Do you remember where you were?

I was at work at a hospital in upstate NY about two hours outside NYC. I was in the CEO's office going over prep for our Board meeting when one of the AAs came in and told us a plane hit in NYC. We went out to a tv in a patient lounge in time to see the second plane go in to the second tower.

We looked at each other, I was at a loss for words. He was a retired Army Colonel and said it was deliberate.

We started then to talk about what had to be done. First, get in contact with the director of nursing to get a status of all staff, call the State to find out if we would be an evacuation hospital and cancel a lousy Board meeting.

We kept watching trying to get numbers of injured. Heard from the nurses, one was an Army Reserve (retired) triage nurse. She was ordered to report ASAP to set up triage so we lost her for over 6 months.

Another nurse was in the OR for us, when she came out and learned about the Pentagon being hit she dropped to the floor, her daughter worked there. It was a tense couple of hours while we waited on word.

Finally we heard no evacuations - that wasn't good news at all. No evacuations meant no injured.

A few hours later I was paged for a call. It was the NYS DOH. Mandatory ER checks on our patients. Our hospital was the closest one to the dams that are the water source for NYC and were, at that time, unprotected.

So every morning we received a call from them regarding patients - what were the symptoms and outcomes. They were afraid of poisonings because it was so easy to walk right up to the dams. Now, not so much but still not too hard.

I remember being numb, walking around trying to keep everyone calm and focused, trying to inform all of what I knew and keep rumors to a minimum. I remember finding out a consultant who worked with us quite a bit was on the second plane and thinking about her young life lost.

I remember the images of people walking covered in soot and the vacant looks in their eyes.

Months later I walked around ground zero on a pass from a friend who was responsible for some of the clean up.

To say that that is not hallowed ground is a lie. It is and always will be. 

My dd came over to my house screaming that some planes had hit the World Trade Center. Well duh, I had the TV on. Not to many years before that I took pics of the Trade center. I was on my way to my sisters. My dd and I sat there trying to understand what was happening and crying a lot. We sat beside each other and held onto each others arms so tightly that we didn't want to let go. We cried all day and the next, nothing made sense. 

So where were you when you heard? 

I worked in Secaucus, NJ at a brokerage firm. I was arriving late to work as usual 9:00am. Driving over on of the bridge you can see part of the NY skyline. I did see some smoke over to the east. I just thought it was a fire.

By the time I arrived to work in the next 5 minutes, people were running outside and looking at the sky. I was still clueless. I worked in a 6 story building and my office was on the 1st floor. I was told what happened as soon as I arrived in. Being that I worked in the financial industry, quite a few of my co-workers had loved ones that worked in the WTC.

My boss and fellow co-workers found a grainy tv to watch the events following. We watched in horror as we saw the towers fall.

The CEO gathered everyone in company and told us to go home. I saw a guy on the phone crying as he told his dad that the planes hit the WTC. We were allowed to go home at 2:00pm in the afternoon. Route 3 was so empty and I drove so fast to get home, a normal 20min drive turned into 10min.

Some of my fellow co-workers that worked on the 6th floor saw the 2nd plane hit. I saw personally how the towers smoldered over 6 weeks after falling. 

In Nov of 2001, I went to ground zero to see the devastation. I took pics like a tourist, even though I am a NJ native. Every year near the site, they read the names of ones who passed. I stopped by within the passed two years. The readers cried and I did too. 

I could never do that victylermom, way too emotional to hear the names. 

I was on my way to college...on the corner of 242 and 45, waiting to make a right turn. I just sat there for a minute taking the news in, trying to make some sense of it all, as I had no visuals....no one honked as I sat there...it really did feel like the world stopped turning, very surreal. 

@Chunky you're right! But the WTC was a stomping ground for me. I have sent a couple of occasions hopping subways to get here and there. Lots of memories there. 

I was a senior in highschool, here in Kingwood. We all knew something bad had happened, we just didn't know what. Then one of my friends told me he had heard a rumor that a building had been hit by a plane in NYC, and I didn't believe him. I walked into my next class and the television was on, and it was like everything seemed to happen in slow motion from then on. We all watched as the second tower got hit, and fell. A lot of people cried. My friend and I checked out of school early and went to my house where our mom's were. We huddled in the living room and watched the news for the rest of the day. It was a comfort to be surrounded by family at that time.

A few years ago I was in NYC and I visited Ground Zero. What hit hardest were the drawings by children who lost someone in the tragedy. That, and in the middle of the rubble was a small American Flag someone had placed as a small memorial. 

I had lived in KW a little less than a year and like you Chunky worked at a hospital except out in Cleveland. I was between New Caney and Splendora on my way out to Cleveland when I heard about the first plane on the radio and immediately I thought "that was no accident." I had The Weather Channel on that morning before dropping the kiddos off and they showed a shot of a beautiful clear blue sky in New York City. By the time I arrived at work and settled into my office the second plane had hit. My office was down the street from the main hospital building so I couldn't see a TV and the internet was jammed up. I was too busy working on contingency plans and senarios for what it might mean if Houston was hit or if we had a military call up how many employees we might have in the reserves. My CEO got stuck in Lubbock and had to drive back, turns out he was one of only two employees we had in the reserves. 

So Houston area went in to a planning mode too? I didn't know that. 

Had just finished my first class that morning. We heard someone from the computer lab say that the WTC had been hit by a plane and didn't think too much of it other than, "Wow, wonder what happened?" We thought it was an accident, a small plane with a pilot suffering a stroke or something. So we went to the student center to grab breakfast before our next class. The tvs were all on talking about the first tower. We were surprised to hear it was a large passenger plane. We watched in horror as it fell and the second tower was attacked.

My mom was on her way to DC that morning. She works for the military and was supposed to have meetings at the Pentagon that week. My dad is a pilot. We knew all flights had been grounded and he wasn't answering his phone. Mom's flight was cancelled, unbeknownst to me at the time. We were all terrified.