Remembering 9/11

[Jshep34 2303]

Always enjoy reading the story of red banadana guy.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[Queen Bitch 1692]

There's a new 6-ep series on Nat Geo (also streaming on Hulu) called 9/11: One Day in America to commemorate the 20 year anniversary. 

I've watched a fair share of 9/11 docs, but this one may be the best I've ever seen, which makes sense as it'd been co-produced by the 9/11 museum. Highly highly highly recommended.

 

[Enchubben 5509]

Watching it now. Lots of emotions running though me: sadness, fear: rage. Great documentary.

[brakeman 28219]

 

[Message Board User 12389]

If you haven't read The Falling Man, do yourself a favor and take 30-40 minutes today to do so.  

 

[Gourmand 7774]

18 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

If you haven't read The Falling Man, do yourself a favor and take 30-40 minutes today to do so.  

 

I read that when it was first published. No magazine piece has stuck with me the way that one did. Superb piece of writing. 

[mdmost 42827]

One of those days I can instantly be transported back to and remember exactly how it felt when I saw the 2nd plane hit on ABC. 20 years seems to have flown by. RIP to the fallen. 

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by mdmost

[Message Board User 12389]

 

[Message Board User 12389]

 

[Guest Lobo]

President Bush with some very moving remarks from Pennsylvania earlier.  I'm not crying, you're crying.  

[Satoshi 129]

SIAP

 

[atomheartbevo 89396]

Kind of avoiding this thread.  It is up there with the Challenger (which I saw live as well).

I worked at a large tech company and we had a lot of clients and employees in the WTC.  Our little group was busy that morning so nobody was sitting around bullshitting on the internet.  We knew something was odd when the internet just went down to a crawl.  We tried to hit up Drudge because it was mostly text-only and figured we'd be able to get it, but nada  One of my co-workers happened to be running really late, so our manager called him and told him to go back home and put on the TV or try to get onto some news sites on his home internet.  He stayed on the line, and we were on speaker phone and he goes inside his house and flips on the TV and within a minute he starts freaking out about planes hitting towers in NYC.  We were just all completely silent

A few minutes later we were able to get Drudge to load, and then somebody got the TVs in the lobby switched to local news coverage (they were normally running just internal bulletins about shit like upcoming flu shots being offered in the cafeteria, etc.).

We had folks crying, who knew clients/co-workers/former co-workers in the WTC.  Completely surreal.

One of the higher-ups came down to the lobby in the afternoon, after a lot of people had just been camped down there for hours, and told everybody to start pulling together all of the extra hardware and asked us to get an inventory of servers we could spare, so we could start helping some of the clients in NY get back up and running.  At the time I thought somebody had been in contact with him and were trying to get their services back online but years later he told me it was mainly to get people to stop watching the TVs - some of them were just zombies. 

[Buzzrock 14870]

There's a new 6-ep series on Nat Geo (also streaming on Hulu) called 9/11: One Day in America to commemorate the 20 year anniversary. 
I've watched a fair share of 9/11 docs, but this one may be the best I've ever seen, which makes sense as it'd been co-produced by the 9/11 museum. Highly highly highly recommended.
 

It’s excellent. Not an easy watch.

[dcbc 14398]

I though I'd posted this previously, but I didn't see it.  An old friend of mine from high school was on the 85th floor of Tower 1.  He made it out alive and wrote down a moment-by-moment account of everything.  He was in the sub basement of Tower 1 when Tower 2 came down.  It's definitely worth a read.

https://billyforney3.com/2018/02/16/my-9-11-story/

[Tylerocks 2551]

35 minutes ago, dcbc said:

I though I'd posted this previously, but I didn't see it.  An old friend of mine from high school was on the 85th floor of Tower 1.  He made it out alive and wrote down a moment-by-moment account of everything.  He was in the sub basement of Tower 1 when Tower 2 came down.  It's definitely worth a read.

https://billyforney3.com/2018/02/16/my-9-11-story/

Man...reading that right after watching the 60min special on the FDNY from that day.

Oof.

Its amazing to me to think of all the individual stories like that.

My wife was there that day for work(this was before we met) ...they were in Soho, about 1-1.5 miles from WTC.  Being on the ground there was a completely different experience than what most people watched unfold on national television.  They met for breakfast at Balthazar and started to sense something was going on.  She overheard some other patrons talking about a plane or plane crash.  Everyone assumed it was a small Cessna type plane with some idiot behind the controls.  

 

[dcbc 14398]

37 minutes ago, Tylerocks said:

Man...reading that right after watching the 60min special on the FDNY from that day.

Oof.

Its amazing to me to think of all the individual stories like that.

My wife was there that day for work(this was before we met) ...they were in Soho, about 1-1.5 miles from WTC.  Being on the ground there was a completely different experience than what most people watched unfold on national television.  They met for breakfast at Balthazar and started to sense something was going on.  She overheard some other patrons talking about a plane or plane crash.  Everyone assumed it was a small Cessna type plane with some idiot behind the controls.  

 

My former boss was on vacation in NY that morning.  She was on the subway heading for WTC when the first plane hit.  Train stopped and she and the fellow passengers had to get off the train and walk to an emergency exit or some such. 

[billfromlaketravis 11357]

My best friend's older brother, and a surrogate older brother to me, lived on the Lower East Side and somehow slept through the whole thing. He was a club promoter at the time, so I'm not really surprised. 

[SuckitKevin 915]

I work for a large metropolitan fire department and was in my 2nd year on the job. On the 11th I was working with our training staff to put together a CPAT (Candidate Physical Ability Test). We were hearing initially about a plane flying into the WTC and all figured it must have been a small Cessna or similar plane. When the 2nd one hit we knew something was wrong.

My FIL was on Texas Task Force 1. He deployed immediately and was in NYC on the 12th. He doesn’t talk much about it but has told us a few stories of finding bones or body parts and hoping it gave some families at least some closure if they had something to bury. It was a brutal time for my wife because I think she finally realized the dangers of our profession. 

[Jiggy-Z 3432]

A few thoughts/observations on the aftermath:

 

I made it up to Manhattan in late October after 9/11.  We drove up from Massachusetts and stayed in midtown.  The mood was still very somber and there were not that many people around.

Traffic was rerouted all over with large trucks carrying the structural steel structure remains.

Closer to the site, there was a heavy smell of what can only be described as burning brake pads and you could tell that it was  from something more than the cutting of steel with saws or torches.

Many buildings were still closed blocks from the site and I remember seeing the venerable Downtown Athletic Club (home of the Heisman) all boarded up.

My cousin, who was a firefighter in Houston, died in 2000 in a blaze a McDonalds.  She was only the second female firefighter ever killed in the line of duty in the US at that point.  Another firefighter also died in the Houston fire.

The memorial in Houston was massive with the official memorial being held in Rice Stadium.  It was very moving but brutal.  I can only imagine  what they had to go through in New York with hundreds of dead firefighters.

[statsman 5418]

I have such bad feelings about this day. It occurs to me that the regular Americans acquitted themselves well, from the firemen who kept running into the last WTC building after the first fell, to the passengers of United 93 to the servicemen over in the ME). Meanwhile, our elites- the elected officials who engineered bad trades of too much liberty for too little security, the administration that overreached militarily in pursuit of a fundamental social and cultural change in the ME, to the business leaders exerting pressure to preserve their economic interests- screwed us all over. 
  
So much gone, not just taken but voluntarily sacrificed as well, just to end up back where we started. 

[Foosters 17725]

18 hours ago, dcbc said:

I though I'd posted this previously, but I didn't see it.  An old friend of mine from high school was on the 85th floor of Tower 1.  He made it out alive and wrote down a moment-by-moment account of everything.  He was in the sub basement of Tower 1 when Tower 2 came down.  It's definitely worth a read.

https://billyforney3.com/2018/02/16/my-9-11-story/

I remember that from years ago. KHS?

[Buzzrock 14870]

Another detail I didn’t know before the Nat Geo series: the two fighters that scrambled to intercept Flight 93 didn’t have time to be outfitted with weapons so they took off unarmed. It was a suicide mission. Maj. Heather Penney seems like kind of a badass.

[dcbc 14398]

7 hours ago, Foosters said:

I remember that from years ago. KHS?

Yes.  1992

[DeepEastTexas 640]

On 9/13/2021 at 3:05 PM, Buzzrock said:

Another detail I didn’t know before the Nat Geo series: the two fighters that scrambled to intercept Flight 93 didn’t have time to be outfitted with weapons so they took off unarmed. It was a suicide mission. Maj. Heather Penney seems like kind of a badass.

Saw her speak back in 2014. She's a bad ass. 

[SHOOTER12 8787]

On 9/11/2021 at 8:09 AM, Message Board User said:

If you haven't read The Falling Man, do yourself a favor and take 30-40 minutes today to do so.  

 

Damn it it is paywalled again.

[SHOOTER12 8787]

On 9/12/2021 at 7:06 PM, dcbc said:

I though I'd posted this previously, but I didn't see it.  An old friend of mine from high school was on the 85th floor of Tower 1.  He made it out alive and wrote down a moment-by-moment account of everything.  He was in the sub basement of Tower 1 when Tower 2 came down.  It's definitely worth a read.

https://billyforney3.com/2018/02/16/my-9-11-story/

Damn, I caught myself holding my breath 🫁

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

Another year goes by.  Scars still there. 

[Anastasis 23390]

On 9/11/2018 at 9:53 AM, SuingToGetAMessageBoard? said:

I actually went to class that morning after it had happened.  I was such a robot..  I saw it on the news, woke up my roommates, but still thought the most important thing was to do some K matrices.

Watched the news on TV that morning. Went down to campus and was fixated on the monitors in the pharmacy building.  Went and sat in a pharm ad class, and the prof came it and told us all to go home. Same prof later chaired my dissertation committee. 

[AUS-97HORN 11669]

55 minutes ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

Another year goes by.  Scars still there. 

they will be there for another 90 years.  They will be there for as long as someone is old enough to have lived through it.  

The Pearl Harbor survivor group is down to less than 1,500 members, the youngest of whom is 97/98 years old,   we still remember, but living memory will only be around for another 10 years or so. 

but you need the living memory folks to explain what that day meant to the US.  you can read in a book that it happened.  just like Pearl Harbor... but unless you have someone who is curious and does the research themselves (thats super fucking rare), they will just read it as a line in a book that has no emotional meaning.

 

try to explain to someone today what the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Cuba meant to the people of the U.S.   

and other than the 100,000 of us that were history majors, no one has any fucking idea what you are talking about... and that was only 124 years ago and while it most likely was a self-inflicted explosion, it drew us into a "world war" with Spain that resulted in us getting almost their entire colonial empire. 

 

[Trey3216 15325]

Officially happened 1/2 my life ago.  Unreal  that feeling when a seminal event reaches the fulcrum of time 

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

I still remember and will never forget.

So many people just wanted to be at work on time and expected to make it home that day.

It felt like a normal day.

 

[Parliament 14121]

Same here.  Every September 11 I go right back to date day.

[Saint Tacky 1609]

I recommend "Zero Dark Thirty." It takes a little bit of the sting out of the day. "For God and Country. Geronimo."

[WhatTheBuck 28703]

I rewatched last night the 60 Minutes episode about the FDNY on 9/11 that first aired a year ago. The part about the sons and daughters of the fallen who’ve joined the force to honor their parents’ sacrifice is so moving. That really brought the tears. Heroes one and all.

That article on The Falling Man talked about how our media didn’t really show us the ubiquity of the people leaping from the burning buildings that day. I’ve read reports from first responders about being on the ground and hearing this constant sound - wham! wham! wham! - and realizing it was the sound of bodies falling on the roof above them. You can hear that in some of the video here. It’s chilling. But this is an excellent account. Never forget.

 

[Vincent Neck 5]

what is suspicious to me about all of this Bin Laden stuff is that Craig James has never denied meeting with the CIA in Islamabad in 1998

Edited September 11, 2023 by Vincent Neck

[Vincent Neck 5]

What did Bill Clements know and when did he know it

[Vincent Neck 5]

[Vincent Neck 5]

[Constant 6722]

 

 

A few pictures of the memorial/museum I took last November. 

Edited September 11, 2023 by Constant

[EastHorn 281]

Curious the surly parent experience on explaining this to kids.  Makes me feel old thinking people didn't watch everything unfold.  

[GopherRock 1765]

 

On our last trip to New York, we saw Come From Away, the musical dramatization of the world suddenly arriving in Gander, Newfoundland. It's a terrific show. The whole episode, as well as the boatlift, shows the brightness that punched through a horrible dark day.

As I've posted before, I hope that if the chips are down, I've got a shred of the courage of those on Flight 93.

Edited September 11, 2023 by GopherRock

[Fudbelty 2785]

Good luck watching this.  Guy needed a statue and a school named after him years ago.
 

My kids watched this in school today.

[ScottS 1057]

Came across this press release today.  Twenty-two years after the towers came down, remains of victims from the World Trade Center are still being identified.

Mayor Adams, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Graham Announce Two New Identifications Of World Trade Center Victims

Quote

September 8, 2023

Represent 1,648th and 1,649th Persons Identified Since 2001 Using Advanced Testing by City’s DNA Laboratory

NEW YORK – New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jason Graham today announced two new identifications of victims from the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. The man and woman, whose names are being withheld at the request of their families, are the 1,648th and 1,649th persons to be identified by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) using advanced DNA testing of remains recovered from the attack that took the lives of 2,753 people.

“As we prepare to mark the anniversary of September 11, our thoughts turn to those we lost on that terrible morning and their families who continue to live every day with the pain of missing loved ones,” said Mayor Adams. “We hope these new identifications can bring some measure of comfort to the families of these victims, and the ongoing efforts by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner attest to the city’s unwavering commitment to reunite all the World Trade Center victims with their loved ones.”

“More than 20 years after the disaster, these two new identifications continue to fulfill a solemn pledge that OCME made to return the remains of World Trade Center victims to their loved ones,” said Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Graham. “Faced with the largest and most complex forensic investigation in the history of our country, we stand undaunted in our mission to use the latest advances in science to serve this promise.”

The two new identifications used all the current capabilities of the city’s DNA laboratory operated by OCME to generate results after more than two decades of negative testing attempts. Techniques include recently adopted next-generation sequencing technology — more sensitive and rapid than conventional DNA techniques — which has been used by the U.S. military to identify the remains of missing American servicemembers.

The identification of the man was confirmed through DNA testing of remains recovered in 2001. The identification of the woman was confirmed through DNA testing of remains recovered in 2001, 2006, and 2013. The two identifications are the first new identifications of World Trade Center victims since September 2021. Some 1,104 victims — 40 percent of those who died — remain unidentified. In addition to the two new identifications this year, OCME has identified 60 human remains associated with previously identified individuals. The latest World Trade Center operational statistics are available from OCME upon request.

Established in 1918 as the nation’s first comprehensive medical examiner office, OCME provides the public with the highest standards of service across the forensic sciences. The agency operates the largest and most advanced DNA public crime laboratory in North America and houses laboratories in toxicology and histology, in addition to the nation’s only public molecular genetics laboratory. OCME is home to the country’s largest forensic pathology training program, having produced more than one-fifth of the nation’s board-certified forensic pathologists since 1990. OCME also houses a department of forensic anthropology and maintains a division of specially trained experts to respond to any and all mass fatality events and disasters.

[Parliament 14121]

Seeing this thread bumped every year just scrapes the scab.  I'm pretty sure it's never gonna heal.

[Jshep34 2303]

I've always enjoyed the story of the guy in the red bandana

[vtaenz 601]

On 9/11/2019 at 8:51 AM, usmc0331horn said:

Just finished listening to this on Audible. It's truly an amazing book and a stunning tribute to all involved.

Read this in 2020, it was incredibly depressing reading it up until it happens because you just knew the outcome for so many.

I'm glad I read it.

[fattyflattie 4636]

8 hours ago, Constant said:

 

 

A few pictures of the memorial/museum I took last November. 

This was the most memorable thing about the first time I visited NYC. What a flood of emotions it invokes. 

[BearSchlong 8077]

I was there in February and witnessed this ceremony.

One of the first things new Port Authority police academy cadets do is a single file march through the memorial, through the tourists. Gravitas.

I was chatting with one of the on-duty PA policemen above ground level and mentioned it and he rolled his eyes and said yeah I wish they wouldn't do that to those kids. Still, I thought it was cool.

[MissingInAction 24807]

I think it's great they bring the cadets through there. If that doesn't convey the stakes of their job nothing will.

[MikeBloomberg2020 20]

Carrie from the Bloomberg Campaign here! Thanks to all the first responders and others who died at the World Trade Center. We thank you for your sacrifice. It is on this day this year that we remember what you all stood for, and for the freedoms that make America the envy of the world. New York is a better place because of you!