Where were you on September 9, 2011? It's one of those dates like Kennedy's assassination, or Pearl Harbor for an earlier generation, where it sticks in people's mind where they were when they got the news.
I was just starting what seemed like a normal day at work. One of my co-workers was listening to the radio and told us what had happened. At first I didn't believe it, thinking there had to be some mistake. But it was real.
Then the other guy who worked in the lab with me came in and started putting things from his desk in a box. He looked somber, and I said, "Did you hear about the terrorist attack?" He said, "Which one? They just told me that I had been laid off." I said I was sorry, and he said, "Ah, don't be. I've been wanting to blow this pop stand for a long time!" But it was graveyard humor.
The immediate effect for the rest of the year in our town was economic. There were a lot of layoffs, but of course the one where my co-worker was laid off was previously decided on, and it was a coincidence that it happened that particular morning. I kept my job, but my husband was caught in a 200 person layoff that October.
I was still at work for the mental health board. We were having a conference of board staff, agency management and some representatives of the State of Ohio Department of Mental Health.
ReplyDeleteAs the news began to trickle into the conference room, my boss immediately shut everything down. Some of our agency management are part of our crises management team that responds to all sort of events that are likely to need mental health assistance. Many of them would later go to New York in the aftermath.
In the mental health system bizarre events like planes crashing into tall buildings frequently happen psychologically to our clients. So we immediately had to prepare for all the consumers that might see this event as a psychological rather than a social event. Also such events trigger a wide variety of responses. So we immediately had to begin shutting down group programs like day care while also assuring clients that we would be with them, and making the system ready to handle this and any related emergencies.
Within a half hour the commissioners also shut down county government routine operations and went into its emergency mode. That included sending home all unnecessary personnel. We knew the third plane had been hijacked over Cleveland. Their fear was that it might try to take out the nuclear power plant in our county.
So I was basically back home in front of my TV within a hour. I guess as a researcher and planner, it was good to be a non essential worker within two organizations, the mental health system and county government that are ready to shift immediately into crises mode.
Oh, Yes. I vividly remember that day. I will never forget it and DC wasn't hit as hard as NYC. It was a perfect first fall day - blue, blue sky, crisp clear air. Not cold, not hot - perfect. (today the temps are heading to 90 again) We have never been morning news watchers or listeners. My husband left for work in Arlington, VA, not far from the Pentagon. We planned to meet at a church in Arlington to attend the funeral for a neighbor's mother. Our youngest son was in high school then in a private school in DC. When driving I always listened to the local classical music station. As I headed towards Virginia on the beltway, listening to music, the woman announcer (the one with the Brit accent - guess they thought that was more classical music appropriate) came on and briefly mentioned the events in NYC and said we could tune to a sister station for full coverage. I can still here her cool, calm British voice in my head. I didn't know what she was talking about so tuned to the other station. Of course I was stunned, listening. I was near the turnoff I usually used to go into DC, and, without any conscious decision, reflexively took it immediately. I tried to call my husband to tell him that I was going to pick up our son and would not make it to the funeral mass. But I couldn't get through - too many people trying to call at the same time. The radio news was full of information and misinformation. By then the plane had crashed into the Pentagon. My husband could see the smoke from the crash from his office window. Our neighbors, on the way to their mother's funeral, saw the plane as it passed overhead, frighteningly low. Their daughter, following in another car, called them to remark on it. The crash came seconds later. But they couldn't listen to the news to learn what was happening, because they were saying their final good-byes to their mother. There were stories of explosions near the State Dept, on the Mall, and near the Capitol Building that turned out not to be true. As I drove into the city to my son's school, it looked like a really bad Friday afternoon rush hour with bumper to bumper traffic heading out of the city on a Tuesday morning. Our son's school is on a relative high point of the city, and the smoke from the Pentagon could be seen from there also. They had herded all of the students (4th-12th) into the cafeteria to watch TV and wait for parents. Some of my son's classmates parents were stuck downtown (one father worked at the WaPo) so the school called and got permission for me to take them home on my way to take my own son home. Landline calls went through. Mobile calls required multiple tries. When I finally got home I went to my neighbor's where a small group of us from the neighborhood watched the news all day.
ReplyDeleteContinued: Later I learned that several people we knew were personally touched. The aunt of one of my son's classmates was on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon. It was the flight I usually tried to take when I would go to Calif to visit my mom. The high school best friend of one of our nephews was killed in one of the Towers. The daughter of of one of our closest friends was spared - she had changed jobs a week earlier, watched from her new office building, as all of her former colleagues died. Our friends have told us that she left NYC every Sept 11 after to get away from the memorials, from her nightmare memories, until she finally moved to a small town in New England. The son of very close friends was a Navy officer who was working at the Pentagon. My husband had written one of his recommendations for the Naval Academy. He ran into the fire area to try to save his own best friend from the Naval Academy who was working in the impact area. His friend died, but he and another officer managed to free a man who was pinned and get him outside to safety. The man was seriously injured but survived. Our friend's son's uniform melted on his back, and is apparently displayed in a 9/11 exhibit at the Pentagon. His mom told me that he hated being called a hero in the news and would never talk about it. Afterwards, everywhere you went in DC you saw military units armed with SAMs - of course, all the important streets approaching important government buildings in DC were closed off, surrounded by jersey walls and barbed wire, and the ever vigilant military vehicles with their SAMs at the ready. The full close off lasted for months. Some of it has remained ever since. No longer can one drive onto the Capitol grounds and park. No longer can people just stand in line outside the White House and wait for a tour. Everyone now needs prearranged tickets to tour the White House or Capitol or other important buildings. The security became less visible after a while (except for the "planters" that replaced the jersey walls that are still around many of these buildings) but the security has always remained tight. Not tight enough, as Jan 6 showed, when domestic terrorists attacked the Capitol - the first attack on the Capitol since the British. Friends in NYC bedroom suburbs said there wasn't a single school in their town that didn't mourn the deaths of parents of students, of their own alumni.
ReplyDeleteOne of our sons was in college in Calif. at the time. He was very upset by the casual attitude of many of his fellow students and even one or two professors. It was so far away, it didn't seem to touch them. He could barely stand watching the TV - NYC was attacked, and so was his own hometown. He felt that too many of them seemed only slightly interested, and not for long before turning to another station sit a sit com rerun.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I was contacted by several non-American friends who expressed their shock and sorrow for us, and for America. It almost seemed like it touched them more than some Americans. Unfortunately, some were touched in the wrong ways, and set out to demonize all Muslims.
Do people have to be personally familiar with the places where tragedies occur in order to empathize? My son was dismayed by his classmates reactions to 9/11, just as I was dismayed by the ho-hum attitude of many Americans to the assault on the Capitol on Jan 6 by their fellow citizens, egged on by their so-called president..
Anne, wow, with it happening in your town and with the effects in plain view it must have been exceptionally traumatizing. I don't think people have to be personally involved in order to empathize, but if you are several degrees removed from it, it kind of played out on slow motion as you learned just how bad things have been. For instance I didn't hear about the one that hit the Pentagon until the next day, or the one that crashed in Pennsylvania until the day after that. One of my cousins worked in one of the buildings, but for some reason he had stepped out for a few minutes and was not there when the plane hit. It was all so random who lived and who died. Of course I guess that's how it always is, we just don't think about it when it's not some kind of mass catastrophe.
DeleteThere used to be a website where people anonymously posted their deepest, darkest secret that they had never told anyone else. I just looked at it a couple of times, and one secret in particular stuck in my mind. It read, "Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I am dead."
DeleteThat is an amazing deep, dark secret. I wonder how the person rebuilt his/ her identity and started over somewhere else.
DeleteKatherine, why were there a lot of lay- offs in your town because of 9/11. I don’t get the connection.
ReplyDeleteI think it was a case of 9/11 exacerbating already existing trends. The U.S. economy had already been in a recession as the technology-stock bubble deflated. Farm and agricultural markets experienced some instability. The industry my husband worked in (he was in the purchasing department of a company which manufactured farm buildings and equipment) went through a downturn because people in the agriculture sector don't make capital purchases when they aren't sure what is going to happen with the prices of the things they sell. This effect was relatively temporary and things came back within a couple of years. But people over 50 searching for decent paying jobs is a whole other subject.
DeleteThe industry I worked in manufactures passive electronic components. Some of their big customers were airplane manufacturers and the automotive industry. Both of these suffered in the immediate aftermath. But the harm wasn't as severe and the layoffs not so deep as the company my husband worked for.
I was in my lab working on an optical design. My second level supervisor walked in and told me an aircraft had plunged into one of the twin towers. I said that I wondered how the hijackers got a plane. I knew they had it in for the WTC especially after their previous bomb attack had failed. The rest of the day was a blur. Watching what was happening on CNN on the internet. The military installation at which I worked was only around 50 km from the site. At that time, the place had become an open base. You could drive in without going through security which I thought was as dumb as it was personally convenient. Luckily, the next day was a compressed time off day for me. My carpool partner had to go in, waiting four hours to get through retightened panic response security. My biggest concern was that the chief executive was someone I referred to as "Little Lord Fauntleroy". And also the hot shots he had around him.
ReplyDeleteA women I knew at work lost her firefighter cousin. Two members of my parish who I didn't know perished. That was as close as it came. I felt we were going to do all the wrong things. And we sure did.
Watched a few minutes of the reading of names. I can't help but think that for every name read, there may be three hundred names of the dead killed in ensuing wars justified by this event. Does memorializing our dead support war mania?
ReplyDeleteI think it can support war mania. However if one is willing to sit in sober reflection, war memorials can also be a witness to the human cost of war, and many times, its futility.
DeleteIt was a work day for me and a school day for my kids, some of whom were elementary-school age and some of whom were pre-school. We were getting some breakfast into the kids before taking the older ones to school. My wife was staying home that year. My youngest was not even one yet - in my mind's eye, he was sitting in his height chair and I was feeding him breakfast when we heard the first news report, but he would have been so young, I'm not certain he was ready to sit in a height chair. (What is the age at which we strap kids into those things? - amazing what one forgets.) We always had an AM talk station on during the mornings, and the guy who read the news at the top and bottom of every hour broke into the show to say that a plane had hit a World Trade Center tower. He realized right away that it might be a terrorist attack - he put it in the context of a previous attempt to detonate a bomb under the building, and said that the terrorists always had promised they would "finish the job". We turned on CNN, and I heard a national-security expert intone the name, "Osama bin Laden", a name I had only heard vaguely at the time. I knew nothing about al Qaeda, and the previous, mostly-unsuccessful bombing had barely blipped on my radar.
ReplyDeleteI dropped the girls off at school and continued on to the office. There was nothing going on at the office: all work had ground to a halt. The core operation of this office was a call center: clients called us throughout the day, and our salespeople called out to clients and prospects. None of that was happening. Usually, it was a busy, bustling place, with the noise of ringing telephones and phone conversations filling the big open areas. It was dead silence - it was eerie. I had my own type of work to do in those days, which also involved working closely with outside parties. None of them were working. It was difficult to get information about what was going on, and there was nothing to do, so by mid-afternoon I went home. I don't remember what happened with the schools that day, but I suppose the kids were sent home early, too.
That evening, our parish pulled together an ad hoc prayer service. The celebrant, a retired priest who lived in our rectory, gave a reflection in which he described the attacks as "evil". Oddly, it was the first time I heard it put in those terms. I was so gobsmacked, I had been struggling to understand what had happened and why it would happen. Who would wish to attack us? In some ways, I think the attacks still are senseless; we know a good deal more "backstory" about al Qaeda and radical Islam now than we did then, but the impulse which would lead to suicide attacks for politico-religious purposes is still as opaque now as it was then.
One more memory came back after reading Jim's. As you recall, all air travel was cancelled and flights in progress were grounded at the nearest airport. The skies were dead quiet. Except - there were AWACS planes circling DC, on the lookout for more terrorist planes. Silence - and then I would hear one. Then silence for another however long time (an hour? 1/2 hour? 15 minutes? I don't remember). The silence was eerie, as it was in Jim's office.
ReplyDeleteI remember too that all planes were grounded in the continental US (I'm assuming that meant going or coming) and that it was a massive coordinated effort by air traffic controllers to make that happen safely.
ReplyDeleteAnd later the story came out about the small town of Gander, Newfoundland which took in nearly 7000 strangers when their flights were grounded.
There is a Broadway musical about Gander's experience, called "Come From Away". If you're into that sort of thing, I recommend it. I saw it in Chicago a handful of years ago. I believe it may have just reopened on Broadway, in case anyone from New York is lurking and is willing to pay Broadway prices :-)
DeleteI think maybe there is a youtube version, we will have to see if we can access it.
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