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 a student midwife, I had just been delivering a baby and came out to find everyone huddled round the TV in the day room. Still makes me have goosebumps as so many lives lost at the exact time a new life was born......

9/11 was the first time I went shopping on my own after my DH had died in the July. My friend asked me to pick something for her.
I got off the bus on my return and went to hers and the tv was on in the sitting room where her two year old ds2 was. I asked her what terrible film was he was watching and she said it was the news!!!

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

Because the Bush family have business interests. During the 'no fly' days that followed several Saudis were flown out of the US.

I was in bed, I was on a drug called methotrexate, you take it once a week and it makes you feel like you have the flu so I'd gone to bed for a nap. I was a student at the time but in my 30s so had my own place.

A few days later I went with a friend to his mother's a couple of hundred miles away.

His mother was going out one evening and her top had skyscrapers on it, we checked to see if the twin towers were depicted.

She was going to a friend's to play Jenga, apparently there was some discussion as to whether it was appropriate.

I think that shows how deeply it was felt, no one in the US would know a game of Jenga was happening thousands of miles away.

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.

This is a false memory. I have it too. The footage of the first plane was only filmed by chance by a French film crew who were filming NY fire fighters, it wasn't shown until later, after the second impact.

Live feeds tot he UK were not established immediately either.

Isn't it strange how memory works?

It was more than just several Saudis who were flown out of the US after 9/11. More like whole families. Mr OBL was living just 800m from Pakistan's largest military base for years too...

They.are.all.in.on.it.together

So was I! Still wondering.....
There is so much terror

I was at work speaking to a guy on the phone and he told me what had happened. I found the whole thing very traumatic to watch unfold. And I remember my dad saying 'America is going to hit someone hard for this'.

I had just started a new job that day in Battersea in an office development. My boss suggested we went to the on-site cafe to have a chat and talk about what I was going to be doing. As we walked in the owner of the cafe had the TV on and he said 'watch this - a plan has just gone into one of the Twin Towers'. Of course, we thought 'accident' and we sat watching when suddenly the second plane hit the second tower. It was surreal. We couldn't leave the cafe. We did no work. We just watched. And then the towers came crumbling down. I felt sick.

I texted a friend in Australia who used to work for Cantor Fitzgerald. He was up (it was late at night) and on the phone to all his friends from there. He ended up coming over to help the London office. They lost almost all their New York staff, bar those who were off sick, or were on foreign trips. The chief exec of CF gave up his job and has spent his life since raising funds for the families of his company who lost loved ones.

Pangurban1 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.

I know exactly who you mean - I came across this family in the museum on my first trip to NYC last year. It was my first trip without baby DS who was the same age as the little girl. Her teddy bear was in the museum with stickers on it - she loved to put stickers on her cuddly toys. DS does too. I think about her so often.

I was at school, I'd never heard of the twin towers but my lesson was interrupted by another teacher bursting in to tell my teacher the news. We knew it was big because lessons wouldn't be interrupted that way.

I also have the false memories of seeing the second plane fly in, but couldn't possibly have gotten home in time from school to see that, as didn't it only happen about half an hour after the first?

Sorry posted in the wrong place. This was in reply to the poster who had just had a baby and wondered what world she had bought her child in to,
I remember cradling both my children, tears streaming, thinking this was the start of an apocolypse.
Incredibly wicked and sad.

I was in 6th form waiting for an RS lesson to start. Our teacher was over 45 minutes late for the lesson. There were only 3 of us taking a-level RS. When he turned up he was as white as a sheet and he said that all the teachers had been watching TV in the staff room. He told us what had happened and then said we could go home if we wanted to. My friend's mum dropped me home and I sat and watched sky news. My dad got in from work and he'd heard on the radio. We both sat and watched the second plane hit. I remember saying it was like something from a film. My mum got in from work and hadn't heard anything as she was a primary school teacher and had been in class all day. I think we watched the news all night.

Prior to this I had worked at Channel 4 (although had taken a break and had been a SAHM for a year as had not gone back after maternity leave).

My HR manager was a lady called Elizabeth Turner. She was lovely, recently married when I knew her and had been planning to have kids. It was obvious she was madly in love with her husband. I found out later that he had been at a meeting at the top of one of the towers and was killed. She was pregnant with their first child - just two months pregnant. She had spoken to him first thing. He had told her that he was waiting for his meeting to start. At Channel 4 there are televisions everywhere, so she saw it unfolding as she sat at her desk. She couldn't get in touch with him. Absolutely awful.

She has since written a book called The Blue Skies of Autumn about the terrible, awful grief that she suffered and how she found a way out of it. She was the only British relative who was pregnant so the press had their moment with her (bastards). Her son must be around 14 now and he will be living with this burden too; the media onto you every year the anniversary comes round. She is now a grief counsellor and I bet she is a brilliant one. I remember has as so empathetic and kind.

I had never heard of Al Quaeda before. Or Osama Bin Laden. The world changed in an instant that day.

I landed at Manchester airport on flight from states after some circling above we where told was to await a space to land (obvs in hind site because air space was shut and every plane landing nearest airport) got in taxi home put radio on thort nothing of it.

Got home and my younger kid brother put tv on and it was on every channel as the second plane hit.

To this day I think you know something terrible has happened when they show unedited news on even the kids tv channels nickelodeon and the disney channel.

Think thats what made realisation sink in.

I was at work on a racehorse stud farm. My boss had asked me to come back from lunch 15 minutes early as the farrier was coming to trim some of the mare's feet. I was sat in the farrier's van as we drove down to the field as the 2pm news came on and the headline was that a plane had hit the WTC. I just assumed they meant a small 2-seater and didn't think anymore of it.

A little while later my housemate, who was out grass cutting nearby walked over to tell us one of the Towers had collapsed - she had her Walkman with her.

After work we went home and watched the news footage all evening with our mouths open. We were in the process of moving house and half our furniture had already gone so we had no sofa/chairs in the living room so we sat on the floor.

In bed asleep after a night shift. Dh woke me up and we watched the whole thing unfold. In the middle the phone rang and a woman was doing the whole insurance selling thing, and it felt surreal to have mundane reality droning in my ear while watching total unreality.

Still can't understand why I didn't shout at her to stop and go and watch the TV!

We watched it on CNN as there was better coverage and live pictures behind the presenters. The first tower began collapsing behind the presenters and it took them a few seconds to notice and look behind them.

It's funny how the mind plays tricks regarding memory. So many people say they went home and saw the second plane hit the Towers live but in reality it happened at 9.03am (2.03pm UK time) and most people would still have been at work/school.

All 4 planes crashed within less than an hour and a half of each other - 8.46, 9.03, 9.37 & 10.06.

I was shopping in Stevenage with my mum and we were heading back to the car and walked past a tv rental shop, the first plane must have just hit as I said 'oh, look, there's a plane that's hit a building'. We got home and I said 'let's see what happened with that plane' and put Sky News on about 5 mins before the second plane hit. We sat in horror watching it fly towards the second tower. I think we pretty much sat in silence watching everything unfold until about 1am.

Actually I think most people on the thread (who weren't already at home) said they got home and were watching as the second tower collapsed - that was 10.28 a.m. or 3:28pm UK time - after school although still in work time. You're right, though - I think many people feel they saw the second plane hit as it happened than actually did, because it was replayed so many times.

Smitten, like we were saying you probably saw recordings of the planes hitting the Towers. The first plane to hit the Towers wasn't caught "live" on camera because no one was expecting it. The second plane hit just 20 mins after the first so most likely you saw recordings of both crashes.

I did see the second plane hit live because, as I said, it was after 10pm in Australia. The first? Noone was quite sure what had happened until the second one came in. There were talks of it being an explosion.

I was in Seville on holiday, flew home the next day. The 'Increased' security at Seville airport was a joke. Heathrow was the polar opposite. I lived in Docklands at the time and worked in the city.

We were all very aware that the risk in London was massive.

I was at work on the public counter. We always had Radio 2 on, so heard it as soon as it was announced. The Dc had been watching the coverage in a TV shop on the way home from school and came in really shaken up.

No, I'm pretty sure I saw it happen live as they had the shot of the first tower on the screen and you could clearly see the second one coming in. I remember it quite clearly. I was on holiday as I was about to start uni.

I was a student nurse and remember going into the lounge on a shift seeing all the patients watching the news on the TV. At first I thought it was a film they were watching. I will never forget seeing those people waving out the window and jumping to their deaths . I just remember thinking how bad it must have been for them to even do that. God typing it just makes me want to cry.

I was at work, in a large, very busy call centre. My colleague was still taking his lunch break, eating his sandwich whilst reading the news on his PC. I remember him saying, 'Bloody hell, a plane's flown straight into the World Trade Centre!'. We all stopped to listen, as another colleague had been there and had eaten in the restaurant at the top only four days previously.

At that point we all assumed it was an accident with a small plane, but then as we carried on reading about it, the second plane struck. It was very, very quiet in the building, despite 300+ staff being in, and I also remember that we barely received any calls from customers at all for the rest of the day (something like 8% of our usual call volumes).

I left as soon as I could at 4pm, and walking home through town I could see crowds of people standing and watching the footage on the TVs in Curry's and Dixons' windows.

When I got home, the phone rang and I learned that a very good friend of mine had been found dead that morning, of a heroin overdose. I had no idea he took any drugs at all, so I was gobsmacked. I remember thinking to myself that he was a lover of conspiracy theories and he would have been gutted to have died before all of the day's events, he would have been bound to have a wild theory of two about it all. Then I felt guilty for thinking this, for crying more for him, who had been stupid and brought this upon himself, than for the thousands of other people who died on that day. Not a good day.