I was aware of the Empire State building getting hit by an airplane and was hoping that the first one was a terrible accident. I also remembered laughing like an idiot when I was a kid playing ‘Flight Simulator’ and crashed into the towers when trying to fly in between them. So when I heard about on the radio the first crash I was hoping, at worst, it was an idiot. I then turned on the TV and saw that bright blue sky and questioned whether or not it was an accident. A moment or two later the second tower got hit on live TV. After that I wasn’t surprised when the Pentagon got hit or when the towers fell.
I was in 6th grade, so I was aware of what was going on. Everyone in my school spent that entire day watching the news.
My sister was in 4th grade and hadn’t been told anything. She came home, turned on the tv, and saw messages like “America under attack!” on loads of different channels. Her school got out an hour and a half before mine did, so by the time I got home she was (understandably) freaking the fuck out.
I did my best and looking back I think I did an okay enough job, but really, that isn’t something an eleven year old should ever need to do. I wasn’t emotionally equipped for that. Most kids aren’t.
Knowing something has changed for the worse in our world. The 90s were so full of hope and excitement for the future and it’s just seemed to get ….. sad after that horrible day.
I was just a kid when it happened. All the teachers were freaking out and running to other rooms whispering. Once my class turned the TV on, just a couple of minutes of stunned silence later we saw another plane hit the towers. We watched it for a little while, before the principal decided maybe it wasn’t for the best that a bunch of elementary schoolers watched that. So we turned it off and went back to lessons. The entire rest of the day, I kept imagining a plane slamming into our school building, even living a half-dozen states away in a small town. I didn’t understand the scope of what was going on, and the adults decided after we’d seen it all to stop answering any questions or talk about it at all.
Definitely realizing the little specks were people jumping because that was preferable to what was happening to them. Shit still gets me, and I was in high school.
There was also the worry that there were more attacks coming over the course of the day. Once there had been two, and then they kept happening, you didn’t know what else might be happening.
And really, nobody did. Imagine you’re in a classroom and your teacher, your nominal responsible adult, is trying to provide a little normalcy and reassurance and they don’t know what’s going on, either.
Having family members living/working close by and not being able to communicate because phone lines had collapsed, and cellphones were also a big problem, no calls would go through.
The internet was down that day. Everyone was trying to go online to see the news, and it killed the internet. A coworker was on the phone, to a friend, getting updated news. I remember her telling me when the first tower fell, and I was absolutely shocked. It just seemed like an impossible thing to happen.
The moment when I understood it was not like the bombing that happened in 93. Watching the footage, I remember also being in panic about the flight that later crashed in Pennsylvania. It just seems completely unreal, and yet a knowing that nothing would ever be the same again.
Watching the news with my family after school, images of death and destruction, and a news anchor said something like “somebody, somewhere is watching this with a smile on their face.”
The horrors of watching people jump to their deaths. Not understanding wtf was going on. Seeing airplanes flying overhead, making u-turns. 9/11 really burst the safety bubble in the West. I was too young to understand what was going on but old enough to feel the change in the air.
I’d rather answer with a positive: it was inspiring to see new yorkers – known for being rude and standoffish – come together and help others in the way they did. And the firefighters and police officers truly gave honor to the job in ways we don’t have anymore
The firefighters wore devices that would beep if it didn’t sense any movement for a set period of time. There was a clip of an emergency worker walking through the rubble and you could hear what sounded like dozens of those devices beeping.
That has stuck with me more than anything else from that day.
The uncertainty of what would happen next. Remember the Pentagon was also attacked and Flight 93 was headed toward either the White House or the Capitol. I live on the West coast and the complete ground stop was beyond eerie.
Also I had friends in Manhattan and it was impossible to find out how they were.
I was in college at the time and I remember the confusion of what was actually happening, the fear that we didn’t know if more was to come that day and where it would be, watching people jump live.
Fast forward to 2024, watching my father die in ICU for 9 after a double lung transplant. He was a fire fighter on 9/11 and he helped with some recovery efforts after the towers fell.
After the towers fell the radios would play music montages (a lot of My Heart Will Go on) and during the montage they’d play the 9/11 phone calls of people trapped in the buildings or people calling from the planes, on the street etc. That went on for months. That time we also the first time in my life time America felt truly united. Shortly after in 2002 the news had a count down clock to the second of when Bush declared war (really it was when Congress passed authorization to use military force d against Iraq) so we went from one crisis to to another
Every moment was horrific from confusion at the first strike, then the realization of what was happening, watching news trucks focus on the Sears Tower (1/8 mile from my home) and drawing the blinds in the classroom because there was a clear view of Sears Tower, and wondering what the constant beeping noise was during coverage. It was the alarms worn by the firefighters who were lost in the rubble. Walking in my neighborhood on a perfect September day with no planes in the sky although I am equidistance from Midway and O’Hare airports. Everyone on the street was crying.
Now we have a felon in office being entertained and lavished with gifts from those who murdered nearly 3000 people as well as slaughtering an American journalist and taking away the benefits from first responders who are ill from the debris as they tried to rescue people.
I had made some bad choices and was incarcerated at the time. I remember being able to barely see the TV the C.O.’s were watching and trying to figure out what was going on. Then I was thinking what if something happened where we were and we couldn’t get out. So scary!
BTW. I learned my lesson and that was my one and only time in there!
I was 13, for me it was the feeling of knowing there was somebody out there that wanted to kill me. I remember thinking There was this guy Bin Laden who wanted to kill Americans, he just killed thousands of them, I was an American, which meant he wanted to kill me too.
It was the first time I had ever thought about something in that way. We had grown up feeling like America was invincible. That myth was shattered that day, and many more of the myths we were taught growing up were shattered in the years and decades after.
I remember heading to work. Was a beautiful day. Clear skies. Warm. The first plane hit. Lots of chatter. Seemed surreal. After that. All traffic stopped. Everyone was in front of a tv. In the afternoon panic set in. People went nuts. Waiting hours to buy gas. Food. Supplies. Etc.
9/11 in my opinion destroyed America. After that greed set in hard. Food prices. Gas prices. Car insurance. Sky rocketed over night. Your employer used to cover 100% of your health care. That all ended that day. The billionaires took control.
I was in 5th grade and in art class and another teacher burst into the room to tell our art teacher to turn on the TV.
I remember we all started piling multiple classes into several classrooms that had TVs since not all did.
When the first tower collapsed one of the teachers began having a hysterical breakdown and other teachers had to usher her out of the room to calm her. Like audibly screaming and crying. Found out later both her parents worked in that tower. They thankfully both made it out in time but she was convinced she just watched both her parents die on TV. Those screams still haunt me.
I stood on my back porch on avenue U in Brooklyn and watched papers from the World Trade Center half burnt settle in my backyard, and ash and other light debris falling from the sky. It seemed surreal.
Someone in the next office was on the phone to a colleague in the World Trade Centre and I heard him say “he’s bloody hung up on me.” I had just seen the news about the first plane on ananova (old news website). I didn’t know what to say to him.
Then we went to a nearby bar to watch the news (in the city of london). At one point the news said there was a plane coming into london that they couldnt make contact with. The 3 or 4 mins of not knowing whether to stay where I was (near big potential targets) or go to the train station was possibly the weirdest of my life. Total dislocation from normality, whilst watching the horror on the TV.
But something that stuck with me was how clear it was that Tom Brokaw and the other anchors didn’t know what was going on. I’d never heard them talk with a tone of genuine uncertainty, before.
The most trusted names in news…. reduced to speculating live on air.
The door of fear that was opened by the attacks was probably worse than the attacks themselves. I think most Americans assumed they were untouchable with the two oceans and our massive military. 9/11 removed that perceived invincibility from our collective conscience.
Waiting on line at Bellvue Hospital on the east side of NYC to give blood or volunteer, seeing the ghostly parade of folks who made it out, covered in dust and ash, walking up from downtown; and finally being turned away because they weren’t finding enough survivors to need our help.
I was a Senior in Highschool at the time, my dad was in the national guard. I left school and as I walked into the front door of our house, I saw my dad in his BDUs with his bags packed ready to go. He was sitting on the couch watching the news waiting for “the call”. I asked him, “what’s going to happen” he replied “I don’t know”. The look of terror in his eyes I’ll never forget. Moments later the house phone rings “yes sir, yes sir, on my way sir, thank you” he hangs up the phone and says to me “I gotta go honey”. This moment will live with me forever. I was so afraid that I would never see him again. You can tell he was concerned not only for his fate but for his family’s and for the country.
Fucking EVERYTHING. Watching in horror at he aftermath of the first plane just to have another plane come into view and cut right through the 2nd tower. The sound of pure terror in the voice of normally stoic newscasters. The realization that “we aren’t as safe as we thought”. Those poor people making the horrific decision to jump instead of burning alive. The first tower falling and you start doing the math in your head on how many people were in the building only to have the 2nd one fall and have to double your math. The ash cloud enveloping everything. The sounds of panic, fear and despair in the voices of people running for their lives or being interviewed on TV. The WEEKS of that body count rising. All of it was just absolutely horrible and will stick with us all till we die.
When people ask what’s wrong with my generation, THIS is a big part of it. Mass PTSD that has never been properly dealt with followed by 20 years of war, the rise of social media and it’s negative effects on our mentality and then topped off with a once in a 4 generation pandemic…. We are a fucked up bunch because of all of this and 9/11 is the fist and biggest part of that cacophony of chaos that were the early millennial’s formative years.
Ugh. Hearing my teacher’s involuntary, gutteral, scream of grief and fear and just everything you never want to hear. Everything that you didn’t even know existed yet as a six year old.
Her son worked there. He didn’t make it. He was pretty young, I think in his 20s. I think younger than I am now, probably. We didn’t see her for a few months after that. I think she came back in the Spring. I think about her a lot, but as a 6 year old tends to do with their teacher, I lost contact long long ago. If she’s still around, I hope she’s doing okay. But I’ll never forget the sound she made that morning upon finding out what happened. It’s like she knew.
I’ve never been 100% sure since I didn’t know his name, but I think he was in the Cantor Fitzgerald floors that were a total loss. So I guess she probably did know once she found out what floors were hit.
That was the moment we all knew it was deliberate. I walked into class between first and second block, and crossed the plane of the doorway into history, turned my head towards the TV already on, and saw the second plane hit live. Which at first I thought was a replay, but immediately saw it was a commercial airliner, and not a “Cessna type” aircraft the principal previously announced on the intercom waiting for first period to end.
I was 26 years old and watching it on tv in the office in upstate NY since our internet was basically unusable due to all the internet traffic. CNN wouldn’t even load. So had to watch after hearing about the first plane. There were three distinct ‘holy shit’ moments where I remember exactly who was standing next to me and in front of me when it happened:
2nd Tower hit (oh, this is on purpose)
Pentagon hit (oh, our whole country is actually under attack)
First tower collapse (a lot of people just died)
A few days later there was a fourth kind of moment where someone published pictures of a park & ride lot at the meadowlands of all the cars that were parked there and hadn’t moved since Tuesday morning. I just thought of all the people that were killed and their survivors and all the shit they must be going through and on top of it they need to figure how to go get their dad/mom/spouse’s car back home. Like I’m not sure where my mom even keeps her spare key; holy fuck how do you deal with that shit? Not sure why that hit me as hard as it did.
Waiting for the phone call to see if my uncle was still alive because he was usually at the pentagon by that time. But that day for the first time in 20 years he left the house late and got stuck in traffic.
The moment I saw the intensity of the fires I knew that both towers were going to collapse.
I was in architecture school at the time. We had just done a whole bunch of seminars on the structural engineering of high rises.
And so I knew that what was happening was the worst case scenario because it was essentially an unforeseen scenario.
When high rise steel frame buildings catch fire, there is time to evacuate them because the structural steel is encased in concrete. The concrete acts as a insulator, preventing the steel from deforming from the heat of the fire.
Even an ordinary office fire, fuled by burning furniture, fixtures, paper and carpet quickly gets up to around 400 degrees Celsius. Which is more than enough for construction steel to expand well beyond its tolerances. However safely encased within the concrete it will take hours for the heat of the fire to reach the steel.
The structural beams do not deform and the structure remains viable, the building can be evacuated.
But I knew, I just knew.
The airframes had plowed into the tower at air speed. They had gone straight through the thin outer curtain wall (not load bearing) without any real loss of momentum and continued deep into the centre of each building. Deep to the middle of each floorplan where the structural columns, stairwells and elevator shafts were situated.
Those structural columns had been hit by a mass of airframe and unchecked momentum.
They essentially took the full impact directly. The concrete had been instantly pulverised and the structural steel was exposed. Exposed directly to a jet fuel fire burning out of control over at least five floors on both towers.
The steel expanded, deformed, the structural geometry was compromised, that floor collapsed, directly onto the floor below it, which now had the entire weight of the building above it to support, so that floor collapsed, directly onto the floor bellow it… Cascading collapse.
Jet fuel does not melt through steel beams.
It does not have to.
The fire only has to make the beams buckle. By not very much at all. And there is essentially no structure anymore.
I was watching it knowing they were sending first responders into towers which were all ready lost. Knowing everyone trapped in floors above the fires were lost.
You can make a strong case that we really should not build much above ten or more floors. High rise fires are extremely hard to deal with, even when only the foreseeable disasters happen. To date, there is not a fire department in the world, that has a viable plan on how to safely evaluate a similar building if this ever happens again.
Don’t ever take a job that requires you to work in a skyscraper.
9/11 was the worst day in my life.
I was 15 at the time, my older brothers were 19 and 22 and both in the military.
I remember watching my mom cry watching the news because she knew what it meant, that my brothers would be deployed.
I still remember walking into the living room with the tv on her crying and my dad sitting at the table watching it.
4 months later my oldest brother was killed in action.
7 months later my other brother was killed on deployment.
My mother was absolutely devastated. We grew up in a very close family including extended family.
My mother committed suicided 3 months later
Within a year of 9/11 I lost my brothers and mother.
My dad barely held on to thing and managed to keep us afloat and be there for me for and helped me graduate. When I turned 20 my dad died of an “overdose” but I know it was intentional. He was a shell of a person, him and my mother were highschool sweethearts and had only been with each other, he had served and retired from the military and was a huge reason my brothers enlisted.
With in 5 years of 9/11 I lost my whole family. And years of therapy and being in a healthy relationship has helped but there are still days I am unable to get out of bed because the depression. But one day at a time.
Comments
Watching the people jump on live TV.
The feeling of watching it live then having to go to school while processing what happened.
Seeing people jump to their deaths to avoid being burned alive.
Watching the second tower get hit.
I was aware of the Empire State building getting hit by an airplane and was hoping that the first one was a terrible accident. I also remembered laughing like an idiot when I was a kid playing ‘Flight Simulator’ and crashed into the towers when trying to fly in between them. So when I heard about on the radio the first crash I was hoping, at worst, it was an idiot. I then turned on the TV and saw that bright blue sky and questioned whether or not it was an accident. A moment or two later the second tower got hit on live TV. After that I wasn’t surprised when the Pentagon got hit or when the towers fell.
Having to try to calm down my sister.
I was in 6th grade, so I was aware of what was going on. Everyone in my school spent that entire day watching the news.
My sister was in 4th grade and hadn’t been told anything. She came home, turned on the tv, and saw messages like “America under attack!” on loads of different channels. Her school got out an hour and a half before mine did, so by the time I got home she was (understandably) freaking the fuck out.
I did my best and looking back I think I did an okay enough job, but really, that isn’t something an eleven year old should ever need to do. I wasn’t emotionally equipped for that. Most kids aren’t.
Watching the people jump out of the towers
The moment of impact on the second tower. That’s when it was 100% confirmed, we were under attack.
It’ll always be the jumpers, the women holding her dress down as she jumped to hear death.
People holding hands as they jump to their deaths and terrified firefighters.
Edit : this one stuck in my mind as well Kevin Cosgrove stuck above the fire in one of the towers on the phone with EMS.
Warning NSFL: https://youtu.be/RLW0jKKRXMo?si=P1n-CeQN8FOMju0S
Knowing something has changed for the worse in our world. The 90s were so full of hope and excitement for the future and it’s just seemed to get ….. sad after that horrible day.
I was just a kid when it happened. All the teachers were freaking out and running to other rooms whispering. Once my class turned the TV on, just a couple of minutes of stunned silence later we saw another plane hit the towers. We watched it for a little while, before the principal decided maybe it wasn’t for the best that a bunch of elementary schoolers watched that. So we turned it off and went back to lessons. The entire rest of the day, I kept imagining a plane slamming into our school building, even living a half-dozen states away in a small town. I didn’t understand the scope of what was going on, and the adults decided after we’d seen it all to stop answering any questions or talk about it at all.
Watching the towers fall.
Of all the horrors of the day, knowing that people were still in them and seeing them crumble in to dust was traumatising.
Definitely realizing the little specks were people jumping because that was preferable to what was happening to them. Shit still gets me, and I was in high school.
There was also the worry that there were more attacks coming over the course of the day. Once there had been two, and then they kept happening, you didn’t know what else might be happening.
And really, nobody did. Imagine you’re in a classroom and your teacher, your nominal responsible adult, is trying to provide a little normalcy and reassurance and they don’t know what’s going on, either.
After, I think it was watching the hate bloom?
Watching the second impact and watching the towers collapse , just total shock !!!
Having family members living/working close by and not being able to communicate because phone lines had collapsed, and cellphones were also a big problem, no calls would go through.
Two moments: The moment we understood what those plane crashes really were. The moment the towers collapsed.
The internet was down that day. Everyone was trying to go online to see the news, and it killed the internet. A coworker was on the phone, to a friend, getting updated news. I remember her telling me when the first tower fell, and I was absolutely shocked. It just seemed like an impossible thing to happen.
When people started jumping. That was horrible.
When they announced the number of firefighters lost.
My best friend was on a flight home from Disney world so waiting to find out if she was alive
Not knowing where my dad was – for hours and hours. Thankfully he was ok.
The moment when I understood it was not like the bombing that happened in 93. Watching the footage, I remember also being in panic about the flight that later crashed in Pennsylvania. It just seems completely unreal, and yet a knowing that nothing would ever be the same again.
When the Pentagon was hit. That was the moment it went from horrible to Oh Shit.
Watching the news with my family after school, images of death and destruction, and a news anchor said something like “somebody, somewhere is watching this with a smile on their face.”
Knowing you had people working in the towers that you knew and having no idea if they were ok or not
The horrors of watching people jump to their deaths. Not understanding wtf was going on. Seeing airplanes flying overhead, making u-turns. 9/11 really burst the safety bubble in the West. I was too young to understand what was going on but old enough to feel the change in the air.
Realizing it was real. I woke up and came out into the living room and asked what movie my roommate was watching not realizing it was the news.
Not knowing what was coming next
Actually being there on top of the rubble pile.
When the second tower collapsed. Also, what a beautiful day it was.
I’d rather answer with a positive: it was inspiring to see new yorkers – known for being rude and standoffish – come together and help others in the way they did. And the firefighters and police officers truly gave honor to the job in ways we don’t have anymore
I remember seeing things fall from the towers. It took me a second to realize those are people.
The second tower being hit, and the sudden realization that it was a deliberate attack.
It was actually very scary to watch.
Realising it was real. It looked like a disaster film. 🥺😔💔
The firefighters wore devices that would beep if it didn’t sense any movement for a set period of time. There was a clip of an emergency worker walking through the rubble and you could hear what sounded like dozens of those devices beeping.
That has stuck with me more than anything else from that day.
The uncertainty of what would happen next. Remember the Pentagon was also attacked and Flight 93 was headed toward either the White House or the Capitol. I live on the West coast and the complete ground stop was beyond eerie.
Also I had friends in Manhattan and it was impossible to find out how they were.
losing my dad on my 3rd birthday
I was in college at the time and I remember the confusion of what was actually happening, the fear that we didn’t know if more was to come that day and where it would be, watching people jump live.
Fast forward to 2024, watching my father die in ICU for 9 after a double lung transplant. He was a fire fighter on 9/11 and he helped with some recovery efforts after the towers fell.
After the towers fell the radios would play music montages (a lot of My Heart Will Go on) and during the montage they’d play the 9/11 phone calls of people trapped in the buildings or people calling from the planes, on the street etc. That went on for months. That time we also the first time in my life time America felt truly united. Shortly after in 2002 the news had a count down clock to the second of when Bush declared war (really it was when Congress passed authorization to use military force d against Iraq) so we went from one crisis to to another
That morning was a beautiful warm fall day with golden sunshine. It just felt like nothing bad should be happening on such a lovely day.
Every moment was horrific from confusion at the first strike, then the realization of what was happening, watching news trucks focus on the Sears Tower (1/8 mile from my home) and drawing the blinds in the classroom because there was a clear view of Sears Tower, and wondering what the constant beeping noise was during coverage. It was the alarms worn by the firefighters who were lost in the rubble. Walking in my neighborhood on a perfect September day with no planes in the sky although I am equidistance from Midway and O’Hare airports. Everyone on the street was crying.
Now we have a felon in office being entertained and lavished with gifts from those who murdered nearly 3000 people as well as slaughtering an American journalist and taking away the benefits from first responders who are ill from the debris as they tried to rescue people.
I had made some bad choices and was incarcerated at the time. I remember being able to barely see the TV the C.O.’s were watching and trying to figure out what was going on. Then I was thinking what if something happened where we were and we couldn’t get out. So scary!
BTW. I learned my lesson and that was my one and only time in there!
I was 13, for me it was the feeling of knowing there was somebody out there that wanted to kill me. I remember thinking There was this guy Bin Laden who wanted to kill Americans, he just killed thousands of them, I was an American, which meant he wanted to kill me too.
It was the first time I had ever thought about something in that way. We had grown up feeling like America was invincible. That myth was shattered that day, and many more of the myths we were taught growing up were shattered in the years and decades after.
I remember heading to work. Was a beautiful day. Clear skies. Warm. The first plane hit. Lots of chatter. Seemed surreal. After that. All traffic stopped. Everyone was in front of a tv. In the afternoon panic set in. People went nuts. Waiting hours to buy gas. Food. Supplies. Etc.
9/11 in my opinion destroyed America. After that greed set in hard. Food prices. Gas prices. Car insurance. Sky rocketed over night. Your employer used to cover 100% of your health care. That all ended that day. The billionaires took control.
I was in 5th grade and in art class and another teacher burst into the room to tell our art teacher to turn on the TV.
I remember we all started piling multiple classes into several classrooms that had TVs since not all did.
When the first tower collapsed one of the teachers began having a hysterical breakdown and other teachers had to usher her out of the room to calm her. Like audibly screaming and crying. Found out later both her parents worked in that tower. They thankfully both made it out in time but she was convinced she just watched both her parents die on TV. Those screams still haunt me.
I stood on my back porch on avenue U in Brooklyn and watched papers from the World Trade Center half burnt settle in my backyard, and ash and other light debris falling from the sky. It seemed surreal.
Someone in the next office was on the phone to a colleague in the World Trade Centre and I heard him say “he’s bloody hung up on me.” I had just seen the news about the first plane on ananova (old news website). I didn’t know what to say to him.
Then we went to a nearby bar to watch the news (in the city of london). At one point the news said there was a plane coming into london that they couldnt make contact with. The 3 or 4 mins of not knowing whether to stay where I was (near big potential targets) or go to the train station was possibly the weirdest of my life. Total dislocation from normality, whilst watching the horror on the TV.
I was like 12 so I didn’t take a lot of it in
But something that stuck with me was how clear it was that Tom Brokaw and the other anchors didn’t know what was going on. I’d never heard them talk with a tone of genuine uncertainty, before.
The most trusted names in news…. reduced to speculating live on air.
Not knowing if the attack was “over”
Not knowing if there would be more attacks.
The door of fear that was opened by the attacks was probably worse than the attacks themselves. I think most Americans assumed they were untouchable with the two oceans and our massive military. 9/11 removed that perceived invincibility from our collective conscience.
Waiting on line at Bellvue Hospital on the east side of NYC to give blood or volunteer, seeing the ghostly parade of folks who made it out, covered in dust and ash, walking up from downtown; and finally being turned away because they weren’t finding enough survivors to need our help.
Not knowing whether there was more to come. Like, what else is gonna happen?
I was a Senior in Highschool at the time, my dad was in the national guard. I left school and as I walked into the front door of our house, I saw my dad in his BDUs with his bags packed ready to go. He was sitting on the couch watching the news waiting for “the call”. I asked him, “what’s going to happen” he replied “I don’t know”. The look of terror in his eyes I’ll never forget. Moments later the house phone rings “yes sir, yes sir, on my way sir, thank you” he hangs up the phone and says to me “I gotta go honey”. This moment will live with me forever. I was so afraid that I would never see him again. You can tell he was concerned not only for his fate but for his family’s and for the country.
Fucking EVERYTHING. Watching in horror at he aftermath of the first plane just to have another plane come into view and cut right through the 2nd tower. The sound of pure terror in the voice of normally stoic newscasters. The realization that “we aren’t as safe as we thought”. Those poor people making the horrific decision to jump instead of burning alive. The first tower falling and you start doing the math in your head on how many people were in the building only to have the 2nd one fall and have to double your math. The ash cloud enveloping everything. The sounds of panic, fear and despair in the voices of people running for their lives or being interviewed on TV. The WEEKS of that body count rising. All of it was just absolutely horrible and will stick with us all till we die.
When people ask what’s wrong with my generation, THIS is a big part of it. Mass PTSD that has never been properly dealt with followed by 20 years of war, the rise of social media and it’s negative effects on our mentality and then topped off with a once in a 4 generation pandemic…. We are a fucked up bunch because of all of this and 9/11 is the fist and biggest part of that cacophony of chaos that were the early millennial’s formative years.
Ugh. Hearing my teacher’s involuntary, gutteral, scream of grief and fear and just everything you never want to hear. Everything that you didn’t even know existed yet as a six year old.
Her son worked there. He didn’t make it. He was pretty young, I think in his 20s. I think younger than I am now, probably. We didn’t see her for a few months after that. I think she came back in the Spring. I think about her a lot, but as a 6 year old tends to do with their teacher, I lost contact long long ago. If she’s still around, I hope she’s doing okay. But I’ll never forget the sound she made that morning upon finding out what happened. It’s like she knew.
I’ve never been 100% sure since I didn’t know his name, but I think he was in the Cantor Fitzgerald floors that were a total loss. So I guess she probably did know once she found out what floors were hit.
Second tower being hit.
That was the moment we all knew it was deliberate. I walked into class between first and second block, and crossed the plane of the doorway into history, turned my head towards the TV already on, and saw the second plane hit live. Which at first I thought was a replay, but immediately saw it was a commercial airliner, and not a “Cessna type” aircraft the principal previously announced on the intercom waiting for first period to end.
That moment everything changed.
It was all terrible but the moment the second plane hit and we knew this wasn’t an accident made it all worse.
Then the hit on Pentagon and the towers going down… Very scary.
Seeing the trapped people actively CHOOSING to jump, knowing they wouldn’t survive before the buildings collapsed.
Seeing the second plane hit the tower live. Everyone on the news was saying it must be a terrible accident until that happened.
The second plane shattered every illusion that the first had been an accident.
Seeing the images of the people in the windows, waving out for help, and knowing they weren’t saved. 🙁
The realization that it was deliberate.
Watching the jumpers was terrible.
HEARING THEM HIT was the worst.
I was 26 years old and watching it on tv in the office in upstate NY since our internet was basically unusable due to all the internet traffic. CNN wouldn’t even load. So had to watch after hearing about the first plane. There were three distinct ‘holy shit’ moments where I remember exactly who was standing next to me and in front of me when it happened:
2nd Tower hit (oh, this is on purpose)
Pentagon hit (oh, our whole country is actually under attack)
First tower collapse (a lot of people just died)
A few days later there was a fourth kind of moment where someone published pictures of a park & ride lot at the meadowlands of all the cars that were parked there and hadn’t moved since Tuesday morning. I just thought of all the people that were killed and their survivors and all the shit they must be going through and on top of it they need to figure how to go get their dad/mom/spouse’s car back home. Like I’m not sure where my mom even keeps her spare key; holy fuck how do you deal with that shit? Not sure why that hit me as hard as it did.
Watching the second plane hit live
Video of people jumping from the top floors to keep from being burned alive.
I was at work. Air traffic controller. It was like a 6 hour panic attack.
The second plane.
It went from a “omg wtf accident” to a “OMG WTF WE ARE AT WAR”
My father’s life was saved by a cancelled meeting in the south tower 4 days before the meeting.
The person he was flying into NYC to meet with, had to cancel to fly out to his sick mother who was in the hospital.
He cancelled all of his meetings, saving himself and my father’s life — the rest of his office died.
Whats worse? watching DJT/MAGA right now deny healthcare coverage for 9/11 First Responders by killing bipartisan legislation to our heros.
Waiting for the phone call to see if my uncle was still alive because he was usually at the pentagon by that time. But that day for the first time in 20 years he left the house late and got stuck in traffic.
The moment I saw the intensity of the fires I knew that both towers were going to collapse.
I was in architecture school at the time. We had just done a whole bunch of seminars on the structural engineering of high rises.
And so I knew that what was happening was the worst case scenario because it was essentially an unforeseen scenario.
When high rise steel frame buildings catch fire, there is time to evacuate them because the structural steel is encased in concrete. The concrete acts as a insulator, preventing the steel from deforming from the heat of the fire.
Even an ordinary office fire, fuled by burning furniture, fixtures, paper and carpet quickly gets up to around 400 degrees Celsius. Which is more than enough for construction steel to expand well beyond its tolerances. However safely encased within the concrete it will take hours for the heat of the fire to reach the steel.
The structural beams do not deform and the structure remains viable, the building can be evacuated.
But I knew, I just knew.
The airframes had plowed into the tower at air speed. They had gone straight through the thin outer curtain wall (not load bearing) without any real loss of momentum and continued deep into the centre of each building. Deep to the middle of each floorplan where the structural columns, stairwells and elevator shafts were situated.
Those structural columns had been hit by a mass of airframe and unchecked momentum.
They essentially took the full impact directly. The concrete had been instantly pulverised and the structural steel was exposed. Exposed directly to a jet fuel fire burning out of control over at least five floors on both towers.
The steel expanded, deformed, the structural geometry was compromised, that floor collapsed, directly onto the floor below it, which now had the entire weight of the building above it to support, so that floor collapsed, directly onto the floor bellow it… Cascading collapse.
Jet fuel does not melt through steel beams.
It does not have to.
The fire only has to make the beams buckle. By not very much at all. And there is essentially no structure anymore.
I was watching it knowing they were sending first responders into towers which were all ready lost. Knowing everyone trapped in floors above the fires were lost.
You can make a strong case that we really should not build much above ten or more floors. High rise fires are extremely hard to deal with, even when only the foreseeable disasters happen. To date, there is not a fire department in the world, that has a viable plan on how to safely evaluate a similar building if this ever happens again.
Don’t ever take a job that requires you to work in a skyscraper.
9/11 was the worst day in my life.
I was 15 at the time, my older brothers were 19 and 22 and both in the military.
I remember watching my mom cry watching the news because she knew what it meant, that my brothers would be deployed.
I still remember walking into the living room with the tv on her crying and my dad sitting at the table watching it.
4 months later my oldest brother was killed in action.
7 months later my other brother was killed on deployment.
My mother was absolutely devastated. We grew up in a very close family including extended family.
My mother committed suicided 3 months later
Within a year of 9/11 I lost my brothers and mother.
My dad barely held on to thing and managed to keep us afloat and be there for me for and helped me graduate. When I turned 20 my dad died of an “overdose” but I know it was intentional. He was a shell of a person, him and my mother were highschool sweethearts and had only been with each other, he had served and retired from the military and was a huge reason my brothers enlisted.
With in 5 years of 9/11 I lost my whole family. And years of therapy and being in a healthy relationship has helped but there are still days I am unable to get out of bed because the depression. But one day at a time.