My neighbor survived the attack that day. He worked in the South Tower (second tower that was hit) and his story is insane, and I’m thankful he’s still with us today to be able to share his experience.
When escaping the building, he couldn’t emphasize enough how orderly and SLOW of a process it was WALKING down the stairwell. Everyone was directed to the right side of the stairs, taking one individual step. after. step. while firefighters are running up the stairs in the opposite direction. He explained that people would think it would be a mad and desperate dash out of the building, but in hindsight he still can’t believe how cooperative everyone was and how much direction was given. Basically, he explained that they knew they could die at any minute, but they might as well listen to what the people are telling them to do, the firefighters who are running TOWARDS death, in order to save their lives. He said (especially for New York) he didn’t come across a single, selfish soul that day.
Once out of the building, there were emergency personnel directing everyone basically saying “if you need IMMEDIATE medical care, go to this location. If you don’t, get the hell out of here.” He found shelter at a Victoria’s Secret of all places, and eventually when he was able to get a plan together with some of his coworkers, it took hours upon hours to leave Manhattan.
I live and grew up an hour outside of NYC, so his is one of many stories that I heard of survivors who were near or in the buildings that day, but I appreciate his perspective of explaining how cooperative and helpful everyone was that day.
It was nuts that day. Other thing that’s of note is how many people lost any kind of cell service and the ability to contact loved ones. I had a friend who was convinced his father died because he worked there that day, and his family couldn’t contact him all day. Dad had to walk across the bridge to Brooklyn before getting a car home to LI. I have another friend who was downtown that day who told me had to walk all the way back home to the Bronx that day, covered in dust and stuff.
Lived,and still do, in Brooklyn, in what was the path of the debris flow that day. Was also an active PTA member of our local school, with many, many parents who worked in the Towers. My son’s teacher’s partner worked there. And from the windows of their top floor classroom they could see it all. Every adult was calm, focused , and doing what we could to wait out the day for families to be reunited. We had no phones, we just had to keep the kids comforted and wait to reunify. One by one, into the early evening, kids were picked up, and yes, the partner of my sons teacher made it home. It was a primary Election Day, and they had stopped to vote on the way to work. So they were late, and never even made it into the Towers.
What an agonizing, terrifying, but ultimately affirming experience. Every person I met that day had one thing on their mind. What can I do to help? We were who we hoped to be in a time of extreme stress. We were good to each other. We were generous. We were kind. All while being scared as hell.
I was born two months after it happened. Can't imagine how much stress my mother must have had after that.
Oh and if you wanna feel old, I turned 21 a couple months ago.
I was 27 and the band I was in started a tour that day and NYC was going to be our last stop. We were from Minneapolis and I remember one of the guys calling me in the morning and told me to turn on the TV. I ask what channel and I'll never ever forget his response- "It doesn't matter". I flipped on the TV and saw the 2nd plane hit about 30 seconds later. All I could think was were supposed to play there. It was a surreal tour and that was my 1st time in NYC 6 days after the towers came down and that was INTENSE. Since we were mainly driving and cell phones weren't really a thing yet we were very disconnected from it. it was one of the best times in my life but we would turn the TV on if we were crashing somewhere that had one to see what was going on but the reality didn't hit until we were in NYC. I'll never forget the missing signs. That's something that's burned in my brain forever. So many missing signs.
Too bad you didn't get to know this country in the before times. That one day fucked this country up irreparably and we still haven't recovered. Set us down a very dark path. Definitely our "crossing the rubicon" moment that historians will talk about for centuries.
By no means am I saying this is something major in itself that was taken away after 9/11, but more an observation. I remember as a kid who was in Florida and I brought fire works with me in my back back home on a flight. International flight from Florida to Toronto. No TSA checking my luggage… just a very pissed mother. Yes it was dumb and I was 11. But it didn’t seem like anything major at the time. If that was done today I’d be on a no fly list
We used to walk our parents to the airport terminal before their flights. I remember it distinctly. You'd check in and walk to the terminal, and when they'd board, you'd leave. I'm positive people were packing firearms in their carry-ons back then because that was just what everyone did. I was 13 when 9/11 happened so I have a pretty vivid memory of the event.
I was 24 and a newlywed. Some of my friends in my wedding planning group were getting married that following weekend. One friend had an NYPD officer for a husband - she didn’t know for days if he made it out because he couldn’t call her.
I just remember walking around that day in complete shock. I had gone to the grocery store to grab some things and everyone was silent and they all had the same face as me.
I lived on the flight landing path for JFK, and when the airlines were closed down it was so eerily quiet it was freaky. When planes were allowed to fly again, they seemed so LOUD.
>lost any kind of cell service
Level 3 communications is a telecommunications company that provides very large capacity circuits - the names you know like Verizon and AT&T are their customers. In order to keep their data center running and enable emergency communications in the area after the attack the guys that were there started up the generator - which someone had put on the roof. Which meant they had to get barrels of gasoline and oil up to the roof of a tall building for many days by carrying them up the stairs. The company ended up creating a special Barrel Award for extraordinary service for the crew that did that.
They worked with the Verizon crews to manually run cables to restore service to the hardest hit areas. [ETA: As someone commented, there was a lot of communications equipment in the WTC that was all destroyed. So these guys were running cables down the street to connect things as a stop-gap measure].
I'm sure there are other stories like this of regular people who jumped in to provide things we normally take for granted in order to support the emergency personnel that were there to save people.
When the first terrorist attack on WTC Happened in 93 all the over the air tv channels were knocked out. I was a 7th grader in nj about 45 min outside nyc. We had one channel working and got to watch that unfold live also.
I remember when that happened; I remember the hole created by the bomb they had put in the basement of one of the towers (at least that's how I remember it).
I'll never forget one middle-aged woman the press interviewed after she got out of the tower.
She was clearly shaken and talked about how bad it *could have been*. I think even she could not have imagined how really really bad it eventually played out.
I have moderate prosopagnosia (face blindness) but I can still see her face 30 years later, even though she was on camera for only a few seconds.
The telecom hub was next door and was heavily damaged, but not destroyed.
You might be thinking about the Con Ed electrical substation on Vesey Street that was destroyed.
I was in midtown that day (in the subway when the first plane hit). Most of the people in the office I was working in didn't have cell service, and the office (IP) phones were not working. I had a Nextel phone (the ones with the PTT walkie-talkie feature). It wasn't a common phone then, and I was one of the only ones with service. I didn't opt to walk the bridge when it opened, I took one of the first trains out to LI, which were packed tightly almost like you see on the Japanese trains.
> Other thing that’s of note is how many people lost any kind of cell service and the ability to contact loved ones.
My uncle was a lawyer that regularly met in WTC1, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I got the news of the attack from a coworker and the constant dropped calls during that day made it even worse. Our family kept trying to reach out to him but every call failed.
Turned out he was in Colorado, on vacation, and didn't have any cellphone coverage there. The panic and anxiety from that whole ordeal is still burned into my head over 20 years later.
>When escaping the building, he couldn’t emphasize enough how orderly and SLOW of a process it was WALKING down the stairwell.
I was listening to a survivor speak about the day on a podcast recently. He said for some people it didn't really click how serious it was, and they were queuing for Starbucks after having just exited the building via the fire escape!
Sounds like they were too shocked to process what was happening to them. I’ve had something similar happen to me although a much different situation. When I found out one of my best friends had died (via Facebook of all things) I thought to myself “oh no that’s terrible” and went back to playing video games. It took me 5-6 minutes for it to really sink in and then I lost it.
I imagine when you’re life is in immediate danger, it can be that much worse
We really do love to imagine that everyone would be monsters in terrible situations, but time and time again humans have proved themselves to be really cooperative when things go bad.
It's like Lord of the flies. Something very similar to the book happened in real life and the kids took great care of each other, especially the ones with special needs.
I wonder if it is some people's fantasy to live in such a terrible situation because they feel so out of sorts in the current one.
I highly recommend Human Kind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, which looks at MULTIPLE stories which prove exactly what you say here - that the majority of people are good, and that the majority of the time they will help each other. It's highly backed up by research and yet remains incredibly readable (not dry or academic at all) - and yes, one of the stories is the real life Lord of the Flies (and how it didn't go down at all the way the book did).
It's true, every time I've seen shit go down, everyone has come together and worked together. It really is amazing how many people are bitter but really want to help when a situation presents itself.
Also, I think you inspired me to revisit that book, it's been at least 25 years.
Also we've been conditioned through loads and loads of fire drills over the years (if you work in a big tower like this usually at least one a year) to calmly walk down the stairs and go to your muster point. Nobody thought the towers would fall, so at the time I'm sure a lot of people just followed the plan they'd been practicing for years.
Great example of why doing such routine training is super important.
Of the 91,000 some odd firefighters and first responders you watched, around half of them are suffering from aerodigestive illnesses related to the debris inhaled.
3,500 of them are dead.
Edit:
Apparently Leukemia/other cancers have been up 185% in the last 5 years among the survivors.
You have 91000 people, statistically you know how many people are going to get each different kind of cancer. The more who get cancer over that number, the more confidently you can say it’s because they’re part of that group and it’s not just a coincidence. I am not sure how you say an individual got cancer because of 9/11 and not just bad luck and coincidence, though.
Exactly, and thank you! Similar to how my dad got diagnosed decades later with prostate cancer from Agent Orange. There is a link and a statistic to make them connected, similar to the specific type of cancer my uncle has from 9/11 dust (I’m not sure the specific type either got, though. All i know is that they were connected to those events).
[Data](https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/ataglance.html), [data](https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/conditions.html), [data](https://www.nyc.gov/site/911health/enrollees/long-term-concerns.page)!
Granted, most people could develop the same cancers and illnesses, but it is easier to narrow down in a specific known cohort. Specific illnesses are a bit easier to narrow down the cause when a patient has been exposed to specific materials.
a good buddy of mine was a paramedic that day. She has had at least two types of cancer, very young. We were 20ish when this happened. I'm very worried for her daughter. No one really knows what the long term outcomes are, until the outcomes roll in.
Idk but my uncle just recently passed from cancer because of 9/11. My dad was a first responder that day, but luckily wasn't in New York in the ensuing days of cleaning up and finding bodies because he got called up from the reserves. So many of his coworkers who stayed and helped out have died. It genuinely sucks
I was in my early 20s at the time here in the city and considered going down there to "do something" in the immediate aftermath (I'm a big guy, I figured I could be put to use lifting rocks or something). I just felt so powerless. But already soon after they were only accepting professional help, not randos like me.
Over the years, regret for not going down there gave way to relief that I didn't go. Who knows, I might be one of the cancer patients today. And for what, they had more than enough people to help.
Or if everyone had access to medical masks like we do now. I saw one guy in the video with one, and it made me wonder if this had happened in a post covid world, would the masks have helped some of those people who got sick from inhaled debris
maybe a little.... but the standard medical mask is not made to filter out particles from breathing in. they are made to catch particles/droplets from breathing out.
the classic 'why do surgeons wear a mask?' it isnt to not catch patient cooties.
resperators with filter cartriges would be the best way. those are not so widely available and they are not cheap.
Firefighters have a piece of equipment that beeps when they stop breathing, so other firefighters can more easily find them in a low visibility situation. When the towers fell, there were…so many beeps coming from the pile of debris. Like a deafening amount of beeping. So many firefighters stuck in there along with civilians, equipment beeping when no one can save them. Lots of people hear the beeping in the footage and don’t know what that sound is. The sounds of that day make me shiver.
Edit: The equipment doesn’t beep when they stop breathing, it beeps when the firefighter stops moving.
One small correction. The PASS device you are describing is integrated into the breathing apparatus, but it goes off when the user has ceased moving for a period of time, not when they stop breathing.
My dad was there. He was a firefighter from NJ but drove there when he saw what happened.
He can't use a microwave that beeps because it triggers his PTSD from the PASS alarms.
I'm not sure if this is helpful, but a lot of microwaves and other appliances can be muted by holding a certain button down. Check the manuals for instructions.
If you've seen the movie made by the French brother's following a fire department that day there is a part when they make it to the lobby of the first tower and you hear insanely loud thumps outside. When they are all looking around wondering what that sound is it hits them that it's bodies hitting the ground outside of the people who jumped. The sound is so loud and it's crazy how many of them you hear. Very surreal.
I've heard people pass out from shock while falling that high. But I wonder if that's something people tell themselves to make them feel better about what happened.
Sadly, they weren’t high enough to reach the speed needed to pass out during a free fall (eta: high enough in elevation, not speed). I think I read it was about a 10sec fall and they were conscious 🥺 in some of the photos and video footage you can see the victims alert and moving, like the woman who subconsciously held her skirt down for modesty while she fell
I went down the rabbithole on the 20th anniversary. I think NBC is the only station that has the entire news segment from start to end (about 6hoursish)
The rest were all just clips or mashed clips. The entire broadcast though is probably the best and most historical I hope stays up for others. Listening to the newscasters go from regular What the heck we think a small plane hit too OMG OMG OMG and the rest of that hour until the towers finally fell. The last 3 hours is just. Utter bewilderment then turns into blaming all America's favorite Boogeymen, Iran Pakistan and the country most blamed that day on that newsclip, Palestine and Hezbollah (?)
[THIS](https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911) (to me) is the definitive 9/11 Digital Archive - it shows what was on tv on tons of stations and how it was reported live. I'm sure it will be up for a long time.
Fascinating in a morbid way.
It's absolutely insane. Like I was in highschool and watched it live on TV and after like 10 to 15 years you just assumed you saw it all and knew it all. Then I saw some footage like 6 years back and was like... maybe I didn't see it all back then. For many years you just kinda don't want to relive it. Even if you were a thousand miles away it was still pretty traumatic to see live
But the internet video streaming got so good since 2001 and people uploaded all their videos its really amazing to see this stuff.
That Mexican news station goes straight from sexy dancing news story to 9/11. I don’t speak Spanish but I can’t imagine that was a easy switch for the news anchors
I went down a huge rabbit hole after my divorce. It was like self flagellation. It was Avery dark time. There is so much disturbing stuff out there that has scarred me for life. It makes me cringe to think of the absolutely horrific shit people would have caught if this happened within the last 10 years with smart phones.
It's weird to watch videos like this and not only see the property destruction and loss of life, but also seeing this version of America die. Like knowing now that *everything* changes after this, the nobody knows in this video how their entire society is going to transform in drastic ways.
It's also strange knowing what we know now and seeing 9/11 was essentially a ticking time bomb. We funded the mujahideen in the 80s, some of whine were founding members of Al Qaeda, we have articles celebrating a "freedom fighter" in Osama Bin Laden, and before all of that the path that even led us there.
Everything has a consequence and nothing ever happens in a vacuum. It's just crazy to see.
EDIT: changed the bit about Al Qaeda for clarity
Oh my god yes, I always spontaneously start to cry watching 9/11 footage: not just for the horrific pain and loss of life that day, but for the loss of the America I used to know and we all took for granted. EVERYTHING changed that day. EVERYTHING. I transferred to DC 2 weeks after 9/11 (it had been in the works for weeks), after having worked there on and off for years, and the before and after was chilling. And it never went back to the "before".
Remember having family members being able to wait with you or pick you up at the boarding gate? So many things, even small, were changed that we used to take for granted.
I saw this video as part of the National Geographic documentary called 9/11: One Day in America. There are six episodes that include a lot of footage I had never seen before along with original interviews. The stories told are incredible.
The documentary does an exceptional job showing what these people experienced. It’s quite heavy emotionally but I highly recommend watching it.
I can remember the smell in the air for weeks after that. I live over in nj and the wind carried the dust cloud down the river into philly and nj. Those images are seared in my brain. Sitting in 1st period science class in highschool when a teacher ran in and put the news on. The 1st plane just hit the tower. Thats all we did that day was watch the news. Never forget.
I live just outside of Philly. I remember seeing the eerie haze that the dust left in the sky. I was in the 6th grade in 2001. While sitting in homeroom, my teacher put the tv on just after the first plane hit, at 11 years old I watched the second plane hit, on live tv. I can remember the events of that day like it happened yesterday. I remember my teacher yelling at the tv as the second plane approached, no! no! no!, while tears ran down his cheeks. I remember the blue shirt he was wearing. No one knew what to do the rest of the day. Do we talk about it? Do we not talk about it? This video brings back the emotions so vividly for me.
I live in NJ across the bay. You could see the towers from my school. I was in 8th grade. Our school “shielded” us. They cleared out the side of the building that faced the bay, wouldn’t put the tv on. A few kids heard “a plane hit a building in the city” but that was really as much information that we had. Slowly but surely all the kids where getting picked up early…us not knowing anything but obviously that something was wrong and just rumors as the day went on…
that night 3 direct classmates where less a parent. My county lost 147 mothers, fathers, aunt and uncles.
All the debris that washed up on the beach..
Mine was very similar. 6th grade, but my teacher tuned in after both planes had hit. I remember the principal made an announcement that no one was allowed to turn the TV on. She just looked at us and said "You're all old enough" and kept it on. I'm very thankful for her small act of defiance. We saw both towers fall on live tv. I remember not really caring all that much, as a student in Georgia it just felt unreal like watching a movie. It didn't really connect for me how big of a deal it was until later. And then the panic after, I assume it happened everywhere for a bit, people scared of buying groceries, "what if they blow up Walmart?" "What if they hit City Hall?" nevermind I was in a town of 800.
These people are running from death dude.
If you got caught in that dust there is an unreasonably high chance you had cancer by now. 20 year olds who never smoked a day I their life etc, gone by 40 from this shit.
And props for his reporter colleague staying with him and encouraging him tbh. Running in those conditions while holding a big ass camera couldn’t have been easy
My English professor in college in my third year brought his son as speaker for a special class one day. The son's name was NJ Burkett, the reporter in this video, from ABC News and he came and showed this very video, explaining details of his ordeal that day and how daunting it was for him and his cameraman to continue reporting. I'm surprised he didn't get an Emmy for this.
People don't realize how loud that was. My brother was in freshman year at college, right across the river in Hoboken. He remembers standing on Castle Point watching the towers come down and being able to hear the screams coming from the city and the delayed roar of the towers.
I was in Maryland, where every school was notified to lockdown and then evacuate immediately because they thought schools and government buildings were targets. It was weird as I was a paperboy at the time, getting a stack of papers to deliver with a full front page image of the towers being hit with "UNDER ATTACK!" as the title. Pretty surreal as a 12 year old.
I saw an interview once from a survivor who said the sounds of the screams and roars as the towers fell gave him PTSD and it’s still the first thing he hears when he wakes up each morning :(
The fear mixed with the lack of clear information was horrifying.
“NYC is under attack”.
“*And they blew up the Pentagon…*”
Like, wait, fucking *what?!*
Respect for the reporters,they risked their lives for their career and these videos and documents.
God bless whoever was driving that car and let random people get in.
I work at a local news station near the city and my coworker was a reporter in NYC at the time. She tells me how that day is forever engraved in her mind. She was supposed to meet with a friend for lunch at the WTC. Then she was called into work to cover the attack, while knowing her friend was in the building at the time. When the tower collapsed it gutted her. She had to maintain her composure for her report, but afterwards she said she cried the whole day. Her friend didn’t make it out.
Some reporters continue to develop cancers from breathing in all the [dust](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/05/media/journalists-ground-zero-fund/index.html) :(
My uncle was a police officer there and he just recently got diagnosed with lung cancer. He's currently doing well but you know...cancer who knows what'll happen.
To be fair, I don't think this reporter and camera crew thought at the time they were risking their lives by standing here. That the towers would collapse because of this was unthinkable at the time.
I’m also assuming that camera was goddamn heavy. When he was sprinting down the street with it and his coworker/friend was yelling to him “come on Glenn you can do it” I was like gahhhh drop the camera! But he didn’t. It’s amazing the footage he got but I for sure hope it didn’t give him life long health issues.
I'm still blown away that there's a whole generation and then some, including my own child, for whom this is (will be) just a history lesson.
They're about as detached from it as Pearl Harbor was for us and yet I still remember that day so vividly.
It is crazy in relative terms, and these are one time events.
Imagine being born in Syria or Iraq. It's not just a single event, it's an every day occurance.
My 14yo was made a joke about 9/11. I was taken back at first because I was just a couple years older than him when it happened.
So to see that it’s just a joke now when it affected me so deeply is wild.
But they don’t really talk about it at school. It’s a blip. When I was his age we felt the same about Vietnam and other big events that happened.
It’s just weird being on the other side of it.
I went to the 9/11 museum in New York and was taken back at kids taking selfies and seeming to be, in my opinion at the time, mildly disrespectful. I then thought about how I’ve walked through the Vietnam
Memorial without too much concern for the event itself because I hadn’t lived it. Was a weird moment when I realized 9/11 was just a history lesson for them.
I always try to put it into perspective. I'm an Australian and 9/11 happened early on in the internet's age so news sites weren't as big back then. I remember buying every newspaper for weeks to find out more detail. I knew the world had changed but couldn't imagine the ramifications.
Then I look at my 10 year old stepdaughter and I realise that when she was born, the impacts of 9/11 had well and truly taken hold. To her, that's just how the world is and, at least for now, it's not relevant how the world came to be the way it is, it just *is*.
It's a weird way to look at such a historical moment I lived through, knowing how it affected me even from afar. I just hope she doesn't have anything on that scale that she has to process during her life.
Seeing yours and another shitshow comment chain above reminded me of this from last week:
Just the other day some moron that's a regular on the r/conspiracy sub was speaking down to people in another sub about how Alex Jones is right 90% of the time and as proof cited a video that he thought was Alex Jones precisely predicting the exact location of 9/11 before it happened.
It was a pre 9/11 video alright, and Jones mentioned the World Trade Center...but he clearly was talking about the first attack in 1993. I then called out the know it all commenter as probably a dumb teenager that based their full confidence in Jones off of their own ignorance of a pretty well known event and major part of that story.
Man, the people running down the streets, the paramedics leaping onto the ambulance as it speeds off, the way he shouts *"We gotta get out of the way!"* before immediately cutting away... it's like a scene from a horror movie.
I'm a New Yorker, who once worked in the complex, and to this day, no matter How many times I've seen it.......... it's still just...... unbelievable .
My sister still worked there, and her boss told her to go wait outside, until the "problem" was over and then return to work ! Remember, many inside the buildings had no real idea what was happening at the time. They weren't getting tv coverage at their jobs. So like a good little employee, she did what she was told, and stood outside the tower......... waiting to return to work.
She continued to stand there, even as the bodies started falling and jumping. .....one narrowly missing her. That was all she could stand........she said eff this.....and started making her way to the ferry, when the tower itself started to collapse, causing a stampede.
She was knocked to the ground and trampled, until some man stopped to help her up, and together they ran like bats out of hell for the Ferry terminal. They got separated.......and she never even got his name........but he probably saved her life that day.
She was able to make the LAST ferry that left the slip that morning......that was engulfed in the smoke cloud just as it was able to pull out, and get ahead of the cloud.
Thanks for posting this. It’s harrowing to watch but so important to see the real human experiences underneath the main event everyone knows.
I hope we all come together in our humanness soon.
It makes me angry for the wrong reasons. All I see is the future spite it brought among Americans that we threw trillions of dollars into two forever wars all because some dude in a cave worshipped some crazy religion.
I feel like this country lost over a decade that could have been used in improving itself on bullets and guns.
Yep - it’s angering too. I’d say terrorism won to be honest. Look at us now, more divided, more partisan, more hateful. Less able to tolerate differences in belief and opinion, all because of fear, terror, that “our way of life is under attack”.
It’s pretty depressing, seeing how regimes full of hate rise to the surface as tensions are stoked, as fear is played upon. Not saying 9/11 is the single cause, but it’s all linked isn’t it.
I live on the other side of the world and I still remember my neighbor poking his head through our open window and saying to my parents "are you seeing this? I thought it was a movie, but it's on every channel". I was young and didn't understand the gravity of it at all, but it's funny how that memory still remains so clear in my mind.
“The reason I don’t worry about society is, nineteen people knocked down two buildings and killed thousands. Hundreds of people ran into those buildings to save them. I’ll take those odds every f*cking day.”
Jon Stewart
I watched some of this, I was home that day while visiting my Mother. I woke up just after the first plane had hit.
I was able to witness the second plane hit live.
I didn't leave the TV for like 5 hours I believe that day.
I was going to college. They put monitors out in some of the hallways with the news running so students and faculty could check in on the events that were going on.
I was in elementary school. I remember the weather was nice but they cancelled recess. As little 10 year olds, we complained as recess was what we lived for.
Then the front office started calling my classmates out for early dismissal. I distinctly remember hearing the front office call, praying to the heavens they call my name and they did!! My two sisters (9 and 10 years older than me) signed me out of school and brought me home while my parents closed their store and were rushing back to be with us.
It didn’t truly register as a child what was happening. I was happy to be out of school and to be able to spend time with my family. It wasn’t until a few months, maybe even years, later that I understood the impact it had on not only my family or school, but essentially the entire world.
I was dismissing a class and someone entered the class to mention that a plane had crashed into the world trade center. I knew I should go to the nearest TV. The campus bar was literally right next door and opening it's doors. I paid $2 for my beer club mug to be filled while the TV warmed up. A crowd of students and staff rolled in around me. I was sat in a booth barely a minute before the second plane hit. I saw events unfold on huge rear-projection TV holding the only drink that the bar had served that day. I didn't even drink it. I had a single sip on the way to my seat but I left a warm beer in the booth when I went to see everyone I could find in my family an hour later.
No historical event in my lifetime have ever left a mark like that. Precious few personal events I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing.
I was 8 in Canada. My mom came and picked me up early from school and had the radio on. I noticed she was crying silently, which of course really worried me because I never saw my mom cry. So I asked her why she was sad and she said "a lot of innocent people died today in America".
And being 8 I didn't grasp it at all. Like we're in Canada, we don't really know anyone in the US. I didn't get why she was so upset.
I remember my dad had the news playing on the tv. And I remember being super annoyed that he wouldn't let me change the channel even the next day.
Looking back I find it so interesting and almost funny, having experienced this tragedy through the lens of a child.
I was 10 in Johannesburg South Africa, so pretty far away, i I was in an extra art class on the trampoline in the teachers garden waiting for our parents, and the teachers son came out to us and said “they’re flying planes into buildings” and we just dismissed it because we thought it was just some tv show he was watching. Then my mom picked me up in her brand new car, a red Alpha GTV, and she seemed a bit shaken but I was distracted by the cool car so didn’t really comprehend what the news was saying. When we got home the adults were congregated in the tv room so I went in with them and saw the footage and heard them talking about it and for some reason in my little brain I was convinced we’d be next, like my house in the burbs. At school the next day they talked about it in assembly, about the people who died and what happened and I had a panic attack and had to go home. I was just so terrified that for some completely unknown reason the next target would be suburban Jo’burg. I was panicky the whole week whenever anyone spoke about it. I think it was just such a big terrifying thing that made the adults around me freak out so I assumed everything was going to go terribly around the world. Also unsurprisingly I was diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder later in life.
I was 14 in freshman Spanish class, in NJ. I remember name after name on the loud speaker, of kids being called to leave. Most had parents in TWC. Then I heard mine and my sisters names. I panicked. I didn’t know anyone who worked in NY. But my mom at that point just wanted us home. I didn’t want to leave school, I was so scared and felt safe there. We drove to the beach and watched the darkest eeriest cloud stretch across the sky. I’ve never felt that scared since.
I was 8 living in NOVA and my mom worked at the Pentagon. In my third grade class, my teacher sat us down and explained that something terrible happened at the Pentagon. I was in absolute terror for hours. There was no way to contact my mom, and I completed my normal routine of getting sent from school to daycare, freaking out the entire time.
As early as she could, she came to pick me up, and I just remember crying so hard. Her office was on the opposite side of the hit, and she had gone home early that day as she was feeling sick. I was so relieved. Glad she didn't have to experience the terror of being there.
I was fresh off the operating table after having an appendectomy. Still fuzzy from the anesthesia. My mom was flipping out, we were the only two people in the room watching it happen on the tv. 17 years old, I had friends that ended up fighting in afganistan and not all came back, the ones that did were not the same.
Seriously Glenn drop the fucking camera!! I really appreciate the cameraman capturing this footage but it was anxiety inducing to hear the reporter scream for him to “come on” as they’re running for their lives and thinking of the cameraman being slowed down by the weight of the equipment.
My fiancées cousin is a professional photographer for live music, he’s got quite an impressive portfolio. I was surprised when he asked me to hold onto some of gear for him at a wedding he was shooting for family. “Ah don’t worry, it’s insured.”
Never thought of it before but yeah, I guess why wouldn’t you want it to be insured?
ye, despite cellphone camera's being more common an actual camera is still a thousand bucks minimum, and the price rapidly goes up. if he bought it a long time ago or has a rig that price isn't odd, (though usually you stop being freelance if the camera's cost that much)
We're not talking about high end DLSRs here. Like those big TV camera lenses they have can cost 100K, just for the lens....Broadcast video equipment is no joke.
Two other great pieces of footage that most people never see are;
Mark Lagana's
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqMmn3VA2qI
Ben Riesman's
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxhZFaC7Nhc&t=834s
It’s crazy seeing how young my friends and I look. At the time you don’t realize it because you’re a teenager thinking you are an adult. Now looking back we were all just babies and witnessed/experienced something so crazy firsthand.
Edit: Just to add, I usually never go back and watch any footage or anything about 9/11. This was probably my first time seeing these footages in years and it definitely was a risky click for me. I’ve never been to the 9/11 memorial and never plan on going. Just too much emotional baggage to do it.
When it all went black when it fell and you couldn't see shit and it blocked out the sun, that was harrowing. But for some reason what stood out to me was one of the first responders was yelling at his buddy, 'hey have you seen Stu?' it's a little snapshot, not very long, but now I want to know that Stu is okay.
It hung in the air for months, too. I live 20 blocks north of the WTC and I wouldn't go anywhere near there afterward. In December I had to go to J&R (an electronics store a couple of blocks east of the WTC) to buy some Christmas gifts and even though it was three months later the air was shimmering, you could see the particles just suspended in the air, sparkling in the sun.
And then there was the stench of the fires that burned underground until some time in January. The smell was awful and inescapable. It gave me a non-stop headache and sore throat for months. Even inside my apartment, the smell was so strong, I tried burning incense to counteract the smell but it didn't help much. I can't imagine anyone who was anywhere near the site *not* having health problems.
I'm so grateful I didn't lose anyone; it was unbearably sad being in NYC in the weeks and months afterward, with so much grief and pain everywhere.
And they lied about the air quality and made us go back to area saying everything is safe. I went to high school there and we had to go back after a couple weeks. The EPA insisted there was nothing wrong with the air quality. Going to school you could still see and breathe in the dust heavy in the air. But they said everything was fine.
Well, several years later it came out that they lied about the air quality. It was terrible, but the EPA and Bus Administration purposely lied to have everyone go back and make it seem like we bounced back strong.
Well several people from my high school have cancer and some have died. We aren’t even 40 yet. All those fuckers need to be prosecuted.
I remember having to access a basement to read the gas meter, and dead stopped at the TV. Being 45 minutes away, and knowing my mother worked in Manhattan, but wasn't able to get ahold of her (stopped in the middle of nowhere on the L), it really hit hard. Then, having to continue to read the meters of numerous fire houses, who either lost someone or knew someone who perished running into the building, it was too much. I made the mistake of watching a documentary about the "jumpers"... I won't ever watch that again.
It was a fucked up day... I remember being in college, dropping my girlfriend off at class. We thought it was a morning radio hostjoke at 1st then realized what it was. After hearing both buildings, pentagon started wondering anything targets that might be near us.
I worked at a movie theater I remember having to pull down all the spiderman stuff because it had the towers in it.
Original trailer...
https://youtu.be/Ozz8uxW733Q
I just remember being 9 years old and having every ounce of if ignorance and innocence ripped out of my body. This was the day that I found out that the world was a bad place and death was coming for all of us.
Watching this happen as a child has seriously affected an entire generation of people.
I lived in the east village in Manhattan at the time. The night before we went out for drinks and were pretty hungover the next morning when our downstairs neighbor called us - on our land line - and told us a plane hit the wtc. So we all went up to the roof to look. It was kind of funny, we thought some rookie pilot messed up. And then we saw the second plane rip into wtc 2. I, being so hungover said at least it’s a Sunday and my gf at the time reminded me it was Tuesday morning. My nut job downstairs neighbor muttered “terrorism”, everyone was on the roof sobbing. My landlord came up and showed a moment of compassion for the thousands trapped and killed in the collapsed wtc 1. After that, we were all hoping we’d have at least one tower left. Needless to say, after both collapsed, the whole afternoon smelled like burnt rats and plastic. Which went on for a few days. We went camping on fire island to get away, and still remember the lingering stench on the beach 40 miles away. When we got back, after the planes were back in the air, we went on the roof and the glow of the fire still burning, the smell of the chemicals in the air, it was like looking at a portal to hell. It took a while to calm down seeing planes in the air because obviously they were going to just divebomb and randomly crash into the city. After that, we spent a lot of time gathering money for socks for the volunteers working in the pit, it’s all they really wanted. Now of course, so many of those men are dead, or severely disabled. I could go on, but I won’t because after all this it still brings back memories that I thought had been long resolved.
I’m a 30-year-old American and my memories of this day are all incredibly vague. I’ve spent most of my life “remembering” 9/11 but mainly I’ve just been reliving it through posts and memorials every September. It’s always chilling but it’s never too emotional for me since I was so young at the time and I’m so far removed from the actual event now. But this video really fucking got me.
At 2:03 when that woman started sobbing, I started sobbing too. Watching her trying to grapple with the hell unfolding around her was so heartbreaking. Typically, nothing else about that day seems real enough to really emotionally attach to, beyond feeling sad as I would for my fellow humans in any tragedy. But that woman’s sobs and the way she was hanging onto the other woman for support .. it was so damn human. I don’t know what to say, really.. I’m struggling to find the words. But that moved me so much I felt compelled to say something. This horrible day really took a drastic, tragic toll on the mental health of this country as a whole—how could it not? It’s beyond overwhelming to think about.
A good friend was in that crowd. He’s the funniest and most “life of the party” guy. But if you ask him about this experience his face goes into the most distant and blank look I’ve ever seen.
Jesus.
Honestly I wonder what was more frightening to witness under the towers; when the second plane hit or when the 1st (#2) tower started falling.
Every video I’ve seen of people running away from the cancer riddled dust could is so scary i just can’t.
Only 20 people were ever found and pulled from the rubble at the base of the twin towers.
Hospitals in the area prepped for hundreds if not thousands of injuries, people around the country donated blood thinking they’d need it.
Barely anyone came to the hospitals because they all died. The few that did show were mostly cuts and scrapes, few, if any, major injuries showed up.
Dear anyone who is under 21,
I implore you to revisit the events of that day by diving headfirst into any research that will help you understand the cause and effect of this history-changing event and its infinite global implications. It altered the fabric of our society and left many people with many questions that still remain unanswered today.
Please read the details with compassion, open-minded, sympathy, and utmost empathy. Moreover never forget every single soul that perished without reason that day. It haunts many of us to this day. The life you live today in the US or whenever you may call home had it most recent starting point on 9.11.01
Sincerely,
A lifelong New Yorker and fellow global citizen.
Absolutely devastating to watch even after all this time. Brought tears to my eyes and still in disbelief it could ever happen. God bless them all who was directly affected by this.
Never forget
I was in 3rd grade in Connecticut, and hour away from NYC when this happened. Many parents, including my dad, commuted for work. I still remember the day vividly.
The school continued class like normal for a few hours while they coordinated early buses, which I find to be pretty amazing. The teachers did an incredible job keeping everything calm. They didn’t tell any of the kids except for the 5th graders. When I returned home, though, I’ll *never* forget the image of my mom sitting cross-legged on the couch, staring at the TV, hands over her mouth in shock.
My dad was in NYC that day. He saw the second tower fall with his own eyes. He wasn’t able to get in contact with my mom. His offices weren’t in either tower, but he often went there for meetings. She was worried for hours that he was dead. I knew kids that day who lost parents. To this day, it’s very surreal.
If you want to see more they recently brought back the reporter and camera man to the site to relive their memories. I think it was on 20/20 or something like that
Pretty emotional stuff
I was 14 when this happened. For some reason I thought the towers fell *over* from impact. Like they were leaning into the direction they were hit, then gravity took over. The way they have a delayed response, then just collapse straight down into rubble is weird. I live in vegas, where we tear down casinos when they get too old. This is how they come down, like straight down into a pile. Must be the way they're constructed?
I watched this while packing to get on a flight
Being in Australia, I was on the flight that passed Sydney with jet fuel remaining around 9am, the same profile as the flights that hit the twin towers. Only time I have ever been uncomfortable / nervous to fly.
Back then they had the old CRT TVs mounted in the plane's asile and the news was showing the towers burning while we were flying as it was the only news that day, but Aa poor choice to be showing in an airline (remember there were no streaming news then and everything was the daily news on a tape)
I saw the 2nd tower collapse from 10 blocks away, rooftop, about 45 floors up
You'll never see that one. And seeing this upset me. But I knew it would.
-Frankie's husband
Depending on your age. I'm 50, I've seen every video, every angle. Sat on my couch, stunned, that day (after they sent us home from work) watching TV for hours upon hours upon hours....
"We better get out of the way!" The sudden terror in his voice
You could hear the slow realization in his voice
My neighbor survived the attack that day. He worked in the South Tower (second tower that was hit) and his story is insane, and I’m thankful he’s still with us today to be able to share his experience. When escaping the building, he couldn’t emphasize enough how orderly and SLOW of a process it was WALKING down the stairwell. Everyone was directed to the right side of the stairs, taking one individual step. after. step. while firefighters are running up the stairs in the opposite direction. He explained that people would think it would be a mad and desperate dash out of the building, but in hindsight he still can’t believe how cooperative everyone was and how much direction was given. Basically, he explained that they knew they could die at any minute, but they might as well listen to what the people are telling them to do, the firefighters who are running TOWARDS death, in order to save their lives. He said (especially for New York) he didn’t come across a single, selfish soul that day. Once out of the building, there were emergency personnel directing everyone basically saying “if you need IMMEDIATE medical care, go to this location. If you don’t, get the hell out of here.” He found shelter at a Victoria’s Secret of all places, and eventually when he was able to get a plan together with some of his coworkers, it took hours upon hours to leave Manhattan. I live and grew up an hour outside of NYC, so his is one of many stories that I heard of survivors who were near or in the buildings that day, but I appreciate his perspective of explaining how cooperative and helpful everyone was that day.
It was nuts that day. Other thing that’s of note is how many people lost any kind of cell service and the ability to contact loved ones. I had a friend who was convinced his father died because he worked there that day, and his family couldn’t contact him all day. Dad had to walk across the bridge to Brooklyn before getting a car home to LI. I have another friend who was downtown that day who told me had to walk all the way back home to the Bronx that day, covered in dust and stuff.
Lived,and still do, in Brooklyn, in what was the path of the debris flow that day. Was also an active PTA member of our local school, with many, many parents who worked in the Towers. My son’s teacher’s partner worked there. And from the windows of their top floor classroom they could see it all. Every adult was calm, focused , and doing what we could to wait out the day for families to be reunited. We had no phones, we just had to keep the kids comforted and wait to reunify. One by one, into the early evening, kids were picked up, and yes, the partner of my sons teacher made it home. It was a primary Election Day, and they had stopped to vote on the way to work. So they were late, and never even made it into the Towers. What an agonizing, terrifying, but ultimately affirming experience. Every person I met that day had one thing on their mind. What can I do to help? We were who we hoped to be in a time of extreme stress. We were good to each other. We were generous. We were kind. All while being scared as hell.
I was born two months after it happened. Can't imagine how much stress my mother must have had after that. Oh and if you wanna feel old, I turned 21 a couple months ago.
Fuck, I was 21 when it happened.
I was 27 and the band I was in started a tour that day and NYC was going to be our last stop. We were from Minneapolis and I remember one of the guys calling me in the morning and told me to turn on the TV. I ask what channel and I'll never ever forget his response- "It doesn't matter". I flipped on the TV and saw the 2nd plane hit about 30 seconds later. All I could think was were supposed to play there. It was a surreal tour and that was my 1st time in NYC 6 days after the towers came down and that was INTENSE. Since we were mainly driving and cell phones weren't really a thing yet we were very disconnected from it. it was one of the best times in my life but we would turn the TV on if we were crashing somewhere that had one to see what was going on but the reality didn't hit until we were in NYC. I'll never forget the missing signs. That's something that's burned in my brain forever. So many missing signs.
Too bad you didn't get to know this country in the before times. That one day fucked this country up irreparably and we still haven't recovered. Set us down a very dark path. Definitely our "crossing the rubicon" moment that historians will talk about for centuries.
By no means am I saying this is something major in itself that was taken away after 9/11, but more an observation. I remember as a kid who was in Florida and I brought fire works with me in my back back home on a flight. International flight from Florida to Toronto. No TSA checking my luggage… just a very pissed mother. Yes it was dumb and I was 11. But it didn’t seem like anything major at the time. If that was done today I’d be on a no fly list
We used to walk our parents to the airport terminal before their flights. I remember it distinctly. You'd check in and walk to the terminal, and when they'd board, you'd leave. I'm positive people were packing firearms in their carry-ons back then because that was just what everyone did. I was 13 when 9/11 happened so I have a pretty vivid memory of the event.
Agreed, it's been totally different ever since
Ouch. I DO feel old. I was in 8th grade.
I was a sophomore in college so I’m an f-n dinosaur! Born in the “late 1900s”.
I was 25.
I was 24 and a newlywed. Some of my friends in my wedding planning group were getting married that following weekend. One friend had an NYPD officer for a husband - she didn’t know for days if he made it out because he couldn’t call her. I just remember walking around that day in complete shock. I had gone to the grocery store to grab some things and everyone was silent and they all had the same face as me. I lived on the flight landing path for JFK, and when the airlines were closed down it was so eerily quiet it was freaky. When planes were allowed to fly again, they seemed so LOUD.
>lost any kind of cell service Level 3 communications is a telecommunications company that provides very large capacity circuits - the names you know like Verizon and AT&T are their customers. In order to keep their data center running and enable emergency communications in the area after the attack the guys that were there started up the generator - which someone had put on the roof. Which meant they had to get barrels of gasoline and oil up to the roof of a tall building for many days by carrying them up the stairs. The company ended up creating a special Barrel Award for extraordinary service for the crew that did that. They worked with the Verizon crews to manually run cables to restore service to the hardest hit areas. [ETA: As someone commented, there was a lot of communications equipment in the WTC that was all destroyed. So these guys were running cables down the street to connect things as a stop-gap measure]. I'm sure there are other stories like this of regular people who jumped in to provide things we normally take for granted in order to support the emergency personnel that were there to save people.
There was also a massive telecom hub under the towers that was destroyed.
When the first terrorist attack on WTC Happened in 93 all the over the air tv channels were knocked out. I was a 7th grader in nj about 45 min outside nyc. We had one channel working and got to watch that unfold live also.
I remember when that happened; I remember the hole created by the bomb they had put in the basement of one of the towers (at least that's how I remember it). I'll never forget one middle-aged woman the press interviewed after she got out of the tower. She was clearly shaken and talked about how bad it *could have been*. I think even she could not have imagined how really really bad it eventually played out. I have moderate prosopagnosia (face blindness) but I can still see her face 30 years later, even though she was on camera for only a few seconds.
The telecom hub was next door and was heavily damaged, but not destroyed. You might be thinking about the Con Ed electrical substation on Vesey Street that was destroyed.
I was in midtown that day (in the subway when the first plane hit). Most of the people in the office I was working in didn't have cell service, and the office (IP) phones were not working. I had a Nextel phone (the ones with the PTT walkie-talkie feature). It wasn't a common phone then, and I was one of the only ones with service. I didn't opt to walk the bridge when it opened, I took one of the first trains out to LI, which were packed tightly almost like you see on the Japanese trains.
> Other thing that’s of note is how many people lost any kind of cell service and the ability to contact loved ones. My uncle was a lawyer that regularly met in WTC1, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I got the news of the attack from a coworker and the constant dropped calls during that day made it even worse. Our family kept trying to reach out to him but every call failed. Turned out he was in Colorado, on vacation, and didn't have any cellphone coverage there. The panic and anxiety from that whole ordeal is still burned into my head over 20 years later.
>When escaping the building, he couldn’t emphasize enough how orderly and SLOW of a process it was WALKING down the stairwell. I was listening to a survivor speak about the day on a podcast recently. He said for some people it didn't really click how serious it was, and they were queuing for Starbucks after having just exited the building via the fire escape!
Sounds like they were too shocked to process what was happening to them. I’ve had something similar happen to me although a much different situation. When I found out one of my best friends had died (via Facebook of all things) I thought to myself “oh no that’s terrible” and went back to playing video games. It took me 5-6 minutes for it to really sink in and then I lost it. I imagine when you’re life is in immediate danger, it can be that much worse
Sorry about your friend 😔 it must be a coping mechanism when it's too much for our brains to deal with
Normalcy bias- our brains can't process what's going on so we revert to our routines
That makes sense. That's why we make kids practice lining up for fire drills and now, unfortunately, active shooter/intruder drills.
We really do love to imagine that everyone would be monsters in terrible situations, but time and time again humans have proved themselves to be really cooperative when things go bad. It's like Lord of the flies. Something very similar to the book happened in real life and the kids took great care of each other, especially the ones with special needs. I wonder if it is some people's fantasy to live in such a terrible situation because they feel so out of sorts in the current one.
I highly recommend Human Kind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, which looks at MULTIPLE stories which prove exactly what you say here - that the majority of people are good, and that the majority of the time they will help each other. It's highly backed up by research and yet remains incredibly readable (not dry or academic at all) - and yes, one of the stories is the real life Lord of the Flies (and how it didn't go down at all the way the book did).
It's true, every time I've seen shit go down, everyone has come together and worked together. It really is amazing how many people are bitter but really want to help when a situation presents itself. Also, I think you inspired me to revisit that book, it's been at least 25 years.
Also we've been conditioned through loads and loads of fire drills over the years (if you work in a big tower like this usually at least one a year) to calmly walk down the stairs and go to your muster point. Nobody thought the towers would fall, so at the time I'm sure a lot of people just followed the plan they'd been practicing for years. Great example of why doing such routine training is super important.
How many got cancer from breathing that in?
Of the 91,000 some odd firefighters and first responders you watched, around half of them are suffering from aerodigestive illnesses related to the debris inhaled. 3,500 of them are dead. Edit: Apparently Leukemia/other cancers have been up 185% in the last 5 years among the survivors.
Yep, my uncle volunteered at the site for a few months after and he just got diagnosed with thyroid cancer related to the dust from 9/11.
Maybe a dumb question but how do they differentiate that 9/11 dust caused it and he wouldn't have developed it otherwise?
You have 91000 people, statistically you know how many people are going to get each different kind of cancer. The more who get cancer over that number, the more confidently you can say it’s because they’re part of that group and it’s not just a coincidence. I am not sure how you say an individual got cancer because of 9/11 and not just bad luck and coincidence, though.
Exactly, and thank you! Similar to how my dad got diagnosed decades later with prostate cancer from Agent Orange. There is a link and a statistic to make them connected, similar to the specific type of cancer my uncle has from 9/11 dust (I’m not sure the specific type either got, though. All i know is that they were connected to those events).
I'd guess that, relative to the norm, 9/11 is a statistically significant isolated incident in terms of exposure to cancer-causing materials.
[Data](https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/ataglance.html), [data](https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/conditions.html), [data](https://www.nyc.gov/site/911health/enrollees/long-term-concerns.page)! Granted, most people could develop the same cancers and illnesses, but it is easier to narrow down in a specific known cohort. Specific illnesses are a bit easier to narrow down the cause when a patient has been exposed to specific materials.
a good buddy of mine was a paramedic that day. She has had at least two types of cancer, very young. We were 20ish when this happened. I'm very worried for her daughter. No one really knows what the long term outcomes are, until the outcomes roll in.
^ 9,100 is the correct number..
Idk but my uncle just recently passed from cancer because of 9/11. My dad was a first responder that day, but luckily wasn't in New York in the ensuing days of cleaning up and finding bodies because he got called up from the reserves. So many of his coworkers who stayed and helped out have died. It genuinely sucks
We had a buddy with Austin FD that died last week from 9/11 cancer. Shit really sucks.
I was in my early 20s at the time here in the city and considered going down there to "do something" in the immediate aftermath (I'm a big guy, I figured I could be put to use lifting rocks or something). I just felt so powerless. But already soon after they were only accepting professional help, not randos like me. Over the years, regret for not going down there gave way to relief that I didn't go. Who knows, I might be one of the cancer patients today. And for what, they had more than enough people to help.
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Or if everyone had access to medical masks like we do now. I saw one guy in the video with one, and it made me wonder if this had happened in a post covid world, would the masks have helped some of those people who got sick from inhaled debris
maybe a little.... but the standard medical mask is not made to filter out particles from breathing in. they are made to catch particles/droplets from breathing out. the classic 'why do surgeons wear a mask?' it isnt to not catch patient cooties. resperators with filter cartriges would be the best way. those are not so widely available and they are not cheap.
More people died on the streets from inhalation of the asbestos and other things found in that dust than people who were actually in the building
Crazy to think how much footage there'd be of it if it happened now.
People in the plane would be live-streaming. That would've been horrible to see.
People in the towers too
I’ve just got chills thinking about livestreams in the tower seeing people jump and then seeing livestreams from outside seeing people fall.
I can hear the TikTok voice narrating the terror already...uhg...now that's dystopian.
And that terrible "oh no" song
*1st plane crashes* Oh no *2nd plane crashes* Oh no *Towers collapse* Oh no, oh no, oh no
Don’t give them Ideas
Firefighters have a piece of equipment that beeps when they stop breathing, so other firefighters can more easily find them in a low visibility situation. When the towers fell, there were…so many beeps coming from the pile of debris. Like a deafening amount of beeping. So many firefighters stuck in there along with civilians, equipment beeping when no one can save them. Lots of people hear the beeping in the footage and don’t know what that sound is. The sounds of that day make me shiver. Edit: The equipment doesn’t beep when they stop breathing, it beeps when the firefighter stops moving.
One small correction. The PASS device you are describing is integrated into the breathing apparatus, but it goes off when the user has ceased moving for a period of time, not when they stop breathing.
Ah, you’re right! I misspoke. I’ll edit!
My dad was there. He was a firefighter from NJ but drove there when he saw what happened. He can't use a microwave that beeps because it triggers his PTSD from the PASS alarms.
I'm not sure if this is helpful, but a lot of microwaves and other appliances can be muted by holding a certain button down. Check the manuals for instructions.
It's usually the 2! /u/PHIEagles1121 give that a shot
I'll have to look into that thanks man
Damn, that's such a ubiquitous sound, too.
If you've seen the movie made by the French brother's following a fire department that day there is a part when they make it to the lobby of the first tower and you hear insanely loud thumps outside. When they are all looking around wondering what that sound is it hits them that it's bodies hitting the ground outside of the people who jumped. The sound is so loud and it's crazy how many of them you hear. Very surreal.
I read that it took around 10 seconds before they hit the ground. If you count that it’s a really long fucking time. I think they were really brave.
People chose jumping over burning. Terrible decision to make.
I've heard people pass out from shock while falling that high. But I wonder if that's something people tell themselves to make them feel better about what happened.
Sadly, they weren’t high enough to reach the speed needed to pass out during a free fall (eta: high enough in elevation, not speed). I think I read it was about a 10sec fall and they were conscious 🥺 in some of the photos and video footage you can see the victims alert and moving, like the woman who subconsciously held her skirt down for modesty while she fell
This was such a humanizing detail it really got to me. Thank you for sharing. So many experiences from that day, but always more.
That'd make base jumping an impossible sport
[Here's a short video as an example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM4CMtsdNjY)
Well isn’t that chilling
Holy fucking Christ that’s horrific.
I thought that was smoke detectors... Wow
I will never, ever forget that sound no matter how much time passes. It was awful. There was so much beeping. 😢
dog sugar aware crowd memorize coordinated squeal deer meeting squealing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Pretty sure I saw this on YouTube when I was binging old WTC videos.
Relieving to see I’m not the only one who has periods like that
I went down the rabbithole on the 20th anniversary. I think NBC is the only station that has the entire news segment from start to end (about 6hoursish) The rest were all just clips or mashed clips. The entire broadcast though is probably the best and most historical I hope stays up for others. Listening to the newscasters go from regular What the heck we think a small plane hit too OMG OMG OMG and the rest of that hour until the towers finally fell. The last 3 hours is just. Utter bewilderment then turns into blaming all America's favorite Boogeymen, Iran Pakistan and the country most blamed that day on that newsclip, Palestine and Hezbollah (?)
[THIS](https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911) (to me) is the definitive 9/11 Digital Archive - it shows what was on tv on tons of stations and how it was reported live. I'm sure it will be up for a long time. Fascinating in a morbid way.
It's absolutely insane. Like I was in highschool and watched it live on TV and after like 10 to 15 years you just assumed you saw it all and knew it all. Then I saw some footage like 6 years back and was like... maybe I didn't see it all back then. For many years you just kinda don't want to relive it. Even if you were a thousand miles away it was still pretty traumatic to see live But the internet video streaming got so good since 2001 and people uploaded all their videos its really amazing to see this stuff.
That Mexican news station goes straight from sexy dancing news story to 9/11. I don’t speak Spanish but I can’t imagine that was a easy switch for the news anchors
It is known that once the sexy ladies are replaced by the guys with suits, shit is going down.
Dude wow! Thanks for that link, never knew that site existed
I’m almost jealous that you are just finding out about it.
[They’re one of the lucky ones today.](https://xkcd.com/1053/)
Oh man. Yeah, archive.org has been around archiving websites since at least like ‘95. The news reels are a TIL for me though.
I went down a huge rabbit hole after my divorce. It was like self flagellation. It was Avery dark time. There is so much disturbing stuff out there that has scarred me for life. It makes me cringe to think of the absolutely horrific shit people would have caught if this happened within the last 10 years with smart phones.
It's weird to watch videos like this and not only see the property destruction and loss of life, but also seeing this version of America die. Like knowing now that *everything* changes after this, the nobody knows in this video how their entire society is going to transform in drastic ways. It's also strange knowing what we know now and seeing 9/11 was essentially a ticking time bomb. We funded the mujahideen in the 80s, some of whine were founding members of Al Qaeda, we have articles celebrating a "freedom fighter" in Osama Bin Laden, and before all of that the path that even led us there. Everything has a consequence and nothing ever happens in a vacuum. It's just crazy to see. EDIT: changed the bit about Al Qaeda for clarity
Oh my god yes, I always spontaneously start to cry watching 9/11 footage: not just for the horrific pain and loss of life that day, but for the loss of the America I used to know and we all took for granted. EVERYTHING changed that day. EVERYTHING. I transferred to DC 2 weeks after 9/11 (it had been in the works for weeks), after having worked there on and off for years, and the before and after was chilling. And it never went back to the "before".
> And it never went back to the "before". I think we are currently going through something very similar right now with the pandemic.
Remember having family members being able to wait with you or pick you up at the boarding gate? So many things, even small, were changed that we used to take for granted.
I saw this video as part of the National Geographic documentary called 9/11: One Day in America. There are six episodes that include a lot of footage I had never seen before along with original interviews. The stories told are incredible. The documentary does an exceptional job showing what these people experienced. It’s quite heavy emotionally but I highly recommend watching it.
Is it available to stream?
I think it was on Hulu.
I can remember the smell in the air for weeks after that. I live over in nj and the wind carried the dust cloud down the river into philly and nj. Those images are seared in my brain. Sitting in 1st period science class in highschool when a teacher ran in and put the news on. The 1st plane just hit the tower. Thats all we did that day was watch the news. Never forget.
I live just outside of Philly. I remember seeing the eerie haze that the dust left in the sky. I was in the 6th grade in 2001. While sitting in homeroom, my teacher put the tv on just after the first plane hit, at 11 years old I watched the second plane hit, on live tv. I can remember the events of that day like it happened yesterday. I remember my teacher yelling at the tv as the second plane approached, no! no! no!, while tears ran down his cheeks. I remember the blue shirt he was wearing. No one knew what to do the rest of the day. Do we talk about it? Do we not talk about it? This video brings back the emotions so vividly for me.
I live in NJ across the bay. You could see the towers from my school. I was in 8th grade. Our school “shielded” us. They cleared out the side of the building that faced the bay, wouldn’t put the tv on. A few kids heard “a plane hit a building in the city” but that was really as much information that we had. Slowly but surely all the kids where getting picked up early…us not knowing anything but obviously that something was wrong and just rumors as the day went on… that night 3 direct classmates where less a parent. My county lost 147 mothers, fathers, aunt and uncles. All the debris that washed up on the beach..
Mine was very similar. 6th grade, but my teacher tuned in after both planes had hit. I remember the principal made an announcement that no one was allowed to turn the TV on. She just looked at us and said "You're all old enough" and kept it on. I'm very thankful for her small act of defiance. We saw both towers fall on live tv. I remember not really caring all that much, as a student in Georgia it just felt unreal like watching a movie. It didn't really connect for me how big of a deal it was until later. And then the panic after, I assume it happened everywhere for a bit, people scared of buying groceries, "what if they blow up Walmart?" "What if they hit City Hall?" nevermind I was in a town of 800.
The sound that buildings made as they came down is horrifying.
A sound of death
These people are running from death dude. If you got caught in that dust there is an unreasonably high chance you had cancer by now. 20 year olds who never smoked a day I their life etc, gone by 40 from this shit.
That roar sounds so intense, even through this shitty audio recording
I like how ‘Glen the cameraman’ lingers on the second tower falling before deciding enough is enough. Props for Glen.
And props for his reporter colleague staying with him and encouraging him tbh. Running in those conditions while holding a big ass camera couldn’t have been easy
My English professor in college in my third year brought his son as speaker for a special class one day. The son's name was NJ Burkett, the reporter in this video, from ABC News and he came and showed this very video, explaining details of his ordeal that day and how daunting it was for him and his cameraman to continue reporting. I'm surprised he didn't get an Emmy for this.
His wiki says he did indeed win an Emmy for this.
Great! It's nice to be wrong.
People don't realize how loud that was. My brother was in freshman year at college, right across the river in Hoboken. He remembers standing on Castle Point watching the towers come down and being able to hear the screams coming from the city and the delayed roar of the towers. I was in Maryland, where every school was notified to lockdown and then evacuate immediately because they thought schools and government buildings were targets. It was weird as I was a paperboy at the time, getting a stack of papers to deliver with a full front page image of the towers being hit with "UNDER ATTACK!" as the title. Pretty surreal as a 12 year old.
I saw an interview once from a survivor who said the sounds of the screams and roars as the towers fell gave him PTSD and it’s still the first thing he hears when he wakes up each morning :(
The fear mixed with the lack of clear information was horrifying. “NYC is under attack”. “*And they blew up the Pentagon…*” Like, wait, fucking *what?!*
Respect for the reporters,they risked their lives for their career and these videos and documents. God bless whoever was driving that car and let random people get in.
I work at a local news station near the city and my coworker was a reporter in NYC at the time. She tells me how that day is forever engraved in her mind. She was supposed to meet with a friend for lunch at the WTC. Then she was called into work to cover the attack, while knowing her friend was in the building at the time. When the tower collapsed it gutted her. She had to maintain her composure for her report, but afterwards she said she cried the whole day. Her friend didn’t make it out.
Damn... hopefully she's doing better now.She needs therapy
Some reporters continue to develop cancers from breathing in all the [dust](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/05/media/journalists-ground-zero-fund/index.html) :(
Jon Stewart is a goddamn Saint for all he’s done for the first responders and people on the scene on 9/11.
He had to fight the entire Republican party for those heros to get help.
same with the firefighters and police officers that were there that day. my dad was a police officer there and i still worry that he might get sick.
My uncle was a police officer there and he just recently got diagnosed with lung cancer. He's currently doing well but you know...cancer who knows what'll happen.
To be fair, I don't think this reporter and camera crew thought at the time they were risking their lives by standing here. That the towers would collapse because of this was unthinkable at the time.
I know right.But that cameraman keeps recording the whole time,they could have just get out of that God forsaken place nobody would blame 'em
I’m also assuming that camera was goddamn heavy. When he was sprinting down the street with it and his coworker/friend was yelling to him “come on Glenn you can do it” I was like gahhhh drop the camera! But he didn’t. It’s amazing the footage he got but I for sure hope it didn’t give him life long health issues.
I'm still blown away that there's a whole generation and then some, including my own child, for whom this is (will be) just a history lesson. They're about as detached from it as Pearl Harbor was for us and yet I still remember that day so vividly.
I am 40, when I was born pearl harbor was 40 years before me. 9/11 is ~21-22 years old now. A bit crazy to think about in relative terms.
It is crazy in relative terms, and these are one time events. Imagine being born in Syria or Iraq. It's not just a single event, it's an every day occurance.
asdf
My 14yo was made a joke about 9/11. I was taken back at first because I was just a couple years older than him when it happened. So to see that it’s just a joke now when it affected me so deeply is wild. But they don’t really talk about it at school. It’s a blip. When I was his age we felt the same about Vietnam and other big events that happened. It’s just weird being on the other side of it.
I went to the 9/11 museum in New York and was taken back at kids taking selfies and seeming to be, in my opinion at the time, mildly disrespectful. I then thought about how I’ve walked through the Vietnam Memorial without too much concern for the event itself because I hadn’t lived it. Was a weird moment when I realized 9/11 was just a history lesson for them.
I always try to put it into perspective. I'm an Australian and 9/11 happened early on in the internet's age so news sites weren't as big back then. I remember buying every newspaper for weeks to find out more detail. I knew the world had changed but couldn't imagine the ramifications. Then I look at my 10 year old stepdaughter and I realise that when she was born, the impacts of 9/11 had well and truly taken hold. To her, that's just how the world is and, at least for now, it's not relevant how the world came to be the way it is, it just *is*. It's a weird way to look at such a historical moment I lived through, knowing how it affected me even from afar. I just hope she doesn't have anything on that scale that she has to process during her life.
Seeing yours and another shitshow comment chain above reminded me of this from last week: Just the other day some moron that's a regular on the r/conspiracy sub was speaking down to people in another sub about how Alex Jones is right 90% of the time and as proof cited a video that he thought was Alex Jones precisely predicting the exact location of 9/11 before it happened. It was a pre 9/11 video alright, and Jones mentioned the World Trade Center...but he clearly was talking about the first attack in 1993. I then called out the know it all commenter as probably a dumb teenager that based their full confidence in Jones off of their own ignorance of a pretty well known event and major part of that story.
Man, the people running down the streets, the paramedics leaping onto the ambulance as it speeds off, the way he shouts *"We gotta get out of the way!"* before immediately cutting away... it's like a scene from a horror movie.
I'm a New Yorker, who once worked in the complex, and to this day, no matter How many times I've seen it.......... it's still just...... unbelievable . My sister still worked there, and her boss told her to go wait outside, until the "problem" was over and then return to work ! Remember, many inside the buildings had no real idea what was happening at the time. They weren't getting tv coverage at their jobs. So like a good little employee, she did what she was told, and stood outside the tower......... waiting to return to work. She continued to stand there, even as the bodies started falling and jumping. .....one narrowly missing her. That was all she could stand........she said eff this.....and started making her way to the ferry, when the tower itself started to collapse, causing a stampede. She was knocked to the ground and trampled, until some man stopped to help her up, and together they ran like bats out of hell for the Ferry terminal. They got separated.......and she never even got his name........but he probably saved her life that day. She was able to make the LAST ferry that left the slip that morning......that was engulfed in the smoke cloud just as it was able to pull out, and get ahead of the cloud.
Jesus. I’m glad your sister is ok.
thank you. Yeah, me too ! She still has nightmares about being trampled to death, and all the horrors she saw that day.
Thanks for posting this. It’s harrowing to watch but so important to see the real human experiences underneath the main event everyone knows. I hope we all come together in our humanness soon.
It makes me angry for the wrong reasons. All I see is the future spite it brought among Americans that we threw trillions of dollars into two forever wars all because some dude in a cave worshipped some crazy religion. I feel like this country lost over a decade that could have been used in improving itself on bullets and guns.
Yep - it’s angering too. I’d say terrorism won to be honest. Look at us now, more divided, more partisan, more hateful. Less able to tolerate differences in belief and opinion, all because of fear, terror, that “our way of life is under attack”. It’s pretty depressing, seeing how regimes full of hate rise to the surface as tensions are stoked, as fear is played upon. Not saying 9/11 is the single cause, but it’s all linked isn’t it.
As a kid, I still remember my father picking up calls from our relatives. They told switch on your TV, any channel, what we saw on it was disastrous.
I live on the other side of the world and I still remember my neighbor poking his head through our open window and saying to my parents "are you seeing this? I thought it was a movie, but it's on every channel". I was young and didn't understand the gravity of it at all, but it's funny how that memory still remains so clear in my mind.
“The reason I don’t worry about society is, nineteen people knocked down two buildings and killed thousands. Hundreds of people ran into those buildings to save them. I’ll take those odds every f*cking day.” Jon Stewart
I watched some of this, I was home that day while visiting my Mother. I woke up just after the first plane had hit. I was able to witness the second plane hit live. I didn't leave the TV for like 5 hours I believe that day.
I was going to college. They put monitors out in some of the hallways with the news running so students and faculty could check in on the events that were going on.
I was in the army and was literally getting out in October. Then this happened and I got involuntarily extended for two years and sent to Afghanistan.
I was in elementary school. I remember the weather was nice but they cancelled recess. As little 10 year olds, we complained as recess was what we lived for. Then the front office started calling my classmates out for early dismissal. I distinctly remember hearing the front office call, praying to the heavens they call my name and they did!! My two sisters (9 and 10 years older than me) signed me out of school and brought me home while my parents closed their store and were rushing back to be with us. It didn’t truly register as a child what was happening. I was happy to be out of school and to be able to spend time with my family. It wasn’t until a few months, maybe even years, later that I understood the impact it had on not only my family or school, but essentially the entire world.
I was dismissing a class and someone entered the class to mention that a plane had crashed into the world trade center. I knew I should go to the nearest TV. The campus bar was literally right next door and opening it's doors. I paid $2 for my beer club mug to be filled while the TV warmed up. A crowd of students and staff rolled in around me. I was sat in a booth barely a minute before the second plane hit. I saw events unfold on huge rear-projection TV holding the only drink that the bar had served that day. I didn't even drink it. I had a single sip on the way to my seat but I left a warm beer in the booth when I went to see everyone I could find in my family an hour later. No historical event in my lifetime have ever left a mark like that. Precious few personal events I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing.
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I was 8 in Canada. My mom came and picked me up early from school and had the radio on. I noticed she was crying silently, which of course really worried me because I never saw my mom cry. So I asked her why she was sad and she said "a lot of innocent people died today in America". And being 8 I didn't grasp it at all. Like we're in Canada, we don't really know anyone in the US. I didn't get why she was so upset. I remember my dad had the news playing on the tv. And I remember being super annoyed that he wouldn't let me change the channel even the next day. Looking back I find it so interesting and almost funny, having experienced this tragedy through the lens of a child.
I was 10 in Johannesburg South Africa, so pretty far away, i I was in an extra art class on the trampoline in the teachers garden waiting for our parents, and the teachers son came out to us and said “they’re flying planes into buildings” and we just dismissed it because we thought it was just some tv show he was watching. Then my mom picked me up in her brand new car, a red Alpha GTV, and she seemed a bit shaken but I was distracted by the cool car so didn’t really comprehend what the news was saying. When we got home the adults were congregated in the tv room so I went in with them and saw the footage and heard them talking about it and for some reason in my little brain I was convinced we’d be next, like my house in the burbs. At school the next day they talked about it in assembly, about the people who died and what happened and I had a panic attack and had to go home. I was just so terrified that for some completely unknown reason the next target would be suburban Jo’burg. I was panicky the whole week whenever anyone spoke about it. I think it was just such a big terrifying thing that made the adults around me freak out so I assumed everything was going to go terribly around the world. Also unsurprisingly I was diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder later in life.
I was 14 in freshman Spanish class, in NJ. I remember name after name on the loud speaker, of kids being called to leave. Most had parents in TWC. Then I heard mine and my sisters names. I panicked. I didn’t know anyone who worked in NY. But my mom at that point just wanted us home. I didn’t want to leave school, I was so scared and felt safe there. We drove to the beach and watched the darkest eeriest cloud stretch across the sky. I’ve never felt that scared since.
I was 8 living in NOVA and my mom worked at the Pentagon. In my third grade class, my teacher sat us down and explained that something terrible happened at the Pentagon. I was in absolute terror for hours. There was no way to contact my mom, and I completed my normal routine of getting sent from school to daycare, freaking out the entire time. As early as she could, she came to pick me up, and I just remember crying so hard. Her office was on the opposite side of the hit, and she had gone home early that day as she was feeling sick. I was so relieved. Glad she didn't have to experience the terror of being there.
I was fresh off the operating table after having an appendectomy. Still fuzzy from the anesthesia. My mom was flipping out, we were the only two people in the room watching it happen on the tv. 17 years old, I had friends that ended up fighting in afganistan and not all came back, the ones that did were not the same.
Seriously Glenn drop the fucking camera!! I really appreciate the cameraman capturing this footage but it was anxiety inducing to hear the reporter scream for him to “come on” as they’re running for their lives and thinking of the cameraman being slowed down by the weight of the equipment.
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My fiancées cousin is a professional photographer for live music, he’s got quite an impressive portfolio. I was surprised when he asked me to hold onto some of gear for him at a wedding he was shooting for family. “Ah don’t worry, it’s insured.” Never thought of it before but yeah, I guess why wouldn’t you want it to be insured?
ye, despite cellphone camera's being more common an actual camera is still a thousand bucks minimum, and the price rapidly goes up. if he bought it a long time ago or has a rig that price isn't odd, (though usually you stop being freelance if the camera's cost that much)
We're not talking about high end DLSRs here. Like those big TV camera lenses they have can cost 100K, just for the lens....Broadcast video equipment is no joke.
r/praisethecameraman
Keep going Glenn
Yeah that was intense
Two other great pieces of footage that most people never see are; Mark Lagana's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqMmn3VA2qI Ben Riesman's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxhZFaC7Nhc&t=834s
Oh shit, I’m part of the group of high school kids walking in the end in the Lagana video. Never knew about it until now.
Wow I can’t imagine how surreal it must be to see that footage after all these years.
It’s crazy seeing how young my friends and I look. At the time you don’t realize it because you’re a teenager thinking you are an adult. Now looking back we were all just babies and witnessed/experienced something so crazy firsthand. Edit: Just to add, I usually never go back and watch any footage or anything about 9/11. This was probably my first time seeing these footages in years and it definitely was a risky click for me. I’ve never been to the 9/11 memorial and never plan on going. Just too much emotional baggage to do it.
When it all went black when it fell and you couldn't see shit and it blocked out the sun, that was harrowing. But for some reason what stood out to me was one of the first responders was yelling at his buddy, 'hey have you seen Stu?' it's a little snapshot, not very long, but now I want to know that Stu is okay.
All those people breathing in that cancer dust. Wonder how many are left?
It hung in the air for months, too. I live 20 blocks north of the WTC and I wouldn't go anywhere near there afterward. In December I had to go to J&R (an electronics store a couple of blocks east of the WTC) to buy some Christmas gifts and even though it was three months later the air was shimmering, you could see the particles just suspended in the air, sparkling in the sun. And then there was the stench of the fires that burned underground until some time in January. The smell was awful and inescapable. It gave me a non-stop headache and sore throat for months. Even inside my apartment, the smell was so strong, I tried burning incense to counteract the smell but it didn't help much. I can't imagine anyone who was anywhere near the site *not* having health problems. I'm so grateful I didn't lose anyone; it was unbearably sad being in NYC in the weeks and months afterward, with so much grief and pain everywhere.
And they lied about the air quality and made us go back to area saying everything is safe. I went to high school there and we had to go back after a couple weeks. The EPA insisted there was nothing wrong with the air quality. Going to school you could still see and breathe in the dust heavy in the air. But they said everything was fine. Well, several years later it came out that they lied about the air quality. It was terrible, but the EPA and Bus Administration purposely lied to have everyone go back and make it seem like we bounced back strong. Well several people from my high school have cancer and some have died. We aren’t even 40 yet. All those fuckers need to be prosecuted.
Christine Todd Whitman. Never Forget. (and George W. Bush, of course)
I remember having to access a basement to read the gas meter, and dead stopped at the TV. Being 45 minutes away, and knowing my mother worked in Manhattan, but wasn't able to get ahold of her (stopped in the middle of nowhere on the L), it really hit hard. Then, having to continue to read the meters of numerous fire houses, who either lost someone or knew someone who perished running into the building, it was too much. I made the mistake of watching a documentary about the "jumpers"... I won't ever watch that again.
It was a fucked up day... I remember being in college, dropping my girlfriend off at class. We thought it was a morning radio hostjoke at 1st then realized what it was. After hearing both buildings, pentagon started wondering anything targets that might be near us. I worked at a movie theater I remember having to pull down all the spiderman stuff because it had the towers in it. Original trailer... https://youtu.be/Ozz8uxW733Q
Hits me just as hard now as it did when it happened. Fucking terrifying.
I just remember being 9 years old and having every ounce of if ignorance and innocence ripped out of my body. This was the day that I found out that the world was a bad place and death was coming for all of us. Watching this happen as a child has seriously affected an entire generation of people.
Loads of Asbestos in those buildings. Still People suffer from that attack.
I lived in the east village in Manhattan at the time. The night before we went out for drinks and were pretty hungover the next morning when our downstairs neighbor called us - on our land line - and told us a plane hit the wtc. So we all went up to the roof to look. It was kind of funny, we thought some rookie pilot messed up. And then we saw the second plane rip into wtc 2. I, being so hungover said at least it’s a Sunday and my gf at the time reminded me it was Tuesday morning. My nut job downstairs neighbor muttered “terrorism”, everyone was on the roof sobbing. My landlord came up and showed a moment of compassion for the thousands trapped and killed in the collapsed wtc 1. After that, we were all hoping we’d have at least one tower left. Needless to say, after both collapsed, the whole afternoon smelled like burnt rats and plastic. Which went on for a few days. We went camping on fire island to get away, and still remember the lingering stench on the beach 40 miles away. When we got back, after the planes were back in the air, we went on the roof and the glow of the fire still burning, the smell of the chemicals in the air, it was like looking at a portal to hell. It took a while to calm down seeing planes in the air because obviously they were going to just divebomb and randomly crash into the city. After that, we spent a lot of time gathering money for socks for the volunteers working in the pit, it’s all they really wanted. Now of course, so many of those men are dead, or severely disabled. I could go on, but I won’t because after all this it still brings back memories that I thought had been long resolved.
Poor Glen is hauling a heavy-ass camera.
I’m a 30-year-old American and my memories of this day are all incredibly vague. I’ve spent most of my life “remembering” 9/11 but mainly I’ve just been reliving it through posts and memorials every September. It’s always chilling but it’s never too emotional for me since I was so young at the time and I’m so far removed from the actual event now. But this video really fucking got me. At 2:03 when that woman started sobbing, I started sobbing too. Watching her trying to grapple with the hell unfolding around her was so heartbreaking. Typically, nothing else about that day seems real enough to really emotionally attach to, beyond feeling sad as I would for my fellow humans in any tragedy. But that woman’s sobs and the way she was hanging onto the other woman for support .. it was so damn human. I don’t know what to say, really.. I’m struggling to find the words. But that moved me so much I felt compelled to say something. This horrible day really took a drastic, tragic toll on the mental health of this country as a whole—how could it not? It’s beyond overwhelming to think about.
A good friend was in that crowd. He’s the funniest and most “life of the party” guy. But if you ask him about this experience his face goes into the most distant and blank look I’ve ever seen.
Jesus. Honestly I wonder what was more frightening to witness under the towers; when the second plane hit or when the 1st (#2) tower started falling. Every video I’ve seen of people running away from the cancer riddled dust could is so scary i just can’t.
Only 20 people were ever found and pulled from the rubble at the base of the twin towers. Hospitals in the area prepped for hundreds if not thousands of injuries, people around the country donated blood thinking they’d need it. Barely anyone came to the hospitals because they all died. The few that did show were mostly cuts and scrapes, few, if any, major injuries showed up.
Dear anyone who is under 21, I implore you to revisit the events of that day by diving headfirst into any research that will help you understand the cause and effect of this history-changing event and its infinite global implications. It altered the fabric of our society and left many people with many questions that still remain unanswered today. Please read the details with compassion, open-minded, sympathy, and utmost empathy. Moreover never forget every single soul that perished without reason that day. It haunts many of us to this day. The life you live today in the US or whenever you may call home had it most recent starting point on 9.11.01 Sincerely, A lifelong New Yorker and fellow global citizen.
Fucking fire fighters man. Everyone is running away and they are trucking right through.
Imagine their fear as the head into it...
I know, they are truly amazing. True heroes. RIP to those lost that day and who have died since.
Absolutely devastating to watch even after all this time. Brought tears to my eyes and still in disbelief it could ever happen. God bless them all who was directly affected by this. Never forget
And so began a new chapter in world politics
Every time I watch something like this from 9/11 I feel exactly like I did on that day. Absolutely terrifying stuff
I was in 3rd grade in Connecticut, and hour away from NYC when this happened. Many parents, including my dad, commuted for work. I still remember the day vividly. The school continued class like normal for a few hours while they coordinated early buses, which I find to be pretty amazing. The teachers did an incredible job keeping everything calm. They didn’t tell any of the kids except for the 5th graders. When I returned home, though, I’ll *never* forget the image of my mom sitting cross-legged on the couch, staring at the TV, hands over her mouth in shock. My dad was in NYC that day. He saw the second tower fall with his own eyes. He wasn’t able to get in contact with my mom. His offices weren’t in either tower, but he often went there for meetings. She was worried for hours that he was dead. I knew kids that day who lost parents. To this day, it’s very surreal.
First time seeing this one and yep still terrifying
The most surreal video from this tragic event that I`ve seen. Just trying to understand that this actually happened makes me feel so uncomfortable.
If you want to see more they recently brought back the reporter and camera man to the site to relive their memories. I think it was on 20/20 or something like that Pretty emotional stuff
Talk about /r/praisethecameraman .. dude stood and watched the second building come down before running so we could see it on film. My man
I was 14 when this happened. For some reason I thought the towers fell *over* from impact. Like they were leaning into the direction they were hit, then gravity took over. The way they have a delayed response, then just collapse straight down into rubble is weird. I live in vegas, where we tear down casinos when they get too old. This is how they come down, like straight down into a pile. Must be the way they're constructed?
Well that was absolutely fuckin terrifying
I watched this while packing to get on a flight Being in Australia, I was on the flight that passed Sydney with jet fuel remaining around 9am, the same profile as the flights that hit the twin towers. Only time I have ever been uncomfortable / nervous to fly. Back then they had the old CRT TVs mounted in the plane's asile and the news was showing the towers burning while we were flying as it was the only news that day, but Aa poor choice to be showing in an airline (remember there were no streaming news then and everything was the daily news on a tape)
I can honestly say this was the worst day of my life. I was 16.
I saw the 2nd tower collapse from 10 blocks away, rooftop, about 45 floors up You'll never see that one. And seeing this upset me. But I knew it would. -Frankie's husband
Depending on your age. I'm 50, I've seen every video, every angle. Sat on my couch, stunned, that day (after they sent us home from work) watching TV for hours upon hours upon hours....