9/11, eight years later

Was just a gorgeous day in the Toronto area....

I had been laid off from a dot com on Sept. 10 and since I got a decent package was looking forward to spending the rest of the year at home with my son who was a year and a half at the time.

On Sept. 11, I had put him in his stroller and gone up the street to get a paper. I had left the radio on and when we got back Howard Stern had just announced that the first plane had hit the WTC. I flipped on the TV and never turned it off the rest of the day. I kept all the papers from Sept. 12 but have never gone through them.

My wife works for Merrill Lynch in Toronto which at the time was in one of the big financial buildings downtown and she called in a real panic because nobody knew if those buildings would be a target with all the flights that were being rerouted to Canada. JR might recall but I think the Toronto subway was shut down that day.

Someone else mentioned living under a flight path at their local airport and how weird it was to see no planes flying. Our house is under a flight path and I'll never forget how eerie that was because it was so quiet.

I have posted the link to this before but some may not have seen it. Great stuff:

http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/2002/10/strangers.html

 

I was going to m second hour class in high school. Someone told me what had happened. I thought it was a pilot error.

When I got to my second class, I saw it on TV. Nobody knew what to think. Then our dumb bitch of a teacher made us take our geometry test. The last four classes of the day we were glued to the TV.

 

My house was too under a flight path. It was the quietest night I had ever had in that house. To this day I will never forget how strange it was going to bed and not hearing planes overhead.

 

First and foremost, I know this is a difficult day for a friend, Shaun Powell. Yes, the same Shaun Powell who was a top sports columnist at Newsday.
He lost his brother when the plane slammed into the Pentagon. My heart goes out to him and his family.
My heart goes out to all of those affected by this tragedy.
I vividly remember where I was when this all went down. It still bothers me today.

 

I remember it raining on the Friday after the attacks, which I think was the day Bush visited, and being almost unspeakably saddened by the sight of the rescuers sifting thru the rubble in the rain. It seemed to be the most hopeless sight ever.

On 9/11, I called my Dad at work, because it seemed to be the right thing to do. At that point, he was pretty laid-back about most things, and I began to wonder how fucked we were when concern crept into his voice as the footage from the Pentagon begin airing. "Well, shit," he said. "I better go watch this."

I had just begun a new (and loathsome) job and went into the office to help out, though there didn't seem to be much I could do as the new guy in sports. Turns out there was: One of my best friends was working in the small building between the Towers that was destroyed in the aftermath, though no one died in the building. He was on his way to work when the planes hit and was walking towards his building when the first Tower collapsed. I finally got in touch with him at about 3 and I wrote a local angle off his riveting first-person color, including how he turned and ran as the building fell.

At some point in the mid-afternoon, I was overcome by an exhaustion I don't think I've felt since. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open. I remember it took a long time before I could wake up in the morning and not immediately wonder if we'd been attacked.

 

Worth reading again.

I forget about the subway, Huggy.
I was working downtown at the time and I heard the news on the FAN 590 driving in. We didn't have a TV in our office so we all just listened on the radio. I remember leaving at around noon just to get home and be with my boys.

 

I can see why No One would try to say that 9/11 is No. 3 on the list of American tragedies. There are a lot of people who consider that day simply a Washington and New York story, which I wholly disagree with. Just look at the overreaching policy change that 9/11 wrought. Without 9/11, there is no war in Iraq, no war in Afghanistan, no thousands of American soliders dying. No Patriot Act. No airline security reform. 9/11 had such far reaching implications nationwide that it seems silly to compartmentalize it as a regional event.

Katrina nearly wiped an American city off the map, but how many people outside of NOLA/Sun Coast were truly affected by that? Not to minimalize Katrina at all. What has happened to the poor people of New Orleans, especially, is awful. But Katrina was no more of a tragedy than 9/11. And the economic collapse? Eh. No way.

 

Along the lines of the Toronto subway, all the NYC bridges and tunnels were closed down around 9 am.

I've always wondered if that was precaution, or if the chatter was off the charts.

It still amazes me they "only" got three planes.

 

Supposedly, there were others but those planes had to land when all the others were forced down. I think in the 9/11 Commission Report there were mentions of other planes. Can't quite recall the particulars.

 

I remember late in the afternoon that day that rumors were flying about gas prices skyrocketing around the country and how there was going to be a shortage of gasoline, etc.

As I was driving home from the office for dinner, every gas station I drove by was just packed with cars with people panicking and filling up. Prices at a few of the stations jumped up about 50 cents a gallon.

Just for the hell of it, I drove out to the far edge of town, where there were a couple of gas stations in the rural areas. Even those were jammed with cars.

By the time I went home that night, all the stations that were open were quiet, and prices had gotten back to normal.

One of the chains that operate stations in a lot of little towns in the state had their stations jack up the price of gas that day, to almost double the price (back then, I think gas was around $1.70 a gallon). They claimed it was to keep people from making a run on their stores and emptying the gas tanks, because they were worried about future supplies. Needless to say, they took a lot of heat in the days after for price gouging.

 

The one image that I will never forget was the initial shot of the first tower after it was hit. At that point CNN was reporting that a private plane had crashed into the tower. I remember looking at that hole and thinking "that's way too big for private plane."

 

I was living way out in the country on 12 acres with no television. Working the night sports desk, I had my mornings free. My son had been born less than a month before. I was digging a French drain around the house and was having a cup of coffee before walking our daughter half a mile to the bus stop when NPR reported the first plane hit.

My daughter and I walked to meet the bus and Jerry the bus driver asked if I had heard what happened. I said, "Yeah, a plane has hit the World Trade Center." "Now, it's two," he answered.

I spent most of the day digging and listening to the radio. That evening the TV coverage at work was almost surreal. It took weeks for the significance of the event to sink in.

Today, I'll pause and think of the thousands who suddenly lost their lives.

And I'll remember all those who were killed or injured in the courses of action ignited by that terrible day eight years ago.