In 2001 I shot days at the newspaper, Wednesday through Friday from 9am to 3pm and Saturday's all day and night. 9/11/01 was a Tuesday so I had off. I woke up in the morning and "stumbled" through my morning routine, eventually settling in the living room with something for breakfast and turned on the TV to see the Trade Towers on fire....
A little while later (I don't recall how long but it wasn't more than an hour) the first tower came down as I was watching.
A lot of folks had friends and family there. I have a good friend who's been in Manhattan since 1998, we still touch base once in a while though he's extremely busy being a documentary filmmaker in NYC. He was a few blocks from the WTC when the first plane hit and, being the photojournalist he started out as, he bought up several "box" cameras from a corner drug store and started shooting.
Later he was trying to call up here to see if we wanted the photos but he couldn't figure out a good way to get them to us. Telephone networks were down, Internet access was iffy at best and there were no easy ways to mail hardcopies so we'd have them right away.
The next day I came into work and CNN was on 24/7 for the next two weeks or more with coverage "en minutae" (if I spelled that right) of what became ground zero....
Plus we had access to all the "raw" photos and stories going across news wire services. A LOT of crap didn't get published. Too horriffic. People you could clearly identify if you knew them falling/jumping out of the buildings, dust and soot and debris and death and carnage...
We had several bomb threats that week. That was another problem. I think a lot of media outlets had those. Kids I believe, almost a natural (if bizarre) reaction to what was going on. I think somehow everyone needed a "vehicle" to make sense of what had happened and for some kids (and maybe some adults too) calling in a bomb threat was one way of deciphering it for themselves...
Dunno, just seems to have looked that way over the years.
I had another friend in Boston where one of the planes came from. He was "in it" too, a city that was near panic over what had been there and had started there.
It was ugly.
I have a photo of the sky and horizon from that time. You can see Lake Erie and the Western New York shoreline all the way up to Buffalo just about. Not a contrail in the sky, no aircraft whatsoever.
If nothing else, we're a navigation point for most air traffic running through Buffalo, NY, Cleveland, OH, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, PA, and Toronto, ON. You can't look up in the sky around here and NOT see the signs of an aircraft of some kind.
You could back then.
The photographers here and most of the reporting staff and our editors all have press identification now, a result of the 9/11 attacks and increased security concerns.
My father's a professor in biology at a local university. He's also the one in charge of all the radioactive materials on campus and their security, stuff used in tracing cellular processes and genetics research, isotopes and such that aren't much higher in energy release than background radiation, but enough to cause a problem if left in the wrong hands. It doesn't happen often now, but in the year after the attacks, espeically while school was in session, my dad got calls from the campus police almost every day to check on various rooms around campus where such materials had been stored. Someone left a door open or a light was on when it shouldn't have been. Stupid stuff that you might just ignore or pass off to forgetfulness, but then, EVERYTHING was a risk, everything needed to be checked and rechecked, regardless of what time of day or night it was.
I saw the second plane smash into the WTC on TV. Until that point, I thought, "Wow, that was one dinger of an accident..." It's not uncommon for aircraft to accidentally smash into big buildings like that, it's happened before though usually small, one person aircraft or helicopters.
The second plane crashed in and I knew that wasn't an accident, it was deliberate. There wasn't any word yet as I recall about the plane in the Pentagon or the one in Pennsylvania...
I know a lot of firefighters and police too. These guys do amazing work and I'm always in awe of what they're willing to do, what they'll put up with, just for the sake of helping someone in need. I'm certain the guys who went into the Towers that day to fight the fires didn't expect the buildings to come down. They were going in to fight a very hard fire, they knew it, you could see it in the footage that was shot and released. They were there to do the best they could against literally impossible odds.
This year there was virtually no effort to mark the occassion in the area outside of what we did in the newspaper. In the past there were memorial services, candlelight vigils, moments and events to mark a very important day in U.S. history. Nothing this year.
That's kinda sad.
I "cheated" and "borrowed" a pair of photos from the wire a year after the attacks and made this up for one of my websites:
Plus, my Mom was sick..so worried about her too. she passed away 6 weeks later.......Now, it is strange that this huge Hurricane is about to hit U.S. again..this weekend..I pray we have no more deaths this week...Bonnie
