I was into work early and was checking out the wine boards, either alt.food.wine or WestCoastWineNetwork. Don’t remember which one. A member who was a financial type with an office high up on WallStreet . Don’t remember his name anymore. He posted “Holy $hit… a plane just crashed into the WorldTradeCenter”. Went down the hall to our conference room, flipped on the TV, and spent the rest of the day watching it all unfold in real time, within minutes of the first impact.
So don’t claim the WineBoards are a big waste of time.
Tom
I was living in Houston at the time. Word spread in the office quickly. One of the admins had a fiancee that was in the upper levels of the first tower and she was freaking out, and all of the other admins were surrounding her, offering her emotional support. The second plane hit. I sent my small’ish team home, told them its better to be with family at a time like this, not in downtown Houston which easily could have been a target. Then I sat, glued to the TV all day watching in horror. Since then I have met several people that were in NYC at the time, some narrowly missed being in the WTC due to unforeseen issues (one forgot to set his alarm and missed a meeting), some were forced to run for their lives in the street. To this day I swell up with emotion just thinking about that day and all that happened, even though I wasn’t directly impacted. God bless all of the heroes of the day, including the folks in that United flight that decided to take action to prevent further mass devastation, even though it led to their own untimely demise.
One of the fellows I was working with at the time was staying at the adjacent Marriott hotel when all this went down. He escaped but it changed his whole attitude on life. Different things became important. Tragically, he died of throat cancer a few years later.
Was working in Reston, VA with a view of the Dulles toll road. One of my teammates bust out of his office still on his cell phone talking to his brother fleeing the World Financial Center screaming “A plane just flew into the WTC!” Like most, we found a tv and spent the next few hours just staring. Drove home (about 2 miles from the Pentagon) later that afternoon after traffic died down. Got home and hugged my (then) fiancee. She said her mom called while I was driving home to discuss … our wedding invites.
Will never forget the smell of the building smoldering. Or the front stoop shrines to neighbors who died that day. Or the silence of the skies when I went for a cigar walk that night.*
*Except for the little prop plane that circled the Pentagon all night. It was incredibly comforting for some reason.
I was in homeroom during high school. In a NJ suburb just outside of NYC. Our principal got on the speaker system shouting, “Planes just hit the twin towers. Our country is under attack!” Obviously the second part of that was unnecessary, but the principal has no filter. The rest of the day was basically shot as a lot of parents started pulling my classmates out of school, while the rest of us moved class to class but spent the entire time watching news coverage of the events.
I don’t know anyone personally who perished or whose parents perished, but 60 individuals from our county died at the World Trade Center.
I was in Bulgaria, getting ready for a NATO exercise. Watched it on the TV in the hotel lobby.
Was laying on the bed and getting ready to go to work and I watched the planes flying overhead. They’d head left and then at the same spot make a 90 degree right turn and head to LaGuardia. I marveled at how precise they all were. Then one flew by randomly and I commented to my wife how wierd that was, and the others continued their arrivals just like before.
We don’t turn on TV or news in the morning so I just went to work, which was by the Brooklyn Bridge. From my office I could see Manhattan. When I got in, everyone was at the window watching the tower on fire. I returned home to get my camera. When I returned I took some pictures and then we stood at the window looking at the fire for a while. My phone rang so I turned around to get it. The entire room let out a scream and I turned back around to see that one of the towers had completely disappeared. It took just seconds. A few minutes later the other went down. We told everyone to go home and I spent the rest of the day watching the cloud of dust and smoke very slowly work its way across the river to the Brooklyn side, and then it enveloped all of us.
The firefighters and the police were heroes that day and in the days following.
So unlike what we see today.
I had friends down there who owned a bar, and others who owned a wine shop. I asked the wine shop guy what he did that day. He said he grabbed a lady from the street who wasn’t sure what to do and they pulled down the metal door over the shop. In the dust and darkness he and the staff and the customers and the lady hunted around for some wine. They figured if they were going to die, they wanted the good stuff inside of them. So he opened a few nice bottles, mostly by feel since the power was out.
I asked how it was.
“Like mud,” he told me. There was so much dust all over everything that the glasses were covered with it and the wine turned it into mud.
Rod Schiffman on WCWN pulled up the message traffic there on 9/11. It was a guy Michael who put out the first alert that I saw. But don’t remember who Michael was.
Tom
I slept through the whole thing and was irritated my phone was ringing off the hook. But our apartment had a clear view downtown and I figured out something was amiss when I woke up and looked out the window at noon or thereabouts.
I watched it unfold in our break room. At first I did not know what was going on…a day I will never forget.
JP
I can recall every aspect of that day vividly from my subway ride to work (stopped at Time Square due to “an incident at the World Trade Center”) right after the first plane hit to . . . . I am almost glad I was making my way to the office across the hall just as the second tower came down so I didn’t have to see it in real life. We had a clear shot view from the 26th Floor on 25th Street and Seventh to the Towers, and we could see all the smoke as it drifted toward Brooklyn under piercing blue skies. And a few minutes before, I had been on Seventh Avenue gathered around a small TV screen through the open door of a delivery truck as we watched the first tower collapse.
The following wine event 4 days later, nominally to celebrate Joe Dressner’s 50th Birthday, is etched in many of our minds and was a key cathartic moment for the NYC wine geek community at the time: September 15th, 2001.
I was at a bankers convention in Lake Placid, sitting at the morning presentation between 2 guys I knew, one was the deputy superintendent of banks in charge of disaster preparedness and the other was the senior official at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in charge of disaster preparedness. Just before 9:00 AM, I excused myself because I had to make a telephone call. I walked out of the large conference room and was immediately grabbed by someone running down the hall who told me that a plaintiff at the World Trade Center.
My room was on the 2nd floor of the hotel soil ran upstairs, turned on the television, and started to dial the phone. As I finished dialing, I hung up the phone, because I realized that I was calling a lawyer at Thatcher Profitt and Wood, whose office was in the World Trade Center. She had better things to do than answer my phone call. It turned out that she was on her way to another convention in Colorado, so she was okay. The 2nd plane hit as I was watching the TV. I went downstairs and told the 2 guys I was sitting with what had happened and suggested that they had better get in touch with their offices because the banking system was going to need a lot of help, and besides, their offices were right next of the World Trade Center. I then wrote a note that said, “two planes just hit the World Trade Center. Terrorism expected,” walked to the front of the room, and put the note in front of the guy who was the president of the organization running the convention. I then left.
A few minutes later, the executive director ran up to me and asked whether she should tell the people in the conference room what had happened. I told her that I had already given the president a note. She told me that the seminar was still going on, so we walked into the room and walked up to the front, only to find that the president was so stunned that he was in a catatonic stupor. The executive director took the podium and told everyone what it happened. Since there were a couple dozen people at the convention with offices in the World Trade Center, and everybody else knew a lot of people who worked there, the room emptied in about 20 seconds with well over 100 people running to their phones. I did not realize how shaken I was until I looked at the note I had written to the president. It looked like it was written by a 90-year-old with Parkinson’s.
I stayed around for a few hours watching with everyone else on the giant projection TV and then drove home. It seemed like every military vehicle from Fort Drum and the Air Force Base in Plattsburgh, and every National Guard vehicle, was on the road south with me. For those of you who know the geography, when I got to the Tappan Zee Bridge, I could see the pillar of smoke all the way down the Hudson River.
There were 2 New York bank trade association conventions that week, one in Lake Placid and the other of the Broadmoor in Colorado. But for that, I probably would have known dozens of people who were killed.
At college, I woke to my mom calling my cell phone to tell me that my dad was ok. Of course, it being 9am in that glorious week between move-in and classes, I was still asleep and had no idea what she was talking about.
My father worked in the post office building at Church and Vesey and commuted in on the Path train to the WTC stop. He had gone in a little late that day because he wanted to stop at the bank to deposit the tax refund checks that everyone got in 2001. His train left journal square but was turned back mid-route. He was never allowed back into his office. He received his belongings many months later - we still have a poster with a large crack in the frame which he will certainly never fix.
At work outside of D.C… Company sent us home after watching on TV. Jet fighters flying all over. Everyone was scared. Vivid images I will never forget
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I worked for one of the larger tenants of WTC, but I was based in the downtown Jersey City office. I had a standing meeting on Tuesday on the 72nd floor of the South Tower, but that was moved to Wednesday that week. I received a call from a colleague saying they were evacuating and we needed to activate our BCP. I lost track of time between his phone call, the tower being hit, and when it collapsed, but I immediately thought the worst. Thankfully he and many of my coworkers made it out safely. Not all were as fortunate-most of them security personnel who lost their lives saving thousands. We will never forget.
Living in Tacoma at the time for some reason I woke up at an ungodly time around 330am PST and decided to go watch some TV, turned on the news and saw a “developing situation” and watched the first plane hit a tower and got sick to my stomach and the news was still positing it was a crash vs. terror. Everyone was in denial. Sat and watched the whole thing play out, Tower 2, Pentagon, field in Shanksville, the stark realization that our country and people were under attack. Around 1pm PST I made it out of the house to go run my sales route in utter disbelief and just wanted some other human interaction and reaction. Every person was stunned, still almost seems unbelievable and unreal…even more so that today was 19 years ago and next year is 20 years.
So many heroic people lost their lives and it’s a good reminder of the sacrifice Police, Fire, and Rescue put on the line everyday…most people don’t go to work and risk not coming home on a daily basis to family and friends.
Thank you for your service.
It was supposed to be my first day of classes my Freshman year at Princeton. Instead I watched in horror with my roommate, whose dad worked in lower Manhattan (he was fine). It was such a watershed moment for me personally. it accentuated the clean break from high school to an independence at college with a new and frightening disruption that framed my whole college experience (I was an international affairs major).
Thank you Frank Siller of Tunnel to Towers for stepping up to ensure the names were read today after the city cancelled what is the most important remembrance.
My core guys were cleaning bins and preparing equipment for harvest the next day. I kept running back to the house to watch the horror. I was I bit too young for the assassination of JFK, but this was my generations Pearl harbor moment.