OT: September 11, 2001... Where were you?

[mechanicalman]

I was driving from Stamford, CT, to Purchase, NY, on the Merritt Parkway when the radio mentioned that it was believed "a small prop plane" hit one of the towers. Initially, it didn't sound nearly as grave a situation as it really was. I walked into work to see a bunch of my colleagues gathering around a TV in a conference room. We watched live as the towers fell, and there were folks in that room who knew people in and around those buildings. We were sent home from work, and I remember falling asleep later that day in hopes that I'd wake up to learn it was all a bad dream. It wasn't.

[Mark]

I was in Annapolis, listening to the morning news on the radio while preparing for work. The news sent me to the TV, and I stayed home to see the whole horrible story unfold. But my wife had to take our baby to his two-month checkup that morning, and so I was wondering the whole time if the events of that day would change the world that he would grow up in.

[btcarfagno]

I was on my way to work on Route 22 in Union NJ. There is one bend in the road where you would go around it and the towers in NYC would be right in front of you. I got around the bend and saw the smoke coming from the first tower that got hit. Got to work as quickly as I could and was the only one listening to what was happening (small manufacturing company). My boss was in a meeting and I told him about each of the towers as they fell. Rat bastard wouldn't let us go home early.

So 5:00 I am leaving and as I get outside and look up I see the smoke and dust from the towers going over the area in NJ. For days afterwards the was an amazing stillness. Not much auto traffic and no plane traffic. The silence would be broken when fighter jets roared overhead.

My father had worked in the towers for decades. I have pictures of my family watching the bicentennial fleet of ships (1976) coming up the river as we watched from near the top of one of the towers. He moved on from that job in 1988 but he knew many people from that office that was still there who were killed.

Tom C