9/10/10 – It’s the anniversary again. Below is the entire cumulative contents of all of my previous postings on 9/11, including the old comments posted by users. Please give it a read and feel free to post your own comments and experiences. We’d love to hear from you. I have temporarily enabled public commenting for this, so you don’t even have to sign up for an account to post a comment.
Where were you on that fateful day
Originally wrtten by Jim Trottier – Thursday, 09 September 2004
When huge historic events happen that seem to effect everyone in the world in some way or another we seem to remember everything about that day in our lives much more vividly than most other days. So let’s discuss where we were and what we were doing on that fateful morning of September 11th, 2001. Here’s MY recollection: I was working at Cirqon Technologies in Gurnee, Illinois. I was a PC Tech there, and had recently moved to that department full-time after 6 months of working half-days in the chem lab and half-days in the IT department. I was at my workstation in IT, next to my boss, Mark Stricklin. Mark and I got along great as co-workers, and he was an awesome boss. He was also a Man of The Cloth, and is very respected in his community. He does a lot of charity work, and enjoys helping everyone he can, so this event seemed to hit him extra hard. Anyway, we were working at our respective workstations when a co-worker came over from another cubicle and said a plane had just ran into the World Trade Center! To us we began to assume some sort of accident where small aircraft struck the building. We wondered, but weren’t overly concerned. A while later the same co-worker returns–more excited now–and says ANOTHER plane hit the OTHER tower now! Ok, now we began to get concerned. It was certainly no accident now. Next we learned that ANOTHER plane had struck the Petagon. I got the chills. The events ran through my head over and over as if to force me to memorize them forever, as I sure will. Shortly thereafter we also learned that yet another plane was still flying and possibly hijacked. Jeff, Cirqon’s V.P., sent our Plating Surpervisor out to buy a small television so we could watch what was happening. He returned with one, and set it up in the conference room. We didn’t have an antenna except the small one included with the TV, so the reception was pretty bad. We managed to rig up a better antenna though, using some wire and the window frame in the conference room. Still fuzzy, but at least you could see a halfway decent picture. We watched the rest of the day as they re-ran the two planes hitting the towers over and over again, the Petagon burning, and the eventual Pennsylvania field crash of the fourth aircraft. I dug out the boombox that I had stowed away in IT (I put it away after boomboxes were banned from every department a few weeks earlier) and tuned it to an all-news channel so we could keep up on events when we weren’t able to watch the TV in the conference room (when we needed to get some actual work done). I remember quite a bit of debate that day on the radio with structural analysts who insisted that the towers could absorb that type of impact, and since they still fell there must have been some other “inside” event as well which contributed to their collapse. As it turned out, that was totally false, and the towers were actually designed to absorb the impact of much smaller planes containing much less fuel–they were, after all, designed at the turn of the century when planes the size of today’s weren’t even imagined. Overall it was an incredibly moving and horrifying day. My boss was deeply saddened, and consoled a few of his friends on the phone during his free time that day, and for several days after. Let’s hear what your experience was. Here are all of the responses that users have submitted from the two other times that I posted this article:
Jayson and I were actually sleeping. He was off work because he had just had his appendix removed. His mom called and said we were under attack—so we ran to the TV and thats basically where we sat for the rest of the day. It just seemed so unreal–I remember looking at the TV and thinking —this has to be a bad joke–it really cannot be happening. I was also calling my family and friends–knowing they were ok, but just needing to talk with them because so many did not get a chance to talk to theirs after that day.
–ishellbell
2004/09/09 19:51 I was in downtown Chicago about a block away from the Sears Tower at a client. At that time details were still sketchy and they thought another plane was on it’s way to Chicago. All buildings were being evacuated. I had no choice but to head back to the train station and get as far away as possible. Unfortunately that’s what the entire loop was doing. The station was wall to wall people. Metra handled everything perfectly. Under the circumstances, schedules were history. They just started loading trains up and running them out as they filled up. They never even charged anyone. I always meant to send Metra a letter commending them and their conductors for going above and beyond on such a frightening day, but never did.
When I got back into town, I just went home and spent the morning watching the coverage with my wife.
It will be forever etched in my memory.
–chad
2004/09/09 20:01 I was also at work(DaimlerChrysler). When a co-worker of mine came to me and told me about the first plane hitting the building, and that it was a passenger plane. Right away I knew that this was big news, having been to New York and I’ve seen how massive those 2 buildings were. So right away I went to my locker and got my boombox. We all kept working (on the assembly line) and listened to the radio as the horrible events of history were revealed. Some of my co-workers that were near me also started paying attention to the radio. It was a day that I will never forget. It is right up there with the day that Kennedy was shot in Dallas Texas. Even today I still remember where I was and what I was doing on that fatefull day.
–wainer53
2004/09/12 10:13 I had just come downstairs and turned on the TV. There was this horrible site of a plane hitting the first tower. I called my sister in Waukegan immediately, and she told me about the pentagon crash. Then while talking to her the second plane hit the second tower. It was devastating. This was the first attack in the United States.
I was 7 years old and walking home from a movie at the Vogue Theater, with my mother and sister when the paperboys were yelling “Extra”, “Extra – Japs bomb Pearl Harbor”. My mother was shocked and I in turn was also upset, but being only 7years old, I didn’t even know what a Pearl Harbor was what’s more where Pearl Harbor was ….
This attack brought back that 7 year old fear, and was a real eye opener about how vulnerable we all are. I continued to watch TV and of course they kept replaying the horrific crashes and live voice recordings from the victims in the air. The shock and grief were unavoidable. The tears and prayers were also unavoidable.
What brave people aboard those planes, and especially the victims whose actions diverted the fourth plane from the White House, as they all knew they were victims of terrorism and going to die.
Pearl Harbor, The assassinations of Martin Luther King, President Kennedy, and Senator Bob Kennedy, the attack on the Twin Towers, Pentagon and White House, the attack on the children in the Russian School, will always be unforgettable hurts in our hearts and souls.
We must always remember the victims in this tragedy and all victims of terrorism, and do everything in our power to avoid a reoccurance. Do not be afraid or embarrased to be vigilant and observant of anything out of the ordinary. Be alert and report anything that looks suspicious to the authorities. We must do everything in our power to not be victims of any wrongdoing. Support our brave servicemen and servicewomen and law enforcement personnel. Help eliminate wrong doings.
–mahirose
2007/09/13 11:31 Well where to start… I got married on the 9th of September and was in Vegas on my honeymoon. I was of course in bed late and woke around 11 am, we began to walk the town and went to New York New York. As we were walking through i notice there werent very many people. Then we walked by a TV and i saw the events and since i was in New York New York i assumed it to be a movie plug, so we kept on walking and i ran into a man who was watching a small tv with others crowded around him and they were all in tears so i asked them what was going on when they all looked at me and at the same time they said we had been attacked. Well we hurried back to our room to check the news to confirm what had happened. Before you know it the streets of Vegas were empty as well as the casinos. Of course there were no flights going in and out so we could not leave to come back home until flights resumed because everyone had jumped on buses and rented cars by that time so we had to stay a few extra days, the flight home was one of the worst and scariest flights ive ever been on, as we landed everyone stood and cheered, happy just to be home safe.
–WhoDunIt
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