Remembering 9/11

[wraithfodder]

I had meant to post this last night, but it took me an hour of scouring the hard drive to find the photo...


This was the 'cross' of steel left after the attacks. I took this picture in September 2006. I went back to the site this past July and it's just a construction site now. I couldn't see anything to identify it as the site of the attacks...

I was at work, turned on the internet to surf the web briefly before starting work, and suddenly there was a photo on the Yahoo news page, of one of the towers with a hole in it. I remember thinking... how the hell could somebody fly a Cessna into a building THAT big? News was very sketchy and then more stuff started appearing on the web. Since I had AOL at work (it wasn't considered 'evil' back in those days) I IMed a friend who lived in the city. She told me what was happening. Then she told me the tower was gone. It just disappeared. She literally lived her entire life in the shadow of the towers and now it just crumbled into dust. I emailed a friend who worked in the city, only to get back a grim "fatal error" email notice. Fortunately she had been running late for work that day so wasn' ti nthe tower. Then someone came running down the hall saying that Washington DC had been attacked and my mind was going "world war III." Since it was chaos, I left, went home (lived very close) and oddly enough, popped tapes into both VCRS and chose CNN and CBS (which was the only station now remaining, as it was the only station with a spare antennae on the Empire State Building - the rest went down with the towers).


I never knew this existed until this summer when I took this photo. It's eerily stunning, and the remains of a sycamore tree root - The Trinity Root - details at www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp, but then I haven't gotten much into the city in recent years.

Now, when 9/11 comes around, oddly enough, I collect the NY Times and some other NY papers and stuff them in a box along with the original papers, and one day, I'll take a look at them and see how the world has changed. Alas, not for the better.

And there are more people's comment s on this topic at http://www.livejournal.com/misc/latestqotd.bml?qid=537

Comments

[darsynia.livejournal.com]

I was helping hubby drop off his car to get a new transmission, and I'd heard on the pop radio I was listening to that some prop plane had probably accidentally hit it. Hubby would SO not have cared about that but I remember sitting there for about five minutes wanting to go in to the storefront at AAMCO (transmission place) and tell him. Finally I gave in and locked the car up and walked over, right as the second plane hit and watched it live on the news television they had up. Spent the rest of the day watching it unfold.

I 'got to see' the whole thing as it happened, though (and this sounds really ungrateful, but...) because I live in Pennsylvania, I missed out on a lot of coverage of NY and DC, because they were showing footage of Shanksville.

The thing I found fascinating was, I'd been obsessed with Diablo II at the time, and was logged into the game chatting with people from around the world as we all watched the news, so I got to hear viewpoints from Australia and Germany and France and Brazil and so on. I can remember so clearly thinking that the towers would never collapse--right as one did.

I'm a 9/11... ugh, I don't want to say enthusiast, or junkie, but I have read and watched and researched a lot about it, because I'm interested in knowing.

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

I've probably seen most of the specials that came out on the attacks - the CBS special -watched that once, probably never again - and tons on Discovery, etc. I just thought when they collapsed, thank god they imploded down, and didn't topple over. The fatalities would be have been astronomical otherwise.