9/11 - Where Were You?

[Marmite59]

It will be 15 years ago on Sunday.

I was working in Canary Wharf; we were told that planes were on their way to London to attack! It was an awful and crazy day. It was before the advent of social media and the main information outlet was 24 hour news which was in its infancy.

Personally (not politically) it meant a lot to me. I've visited NYC loads of times and have family there. We visited a few weeks after (pre booked) and it was mournful to the point of elegiac. There was also a nationalist spirit which the 30 something me found distasteful but now I understand it better. I have family members who lost friends and some saw it first hand. I've taken my family to see the 9/11 Memorial and it is heartbreakingly sad yet - to me - a symbol of New Yorkers' unbroken spirit and incredible resolve.

So what are your memories? Have they faded? Where were you and what did it mean to you?

I was returning to work after a lunch break. I had pressed the button for the lift and a work colleague arrived alongside me. I can't remember exactly what she said. It was something like 'there was a terrible accident/incident/plane crash in New York'. I don't know if the second plane had hit yet. She was very sombre. I remember that.

I was at work in a large primary school in central London. I took a call from New Scotland Yard telling me that, in case of a similar attack in London, our school, with two large halls, would be used as a temporary morgue. We had hundreds of hysterical parents wanting to collect there children from school immediately, trying to pacify young staff, and organising routes home for employees that did not involve public transport. TVs were on everywhere and a terrible sense of foreboding. We really felt like we would get hit next.

In a shopping mall in Norwich, we'd gone up to visit some friends. We all stood and watched in horror as it was broadcast live on the TVs in a shop window.

There was another plane involved outside of NY. I remember there was a woman who was taking her daughter to disneyland as a huge treat. The daughter was quite young. They died along with the other passengers. I had a baby a couple of years after and this brought home their untimely deaths and how they were cheated out of their happiness. For some reason, their death stood out and struck a particular nerve with me.

At work - teacher in a school with a large number of Muslim families... we only found out about the attach when parents turned up at school to get their children early as they'd seen the news and we're scared of reprisal / animosity

Working on an IT project for British Arab Commercial Bank , in a basement near Mansion House in the City. I was working with my best mate and a couple of guys from the bank. Someone came down to tell us that they'd just heard about the first plane hitting the tower on Reuters. We were all a bit shocked but assumed it was a bizarre accident. Of course when they came again to tell us about the second plane, we all knew it was no accident. Even for us, who'd worked in the City during the IRA years (our offices in the Commercial Union building were completely destroyed in 1992) this was the most shocking thing we'd ever seen or heard in our lifetime. It was compounded by the fact that a group of our friends and colleagues were working at Bank of America in NY, in the WTC. Luckily they were lazy so and sos and hadn't planned to get in to work til later that day - but we didn't know that and as communications were so bad for a while it wasn't until hours later that they managed to make contact. A very dear friend of mine should also have been at work that day at Cantor Fitzgerald where over 600 staff died. I was frantic as I couldn't get in touch with him for days, when he got in touch to say he was in Japan, the relief was immense.

I was at work, and we all had TV screened to our desks. Everyone was crowding around desks just gawping. Then rushing to try to call friends and family. It was in the city so everyone knew people in there. We had an office there and of course there was no answer. A colleague on secondment from that office had a sister who was at the Pentagon that morning, so just as we thought it couldn't get worse, it did. I went into a meeting and we out to find that everyone had been sent home because of a supposed threat to canary wharf.

Then all the planes stopped - I can't remember for how long - and when they started flying over, everyone just stopped and stated at them.

Can someone remind again me why the war on terror didn't head towards Saudi?

I had just collect my DS from school. He was watching TV and said "Mummy, every programme has an airplane crashing onto a building on it". He still remembers it now. It was horrific seeing the images over and over. I remember not watching the news as I couldn't handle it after a while.

I was in a job interview in a hotel in Cardiff. I had got through the first round when I rang my then BF now my DH that I was doing well. I was on a pay phone as barely anyone had mobiles back then. He told me to find a TV as the tower had been hit by a plane.
I asked the hotel receptionist to turn the TV on and she did in the lobby area. Within minutes there were over 50 people staring silently at the screens in horror when a second plane hit. We all stood there dumbstruck. It became very clear this was no accident and this was was horrific terrorist attack.
The building had just started to collapse when the interviewer called me in for my final interview. He had no idea what had happened and I must have looked white as a sheet. He asked what was the matter and I told him. He ran out of the room as his brother worked for merryl Lynch in tower 1. I have no idea what happened to the interviewers brother.
All the interviewees went and sat in the hotel bar and we all had a few drinks as it unfolded! Too shocked to move really.
I had an email a week later. No surprise that I didn't get the job.

My little brother was flying to magaluf as it all happened he was mid air. He was only 17. And didn't know about it for hours my mum finally managed to get hold of him and he was fine. The journey home a week later was petrifying for him

I was on holiday in Cuba with my BF (now DH). We saw footage of the planes flying into the towers on Spanish CNN, thought 'Jesus, that's awful,' (couldn't understand the audio reporting as neither of us really speak Spanish, but we could see the basic facts from the visuals) then carried on with our holiday. It was only on getting on the plane home that we realised how shaken the Western world was by it - the plane was abuzz with conversation about the safety of flying at all, etc. It sounds callous describing it now, but honestly, it didn't seem 'worse' than any other disaster to hit the news on a weekly basis - and it wasn't, actually. Not to dismiss the gravity of what happened and the awfulness of all those lives lost, but it did, and still does now, make me think about how we view these things. When you're not swept up by others' reactions (no one where we were at the time it happened seemed to be that affected/interested) it does change your own reaction. Because we weren't with other Westerners, we reacted the way that, had we been at home, we might have reacted to that kind of horrible event in a much more distant place - Asia, Africa: i.e. 'Ah, that's awful but awful things happen.' I'm not explaining myself very well, dammit. Have drunk too much

At work. DH called saying 'switch on the news'.

Two of his colleagues were due to go to a 9am meeting with Cantor Fitzgerald - it got moved to 10am at the last minute, so they weren't there when the planes hit. Two American friends lost family that day.

Can't believe it's fifteen years.

I had also only been up the towers 5 months earlier on my third trip to NYC it was extremely high so the thought of those jumpers is horrifying. I went to the visitor deck and up there was a McDonald's and other takeaways. When I visited I Walked through security and a guard with Rastafarian dreads stopped me and grabbed me by the wrist. I had burnt my arm a week before my trip, cooking a pizza, it was a straight line scar and nasty looking. It looked self inflicted.
This guard grabbed my wrist and looked me dead in the eyes and said "are you ok young lady...remember someone always cares" I told him it was a burn and he gave me a big hug and he said he could not have forgiven himself if he hadn't shown some concern human to human.... That really touched me.
I pray to this day he was not in on that fateful day.

I was living and working in central London. We all had access to the Internet and one of my colleagues came in and said "America's under attack". The rest of us looked at him like , thinking he was joking, but then logged into BBC website and watched the whole thing unfolding in disbelief, wondering when it was going to end and wondering if London would be next. Bizarrely, I remember going to see Planet of the Apes in Tottenham Court Road that evening and there was a strange atmosphere, like no one was really watching the film.

At work in a high rise office in Boston.

I was at school - I remember a teacher coming in & telling us that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and being bemused that they had interrupted our maths lesson to tell us that. I just didn't understand the significance of it all, later that evening I was really annoyed that a television programme I wanted to watch had been cancelled for news footage, and my dad told me off for being selfish

Primary school, I was year 4.

2 years prior to 9/11, I moved into my current house... So on Sunday, I've lived in my house for 17 years :)

DH and I had taken a day off work to go for a potter around London...go on the London Eye, have a couple of drinks in a pub by the Thames etc.
The first we knew was sitting on the tube opposite a man reading the early edition of the Evening Standard, which had a picture of the plane crashing on the front page.
We couldn't make head nor take of it.
I think not watching it happen as it happened means that I really struggle with the timeline but can't bear to research the details.

I was pregnant with DD. I had popped into my Aunty and Uncle's garage for a chat. My Aunty asked if I had heard the news- a plane had hit one of the towers of the WTC. I said I didn't know what that was, and she said the Twin Towers. We were chatting about how on earth a plane could go so badly wrong as to fly into a building that big- we thought it was a little plane.
My Uncle ran- ran up the drive way from the work shop and burst into the office saying "Another one's hit, put the radio on."
My Aunty put on the radio and we waited for news and it was just bizarre.
I drove to my best friends and she and her then BF had the day off. I told them to put the news on- I don't know if it already was. The three of us just sat watching the news in silence. The odd word said here and there.
Every so often, someone would look at my belly.

When I went home, Dh came home a little after. We were watching it and that was when they started showing people jumping.

Merely days before when we were watching a film, I had been soundly mocked by everyone for asking how on earth people could go to work in places like that. Nobody could understand my argument of "Well, what about fires? Lifts don't work in fires and the buildings are so bloody huge that people can't get out safely".
I went on and on about it. And then this happened.

I still feel such overwhelming sadness about the loss.

Singapore. Got home from work, dhl and I switched on the tv and said "which movie is this?" Except it was the news channel

I had just left university and moved 230 miles to live with DP now DH.
Got some temping work in an insurance company in their terrorist team .... Been there 4 days. That was fun

I was in Boston, sitting on a sofa, watching the news, feeding my newborn. I called my brother in law after the first plane hit and told him to turn on the news. Then I watched on the phone with him when the second plane hit. It was surreal. The only event comparable in my life was the boston bombings and the subsequent lockdown.

A friend worked with a couple who died in one of the planes out of Boston along with their small child. His boss was asked to go into their house to make sure it was ok in advance of their relatives showing up. He said it was the saddest thing he has ever seen - the cups in the sink, the paintings from pre school on the wall, the calendar showing events they would never go to, the belongings that didn't need to be preserved for anyone because they were all wiped out.

They have been running interviews on 9/11 on NPR all this week with people affected - and the saddest one I heard was from the United employee who checked in on 2 of the hijackers - they were late and he checked them through. He heard what happened but didn't know which plane and the next day he went in to work and people were looking at him and he said "I did it, didn't I?" He remembers several of the people/families he had checked in ahead of these 2, bits of chat with them etc and they were all wiped out. He said that he felt like he had lived under a shadow for 15 years. He now works for the department of homeland security.

Just on the people jumping. I really don't think there is any sense of shame at all about people jumping. But the US in general was not shown any photos of people jumping - not in mainstream news or newspapers. That was out of respect for those people, whose last moments these were, dreadful last moments. Where these photos are in the memorial is probably from the same sensibility.

I remember being shocked going back to Ireland and seeing a picture of people falling from the towers in a sunday newspaper as part of a general article about the event. I had never seen those photos. I suppose they were on the web but 15 years ago, people still got a lot of their news from tv/radio/newspapers and didn't search the web.

I flew out of boston a couple of years later on 9/11 on a united flight. When we landed in Heathrow, the captain announced that we had flown from the same gate as one of the 9/11 flights and that he had known the captain and crew. It was sad and eerie.

I was in Australia visiting my family with my nine month old. I was watching the news whilst breastfeeding her late at night and then they showed a picture of a big hole in the WTC. I called my mum to get the phone because I knew DH got off his bus outside WTC everyday to go to his work 2 blocks away. Whilst I was still watching, the second plane flew in. I started crying then my mum and dad came and sat in the room with me and we all started crying when the buildings detonated and fell down. I didn't know for about 6 hours whether DH was dead or alive.

DH did get off the bus after hearing what he thought was a construction accident. He and a friend were staring up at all the paper fluttering down when his friend saw someone jump. He told DH 'Let's get out of here' and they started heading north, made it to Jacob Javits center when the second plane hit then they were able to get a taxi up to PATH station and get one of last trains back to New Jersey.

Biggest heist in history and true forces of evil showed themselves that day. They thought they owned us after WW2...

DH and I were heading out to the cinema. I was flicking through TV channels waiting to go and saw some footage of the first plane hitting. I told DH and we said god that's terrible, but then turned the telly off and went out as planned. I've always felt a bit guilty that I didn't realise what was happening and pootled off to the cinema, but I think it was being presented as a freak accident until the second plane hit.