[Nibile]

While the Twin Towers were attacked I was exactly at mid flight over the Atlantic, destination San Francisco...

[GraemeA]

Route setting at the Foundry for the Inter Services Lead Championships. I remember thinking Mark and Lard are maybe going a bit far with their chat about a plane crashing into the Twin Towers then realised they weren't joking.

Quite a few of the competitors for the comp didn't turn up the next day.

[GCW]

I was working in A+E and when someone told me a plane had hit the twin towers I thought it was a joke.  Eventually I went to look at the TV in time to see the second plane hit in real time.

[cheque]

I was working in a call centre in a small 6-storey tower block in the centre of Nottingham. News kind of filtered through that it had happened from people's flatmates on their mobiles (seems bizarre to think it but very few of us had them). Discussing it at mid-afternoon fag break, the floor manager said "Thank God they didn't attack this building". He was totally serious. 

I remember the next morning feeling very surreal, with everyone walking around in a bit of a daze. The headline of the Independent was "Doomsday America" and I bought a copy thinking it was the maddest thing I'd ever seen. I sometimes find it when I'm moving house and it hasn't lost its impact!

[Duncan Disorderly]

El Chorro - heard a few snippets from folk and had a chat to a guy in (bad) Spanish... Didn't see any images or get the full lowdown til we went to Granada about 4 days later.....

[luckyjez]

Me and my wife were on holiday in Pembrokeshire and we'd been paddling about in a Canadian canoe of the River Teifi near Cardigan.
When we got back to the car, there was a text from Sam T (of this parish) saying "Holy Shit - have you seen the news?". The rest of the holiday was a slightly surreal daze of watching the television (I remember loads of repeats of E.R.?) and wandering about unable to concentrate.

[magpie]

someone told me a plane had hit the twin towers I thought it was a joke.  Eventually I went to look at the TV in time to see the second plane hit in real time.

Same for me, my brother told me and I just assumed he was confused about what had happened but then I went to look at the TV and saw the second plane hit, it still makes me feel a bit funny thinking about it now, it didn't seem possible or real, it was a bit like watching a film.

[Stubbs]

Was in Leeds, it was the summer after finishing my undergraduate course.  I remember being in the newsagents and the owner saying that a small plane had hit the tower; I got home and turned on the see the footage, it was obvious it wasn't a light aircraft.  One of my housemates was in New York and had been in that area the day before.

Even thinking about it now I find it hard to believe it actually happened, somehow it just seems so unbelievable. (edit what Magpie said).

[Baron]

Watching on the internet behind the counter at Rock and Run in Sheffield with (can't quite remember) Cowboy Hat, Dylan, Dense, maybe Saltbeef, Jules and others.

[gme]

Having one of the best sessions i ever had at a certain Yorkshire point break. Heard on the Mark and Lard show (like GraemeA).

The first plane hit just as we left the car to go in, 3hrs later when we got out the world had changed quite a bit.

[iain]

Working on an IT helpdesk in the scottish parliament. Someone came in saying a plane had hit the towers and we turned on the TV (there was one in every room for supposedly watching the debates).

I remember seeing the second plane, feeling utterly horrified as I realised what was about to happen and wanting to, completely irrationally, tell someone/anyone so they could stop it. Then watching the collapses, utterly surreal even thinking about it now.


Nibs, what was it like landing in the states so soon after it happened? Presumably they didn't let your plane get to San Francisco?

[lagerstarfish]

Inside the keep at Peveril Castle with Joe Picalli

We saw the stuff on TV when we went down to the pub for food. After spending the morning watching Joe colliding with an 800 year old fortress with little resultant damage, it was a surprise to see a similar, but more modern event ending so differently.

We decided that the basement of a 12th century fortress was as good a place as any to be protected from the end of the world.

[andy popp]

I was working at home. Someone rang and told us to turn on the television, which we did in time to watch the second plane hit. The day before I'd climbed what was for me a major project and probably the last 'hard' route I'll do. At the same time my wife was beginning to complain of the symptoms that were to herald in ten years of hell. Somehow the shocking terribleness and strangeness of world events seemed get bound in with events unfolding in my own life.

[dave]

I'd gone from home out to fox house via two busses and a train for a session on burbage south boulders. Decent nick for the time of year as I recall. I heard something about it from people talking on the train at sheff station on the way back.

I must admit that prior to that day I had never heard of the world trade centre.

[cowboyhat]

Watching on the internet behind the counter at Rock and Run in Sheffield with (can't quite remember) Cowboy Hat, Dylan, Dense, maybe Saltbeef, Jules and others.

It wasn't me, day off for whatever reason. I was having breakfast at home and the landlady let herself into the flat and came running up all hysterical about it, seems like she twigged it might be important.

Then I went to the Tor. Foot and Mouth etc... it was very busy there though I can't remember the other cast members. Stone?

Was Burbage South really open?

[SA Chris]

Having one of the best sessions i ever had at a certain Yorkshire point break.

http://bestnewspoint.blogspot.com/2011/08/surfer-witnesses-911-attack.html

Imagine what it was like for this guy.

I too still find it hard to believe it happened, 12 years later it still feels hard to take in.

[Falling Down]

I was working in Aberdeen in the BP offices.  Had the internet on then wandered down to the press/PR centre to see the second plane go in.  It was really weird and unsettling.  Ended up going back to my hotel and watching on the tele then caught a train back to Manc the next day as I wasn't allowed to fly.

[fried]

I was on an island in the Mekong in Laos, we had no TV on the island and had effectively had no news from the outside world for a few days. An Australian arrived and told me about the attack, I was a bit dubious as it all sounded a bit far fetched, when he started going on about an attack on the pentagon building I knew he was taking the piss....then a couple of days later I arrived in a city (can't remember the name) and heard that it had in fact happened. The reactions from the locals was a bit different to that in the west. I remember sitting in a bar which had maps on the table of the bombs dropped on Laos during the Vietnam war, listening to an American argueing wth a not especially sympathetic Laotian.

[dave]

Was Burbage South really open?

Deffo, i remember I had spoke on the phone to some mates on Froggatt that same day, assume the restrictions must just have been off by then.

[gardinrm]

What's very interesting to me about this thread is the level of detail people remember of that particular day. No doubt we have no idea what we were specifically doing 2 weeks later. It's amazing how things are etched into our memory when something monumental happens. I was off sick at home and saw every bit of it on the tv. Then my brother and his mate came home and we all watched the rest. I remember having a very mature talk (i was pretty young at the time) about what it meant and why it had been done. Sobering is the word that comes to mind.

[Nibile]

Nibs, what was it like landing in the states so soon after it happened? Presumably they didn't let your plane get to San Francisco?

The full story, if you are very bored, is this:
I was sipping my coffe on the plane, relaxed and thinking that within a few hours I'd be in San Francisco. My girlfriend was dozing. At some point, I noticed that the coffe was inclined in the cup, a clear sign that we were turning. When the coffee was horizontal again, I couldn't help but think that something didn't quite fit in.
Then I realized: the sun was on the opposite window than before.
What the fuck. We are going back.
As I sat there between terrified and idiotic, the Captain spoke, quite unexpectedly because the flight attendants looked at one another puzzled. We were going back to Paris, because EVERY airport in USA was closed, due to terroristic problems.
Hmmm, I though, are we sure the Captain isn't speaking with a gun held in front of his eyes? Not funny. People started calling home, and I told my girlfriend and the Spanish couple what was going on. The Spaniards said "Oh" and went back to sleep. Of course they did, they were Basque.
Anyway, I thought about general threats of bombs. How far from reality I was. So I started planning for the following day, when surely we'd be gone back to San Fran: delay the car rental, delay the hotel reservation, and the likes.
We landed. Not before being terrified again, when I saw an enormous white cloud coming from an engine, it seemed. Luckily before panicking - all alone - my small flight knowledge made me realize that we were just dropping the fuel, not to be too heavy for the landing...
Charles De Gaulle airport was hell. Special Forces everywhere, people on the phone crying and yelling. Getting bits of frantic conversations I understood about a plane crash and a building collapsed. The two things didn't have any correlation in my mind. Naive.
We collected our luggage and I noticed an Air France lady with some lists in her hands and a walkie-talkie. I immediately asked her "Excuse me, when will you give us our new tickets?" She patted me on the shoulder and said: "For today, just be happy that you're alive." Hmmm, strange lady.
I queued for a phone and called home. "Lore where are you?" My father said. Then he explained what had happened. Twice. I could not understand. At the moment, media were talking about 20.000 victims. War. An Air France flight seemed to be missing at some point. "Stay away from Paris!" my father told me.
We went to the bar and we saw the TV.
That was my holiday you motherfuckers.
Everyone was going to be flewn back home. We refused. I didn't want to go home. We searched for an hotel. We found one at Orly, where we got at 2 am. I was starving, and we went into a nearby bar, where they didn't have anything except alcohol and karaoke, and neither fitted my mood. In the hotel room, that had a beautiful view over a gigantic roundabout and the end of a piste, I found a good night chocolate on my pillow. My dinner.
On TV, there was "Bicentennial Man", a very joyful film in which everyone dies.
After a strange night, the following morning I got a rental car, and just a few hours later I was pulling slopers in Bas Cuvier, in the strangest session of my life.
I've never felt so close to other climbers in my life. I needed human contact, I wanted to shake hands, to hug.
So finally we spent three weeks touring the North of France, the D-day beaches, and Font. It was freezing and in my suitcase I only had tanks tops and beach shorts.

[mark s]

i was in worksop putting a fence around a farm shop
heard steve wright (i think) talking about a plane crashing and i was picturing the 2 seater type.
didnt see much about it until i got home.

still never less shocking when i see it on tv now.
the conspiracy nutters still do my head in,
dread to think what must have been going through the jumpers heads.been in a compartment fire that was 400/500 deg and another top to bottom in smoke,not nice places

[Wood FT]

I was at school, the teachers were all shuffling around and even that hard bastard mr spilsbury looked shocked. I didnt understand why people were crying at a burning building. Later on we all went and sat on the hay bails in the back field, we all seemed to think it meant war but didn't have a clue what that meant. What a horrid turning point in history.

[Pantontino]

I was stood in the upstairs office of the Llanberis branch of Outside (now the V12 building) looking out of the window towards Cloggy wondering what was happening, what it all meant. The phone kept ringing "have you heard?", everybody in a state of bewilderment.

[dave]

The Spaniards said "Oh" and went back to sleep. Of course they did, they were Basque.

I hope they both left the aircraft via different routes, since as we all know, you should never put all your Basques in one exit.

[rginns]

I'd just finished a 12 hour shift at the local mill having just shovelled about 2 tonnes of wheat that had burst out of one of the relay pipes that had breached.
That was a great job (yeah right)

[Nibile]

The Spaniards said "Oh" and went back to sleep. Of course they did, they were Basque.

I hope they both left the aircraft via different routes, since as we all know, you should never put all your Basques in one exit.

I know the pun but I don't get it..
 

[GCW]

Putting all your eggs in one basket.

[Nibile]

Oh.

[Dr T]

Ill in student digs watching the whole thing live on tele...

[krymson]

Ill in student digs watching the whole thing live on tele...

That was a bit weird and off-putting, made the whole thing surreal. Class was stopped and our teacher put it on TV. It really seemed like something out of a movie at first and was hard to wrap your head around the fact this was something real that was going on right now.

That entire day was scary and tense since there were multiple attacks after the towers -- Pennsylvania, and then the Pentagon. It's not like the terrorists are going to go "ok that's it we're done" so you're never really sure if it was finished or somethign else bad was going to happen.

[SA Chris]

What's very interesting to me about this thread is the level of detail people remember of that particular day. No doubt we have no idea what we were specifically doing 2 weeks later.

Apparently many people are the same about what they were doing when They heard JFK had been killed

[Oldmanmatt]

I was sitting watching BBC world in a mates house in Dubai.

Odd. I'd recently left my job and had to leave the apartment that came with it, so Lili and I were staying in a Villa while my mate was away and we looked for a new apartment.

Bored really.

Think I was eating lunch.

I remember the screen switched to an image of the towers, smoke pouring from one...

The news readers didn't seem sure why, or even why the live image had been dumped on them.

Then the second plane went in.



Got a call from my mate, later that day.

He worked for Solar Gas turbines (a Yank company), saying they wouldn't be back as Solar we're evacuating all personnel from the Mid East because Bush was going to Carpet bomb the the entire region back to the Stone Age.


I wonder, sometimes, how close that actually was to happening?

Some of the stories that have emerged of the idiotic panic that ensued during the Cuban missile crisis and how close we really came to Nuclear Armageddon over the mere threat of a missile being emplaced and the loss of a single, one man, aircraft.

Well...


Makes you wonder, eh?

[SamT]

What's very interesting to me about this thread is the level of detail people remember of that particular day. No doubt we have no idea what we were specifically doing 2 weeks later.

interesting thread.

I was at work in a large open plan office in a towerblock in sheffield.  I remember looking at the beeb website at the looped footage like it was just not real, wondering if it was all faked/spoof, then as it dawned and the phone calls came in just being a bit stunned by it all.  I recall some folks just looked at it and went "Oh" and turned back to their work.  I thought how on earth can you watch that and just get back to your mundane crappy job without so much as hint of shock/interest.  Weirdos.

Eventually the internet a worked crashed (or the powers that be turned it off so the folks like me, with some sort of imagination/conscience would get back to work.

I distinctly remember walking away from work at 4 along the top of fargate in town, looking at peoples faces and picking people out - "you know.... you know..... you don't know yet, you know, you don't etc etc"  It was blindingly obvious who was deep in thought, concerned contemplation etched on their faces, or who was care free, joking, smiling.

I went home, stuck the telly on, phoned dad.  Eventually, after getting saturated on the same headlines, same looping footage, I grabbed my rucksack and went out to Apparent North bouldering.  Was a nice evening. Such a great tonic, you can forget about the shit stuff so easily.  I remember sitting on the stone trough, place to myself, looking out at the sunset and it suddenly returning to my mind again, bam! so I packed up,  sulked off home. Cant remember anything further.

edit - dont remember txting Jez though, sorry for probably ruining your day Jez

[dave]

Apparently many people are the same about what they were doing when They heard JFK had been killed

My dad alwaysnsays he knows where he was, and so do I. I was in a history lesson about the assassination of JFK.

[Bubba]

Eventually the internet a worked crashed (or the powers that be turned it off so the folks like me, with some sort of imagination/conscience would get back to work.

I remember all the news sites going down because of the traffic, though you could still crawl through to some of them using "www2." for a while. 

I was programming in Glasgow. Remember phoning Sel and telling her to get to a TV and then worrying about the in-laws in case London got hit as well.  Shocking day and I find it hard to re-watch the footage these days knowing how it all played out.

[namnok]

I remember it was a glorious sunny day and had planned to meet some mates for a boulder session.

 Got to manc piccadilly and missed train. Got next train with plans on getting a differnt way to hathersage. Got totally lost and ended up in sheffield before giving up and heading straight back home.

Got home to see the the towers ablaze. Called my mates who i were meant to meet and told them i wasnt joking just as the first tower fell. They left soon after.

[Baron]

My friend Matt has been to New York. He has a picture of himself in the viewing gallery at the top of one of the twin towers - taken on September 10th 2001.

[iain]

I needed human contact, I wanted to shake hands, to hug.

I understand that.

[JackAus]

Asleep. School the next day, its all anyone spoke about. Flew to the UK a week after though. Never seen a flight that empty. Was maybe 50 people...

[johnx2]

...so it's just me that only has a very vague recollection?  We'd just moved to Ilkley (blimey, which means it's the longest I've lived in one place). I think I was at work most of the day.

I must've been a bit caught up in the hyseria as I remember feeling releived that we'd sold our London house (to a city lawyer), as I thought city money might not be rushing into town*.

(I was on Gower St on the morning of the 7/7 bombs (round the corner from where the bus was blown up.) Clear memories of that day I can tell you. I've also heard about four IRA bombs go off, though only the no. 10 mortar bomb properly rattled my windows. There's no ambiguity about when it's a bomb.)





*This does not make me a bad person, or unusually self-centered (in my view). It does however make me wrong, as the house doubled again in price. Hey ho.

[burbistan]

On a campsite at Kiln Creek, Big Sur. We had a little radio we'd taken on the JMT and my missus was listening to it. Said she thought something was happening in NYC but maybe it was a hoax? We shared the earpieces just as the first tower collapsed. Soon obvious it wasn't a hoax. I thought of friends there then remembered I'd been to top of the south tower a month previously.

Then it occurred to me the other people on the campsite probably weren't listening to the radio. Opposite us was a red Mustang with New York plates. I woke the guy up and told him. He couldn't take it in. Said he owned a small firm run out of offices in one of the towers. He came round the campsite with me to tell others then raced off to find a landline. A soldier in a jeep came into the campsite from a nearby base to check people knew about the event.

We had to go and hang with mates in SF to see what would happen with our flights home. Stopped in Monterrey and saw the reruns of the towers collapsing on TV. Public opinion was already polarising between instant seek and destroy or more rational process.

We eventually made it home on our intended flights. I always wondered what happened to the Mustang guy's employees.

[outlawed]

I watched it in smoking room of civil service department i worked for. Finished my fags then went back to dealing with angry farmers. Whole govt compound where based went over the top mental. Like a mad lockdown for a week before back to normal.

Never felt different to living through London IRA for years to me. Had family member lose half face eye and ear in Victoria station bomb.

Thing i remember most is a tv reporter that night saying it would be a very brave American who rattled an IRA collecting tin in a Boston or New York bar tonight.

[seankenny]

I was in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, having chips with some Taliban.

Clearly I didn't find out what had happened for some time afterwards, what with TV being banned in Afghanistan at the time.

[chillax]

In history class in secondary school. The teacher brought us all out of the classroom and into a little storage room which had a radio. I remember him telling us that this was history in the making. The whole scene was eerily reminiscent of something from WWII, a crowd of people huddled round a wireless, hearing news that would change the world.

[Oldmanmatt]

Silly observation...

But the Bunkers Facebook page hit 911 likes this afternoon.

Then.

Stopped.

Yeah, I know, spooky uh?


Seriously, glad to see another anniversary of that day pass without some idiot carrying out some equally pointless, inane, sickening, atrocity in the name of some fictitious deity or to celebrate the original idiots.

Mind you.

The day's not over yet.

[SA Chris]

I was in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, having chips with some Taliban.

Clearly I didn't find out what had happened for some time afterwards, what with TV being banned in Afghanistan at the time.

Seriously? If so, amazing

[magpie]

What's very interesting to me about this thread is the level of detail people remember of that particular day. No doubt we have no idea what we were specifically doing 2 weeks later.

Apparently many people are the same about what they were doing when They heard JFK had been killed

There's a proper reason for it, it's to do with how different types of memories are formed and what part of your brain you store them in, I think.  I can't remember all the science but basically certain emotions triggered by some events mean that you create a different sort of memory from normal so they are easier to recall, seems more vivid and fresh than regular memories do and they tend to be of big, life changing or shocking events.  I watched a documentary on it and I remember thinking at the time, when they described those sort of memories, that one of mine was of September the 11th watching that second plane hit.

[seankenny]

I was in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, having chips with some Taliban.

Clearly I didn't find out what had happened for some time afterwards, what with TV being banned in Afghanistan at the time.

Seriously? If so, amazing

Yes, seriously! I have pretty much the last tourist visa ever issued by the Islamic Emirate of Afghansitan. (If that isn't optimism, I don't know what is...)

[SA Chris]

Duly wadded.

[mark s]

i watched a programme today about firehouse 10 at the bottom of the wtc
they lost half the men on shift that day.
at work yesterday we were talking about it.even the watch manager was suspicious of how they collapsed.the others told him he is talking crap.
they were saying how all the rules of deploying ff's to buildings went out of the window.even blokes not working came in and went into the building without logging in.

its the noise of the breathing apparatus automatic distress alarms in the silence and dust that i now dont like.