in the towers, and their loved ones pleading with viewers to let them know if anyone had seen them. “My sister was on the 85th floor of Tower 1 . . . “ “My dad was on the 72nd floor of Tower 2 . . . “ Every night DH would watch this and I’d get so mad at him. I refused to watch and would go upstairs to read.

It was all so heartbreaking, and it’s no better 18 years later.

I saw and heard a videotape from one of the first responders walking through the lobby of one of the towers before the towers fell. You could hear the 'thud' as the bodies of jumpers hit. I will never, ever forget that sound.

My workplace (federal bldg) was shutdown by executive order a couple of hours after the attacks. It was so shocking to hear my manager announce "Pick up your things, leave the building in an orderly fashion. All federal offices are closing immediately". Nothing like that had ever happened, nor ever happened again.

@cauliflowersqueeze that got me too, i think i cried as well, it really affected me, i struggled to watch the footage of it after

Phone messages (I cried today at reading one of them)

The Falling people

I was at the end of a DT lesson when our teacher told us. Then when I got home, I saw the 2nd tower was hit. I remember just watching in disbelief.

Those first responders who went in and tried to save others, who survived, they are still suffering horrendously with complications following breathing all that stuff in...