D.C. Area Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Re: Where were you? How were you affected?
I was at my first day of work as a law clerk in downtown DC (part-time job while I was in law school). I was sitting at my desk, and someone sent an email about a plane hitting the WTC. I assumed it was an accident. Then there was another email about a second plane. I tried to go on news websites, but they were all locked up. I walked down the hall and someone had a small TV showing the news. We all crowded around and watched.
They announced that a plane had hit the Pentagon and more planes may be headed for DC. I was terrified. I tried to call DH (we were dating back then), who was working less than 1 block from the White House. No phones were working. There were news stories floating around about car bombs going off, explosions at other federal buildings downtown, etc. I remember the Metro shut down as a precaution. DH and I finally contacted each other via email and made a plan about how to get out of the city and get back home.
We were living in an apartment in Pentagon City that overlooked the side of the Pentagon that was hit. When I got home, smoke was still billowing out of the building. It was charred black. It was surreal. I saw that image every day until they eventually rebuilt it. When I think about that day, I still remember how scary it was.
when it actually happened I was in my freshman chemistry class in SC - the class was over at 9 - I went back to my dorm and watched the news the rest of the day.
I remember how clear the day was - not cloud in the sky and it there was a little chill in the air -- perfect fall weather.
does anyone else feel like it hasn't been 10 years ?
I would like to go to the Newseum - they have a 9/11 special - I hear there is a room full of cellphones and shoes that were found at Ground Zero
I was teaching a class full of kindergartners. One of the teachers came in and told us about the plane crash. Then rumors started coming in about the Pentagon, then the towers crashing. I was trying to figure out what airlines they were as my stepmother was a flight attendant at that time for Delta and I didn't know if she was flying that day or not. I had also heard that different buildings in and around DC had been hit, so I was worried about my dad. It was very scary as we couldn't turn on TVs at all to see what was going on due to we were trying to keep it quiet from the children. Parents were coming in and picking up their children and taking them home. My afternoon kindergarten class consisted of about 10 students out of 25 whose parents still brought them to school. By the end of the day I had 4 students left because parents came and took them home. We had many parents in our school who worked in the Pentagon, so we were worried for all of them.
Once school ended for the day, I went straight to my dad's house and watched the coverage for the first time. It was shocking to see the towers fall. I had been up to the top of the towers 10 years before for a high school class trip. Now they were gone. When I drove back to my apartment that night from Herndon to Leesburg, it was very strangely quiet as there were only about 5 cars on Rt. 7 the whole time.
I hunkered down in front of the tv and just cried for the next few days.
I was at work in the Watergate building. We could see the smoke from the Pentagon.
I remember my boss coming over and telling us to go home. I think she was one of the first at our company to make that decision as it seemed senior leadership didn't know what to do. I was fortunate in that I drove to work at that time and with the Watergate building be so close to the bridges I was able to get our of DC and into VA relatively easy.
My poor parent's were trying to get a hold of me and couldn't for the longest time. I don't think we were able to connect until 2pm or 3pm. (they were in NC).
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I had just finished a FEMA project/work trip at a nuclear power plant in Vermont. I had left a bunch of my colleagues up there b/c they had to complete some stuff. I had driven from Vermont to Boston to visit with my mom for a few days. That morning, I was on the elliptical at a local gym and saw the news about the first plane, and then saw the second plane hit. I drove home and told my mom, and we watched the news the rest of the day. I was worried sick about my colleagues in Vermont b/c there were rumors about attacks on nuclear power plants. I also had, the week before, finished a project where I helped assign staff to a new project at the Pentagon, and I was worried sick about them too. Thankfully, everyone was okay.
I was supposed to fly back to DC on September 12. Instead, I took the train back to DC a few days later. It was so eerie riding through NYC...you could still see the smoke coming from ground zero.
the worst thing for me was not knowing that my gay boyfriend, dan, was ok until getting back to my apartment. we were calling each other for hours even though cell phones weren't really working at that point. he was working at world financial center (basically, right next to WTC) and we were supposed to meet for lunch at the WTC plaza that day. i was so, so afraid that something happened to him. i didn't really breathe until i knew he was safe.
once i got home, it was a lot of calls and e-mails to tell everyone i was ok, make sure they were ok, etc... and watching the news as i hadn't seen footage until getting back to my apartment. the following days were just sad and surreal. i stopped watching any kind of news coverage within 48 hours because it was just too much.
i can't believe it was ten years ago.
i had moved to downtown brooklyn 2 months prior and had also started new job working downtown nyc. I woke up late to vote that day before work (never made it)...practically ran out the house to take the subway which was a block away to work at 9...hubby (boyfriend at the time) called me back..but I had left
the train i was on stopped at chambers st and no one said why just that there was a fire..it was utter chaos outside...I'm from LI so downtown was still soo new to me and the streets don't have numbers like midtown...people were running everywhere I had no idea where to run for cover so many people..all I saw was red fire, smoke, people covered in ash and the fire in the distance coming towards where I was
I made it to my office building and stayed there until -now hubby- walked all the way from 59 & Lex and we walked home to brooklyn.
To this day i really have no clue how i escaped and was in shock for quite a while and tuned out from the tv for a while, when I did i watched nickelodeon.
I was also at work in the Watergate building. Several people in our offices on the 12th floor saw the plane hit the Pentagon - it was horrible. I was at my desk when I heard about the first plane, and thought it was an accident. Then someone came to tell me about the second, and I headed to our media training room to watch (on a bank of tvs).
I was still living in Baltimore at the time, so I went to a colleague's house for most of the day. When I finally drove home, the digital signs on 95 all said, "major event ahead, roads closed into New York City" and it was so eerie.
The next week, I was laid off. All business in my industry pretty much stopped and I was a recent hire. The next 8 months of random jobs really sucked, but the following May my previous company asked me to come back. Thank goodness.
I was a senior in high school. We sat in first period (band) completely oblivious to anything. When the bell rang and students started coming in from their first class, they were all talking about planes flying into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It sounded so ridiculous that I thought they were talking about some new action movie I hadn't heard of. I asked one of them what was going on, and they said it was real...it just happened a short while ago. I walked to my next class in shock, and my AP Bio teacher turned on the news so we could see what was happening. Smoke was coming out of both towers and the Pentagon had just been hit. Our prinicipal came on the PA system to tell everyone what happened. He told us that we were going into a lockdown and that the TVs had to be turned off so learning could continue...that he would update us if anything else major happened.
By lunchtime, rumors were going around that an unknown plane was circling around Dulles (my high school is only 6 miles away) and we were definitely freaked out. Some students were picked up early because they had family members at the Pentagon. My dad used to go there once in a while for his job, so I was a little worried about him. I got home, found out he was safe, and couldn't stop watching the news for weeks. Aside from the buildings smoking and collapsing, the video/images that are forever burned into my mind are the ones of the people jumping out of the WTC windows. Tearing up again just thinking about it...
I was a sophomore in college (Upstate NY) standing outside the building where my next class was. I was with 3 of my good friends from high school waiting for the 4th person we knew before we went inside. He came sprinting around the corner and pulled us inside and had the secretary change the channel on the tv (he heard about it on the radio on his way to school) and about 50 of us stood in the hallway looking up at this 10 inch tv watching it all unfold.
We went to class and halfway through there was an announcement that classes were cancelled for the rest of the day and that everyone should go home.
I went home (about 5 blocks from school) and my mom had no idea what happened. I turned on the tv and we sat there and watched for about 4 hours.
That night, my mom wouldn't let anyone turn on the lights (in hindsight it was pretty funny, very 1941 blitz-like). And there were f-16s flying all over the place.
I'm terrified today for the first time in my life. I have never worried about DH going work, but today he was pulled out of the operations center and put on a patrol at the White House. I was in hysterics most of last night and I'm trying to keep busy, but I can't help to think something might happen to him.
We make the rockin' world go 'round.
I was a junior in high school in St. Louis. I'd finished my zero hour (6:30am) biology lab early so I went to hang out in my first hour AP American History classroom because the teacher always had the tv on. When the news came out that the first plane had hit, our teacher changed it to The Today Show. I remember thinking that it must have been a horrible mistake, or that the pilot must have been drunk (there was a pilot who crashed a plane at the St. Louis airport shortly before who was then found to have been seriously intoxicated). When the second plane hit I was in shock.
My mom called me and told me to come home. I went home and my step-mom, who works for CBS, was packing her bags to go on a 5 day trip because they didn't know where they were going to need her. My mom was hysterical because St. Louis obviously has the Arch and actually has the second highest concentration of federal buildings outside of DC and a major air force base right across the river, and my step mom was going to her office, which is downtown, immediately across from the arch on one side, the federal reserve building on another and a federal courthouse on the third side. My mom and I watched the news all day, and I don't think either of us exhaled til my step-mom came back (CBS decided making personnel fly into regional airports and drive into NYC was a poor choice).
Stand up for something you believe in.
I was a junior in high school and was in my journalism/newspaper class. That class was kind of a joke and we were all just doing our normal goofing off or working on other homework when a friend of ours in a class down the hall came running in and immediately turned the tv on. He was explaining and I just remember looking at the screen, at the close up of the WTC and thinking, "What building is this?" I had never been to New York and was certainly not familiar with the buildings and I never even realized the buildings I was so familiar with seeing in movies were the WTC. I couldn't wrap my head around because they just kept showing the close up of the building - but then we saw on the tv when the second one hit. I went to German class next, which was actually in an old bomb shelter of the high school, and there was no tv down there. No one really focused on anything and then the rumor was going around that the Pentagon was hit.
My dad had just retired from the Air Force in '98 and his last assignment was at the Pentagon. When I got home, it was pitiful. My dad sat there with his plaque they gave him at his retirement (where they all signed it) and he was trying to get in touch with the people he used to work with. My dad was ready to go back but in times of need, they can pluck you out of retirement...I know he would have gone willingly. It ended up being the section of the Pentagon he had worked in. However, his department (Weather Wing) had been relocated prior to 9/11 to a different section of the Pentagon.
I had just finished grad school that May, and was working a terrible temp job in Dupont and living there too. I walked to work, so the first plane hit during my walk there.
My temp supervisor told me what happened, and they were all gathered in someone's office watching the news. I went to the strange temp room I worked in, and just tried to get on any news site I could, but they were all overwhelmed and you couldn't get on the Internet.
The people at the office were saying to stay put, there were all sorts of crazy stories about other targets, and people weren't sure the Metro was safe. I thought, "Eff this, I can walk home," so I left. There were so many people walking, way more than I've ever seen before or since. And tons of cars streaming out of the city, and not a single car going in towards downtown. It was surreal.
I went back home, parked myself in a chair in front of the tv, and I didn't move for hours. I think I watched tv until late in the night. All the while, I was fielding calls from people trying to make sure I was safe, while simultaneously trying to reach my college friends who lived in NY to make sure they were okay.
Mine's a little embarrassing because in times of extreme stress, I shut down emotionally.
I was also a sophomore at JMU and had a 9:30 psychology class. The last girl to get to class mentioned something about a plane crash but didn't give any details. For the next 90 minutes, we were completely unaware of what had happened. My professor had brought in a preserved human brain that day. I remember the sharp smell of the formaldehyde. The moment we stepped outside of that classroom, everything changed. There was a little faculty office outside the room and I caught my first glimpses of what happened on a tiny TV. This is where it gets embarrassing.
Rather than go back to my dorm to watch the news, I went to the JMU bookstore. I had to keep my mind busy. I hadn't finished decorating my dorm room so I rationalized buying a poster. Outside, there was a small table set up where a man was selling jewelry. I bought a little amethyst cross pendant?if ever there was a day to pray, it would be this one. Then I went back to my dorm. I shared a suite with five other girls. They were sitting on the futon glued to the TV then watched with horror as I meticulously hung my new poster then went to the gym. At the gym, I found an elliptical machine that didn't face the TV. I exercised for a really, really long time. Then I went to my afternoon class, only to find a note on the door that it was canceled. I never did join them on the futon.
My roommates, whom I barely knew, probably thought I was a heartless person, but in reality, it wasn't until a few days later that I could even bring myself to watch the footage. I went home that weekend to be with my parents. I just needed people around me that I cared about before I could accept what had happened.
That November, JMU marched in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I'll never, ever forget it. We somberly visited Ground Zero after the parade late at night. The dust had barely settled. The 75th anniversary commemorative snowglobe that Macy's sold that year had the Twin Towers in it... because the snowglobe was produced before 9/11. It's one of my most sentimental possessions.
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I was working at my job at Wolf Trap. I didn't know why my coworker was crying and on her knees and praying out loud. Then I found out.
I left - I drove home from Vienna to Old Town Alexandria thinking that they may close the major roads soon - and I wanted to get to my house. I didn't even know about the Pentagon until I got home.
I got drunk that night with my neighbor - a guy with whom I had an on-again-off-again relationship. I have no idea where the guy is now, his name was Mark (damn I don't remember his last name) but he was also from NJ, and had friends in NYC like me, and it felt good to sit with him on his front porch and just drink and talk. He hung up an American flag on his front porch within minutes of finding out and I really respected that. I'm thinking about him today - not that I miss the relationship - but he was a big part of my memory of that day. I think if I saw him again I'd give him a hug.
I'm actually having a hard time today. I can't stop thinking about the whole thing. It seems like it was ten minutes ago, not ten years ago.
I was at work in NC. We'd recently had a round of layoffs, and closed an office, so I'd been demoted out of my office and into a cubicle. I was in the back corner of the room, in a section of 4 cubes, and the person in front of me must have been out that day, or away from the desk. The two next to me were empty. A sales guy from out of town went in to one to use the phone. I heard him on the phone with his wife, saying "we're going to try to rent a car and drive home, the airport is closed.
I didn't know what was happening, and I tried to get on a news website to find out. When I couldn't get on any, I walked over to someone else's and asked if they could get on the Internet because I couldn't. Someone had gotten on a site, and said a plane had hit the WTC. We had a TV, but it was only for watching training videos and such, we did not have cable. The TV was in our boss' office and so we went in there and tuned it in the best we could. We watched through the fuzz as the towers fell. I remember wondering if that really could be happening, or if the picture was just really bad. I also remember thinking it was like something in a movie.
My mom was at the time a housemother at an orphanage, and she worked one week on and one week off. Normally when she came home on Tuesdays, she, my sister and I would get together for pizza. I remember her calling to see if I thought that we should still go out, or if we should not be out in public. We decided to go.
Like schy, I kind of ignored it. I was in grad school, and had just gotten to my class... and was sort of annoyed that class was cancelled. I took a walk around campus, then went home. My roommate sat in front of the TV bawling all day, and I was thinking "Huh?" I think I was a little desensitized emotionally, after having spent a summer doing some (minor) natural disaster work.
Of course, afterwards, the gravity of the situation hit me.... once they started talking about the casualties, and the widows, etc. Then when I moved to D.C. in 2002 it really hit me... like "wow, OK, now I get it." Hearing my coworkers talk about how the plane flew right over our building - and made everything dark from its shadow - still creeps me out.
I worked at a museum on the grounds of a general aviation field inside the beltway. We were in the process of finalizing catering details for a fundraising dinner that was going to be held on the field, inside the security fence, on 9-21.
On 9-11, I was running a little late to work (I commuted about 35 miles on 270 and the Beltway each day and was supposed to get there at 8:30). I was listening to the radio, and heard something about a plane hitting the WTC right before I ran into my office. Working at a general aviation field, I was hyper-aware of accidents that involved small planes, and just assumed it was a small plane. I got in to my office and my dad called me a few minutes later and said something about it and I said "Oh, I know, I heard about it already." Then I started to work.
Then the second plane hit and my dad called me again and sent me an email. At that point, we knew it wasn't an accident or small planes, and I just felt helpless. I was trying to get on news sites but they were all down. My boss didn't want to get the TV out. She finally did, but we didn't have cable and it was fuzzy. We moved the TV into a conference room where the reception was better and just watched because nobody was coming to our museum.
I will never forget watching the towers and seeing the first one start to bulge. I said to my coworkers that it was going to collapse, and one of my coworkers tried to soothe me and said it wasn't, that they were too strong. I was almost hysterical because I could see it bulging and people were jumping and when it started to fall, I screamed and almost fainted. By the time the second tower fell, I was numb and my face and head ached from crying.
My boss (who was truly awful) made me go and deliver the contract. Looking back, maybe she was trying to get me away from the TV. I don't know. But I drove a couple of miles to the restaurant and none of the radio stations were playing music and all of the DJs sounded so confused and shocked. It was surreal. Nobody knew what would happen next and information was so scattered.
I got to the restaurant, and the manager looked at me like I was crazy for being there to deliver the contract, and I sat at the bar and watched TV for a few more minutes and then went back.
When I got back to the grounds of the airport, I was greeted by a MD National Guard soldier with a rifle. He stopped my car and grilled me about why I was there. Thank goodness I had my employee ID with me, because he would not have let me on the grounds without it. At that point, they had grounded all air traffic and the airport had filled up with small planes that had been ordered to land. Many of them ended up staying at the airport for weeks.
When I got back to my office, my boss told us to go home and I drove back home on the Beltway. I remember two sections distinctly - first was between Georgia Ave and 270. The sky was so blue and beautiful and I was stunned that something so terrible could happen on such a beautiful day. The next was getting on to 270 - I looked at some of the drivers around me and people were crying in their cars.
Once I was home, I checked in with my family and friends as much as I could and everyone was ok. I spent the evening with friends watching coverage and drinking.
The thing I remember most about the days following was the silence. I lived near a general aviation airport and worked near one, and I was used to hearing planes. Not hearing them was awful.
We did end up cancelling the event as we were never allowed to use the airfield for events again. The airport was officially closed to traffic for over a year because of its location, although the state police and National Guard landed at least one flight a day there to keep it continuously operational. About 3-4 weeks after 9-11, they allowed the grounded planes to fly home and it was practically a military operation.
I was a sophomore in HS. Our school didn't want teachers turning on the TVs, but my study hall teacher let us watch coverage. I remember parents coming to get their kids early, but I stayed in school all day (no reason to go home early). I just remember being shocked, sad, and angry.
When I was talking to my mom yesterday, she said there was an interview in the local paper with a police officer who remembered seeing a low plane fly over the area that morning. That was Flight 93. Gives me chills to know if flew practically right over my town.
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