Remembering 9/11
Sep. 11th, 2008 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wraithfodderI 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
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
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Date: 2008-09-12 05:52 am (UTC)Becky was in the bathroom finishing up a shower (I think) when I turned on the motel room's TV on the morning of the 11th to see what kind of weather the Weather Channel was predicting for our drive across southern South Dakota and Minnesota. I somehow ended up on one of the network morning talk shows, where they were regularly interrupting for news updates about "a plane that had hit one of the towers". I called Becky out of the bathroom and we both watched the live coverage as the 2nd plane hit. We debated whether to continue our vacation or just drive back to Lincoln, and decided to continue. We then drove most of the 11th, watching the eerily clear blue skies (no jet contrails) all day. The next day, at The Mall of America, most of the stores were closed all morning to allow employees to attend a memorial/counseling service. I was then interviewed in our Minneapolis hotel, by a local reporter looking to get the stories of travelers trapped in the Twin Cities by the airport shutdowns. Several of the folks stuck in our hotel were from the New York area and were trying to get rental cars so they could drive home from Minneapolis.
Because it was "premiere week" on TV, I had set two VCRs to record 6 hours of episodes of shows I was interested in, so I had (and still have) a few hours of "live" network coverage of the events on tape, but from the evenings of the 11th and 12th.