Where were you when the towers fell?

As most of you know in two days, it will be the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. (I don't know about abroad, but here in the US, you can't escape it. It's on tv, on the radio, in the newspaper, and on everyone's hearts and minds.)

The 9/11 Attacks were a turning point for my country and a sobering moment for all of us. No matter if you lived across the seas or in NYC yourself, you were moved by the attacks. It changed the world we live in and we're still dealing with the repercussions of that day today.

The question "Where were you when the towers fell?" has become a part of this generation's culture, just as "when did you hear about the attack on Pearl Harbor?" was long ago. In the ten years since the attacks, I've asked many people that question and received a multitude of answers, from the mundane, "I was brushing my teeth before work." to the shocking firsthand accounts of those in NYC or DC. I even once met a person who had worked the night shift the previous night and hadn't even heard about the attacks till the next day.

My story

I was still in high school back in 2001, still two years from graduating. I was sitting in History class when the principal came on the intercom and told the teachers, "There's something of interest on Channel 2 that you and the students may wish to see."

My history teacher, Mr. McFadden, turned on the television to the scene of the North tower burning and a column of smoke coming off. At the time, there was little information, only that some sort of aircraft had struck the building. The other students in the class started discussing theories; many were of the opinion that it was an accident. Others, seemingly armchair aviation exports, spouted off that you're not allowed to fly planes that close to buildings. While we discussed what was happening, our eyes left the television as we fast each other, until one of the girls in the class gasped, "Another plane flew into the tower, I just saw it, I just saw it." Suddenly, all theories of this being an accident went out the proverbial window. We continued to watch the news station, largely in silence till the period ended and we moved on to our next classes.

As I was shuffling down the hall way, making my way to the AP Biology lab, I heard cries of shock and quickly the hallways emptied as students went into the classrooms to see what was happening. I slipped in to Mrs. White’s lab and saw all of my fellow class mates circled around the tv. Some were crying, others stared emotionless as the towers fell one by one. After that, Mrs. White turned off the tv and stated that “life must go on and we had a lot to cover before the AP Exam” in a very Mrs. White way and continued with the lesson as normal.

It wasn’t long before then that were instructed to go to our homerooms and that we’d be going home shortly. After the FFA grounded all aircraft in the US, almost all planes responded. There was one plane still flying over my town that was not responding, and despite being a small largely unimportant town, the local government decided to evacuate all public buildings. I was home by noon and spent the rest of the day, glued to the tv, before realizing that they were just regurgitating the same information over and over again.

These stories and firsthand accounts are touching and moving. In a time like now, when a lot of those old emotions are resurfacing, speaking about it can help us deal with it. So I ask you, where were you when the towers fell?

I honestly had no idea what the Twin Towers were and when I got a text saying they had fallen it meant nothing.

I was out shopping at the time and passed a tv shop where there was a massive crowd and I will never forget seeing the video of the plane crashing into the second tower, the whole shopping centre was silent afterwards. I will never forget that moment.

The only other thing I can compare the clarity of memory to was the impact of Princess Diana's death. That's another time when everyone here remembers where they were

On that particular day I was working as a telephone receptionist for an airport carpark company. As usual we had the TV on but only showing the teletext pages for flight times. We knew nothing about what was happening until one of our customers came in and told us that he reckoned we wouldnt have many people coming today to catch outbound flights. Puzzled we asked why, and he just answered to turn on the TV.

We did that just in time to see the second plane fly into the second tower. We watched for the rest of the day as the events unfolded and of course when the towers fell and we still knew of all the people trapped up the top emotions poured out.

Strangely enough not many people turned up that evening for their college lessons though.

I was working as a consultant at a law firm 2 blocks from the White House. A friend called me and told me that a plane hit the world trade center. I didn't believe him since he was always calling me about something that wasn't real and he was a jokester. I went back to working on my project.

My office was 3 doors down from the partners lounge when I happen to notice many folks running down the hall towards the lounge. I could hear the gasps and shrieks coming from the lounge. I got up from my desk and started walking down the hall when everyone in the room started crying and screaming....the towers had started to fall.

The mood changed in the office and folks were frantic to get out as there was word that a 3rd plane was headed towards the white house. (I never knew if this was true because there were so many rumors flying around that day)

The streets were packed if you tried to drive you were pretty much SOL as you couldn't get 2 feet on any street in DC. I was able to make it to my metro train...The Blue Line...which runs right under the Pentagon. I had no idea the Pentagon had been hit since I left work without catching up on the news. My train was diverted to another set of tracks.

It took awhile to get home that day but I was very thankful I was able to make it home. On September 11th a lot of folks did not make it home. My heart and prayers go out to them and their families.

It was my first semester in college. I checked a news feed before I head into my morning classes, and a few days earlier I remember a base-jumper getting caught on the statue of liberty. The news report implied it was a small plane, and assuming some other jackass had tried joy-riding as well, I dismissed it and headed to class.

In class, my teacher promptly indicated there was a bigger problem, and canceled the lesson. On my way back to my dorm I stopped through the student union and watched the second plane hit and the weight of the day finally hit me. I watched the news between classes, and somehow managed to witness the towers falling.

It hit very hard for me, having been to New York City for the first time that prior summer and stood at the top during my trip. Blessed Be to all those with worse experiences.

Err...okay, I was stationed in Misawa Air Base Japan. I remember getting a call in the middle of the night from a co-worker telling me to turn on the news. Like everyone else, I couldn't immediately process what I was seeing. We were ordered not to report to the base that day but to sit at home until directed otherwise. That was a long day--I just sat there watching the news over and over.

The next day we reported to the base and you could tell immediately that everything changed--there was now an armed tank pointed towards the front gate and it took 3 hours for me to get on base (security checks) when it normally only took a few minutes.

Like Exo, I was in my first semester of college. However, Harvey Mudd's in southern California, so it was early in the morning for us when things started to go down. I remember my roommate, who always got up ridiculously early, waking me up with this exclamation that one of the towers had been hit by a plane. I remember groggily remembering about how a small airplane had once done that and thinking it wasn't a big deal. After being unable to get a bit more shut-eye before my alarm went off, I got up and checked CNN's website to find that it wasn't a dinky biplane that had hit them.

After quickly getting dressed and grabbing something to eat, I went to the common area of a dorm that had a big TV. A bunch of us were there watching it unfold. The second plane hit right before I had to leave to go to class. Yeah, Mudd didn't cancel classes at all. A few professors did dedicate time to watching the news reports and discussing it, but most of us had class as usual.

This happened in what was my second or third week of college. Because of that, the 9/11 attacks have always created this very strongly defined boundary between childhood and adulthood for me. On top of the stark contrast between high school life and college life, what followed for the country in the years after the attacks really made me, for the first time, closely examine American society and politics, and how I fit into them. More than any other event in my lifetime, 9/11 has really put the ideals of the United States to the test.

What's interesting is that, at least in my experience, it's the older generations that grew up and lived without the spectre of 9/11 that seem the most willing to throw away the ideals of the US for greater security. Conversely, those of us who grew up around the time of, or after, 9/11 seem to be the ones calling for greater tolerance and willing to accept some security risk to protect our freedoms.

i dont remeber much because i was so young at the time but i remeber that i was in middle school in 7th grade in english class and i remeber it being annouced and our teachers turning it onto the channel and just everyone stareing at the tv and then class being ended early.

I was asleep when my partner came in to tell me one of the World Trade Towers was on fire. I told him to leave me alone and go to work. He made it a point to shake me until I woke up and looked at the tv. I was shocked awake to say the least and then my pager and cell phone started to go off. Showered and back out the door to the TV station where I work.

On my way in the interstate was so empty for being rush hour it was scary and I actually listened to AM radio news for one of the few times in my life. That's when I heard another plane had struck the other tower and all air traffic had been grounded in the U.S.

As I walked in the door everyone was starting at all the TVs we have tuned to multiple news stations and then the first tower fell. The silence in a room usually filled with so much noise thinking what everyone else was thinking was heartbreaking.

Seeing all the video that came in that day and in the days after was really rough. We have hundreds of tapes filled with stories and footage that i'm not even sure has ever been aired.

I was 8 years old when it happened during 3rd grade in elementary school. I didn't know what had happpened until I came home after school, and my parents explained it all to me. I didn't fully understand why it happened, because I was too young fully comprehend what had occured. I was so afraid, all I could do was watch the news and cry. I didn't sleep that night.

I learned a new word that day... "Terrorism".

I had taken a couple of days off from work because I had a college friend visiting from Delaware.

Just the day before, we had stopped at EBGames and were looking through the games when he saw Deus Ex: Game of the Year edition for like $15 because it had been out a while. He highly recommended I pick up the game.

That night I installed it and he watched as I played through the first "level" of the game. A level that takes place in the remnants of a destroyed Statue of Liberty (destroyed by French terrorists).

The next morning, my mother wakes me up to tell me the Twin Towers had been attacked by terrorists and that I should probably get my friend up (he was sleeping in our guest room on the first floor of the house).

After having just experienced Deus Ex, "surreal" is the only word I can use to describe the feeling I had. Every time a new attack was announced (Pentagon, then they said a car bomb at the Senate, then the plane in PA) I just kept thinking to myself, "how much further is this going to go?!" In my mind I kept seeing the dystopia that America had become in the wake of terrorist attacks and feeling like I was somehow living those exact events.

I am fortunate to not know anyone who was physically harmed during the attacks, but my fiance, MikeyNY, witnessed the horror first hand from his dorm room at Pace University. Horrors we were sheltered behind even by live coverage on TV. But I'll leave it to him if he wants to share those experiences.

I was awakened by my Mom early that morning. She said something like; "hey Jason the World Trade Center's being attacked." In my half conscious delirium I could not fully grasp what she was saying and thought she was probably kidding so I slurred into my pillow; "so what?" I got up a few minutes later and saw that one of the towers was indeed on fire and sat down to watch for awhile. While I was watching and listening to the newscaster all of a sudden- faster than I thought possible- another plane crashed into the second tower.

Of course all thoughts of it being simply an accident quickly dissolved. I was in my 2nd semester of college and I had class that day so I rode my bike the 4 miles to Pasadena City College. I had never seen the campus so quiet. It wasn't as if there wasn't anyone there, there was. Everyone was just really quiet and speaking in very hushed tones, I'd never seen anything like it. I went to my Film History class and we talked about it a little bit and then Professor Foster did his lecture on Akira Kurosawa. Afterwards we were supposed to watch Toshiro Mifune but I just wasn't in the mood. I think I just spent that whole day in a sort of disassociated detachment, trying to hold my emotions at arms length because I was afraid I'd break down if I let it all in. I kept playing all the details including what I was hearing from others and what was being reported and trying to put them all together to help answer those questions we were all asking ourselves; who did this? why? how? I remember thinking how much everything would change after that day. My two best friends were in the military at the time and I was really worried about them because I couldn't reach either for almost a week after that.

I was 15 in year 10 at high school. The planes hit during the early night here and i was alssep. By the time I found out it was the next morning, September the 12th, I remember my dad shaking me awake and showing me the news paper. I didn't comprehend it at the time, I just wanted to go back to sleep but as I lay there the reality dawned and I got up. I devoured the paper and watched the news until I had to go to school.

I remember the whole school stood for a minute of silence during the first perioid.

Our Prime Minister was in Washington during the attacks and due to the plane groundings he could not return to Australia for three days. Our PM at the time was from the conservative party and he felt very personally affected by the attacks being so close. I think he and GW Bush got along quite well. Australian troops were on the ground in Afghanistan three weeks later.

We have always felt splendidly isolated at the bottom of the world in my opinion, but the world changed that day. Bali was attacked, our embassay in Jakarta bombed. Our troops are still in Afghanistan and Iraq. Domestically our politics become more divided, immigration became a hot topic and racial tensions rose.

I remember a news commentator saying at the time that they (the terrorists) had awoken a sleeping bear (America) and the world would not be the same. How true that was

Let me start off by saying that this isn't something that I go into quite often, I know it was a while before DakonKor even found out I was in NYC on 9/11. I digress though.

I was about 5 blocks away in Speech class at Pace University (My freshman year and about 2 weeks into the semester) when the first tower was stuck by a plane that morning. I remember that there was a loud crashing sound that at the time reminded me of someone knocking over a big food cart with lots of aluminum trays on it. No one in class knew what had just happened at the time so class ended as usual several minutes later. One of my friends and I left the class to return to our dorms upstairs, and as we were crossing the courtyard of the school we noticed people staring at pointing, we couldn't see the towers from where we were but we saw lots of smoke. So we ran for the elevators and headed back to our rooms.

When I got back to my room on the 11th floor of the building I had a decent of view of everything that was happening. I picked up my phone and called my mother, who was about 350 miles away at work, and told her that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. Needless to say she didn't believe me, because the call went to her before most news agencies started reporting it. I hung up with her shortly after, not knowing that I wouldn't be speaking to her for about another 10 or 11 hours.

I went to one of the common rooms on the floor to see if I could get a better view of what was happening, while I was there watching the horrific things that were happening (I'll spare the details for my own sake), the second tower was hit. 5 Blocks away and 11 stories up, we felt the heat of that explosion. I can't remember how much time went by, or how many times I tried to call my mother again and couldn't get through because the phone lines were being swamped with calls. I remember I was in back in my room when the first tower actually came down.

I can honestly say that watching the dust cloud rush towards the building was the most terrifying moment of that day for me. The dorms were evacuated, and we were all rushed to the underground gym. At that point we even had business professionals from the surrounding area taking shelter in the school with us. We were sheltered in the gym while the second tower came down, there was a lot of rumbling and the gym shook a little bit. About 30 minutes after the second tower came down our school was evacuated because apparently there was either a gas leak reported near the building or a bomb threat had been called into City Hall across the street.

I managed to find 4 of my friends and I stuck with them. One of my friends' Grandmother lived quite a ways into Brooklyn, and she said we should head there since everywhere around the school was chaos and no one knew what was going on. When we tried to cross the Brooklyn bridge on foot we were told by the officers there it was closed and we had to make our way to the Manhattan bridge. We ultimately made it across the bridge and were able to catch a subway train (they were still running outside of manhattan and were free to help get people out of the city) out to her grandmother's place. She took us in for the night, let us use her phone to call our families, we got pizza and just watched the news all night trying to process everything that happened. The next morning She walked us all to the nearest subway station and we caught a train to Penn Station.

The school was closed for about a month and was used as a triage center as well as a temporary morgue for some of the bodies that were found. When we were finally allowed to return to school you could still smell the scent from the rubble in the air, and everything inside of the dorms was covered in a layer of dust.

Well that's my story. I'm just happy that my original plans for the day fell through. Myself and a few of my friends in the dorms had planned to head up to the observation deck of one of the towers (the tops floor) that morning. Luckily they all wanted to sleep in and I felt guilty skipping class and decided to go.

I was home sick with the flu when my manager at the bank called a bit hysterical sounding and told me to turn on the TV. I sat and watched this unfold and couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was there watching things unfold when I saw the second plane hit the tower it was like trying to grasp something so huge you couldn't understand it. I just kept thinking about the poor people there. Then seeing the towers fall I just was in shock I couldn't grasp it. I remember that they evacuated the downtown core of Toronto as an emergency precaution and my roommate at the time said it was like the city was dead everything and everyone was unbelievable quite. There were lots of people in Toronto that knew people in NYC some who knew that worked at the WTC. A friend of mine had knew someone that was due to be at the WTC that morning and he was frantic to get ahold of them. He finally did and it turned out she was in the bottom floors and was evacuated. I remember sitting there and hearing the recorded phone calls of sons to mothers saying they weren't sure they were going to get out and that they loved them and just feeling so overwhelmed and powerless to help these people I just wanted to make everything better but I couldn't. I recall there being tons of firefighters and policemen going to NYC to help out and how a small town in the east coast opened its doors to New Yorkers who's flights had been diverted there.

I think the biggest impact for me was when I met my ex-boyfriend on New Years Eve in Toronto we were very enamored with each other and I ended up going to NYC the following week it was there that at my request he brought me to the site and I remember seeing the board with peoples pictures and standing beside a building and looking up and seeing a spiderweb of cracks in the glass and looking out over the devastation and breaking down and him hugging me. It was so incredibly powerful you could feel the wash of emotions in the area. I will never forget any of it for as long as I live.

I was at work that day. I was at my station with 12 others and the phone rang in the captain’s office and Capital Jacobs turned the TV to CNN and we were watching when the second plane hit the south tower. We were talking among ourselves when the south tower fell and what I remember the most was the utter silence in the station. The north tower fell and a camera person filmed a lone firefighter walking into the dust cloud with everything he was going to need.

My Fire Department has a relic from the Twin Towers. The relic is a helmet of a New York City Firefighter that lost his life ten years ago today. Below the helmet there’s a plaque engraved. “Brother when you weep for me, Remember it was meant to be, As I did the job I loved to do, I pray that thought will see you through.”

I heard the news on my local alt-rock morning show and I called in asking if it it was a "war of the worlds" style broadcast and was told that it was indeed happening. So I went to to class, had classes for the day cancelled, then went to work at the Boys and Girls club and had an interesting day of reassuring the children.

i was heading home from work and on the way heard it on the radio.