9/11 your experience?

[Stig / Major Tom]

I was building an office in the county Child Support Enforcement building - putting in a door frame at that moment - when the lady in a nearby cubicle said "a small plane has hit the Trade Tower!". She heard the news on her softly playing radio.

A few mins later she said loudly that "another plane has hit the other Trade Tower in NYC!"
After that the director put the live news on the P.A. system, and we all listened and wondered - trying to go back to work.
When the first tower fell - all unnecessary work pretty much stopped.

I could listen, and still do my construction. There were no TV's in this building.

One of the worst parts of that morning was a newscaster announcing that, after a plane was reported hi-jacked over Cleveland - "the terrorists are hitting every major city in the country!" He reported this as news - not speculation.
Scared the crap out of everyone listening to him.

My wife was home with our 2 yr old daughter - and watched it all on TV.

That afternoon every gas station was clogged with impossibly massive lines. One station added $5 to ea. gallon.
At 6:00AM the next morning on the way to work - I stopped and filled up my VW bus. I was the only car at the station. Panic was over!

Major Tom

*on the way back from Delaware this summer - we stopped at the Flight 93 National Memorial, in PA. Took no photos there.

[Iahawk]

I was at home that morning as I was an outside sales rep for my company...I listened to National Public Radio at home and then left at some point in the morning for a 2+ hour drive up North to call on a small hospital up near the MN border. I listened to NPR all the way up there and, after my sales call, all the way back home.

[Ex-KLR]

I was at a motel in Louisville KY. I had taken a week's vacation to attend a NQC concert there.  I was outside the motel when someone came from their room and said that a plane had just crashed into a building in New York.

[Neil955i]

Even here in the UK it dominated the news all that day and I was able to listen in the car whilst driving back from a meeting up North.  The shock was felt nation-wide and like you Stig my wife of less than 1 year was home with our baby daughter watching it unfold live on the BBC TV News.  Terrible, terrible day.

[klaviator]

I was going to school at the time and had sat down in the classroom a few minutes before class started when someone walked in and said a small plane had flown into the WTC.  We turned the TV on to CNN and watched.  It was obvious it was more than a small plane.  Then the second plane hit.  The CNN reporter was an idiot but we watched as events unfolded.  After a few hours they cancelled all classes and sent us home.

About a month before 9-11 I was in the Pentagon for some briefings.  The small auditorium where we had the briefing was where the plane hit.  If the timing had been different......

[randyo]

I was in the field, with my wetland scientist hat on, delineating wetlands, and locating them with a RTK GPS rover, Not aware what was going on, suddenly, my GPS receiver was not getting a signal, so I drove back to office, is when I found out about the attacks

my next thought, was that the satellites were turned off, a call to Maine Technical Service, my GPS vendor, their base station was working fine. Turned out, all I needed to do was reboot my GPS data collector