9/11

branie2

Where were you that day?

I was on my way home from a holiday in France with my parents. We had travelled through the Channel Tunnel, and all the way through England into wales, and into the boat at Holyhead. When we got onto one of the lounges board, we noticed that the people were watching the events unfold on TV, but we had assumed that it was a very good film.

Tokyo

At my desk in college, working on my masters. Was on another online forum at the time, when posts started flooding in about a plane crash in NY. The rest as they say, is history.

Harry Palmr

11/9 to me guv.

MilesMorales1

I was 8 years old and we were in school and someone came in and whispered something to our teacher, and she started crying. Then when we went home I wasn't happy cos we had nothing on the telly but the news all night.

gifted

Working on the building site in vistakon in limerick...the mother phoned me and told me the world was ending ffs.......

PirateShampoo

In work building the new printing factory in Jobstown when news started coming over the radio, 2 into the towers, one into the Pentagon and rumors of a 4th being hijacked.

Which year?

fmpisces

I was at work. I was living in the UK at the time and worked for a railway company in the ticket office in Bishops Stortford.

On another note, years later my youngest was due on 11/9/05, but he arrived a day early.

Doctor Nick

Work. The dealing room shut down and we all watched it unfold on Bloomberg. One fella who arrived in late after his lunch thought it was a film we were watching.

DontThankMe

I was reading these threads about this exact same topic.

http://touch.boards.ie/thread/2055675490/1/#post62003514

http://touch.boards.ie/thread/2054861354/1/#post50521176

Schwanz

Working, no footage available & when I went home I seen it on Sky News.

Hard to believe people don't think planes actually hit the buildings

Dublinflyer

I was flying home from San Francisco and supposed to be going via JFK but ended up getting diverted to Millard Airport in Nebraska. We were told there was a minor technical fault and we needed to land to have it checked. It was only when we landed and phones were turned on information started reaching us as to what was going on. I ended up stranded there for a few days and eventually travelled up to Toronto where I have family and stayed with them for 10 days before making it back home.

Winterlong

I was in the US at the time. About 300 miles south of New York. When the news broke we were sent home from work. There were guys with shotguns standing outside offices and at the entrances to residential complexes.
It was surreal to be over there. The following day our pool was covered in dust that had blown down from New York.
There was a Sikh lad we worked with. He had to stop wearing a turban in the days and weeks that followed as he was getting abused in the street.

branie2

Harry Palmr wrote: »

11/9 to me guv.

Everyone uses the term 9/11

FizzleSticks

This post has been deleted.

clairewithani

In work and someone came in and told us what happened. When she went out a woman working with me said "never mind her, she is always making up ****". It was two hours before we found out it was true.

Tellyium

Finding out about it was surreal for me.
Was in Australia at the time and I had an early night on 9/11 hence I didn't find out until I was on the bus to work the next day.
Another passenger was reading the Sydney Morning Herald and there was a picture of the twin towers ablaze taking up the whole front page. I hadn't heard a thing before that. Probably the biggest WTF moment I've ever had

humberklog

Engineer on a building site in Ballymun thinking "aviation fuel can't melt steel" and scratching my chin whilst lining my hard hat with tin foil.

Kermit.de.frog

I don't remember where I was. It wasn't that big an event.

Manic Moran

Woken up by friend whose brother was flying in from NYC that morning. I was to pick him up at SFO. After some confusion when she realized I had no idea what she was on about, she told me to turn on the news. This was just in time for the first report of the Pentagon on fire. I said that someone apparently had declared war on the US, put my uniform in the car, and went to work, wondering if I would be home that night or deploying somewhere.

Manic Moran

Double post.

BillyBobBS

On the rooftop in my Brooklyn apartment watching the second plane crash. Pretty stunning at the time but i do wish people would stop yabbering on about it as it was 16 years ago ffs.

AllGunsBlazing

Woah, you're so detached and edgy....

fizzypish

AllGunsBlazing wrote: »

Woah, you're so detached and edgy....

After witnessing an event like that first hand, I'm sure we'd all like to be able to detach.

(Thats kinda sounds like I seen it myself, I didn't. Just a general observation about witnessing horrific events)

Turtyturd

I was watching a film. Some people came in and thought I was watching the news.

MarcusP12

MilesMorales1 wrote: »

I was 8 years old and we were in school and someone came in and whispered something to our teacher, and she started crying. Then when we went home I wasn't happy cos we had nothing on the telly but the news all night.

Are you sure you're not confusing your teacher for George W Bush?!:pac:

MarcusP12

At work with my buddy who was off work that day giving me updates as it was happening....was an extremely surreal day and one which will stick me for a long time.....off the top of my head its one of the main events I remember down the years along with say the Enniskinnen and Omagh bombings and the Zeabrugga sea ferry sinking....

MickDoyle1979

It was lunch hour and I was sitting in the hut at the service station and I was flicking through channels on the radio when Gareth O'Callaghan said he was looking at amazing footage of a plane hitting the world trade center.
I had been reading about the killing of Masoud the Northern Alliance leader by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan the Palestinian Israeli conflict had erupted again a year or so before and the Oklahoma bomber had been executed not too long ago.
I was thinking was it the Taliban Al Qaeds Palestinians or Mcveigh's crowd.
I had been reading the Tom Clancy novel Debt of Honor on which a Japanese civilian airline pilot takes revenge on America after the death off his brother and son in a war in the Pacific by crashing his jet in the Capital in Washington.
Movies like Armageddon and Independence Day and Deep Impact and Executive Decision had been in the cinema a few years before.
It all seemed unreal.
Joe Duffy came on next and he was talking to Conor O'Clery who was watching the WTC burn and describing it over his phone live on air. He described seeing a man fall and explode when he hit the pavement.
Ruairi Quinn the former Labour leader came on and he immediately said it must be Bin Laden behind it. He was an architect before he was a politician and he said those buildings were coming down.
Then news came in about the attack on the Pentagon and finally the crash in Pennsylvania.
The heroics of the passengers who took on the terrorists has always moved me ever since.
Real life Die Hard. The sheer selfish will to survive or agonizing terror or heroic selfless sacrifice to save thousands at the cost of their own lives? Who can say?

Some Joe Higgins type came on blaming America because this was payback for Vietnam or some bull. Already the apologists started...

In remember the American ambassador was on Questions and Answers a few days after and it was obvious America was going to war in years ahead with the Taliban Saddam Qaddaffi and all the rest of the dictators and terrorists in the Mid East.

The audience seemed determined to blame America plead Irish neutrality of course and make excuses for the terrorists. Anyone with a brain knew this was the new reality. The Cold War as over and this new war as the new normal for the 21st century.

I can remember the bliss between 1989 and 2001. The West as at peace. It looked like a free open world was the future and inevitable triumph of liberal values the world over.

Apart from the Israeli Palestinian conflict the sanctions and no fly zone in Iraq the Mid East was not news. People laughed at the Taliban blowing up Buddhist statues and the pin prick Al Qaeds attacks barely got a mention. Clinton would order a cruise missiles strike now and then on some camp or facility.

Blair and Clinton we're considered heroes for stopping the genocide in Kosovo. For thugs like Milosevic it looked like their days were numbered. Putin was condemned for the supposed excesses against the Chechen Islamists.

The world got a rude awakening that day.

Tom Mann Centuria

On a ferry to Ireland, going over from the UK for a wedding.

weldoninhio

branie2 wrote: »

Where were you that day?

I was on my way home from a holiday in France with my parents. We had travelled through the Channel Tunnel, and all the way through England into wales, and into the boat at Holyhead. When we got onto one of the lounges board, we noticed that the people were watching the events unfold on TV, but we had assumed that it was a very good film.

Ninth of November?? What year??

beefburrito

At my girlfriend's house looking out from the veranda admiring the nice view,she ran out all dramatic and said that a plane crashed into the world trade center,sure I didn't even know there was a such building.
Being the selfish bastard I was that day,my first thought was buy every ****ing newspaper the following day.
Then I remembered fckin hell I'm a bad bastard for being so thoughtless.
Anyhow I bought around 12 newspapers the day after, broke up with herself a few months later....
Never set eye's on those papers because she decided to hold onto them,and said I had no proof they were mine lol
Anyhow I still resent her for holding onto the paper's.

I'm older and more empathetic now,I think it's a travesty that thousands of Shi'as Christian's and Yazidis were slaughtered in Iraq and there's no outcry in the West....

hairyslug

Was working, listening to it all unfold on the radio and tbh, I thought they were exaggerating it as I couldn't believe it could be that bad.

nigel_wilson

I'm too young to have experienced it but on an opposite note, an American guy in his 30s was telliing me a few weeks ago that he was working in Mexico during the late 90s early 00s. On Sept 11th he was awoken by cheers from the locals outside his apartment as if something amazing had happened. He was genuinely surprised and wanted to find out what they were on about.

Turned on his TV to see planes hitting the WTC. Says he didn't stay too long there.

endacl

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Which year?

1973. The year Pinochet overthrew Allende in Argentina. A black day for democracy and an instance of the US interfering in the democratic processes of sovereign states. I believe this practice came back to bite them?

MickDoyle1979

endacl wrote: »

1973. The year Pinochet overthrew Allende in Argentina. A black day for democracy and an instance of the US interfering in the democratic processes of sovereign states. I believe this practice came back to bite them?

Yes yes all the airline passengers firemen cops office workers etc many of whom were Irish all deserved to die horribly because what the US government did in Chile.

Americans who wanted to defend their country from terrorists and who fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't die for Halliburton of the oil companies or the arms industry or an imperial project. They died because they didn't want terrorism coming to the West. We know the agenda of the power elites but it is in the interests of the ordinary man woman and child that Islamists are halted.

Likewise World War 2 was really fought because America and the Soviets wanted to grab the world stage from the European powers who ate each other not for the Jews or democracy or humanity. The ordinary man knew this but it was in their interests to see fascism destroyed.

Islamism has to be stopped. Whether its the Americans Putin or China fighting these animals I am behind them.

drdeadlift

I was about 18 and was working in a builder providers business.I was pulling lengths of qualpex out of a shelf for a customer.One of my co workers shouted at me,here anto a plane just crashed into one of the wtc buildings.
My initial though was cessna+poor visibility how traigic,then a while after ..here anto another plane just crashed into the other building..
The building trade back then was so so busy but that after noon everything went quiet pretty quick.
I went home to find my dad staring at the tv footage we will never forget.

The most suprising thing of all is the ability of inexprienced joe soaps flying two jet aricraft at or beyond their max airspeeds and sucsessfully hit two runway width buidling first time around.

valoren

At work, eating lunch when someone mentioned a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers. Naturally assumed it was a Cessna plane. You automatically don't think Passenger Jet. Went on Sky News website which pretty much assumed the same.

Quickly became obvious to everyone that something incredibly serious was happening. Within an hour, the canteen was packed with 2 thousand people (it was an US multi national) watching on a giant screen that was erected as the second tower fell. Picture thousands of people shouting expletives simultaneously. I remember thinking thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people had been killed and just feeling a kind of emptiness mixed with a kind of frightened awe. This was seriously WTF stuff. The company I was working with made million dollar servers some of which were in the towers at the time. These machines were so sophisticated that they sent warning messages from overheating and then went offline.

Pac1Man

At home playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, delighted that the unusually dense servers the previous week had finally cleared up.

Wildcard7

(note: I'm swiss) I was in the army, in basic training, and it was "survival" week. Which is a week towards the end of training where everyone camps out in the forrest with nothing but a few canopies, you live off beans and toast, and you are sent out for shooting exercises after barely sleeping 3 hours in the wet and cold. We were all 20 year old lads and none of us took the whole army thing very seriously (who'd attack Switzerland?). But when they rounded us up, brought us into a small room and showed us a video of the attacks I'd lie if I said I wasn't sh1tting myself a little. It was quite clear that America would not react to this sort of thing with diplomacy, so at least my mind went crazy wondering about scenarios like WW3.

One of the most surreal moments of my life.

Tigger

branie2 wrote: »

Where were you that day?

I was on my way home from a holiday in France with my parents. We had travelled through the Channel Tunnel, and all the way through England into wales, and into the boat at Holyhead. When we got onto one of the lounges board, we noticed that the people were watching the events unfold on TV, but we had assumed that it was a very good film.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=273541

_Kaiser_

In work in a callcentre at the time that dealt mainly with the US market.

Word spread quickly across the floor, the calls stopped coming in, and the network ground to a halt as people watched updates on Sky/BBC .. then those sites crashed as well as I remember.

MickDoyle1979

drdeadlift wrote: »

I was about 18 and was working in a builder providers business.I was pulling lengths of qualpex out of a shelf for a customer.One of my co workers shouted at me,here anto a plane just crashed into one of the wtc buildings.
My initial though was cessna+poor visibility how traigic,then a while after ..here anto another plane just crashed into the other building..
The building trade back then was so so busy but that after noon everything went quiet pretty quick.
I went home to find my dad staring at the tv footage we will never forget.

The most suprising thing of all is the ability of inexprienced joe soaps flying two jet aricraft at or beyond their max airspeeds and sucsessfully hit two runway width buidling first time around.

The pilots trained at flight schools and with sinulators. The flight paths of their aircraft show they followed river courses from the air and their targets were hard to miss. The WTC and Pentagon can be seen from tens of miles away. Not hard for a person with rudimentary skills. The pilots never trained to land which is the most difficult maneuver. They obviously didn't have to.

Was doing a day shift in a 24 hour factory, working for a supplier. There was a TV showing Sky News in the canteen. Another contractor says to me there's been a horrible accident in the states, plane crash, hit one of the Twin Towers.
I thought "Jesus that's bad news, hope someone survives" but I thought no more about it.

An hour later the same guy comes back to me and says it just happened again. I said no way, the news is on loop, stop spending so much time in front of the TV, you're watching the same thing over and over.

But your man was shaking, says no really, come down to the TV and see for yourself. I knew the world was never going to be the same.

branie2

Tigger wrote: »

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=273541

I hadn't joined boards at that stage

It would have been incredibly interesting if Reddit, as it is now, was around at the time of the September 11th attacks. The likes of the live threads, the likelihood of people being in the Twin Towers being Reddit users, and the up-to-the second updates these generate, would have made for such a fascinating (and impossibly morbid) view.

Omackeral

Deleted User wrote: »

It would have been incredibly interesting if Reddit, as it is now, was around at the time of the September 11th attacks. The likes of the live threads, the likelihood of people being in the Twin Towers being Reddit users, and the up-to-the second updates these generate, would have made for such a fascinating (and impossibly morbid) view.

Imagine if Facebook or Snapchat was around then.

Omackeral

Omackeral wrote: »

Imagine if Facebook or Snapchat was around then.

And the now availabilty of smart phones with cameras.

We would very likely have images from inside the towers appearing across social media.

branie2

Imagine if YouTube was around as well

Benjamin Buttons

Wildcard7 wrote: »

(note: I'm swiss) I was in the army, in basic training.................. .

One of the most surreal moments of my life.

At last, at last.
Are you issued with one of those pocket knives bearing your army's name along with your nation's colours and insignia, please don't disappoint?

rainbow kirby

At the church for a service for a girl 3 years behind me who had been killed in a car crash over the summer. I was 17 and in 6th year at the time. Heard about it in a friend's car on the radio on the way home, put on Sky News as soon as I got home.

sbsquarepants

I was in work watching it unfold online - quite surreal I have to say.

The following weekend myself and few mates had planned to go to Kilkenny for the weekend - government gave us a day off as a mark of respect.
Lovely I thought, ever the opportunist - we can get away that bit earlier, more bang for our buck. Never dawned on me (or the others) that practically everywhere would be closed due to that very day off!