1 post tagged “september 11th”
What are your personal memories of September 11th?
september, 2001 was the fall of my last senior year in college. i had a VLSI class at 8am but i arrived only to find that it was cancelled for the day. when i got back in my car to head home for a nap, i heard on the radio that a plane had flown into the world trade center. this would have been right at 8am CST so it was actually in between the 2 planes hitting the towers. i drove home and turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit live. at that point, no one knew exactly what was going on other than this was a plane hijacking and that both WTC towers had been hit. i remember my friend lorrie calling and asking me what i thought was going on. i think i told her that i didn't know but that i thought we would be safe in starkville, ms.
about an hour later the towers collapsed. the only video there was at that point was the long shot from far away so all you could really see was the tower going down and a huge cloud of smoke coming over the whole site. by then i didn't know what to do and the news didn't have any new info, so i went to my 11:00 class. i remember sitting there listening to the professor's lecture thinking that neither she nor anyone else there knew what had happened. it was a pretty empty class that day and i presume that anyone who had seen or heard the news reports had just skipped the class. it was a strange feeling sitting in a class like i had done hundreds of times but knowing that it didn't matter and that probably no one else there knew what was going on in NYC.
that afternoon, i had to do some work in a computer lab on campus but was trying to stay up-to-date with the latest. the campus internet connection--which is usually very fast because they have a FAT pipe--was completely bogged down. i don't know if it was from on-campus usage or the slowness of the internet at large that day because of everyone in the US checking CNN.com every 5 seconds. this, of course, led to speculation that the terrorist attack was also targeted at communications networks and that they were bringing down the internet. this was ultimately proven false, but it seemed plausible at the time.
i really only have specific memories of the hour or so when i found out about the attacks and watching the towers collapse. the rest of that day doesn't really stand out much. i think i was in shock like everyone else and just went through the motions of the day.
