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September 11th

JimboBBN

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2016
11,036
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The Bluegrass State
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Kentucky
Some people call it Patriots Day now. Whatever you choose to call it, can't believe its been 19 years. I was in third grade, but to this day, the only day from that time period I can recall from beginning to end.

I know we have some NY residents and former residents on here who have some crazy stories. Please share. May we all remember the lives lost on that terrible day, and never forget.
 
jumpers110905_560.jpg


To this day this makes me angry. Imagine being so scared of the flames inside, knowing you are going to jump and die or burn alive. RIP
 
Such a gripping image. It’s believed that some of the jumpers may have been so disoriented by the smoke that they fell.... which might be even more terrifying than actually choosing to jump. What a terrible day that was.


On Patriot’s Day it’s important to remember those lives lost and ruined by the attack, while also saluting those who answered the call to respond in kind.
 
Patriot's Day is a day we remember the people who lost their lives for simply going to work. Many children became orphans, many mothers and fathers became single parents. And the illnesses that still effect the survivors and the first responders shall not be overlooked. It was a sad and tragic day. New York was ground zero. But make no mistake about it, 9/11 had many impacts on lives far outside of NYC. There are still people from nowhere South Dakota serving and risking their lives today, 19 years later as a direct result of 9/11/2001.

However you want to remember it, just remember how close we became with our neighbors in the days following the senseless attack.
 
jumpers110905_560.jpg


To this day this makes me angry. Imagine being so scared of the flames inside, knowing you are going to jump and die or burn alive. RIP
Jesus man. No matter how often I see this, it's hard to look at. I can't express enough gratitude for the people went running into the burning towers to help. Absolutely heroic.

#patriotsday
 
Wrote this two years ago. Still applies.

Llived about 20 blocks from the towers.

Was teaching that day, up at CPE1 on 106th street. Was helping in a first grade class when a first grader told me another kid was saying that there were explosions downtown. I said that people like to make stuff up. Still have no idea how the kid knew.

Then the principal started coming around and telling us. A lot of phones were down, and there weren't computers in the classrooms and people didn't have iphones or anything.

We got only a bit of news. It was really scary, because we just couldn't find out what was happening. We heard about the Pentagon, and there were rumors that the Supreme Court had been attacked... and then the fighters started screaming overhead, and I genuinely believed WWIII had started.

Parents started to come and get kids. An aide sat in the back with an ear bud in, and told us what he could figure out.

At around 10:45 I went out to get food for everyone. The streets were PACKED... like a completely full subway, with everyone walking north. Now, 106th is MILES from Ground Zero... but everyone was just running away. Saw people covered in the dust. Went into a restaurant, where there were a hundred people around a TV, and there was a shot of one of the towers still standing, and I blurted out "Wait, are the towers still up?!?" and everyone turned and one person said "No, that's from before."

Eventually school closed and I went over to 5th ave to catch a bus downtown, because the subways were down. The only traffic was buses, and HUGE convoys of tractor trailers with medical supply names on the sides, and humvees. I still didn't know everything that had happened.

When the bus got a bit further south I leaned out (it was a bus where everyone faced each other) and looked downtown, and my heart stopped. I hadnt seen the plume yet, and it basically covered the entire horizon. I think I gasped, and everyone else leaned over and looked down the length of the bus, and you could tell nobody had really SEEN it yet, because everyone was floored.

I lived below the cordoned off zone.

Met all my friends at my buddy's apartment on Thompson, which was also below the cordoned off zone. When our friend who actually worked at the towers showed up at the door we all burst into tears and hugged. My college roommates dad also worked there, but got out safely we learned later.

Everything was dusty. That night it was silent. I had a corner apartment on the NE corner of MacDougal and 3rd. I could see right down south MacDougal and see the plume. There were huge floodlights all night, lighting it up. I got high, and sat on my fire escape on the 3rd floor, and watched four kids (I assume NYU students) play frisbee in the empty West Village streets while a kid jumped up and down smoking a joint on a trampoline right in the middle of the intersection of MacDougal and 3rd. Occasionally they would call out "car!" and move for the humvees or whatever that came by. It was silent, and eerie.

The fire department on my block (now Anderson Cooper's house) lost a guy... Keith Roma. The flowers outside the place took up the ENTIRE block, five or six feet wide and three or four feet deep.

There were missing person posters EVERYWHERE. Myentire neighborhood was covered in them. This is Rays, which was a couple of blocks over...

dt32+David+Turnley+corbis.jpg


Another shot...

Fcobb00-R3-7_6.jpg


I remember two that stuck out.

One was an older man, and on the poster it said he had six grandkids.

Another was a pretty young blond woman in a white dress. On the poster it said she had just gotten married.

I knew that nobody needed to know any of that to find them... it was just their loved ones heartache.

The Daily News the next day... I remember seeing this cover...

images


... and thinking "Holy shit. If there are 10,000 of us dead... how the hell can we ever recover?"

My best friend was in the National Guard and was called in for body recovery on the 12th. He called me on the way in, and we talked. We didn't talk again for three days. He called when he had come back out, and had a breakdown. He just kept talking about what it was like to find the bodies, the parts, and having to MOVE them... he kept talking about the weight of them. I quickly got out of town (he lived in NJ) and got over to his place, and we got in the car and left, drove up to Vermont, and stayed up there for a few days so he could get his head straight.

Everything I owned was dusty for a month after, and the smell... the smell stuck around for six months. The plume, the smoke... it lasted what felt like forever.

I didn't see any footage or photos of it for... for a long, long time? I couldn't. The first thing I really saw was when I was at the New York Historical Society, and I walked past a door, and there was a movie theatre inside, and on the screen as part of a 9/11 exhibit they were just playing a single shot... a single steady shot of one of the towers burning. A close up, showing maybe the top twenty or thirty floors. I happened to look to the right as I passed, and it hit me like a truck. I just stood there, mouth open, and watched the video from the doorway for maybe ten minutes. I just couldn't move. I still don't really watch anything about it.

When the big power outage happened, everyone I know panicked; we assumed we got hit again. Every time a plane flew low, my then-girlfriend and I would pause, and wait, until it passed. The plane crash in Queens a month or so later had everyone panicked. And every time there was fireworks in the city, the streets would be full of frightened people, thinking we were under attack.

Worst day of my life, without question.

Crazy... they talked about doing a fighter fly over NYC today... everyone up here was like "Are you ****ing nuts? The LAST thing anyone here wants is to hear that again." There is nothing as ear-drum-bursting as fighters overhead, and when you hear them at what you think may be the start of WWIII... no thanks.

And it is a damn shame that we went from "We are all New Yorkers today" to people hating the city, even if they have never been there, because of what they think it represents politically:( Would be great if we could get back to the "we are all in this together" feeling, but I suspect we never will.
 
Good lord. I wish all americans had the capacity to act like they did and feel like they did on 9/12. Seems like the country has forgotten that politics don't make the world turn round, regular people do. The brave patriots involved deserve the love of every single american. I hope I would have had the courage that these brave men and women had. The actions of all the first responders and heroes are solid proof that america breeds the best and the finest individuals to walk this earth.
 
Good lord. I wish all americans had the capacity to act like they did and feel like they did on 9/12. Seems like the country has forgotten that politics don't make the world turn round, regular people do. The brave patriots involved deserve the love of every single american. I hope I would have had the courage that these brave men and women had. The actions of all the first responders and heroes are solid proof that america breeds the best and the finest individuals to walk this earth.
I have faith in humanity and especially Americans. I truly believe we in a perfect storm of funk right now and we'll soon snap out of it.

One thing Americans have going for them is resilience and reluctance to change from being the best.
 
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National geographic has a good program documenting events leading up and following 9/11.

Inside 9/11. I believe it is a 3 part documentary. Zero hour has some pretty crazy stories. Hard to believe that people survived from 90 stories up.
 
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You know, it might sound strange, but at least locally the whole covid thing has had a similar effect. Neighbors really checking in with each other, neighborhoods coming together... I mean, obviously you have the social distance thing, but up here I think that the virus has, in some ways, really united people.

Unfortunately it has also caused huge rifts, but not everywhere, and not with everyone.
 
Our community was never divided. We just get along. Down here you wouldn't know covid exists outside of restaurants being weird and bars being closed. Outside of a bunch of white women screaming, no social unrest either. It's a nice bubble we live in.
 
Our community was never divided. We just get along. Down here you wouldn't know covid exists outside of restaurants being weird and bars being closed. Outside of a bunch of white women screaming, no social unrest either. It's a nice bubble we live in.
Honestly, its like that here. People are more than willing to take reasonable precautions but as a whole, people don't make a big deal out of it at all. People in the midwest already help each other out on a daily basis, so not much has changed. 99.9% of fake outrage and covid scare tactics are limited to social media and click bait news. People are more than happy to talk politics around here, but its not the SJW BS. Its more about policy, healthcare, taxes, farm bills.
 
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Honestly, its like that here. People are more than willing to take reasonable pre-cautions but as a whole, people don't make a big deal out of it at all. People in the midwest already help each other out on a daily basis, so not much has changed. 99.9% of fake outrage and covid scare tactics are limited to social media and click bait news. People are more than happy to talk politics around here, but its not the SJW BS. Its more about policy, healthcare, taxes, farm bills.
I honestly think it's like that most places. We get too caught up in what the lunatics (both sides) post and do on Twitter, etc. That's not the real world, imo.
 
I honestly think it's like that most places. We get too caught up in what the lunatics (both sides) post and do on Twitter, etc. That's not the real world, imo.
Even amongst friends---I see people tweet, insta, and share facebook memes that are dumb AF. But those people aren't like that when I talk to them in person. Im not sure why the feel the need to have an alter ego online. With as little as you see some people, their online behavior can't really shape your opinion of them.
 
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Even amongst friends---I see people tweet, insta, and share facebook memes that are dumb AF. But those people aren't like that when I talk to them in person. Im not sure why the feel the need to have an alter ego online. With as little as you see some people, their online behavior can't really shape your opinion of them.
One of my best friend's wife started spouting about California making pedophilia legal last weekend while we were partying. I'm like "what?!?!?!?" But she believed it, because she read it on some post.
Come on, people!
 
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Even amongst friends---I see people tweet, insta, and share facebook memes that are dumb AF. But those people aren't like that when I talk to them in person. Im not sure why the feel the need to have an alter ego online. With as little as you see some people, their online behavior can't really shape your opinion of them.

Doesn't almost everybody behave differently online?

Probably equal parts more honest and more confrontational.
 
One of my best friend's wife started spouting about California making pedophilia legal last weekend while we were partying. I'm like "what?!?!?!?" But she believed it, because she read it on some post.
Come on, people!
The worst is when you know people are fully convinced of something that is just insanely false and not remotely rational.
 
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RIP to those who lost their lives on 9/11. Also RIP to the thousands upon thousands of innocent lives lost to counter terrorism.
 
Wrote this two years ago. Still applies.

Llived about 20 blocks from the towers.

Was teaching that day, up at CPE1 on 106th street. Was helping in a first grade class when a first grader told me another kid was saying that there were explosions downtown. I said that people like to make stuff up. Still have no idea how the kid knew.

Then the principal started coming around and telling us. A lot of phones were down, and there weren't computers in the classrooms and people didn't have iphones or anything.

We got only a bit of news. It was really scary, because we just couldn't find out what was happening. We heard about the Pentagon, and there were rumors that the Supreme Court had been attacked... and then the fighters started screaming overhead, and I genuinely believed WWIII had started.

Parents started to come and get kids. An aide sat in the back with an ear bud in, and told us what he could figure out.

At around 10:45 I went out to get food for everyone. The streets were PACKED... like a completely full subway, with everyone walking north. Now, 106th is MILES from Ground Zero... but everyone was just running away. Saw people covered in the dust. Went into a restaurant, where there were a hundred people around a TV, and there was a shot of one of the towers still standing, and I blurted out "Wait, are the towers still up?!?" and everyone turned and one person said "No, that's from before."

Eventually school closed and I went over to 5th ave to catch a bus downtown, because the subways were down. The only traffic was buses, and HUGE convoys of tractor trailers with medical supply names on the sides, and humvees. I still didn't know everything that had happened.

When the bus got a bit further south I leaned out (it was a bus where everyone faced each other) and looked downtown, and my heart stopped. I hadnt seen the plume yet, and it basically covered the entire horizon. I think I gasped, and everyone else leaned over and looked down the length of the bus, and you could tell nobody had really SEEN it yet, because everyone was floored.

I lived below the cordoned off zone.

Met all my friends at my buddy's apartment on Thompson, which was also below the cordoned off zone. When our friend who actually worked at the towers showed up at the door we all burst into tears and hugged. My college roommates dad also worked there, but got out safely we learned later.

Everything was dusty. That night it was silent. I had a corner apartment on the NE corner of MacDougal and 3rd. I could see right down south MacDougal and see the plume. There were huge floodlights all night, lighting it up. I got high, and sat on my fire escape on the 3rd floor, and watched four kids (I assume NYU students) play frisbee in the empty West Village streets while a kid jumped up and down smoking a joint on a trampoline right in the middle of the intersection of MacDougal and 3rd. Occasionally they would call out "car!" and move for the humvees or whatever that came by. It was silent, and eerie.

The fire department on my block (now Anderson Cooper's house) lost a guy... Keith Roma. The flowers outside the place took up the ENTIRE block, five or six feet wide and three or four feet deep.

There were missing person posters EVERYWHERE. Myentire neighborhood was covered in them. This is Rays, which was a couple of blocks over...

dt32+David+Turnley+corbis.jpg


Another shot...

Fcobb00-R3-7_6.jpg


I remember two that stuck out.

One was an older man, and on the poster it said he had six grandkids.

Another was a pretty young blond woman in a white dress. On the poster it said she had just gotten married.

I knew that nobody needed to know any of that to find them... it was just their loved ones heartache.

The Daily News the next day... I remember seeing this cover...

images


... and thinking "Holy shit. If there are 10,000 of us dead... how the hell can we ever recover?"

My best friend was in the National Guard and was called in for body recovery on the 12th. He called me on the way in, and we talked. We didn't talk again for three days. He called when he had come back out, and had a breakdown. He just kept talking about what it was like to find the bodies, the parts, and having to MOVE them... he kept talking about the weight of them. I quickly got out of town (he lived in NJ) and got over to his place, and we got in the car and left, drove up to Vermont, and stayed up there for a few days so he could get his head straight.

Everything I owned was dusty for a month after, and the smell... the smell stuck around for six months. The plume, the smoke... it lasted what felt like forever.

I didn't see any footage or photos of it for... for a long, long time? I couldn't. The first thing I really saw was when I was at the New York Historical Society, and I walked past a door, and there was a movie theatre inside, and on the screen as part of a 9/11 exhibit they were just playing a single shot... a single steady shot of one of the towers burning. A close up, showing maybe the top twenty or thirty floors. I happened to look to the right as I passed, and it hit me like a truck. I just stood there, mouth open, and watched the video from the doorway for maybe ten minutes. I just couldn't move. I still don't really watch anything about it.

When the big power outage happened, everyone I know panicked; we assumed we got hit again. Every time a plane flew low, my then-girlfriend and I would pause, and wait, until it passed. The plane crash in Queens a month or so later had everyone panicked. And every time there was fireworks in the city, the streets would be full of frightened people, thinking we were under attack.

Worst day of my life, without question.

Crazy... they talked about doing a fighter fly over NYC today... everyone up here was like "Are you ****ing nuts? The LAST thing anyone here wants is to hear that again." There is nothing as ear-drum-bursting as fighters overhead, and when you hear them at what you think may be the start of WWIII... no thanks.

And it is a damn shame that we went from "We are all New Yorkers today" to people hating the city, even if they have never been there, because of what they think it represents politically:( Would be great if we could get back to the "we are all in this together" feeling, but I suspect we never will.

Great stuff.

I do disagree that we will never have that “all in this together” feeling again.

Unfortunately, IMO the reason that will cause us to have that feeling again will be the same reason that causes someone like you 20 years later to share a story like the one you just posted.
 
RIP to those who lost their lives on 9/11. Also RIP to the thousands upon thousands of innocent lives lost to counter terrorism.
Who knows how many tens of thousands of lives they saved by serving their country. They def do deserve more recognition and their sacrifice should never be forgotten. Great point.
 
Patriot's Day is a day we remember the people who lost their lives for simply going to work. Many children became orphans, many mothers and fathers became single parents. And the illnesses that still effect the survivors and the first responders shall not be overlooked. It was a sad and tragic day. New York was ground zero. But make no mistake about it, 9/11 had many impacts on lives far outside of NYC. There are still people from nowhere South Dakota serving and risking their lives today, 19 years later as a direct result of 9/11/2001.

However you want to remember it, just remember how close we became with our neighbors in the days following the senseless attack.
This....One of the most historic days/memorable days, is a day no one remembers....

September 12th, that is.....
 
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