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I was working at One Wall St Court at the time and I took the 2 train down to Wall St station in the morning. The first plane hit before I got out of the subway and as I was walking to my office I saw a huge crowd of people staring in the direction of the towers. My first thought was “loving tourists.” but once I got to where they were standing I could see that one of the towers was on fire so I thought “OK. That’s not something you see every day.” Then I figured that since my office wasn’t on fire my boss would still expect me to be there. I asked a nearby cop what had happened and he told me that a plane had crashed into the building. At this point terrorism hadn’t entered my mind. I just thought that someone was going to get fired for being an idiot since I was pretty sure that the whole area was restricted airspace. As I was getting ready to continue to work the second plane hit. I didn’t see the plane from where I was standing though, just the explosion, so I assumed that the fire from the first plane had ignited something and wondered why there was a bunch of explosive stuff in the tower. At this point a bunch of people screamed and started running away. I was kind of grump so I stayed where I was and decided I would knock over the first person who tried to run into me. No one did and everyone stopped running after a few seconds. Some homeless guy got nocked over so I helped him up and headed to work. When I got in I ran into the CEO and told him that a plan had crashed into one of the twin towers and he told me, in his thick French accent, “No. TWO planes.” Now I’m starting to think, “Wait a minute that can’t be a coincidence. This could be terrorism.” “Of course it’s terrorism.” He shouted back. Well, I remembered that several years before a guy had parked a van full of explosives in the garage of the WTC. A few people died and there was a bunch of property damage. I figured not much would come of this either. Fire crews would put out the fire and that would be it. So I headed into my office and called up the one and only client of our web hosting management software. The software was basically still in beta so I had been spending all day every day trying to help him get our stuff working. At one point I heard what I thought was a large truck driving by outside. And then the CEO stuck his head in my office and told me that we were evacuating the building. This sounded pretty dumb to me but I told our client I had to go and we all walked downstairs. Once we opened the emergency door all I could see was ash flying horizontally past the door. I think I actually told the CEO “gently caress no. I’m not going out in that.” So we all went back to our office. By this point every room with a window had a light dusting of ash all over it, even though the windows were closed. The CEO started freaking out and asking what we should do. I figured we might have to stay there a while so I started filling trash cans with water and told him to go get the promotional shirts so we could soak them and use them as filters. At some point while were were doing this his girlfriend showed up. She had been job hunting in the area and apparently ended up having to huddle in a doorway with the CEO of Citibank while the towers were collapsing. This is when we figured out what the rumbling was and where all that ash came from. The building superintendent also walked in and handed us 3 of those paper dust masks. After a while we decided to make an other evacuation attempt. We handed the mask to the CEO’s girlfriend, the secretary and the intern and the rest of us tied the water soaked shirts around our faces and we took off and started walking north. The dust had settled but now everything was covered in a thick layer of that ash. It was a scene that, until then, I thought only ever showed up in cheesy post apocalyptic movies. Once we got to the Brooklyn Bridge everyone decided to head into Brooklyn, except me. By this point we had heard that there were other plans crashing into stuff so I’m thinking there’s no way I’m going to join thousands of people on one of the most recognized bridges on the planet. Besides, I lived in Manhattan. What was I supposed to do once I was in Brooklyn? I figured that everything would be on lockdown for a while so I got bought a bunch of water and some food that would not require working gas or electricity on the way home. Just before I got into my building I passed a tall black transvestite. She was walking in the opposite direction as me rocking her head back and forth into her hands and chanting “Arabs killed American citizens.” to herself over and over. As I passed her I remember thinking, “Oh poo poo. I’ve seen this movie before. Things are about to get really bad.” SeventhUncle fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Oct 16, 2015 |
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Oct 16, 2015 00:49
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Other random anecdotes: We didn't have a TV or radio in the office so the only "news" I initially got about it was from slashdot.org. I remember that being so full of conjecture, speculation and contradictory information that I just ignored it. The first official news I heard was from people gathered around cars with the radio turned up. The following weekend my roommate and I were moving. We had already signed the lease and our current lease was up so we had no choice but to follow through. The move involved going through the Lincoln Tunnel. There were military guys with assault rifles stationed at the entrance inspecting cars. One of them opened the back of the truck and just waived us through. That seemed weird because the truck was stacked floor to ceiling with furniture and we could have had anything buried in there. After the move my commute was supposed to be a short trip on the PATH to WTC station. That obviously didn't happen.
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Oct 16, 2015 20:39
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That had never occurred to me before. Now that you mention it though, there must have been a whole bunch of people in situations like that; phone operators, ATC operators etc. Condolences.
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Oct 17, 2015 22:05
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