I’m sure this question has been asked before. (Just like, “Where were you when you heard JFK was assassinated?”)
Where were you and what were you doing on 9/11/2001, when you heard about the attack on America in NYC, Virginia, and Pennsylvania?
I was at work as an orthopedic medical assistant. The entire staff and a few patients were huddled around a TV in one of the offices.
Seeing those images changed us forever.
So, TKZers, your turn. Where were you on 9/11/2001?
The clock radio came on a few minutes before 6AM on the morning of Tuesday, 9/11, just like it did every workday morning, playing local radio station K103. The DJ, local Portland, OR, radio legend Craig Walker and the news guy, John Erickson, were talking about a “small plane” that had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in NYC. I quickly got out of bed, dressed, and went out to turn on the TV and CNN, just in time to see Flight 175 crash into the south face of the south tower of WTC 1.
I thought, “this was no accident.”
I was in shock as events unfolded. I started late at the library that Tuesday, at 4PM, and so was glued to the TV until then as the the Pentagon was struck, the two burning WTC towers eventually collapsed, and finally, Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, brought down by the heroic passengers before the aircraft could strike its target (likely the U.S. Capitol).
I felt like I sleepwalked through work that night, myself and my coworkers still fixated on the events 3000 miles away. I had visited the World Trade Center in June 1979 as part of a post-high school graduation trip I took and couldn’t believe it was gone.
Like so many millions of people, the world changed for me that day and things were never the same.
Like many, I was at the day-job.
The hospital where I worked (and still work), was in the second day of a week-long Joint Commission inspection that happens every three years, and I was doing one last quick walk through of our outpatient imaging center and caught the same “small plane” report Dale mentioned from the TV in the waiting room.
I paused for a quick second, but had to keep moving.
I caught the unfolding of the rest of the day from waiting room to waiting room.
The inspection continued without interruption, and, in fact, our emergency preparedness and command set up was added to the review (we are the regional coordinating hospital).
That night, when I finally go home, I sat out in the blue-hour just after sundown, with my two youngest sons, noticing the quiet (we lived under the approach path to Atlanta-Hartsfield-Jackson Airport about 20 miles away), and at one point, heard – but didn’t see – a large, “heavy” aircraft ominously low-rumbling from the north to the south across the still darkening sky.
At the end of the week, when the airports opened again, I was at my eldest son’s football game when I saw my first plane since Tuesday on approach in the distance, seeing it somehow differently, and sometimes I still get that same feeling from time to time.
Out for breakfast with two close friends, laughing together as usual when we noticed the wait staff all clustered around the radio at the cash counter. It was unclear at this point what had happened, just that is was a catastrophe and we left our breakfast and stumbled out, going our separate ways, home to our television sets. It was horrific and unbelievable.