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9/11/01

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    • I had worked a 12 hour night shift the night prior and was at home asleep. Woke up to the phone ringing around 11am. The next several days were a blur, especially at work. Our world changed that morning. God bless all that were lost that day, with a special prayer for the first responders.
      RIAP
    • i was on the lirr just leaving long beach . it was a crystal clear blue sky, and i had a clear view of the nyc skyline. i noticed a black smudge of smoke over the twin towers, but really didnt think too much of it, but seconds later there was a flash of orange as the second plane hit, and within a minute, cell phones started ringing and we found out about the planes hitting the world trade center. i kinda knew it wasnt any freak accident, knew we had been attacked by terrorist, and knew immediately the world had just changed forever.the train stopped at valley stream, and we found out all traffic in and out of the city, roads highways and trains , was cut off. i was able to get a ride back to cedarhurst,where i used to work,selling mens clothing, and as i got into the store they already had the story on tv, and a few minutes later, the first tower fell.my friend rudy abad lost his wife, marie, hers will be the second name spoken tomorrow.
      we lost a lot of first responders that day, people i knew. ex coworkers that worked at canner fitzgerald,
      and the mourning went on for months. from the beach every day that brown giant noxious cloud hung in the west. air traffic was halted for a week , and we were so in shock, it took a day or two to realize how hauntingly quiet it was, as long beach is not far from kennedy airport, and airplane noise is like constant background noise here.long beach and its surrounding fire departments all lost good young men.the ones who survived returned day after day to help find bodies within the ruins.
      its all good
    • Living in Houston and driving into work and the talk radio host started talking about it. Remember going to eat with my children at Mom Day Out and taking those home and picking up the others from school early. Never had another day like that my life, and I and pray we never will again.
      The road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage.
      Richard Ewell, CSA General
    • Trebor wrote:

      I had worked a 12 hour night shift the night prior and was at home asleep. Woke up to the phone ringing around 11am. The next several days were a blur, especially at work. Our world changed that morning. God bless all that were lost that day, with a special prayer for the first responders.

      I too worked the night shift the night before. I woke up like any other day around 1 in the afternoon, turned on the TV and there it was. I couldn't believe it. It scared the s**t out of me and I was 1200 miles away in FL. I was afraid to open the front door and look out. All that came to mind was the movie Red Dawn. All I could think of was that there was going to be foreign soldiers walking down the street taking over.
      God Bless all those that were lost and may we never forget OR forgive.
      Changes Daily→ ♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫ ♪♫♪♫♪♫ ← Don't blame me. It's That Lonesome Guitar.
    • I was at work (Chem Professor) trying to do a whole week of work in one day because on Thursday (9/13), my wife was scheduled to have an all day surgery to have a large malignant tumor removed. It had been diagnosed on Memorial Day and she had gone through chemo all summer. The surgery was followed by more chemo in the Fall, radiation in the Winter, and then years of hormone therapy. Trying to stay focused and positive during the recovery period was hard when all media was focused on death and destruction 24/7. I remember watching the memorial service from the National Cathedral a couple of days into her recovery. It was the first uplifting thing we had seen that week. During the service, the congregation sang "A Mighty Fortress is Our God". Unfortunately the broadcast was not closed captioned so the TV audience couldn't hear how appropriate the lyrics were. Being a life-long Lutheran, I had no need for text and knew full well what they were singing. I was struck by the fact that in the 500 years since that hymn was written, there has been no better message set to music for the occasion. Basically it says that fighting evil with guns and bombs is a fool's errand. Instead you should trust God and wage peace.

      Anyway, it's been 13 years and against all odd, she is cancer free. gif.014.gif She's not strong enough to hike as she once was, so I have to convince her that it is OK for me to go hiking on my own, which I do - she just makes sure I feel guilty about it. ;( We go on day hikes often and car camp when we can.
    • I was at work, sitting at the desk, when a friend who worked in the next hangar called to tell me an airplane had flown into the tower. We both figured it was some idiot private pilot in his Piper or Cessna got to close to the tower trying to do a fly by. I remember thinking that would create havoc for the pilot of the helicopter I maintained at the time. A while later my friend called back and told me about the second plane, this time he knew the details. My first concern was for my aircraft and pilot. I was just about to start making phone calls to find out if he was OK when I heard him landing in front of the hangar. He had been on approach to JFK airport and was told by the control tower to leave or be grounded there. He elected to fly home. With the aircraft secured in the hangar we walked up to the local FBO and watched TV for a while. I was dazed and in a state of shock, almost. I phoned my boss and filled him in about our situation and then headed for home. My drive took me past a Long Island Blood Services facility and I figured I would stop in and donate blood as there would probably be a big need for it. When I got there the line went around the building and they were handing out slips of paper with a time for you to come back. My time was midnight so I went home. I like so many others spent the rest of the day in front of the TV. At midnight I went back to the blood center and was told they weren't collecting anymore since there really weren't that many injuries. People had either made it out of the towers OK or they were dead. That's when the reality hit me and I stood on the sidewalk right there and cried like a baby.
    • After the first tower fell I went to my scheduled physical at my Dr. After some tests I went into the waiting room. W was making his first speech over the speaker in the room. The room had many elderly folks in it. As W spoke i could see the looks on those folks faces, and I thought how this was not the first time these folks heard this type of thing. I kept thinking how they all sat though FDRs announcement on Dec 8th 1941. I was upset with myself because I do not own a weapon, and if the PooFan , how was I going to get me and my family to Montana
      Cheesecake> Ramen :thumbsup:
    • Drybones wrote:

      I was at work, my daughter was living in DC at the time and could see the Pentagon from her apartment balcony.


      My sister's husband's sister (my sister-in-law-in-law??) was actually in the Pentagon on 9/11, but not in the part that was hit. She works for the State Department in the foreign service. That was her second incident. She was also held hostage by some radicals when she was posted in South America.
    • I could go on in detail about that day..and the many days, weeks and months afterwards. I can reflect on that day and being down there...the sights and sounds and the countless friends and and people I knew that at that time were missing or MIA and later learned to not have survived. It seems so long ago...but today at the exact moment the first plane had hit the WTC and the service began..it seemed like it was yesterday.
      RIP and never forget.
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      RIAP
    • A.T.Lt wrote:

      I could go on in detail about that day..and the many days, weeks and months afterwards. I can reflect on that day and being down there...the sights and sounds and the countless friends and and people I knew that at that time were missing or MIA and later learned to not have survived. It seems so long ago...but today at the exact moment the first plane had hit the WTC and the service began..it seemed like it was yesterday.
      RIP and never forget.


      That's heartbreaking. ;(
      Lost in the right direction.
    • I was upstate on 9/11, working in a media lab on a big project for NBC. I'd been in Manhattan the day before. I patched NBC's satellite feed into a big screen, and everyone in my wing of the building crowded into the lab.

      My brother was on field at JFK figuring the weight and balance for a DC-8 cargo hauler when the towers went down. He saw them fall across the bay.

      I lost several of my high school classmates that day, including one guy who had been a hiking buddy back in our high-school days. (I'd even dated his sister for a while.)

      The next time I went to NYC was to do more work at 30 Rock on 9/23. That was the day the anthrax arrived. And I know I was handling paper coming out of the newsroom, because I was walking the network operators through the setup for Nightly News, and they changed the whole lineup at the last minute. I had the new lineup literally hot off the photocopier, brought in by a breathless studio page. I would have been a lot more reassured if I didn't get as many reassuring phone calls from the company doctors!

      I say all this to defuse the, "But you weren't affected personally" that I hear when I make the next statement:

      Never forget. But never hate. The terrorists won a shameful victory that day if we allow the memory of that day to control our lives. If we go about hating and fearing the whole world because of what they did, they've destroyed what we used to be.
      I'm not lost. I know where I am. I'm right here.
    • hikerboy wrote:

      one of the toughest things to live through was the lack of cell phone service when the towers fell.it was a while before we were able to contact friends and coworkers to see if they were okay. and some never responded.


      Yeah. My stepfather is a funeral director, and my mother and he had been down at Church Street (in the shadow of the towers) early that morning to run a death certificate, and then went to Staten Island for the burial. With the phone service down and all transportation routes shut off, they wound up sleeping in the hearse because they couldn't get back to Queens. And of course they had no way of getting in touch with my brother and me.
      I'm not lost. I know where I am. I'm right here.
    • AnotherKevin wrote:

      hikerboy wrote:

      ...... With the phone service down and all transportation routes shut off......


      Since my commute takes me from Long Island to New Jersey, across two bridges, I've told my wife not to worry if things go to hell in a hand basket. I wouldn't even attempt to get home in that sort of situation. I really should really keep some extra stuff at work, but I don't.
    • I found this thread while perusing the forum. Upon reading it, a rush of memories flooded through my mind. Each of the folks listed below were KIA as a result of this attack, though some because of their youth raised their right hand years afterwards.

      A friend working at the Pentagon later told me after the building rocked from the impact and the lighting failed, she struggled to secure the classified. Her sergeant found her and dragged her out of the smoke filled room. The next day, with the building still smoked filled, she as well as 100’s of others reported for duty.

      Lest we forget.....



      SSgt Ray Rangel - USAF
      SrA Elizabeth Loncki - USAF
      PFC Adam Harris - USA
      MSgt Eden Pearl - USMC

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Dan76: Clarity ().

    • AnotherKevin wrote:

      Never forget. But never hate. The terrorists won a shameful victory that day if we allow the memory of that day to control our lives. If we go about hating and fearing the whole world because of what they did, they've destroyed what we used to be.
      That's one of the wisest things I've ever heard anyone say about anything.
      I guess 911 was our Pearl Harbor
      I was at work when it happened and my immediate concern was what may of happened to the helicopter, and it's pilot, that I was maintaining at the time.
    • On 9/11/01 I was working in mid-town Manhattan. People flocked to the conference rooms to watch the aftermath of the plane strikes. One employee went into uncontrollable hysteria when the first tower went down. Her sister worked in the area and she couldn't contact her - later it turned out she was alright. I called my wife and told her I would be home as soon as I could. She received several calls from panicked friends asking about me. My boss was in charge of the emergency team and I was his right hand man. We shut down the computer room in fear of power outages and evacuated over 700 employees once it was clear it was safe to do so. [I was responsible for the Computer Room and we set up a conference call system to check back later that night and several times the next day - we had someone power the Network and Servers on the next day, but the office was remained closed the rest of the week.] We watched thousands of people streaming north on Park Ave towards Grand Central Station. No one was walking south. The trains started to run and we gave the go signal. Then they closed Grand Central due to an unidentified Van parked out front. Once they cleared it, the terminal was jammed as we escorted people through the mob scene to their trains. Finally, we left and my wife and kids greeted me at the door. I hugged the kids and cried for the first time that day.

      The next day, after taking care of work business, I called my brother to discuss whether our hike was on or not. On 9/13/01 we drove to Salisbury, CT to start our very first section hike. Fyck the terrorists.
    • I always liked Ann Coulter's idea that the best memorial was to rebuild the Twin Towers, but this time with machine guns and canons on top. So the message of never again.

      But other than that, move on with our lives and not give them the pleasure of knowing we are living in fear.
      The road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage.
      Richard Ewell, CSA General
    • AnotherKevin wrote:

      LIhikers wrote:

      I guess 911 was our Pearl Harbor.
      It may still prove to have been our Reichstag fire. God forbid.
      As a matter of curiosity to what extent do you make this assertion? There’s conspiracy theory’s and there‘s conspiracy theory’s, if a building that size were to topple over and its full length realized horizontally covering city blocks, well, it wouldn’t be good. So did some entity help it to drop straight down in a controlled demolition when fire suppression efforts failed and structuraley the building was lost...it’s possible? plausible? maybe, likely...Ja.

      The post was edited 5 times, last by Socks ().

    • The US administration, CIA and FBI received multiple prior warnings from foreign governments and intelligence services, including France, Germany, the UK, Israel, Jordan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco and Russia.[5][30] The warnings varied in their level of detail, but all stated that they believed an al-Qaeda attack inside the United States was imminent. British Member of Parliament Michael Meacher cites these warnings, suggesting that some of them must have been deliberately ignored.[31] Some of these warnings include the following:
      • March 2001 – Italian intelligence warns of an al-Qaeda plot in the United States involving a massive strike involving aircraft, based on their wiretap of al-Qaeda cell in Milan.
      • July 2001 – Jordanian intelligence told US officials that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on American soil, and Egyptian intelligence warned the CIA that 20 al-Qaeda Jihadists were in the United States, and that four of them were receiving flight training.
      • August 2001 – The Israeli Mossad gives the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and says that they appear to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future.
      • August 2001 – The United Kingdom is warned three times of an imminent al-Qaeda attack in the United States, the third specifying multiple airplane hijackings. According to the Sunday Herald, the report is passed on to President Bush a short time later.
      • September 2001 – Egyptian intelligence warns American officials that al-Qaeda is in the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, probably within the US.
      Be wise enough to walk away from the nonsense around you! :thumbup:
    • Yea I remember where I was. In a retail establishment in King of Prussia, Clearly boring, and horribly in the wrong place without a tv or radio. It was so bad I wanted to call out. Standing around with no customers, fellow employees bickered about each other, what a shame.

      That being said during the unfortunate circumstances. Here are a few really odd things I learned.

      After the event 800+ people came forward and had a vivid clear "dream" of the people jumping and the collapse of one of the buildings. 30 + days before it happened. This was reported on some news station... NBC at the time. Really super tough to discuss a tall rectangular building a shocking loss of life to many prior to the event. Just like the news these folks saw it like a "helicopter" like view and not knowing it was NYC. There wasn't much they could do. Shocking. But go ahead and dismiss this for some of you. All they sensed was a terrible loss of life.

      Yes there were people dancing on top of buildings on the NJ side - they were under surveillance. Go ahead fill in the blanks - it happened. Some children close to the area had parents who received phone calls to stay home that day.

      When the planes left the skies the scientists in a "weather" position noticed a -4° drop in the upper altitudes where planes fly... but you cannot find any data on the internet on that one. On average 20 thousand planes are in the daytime airspace, with engines that heat the exhaust to 500°

      What I remember was all the major highways filled with "rivers" of UPS trucks that stepped up on the delivery process, they had a plan.

      9-11 still sticks in my memory.

      Why we did not retaliate against the country they came from blows my mind.

      Turns out the Boston bombing was orchestrated from the same country, because they paid for it. The country I am talking about flies private planes and is EXEMPT from TSA in all circumstances. After the bombing one person in his twenties, was allowed to leave just a few hours from Boston.
      Be wise enough to walk away from the nonsense around you! :thumbup:

      The post was edited 3 times, last by Wise Old Owl ().