General Discussion

... louder each time. After several people were looking at her, she said a plane had hit the WTC. News sites were clogged from the spike in traffic, so coming here to DU was actually a bit of a lifeline, a place where information could be relayed without being jammed up.

I actually live on the Jersey side of the Hudson, but that week had been house-sitting on Long Island while my parents were vacationing in upper Wyoming and Montana, because it cut my commute from ~2h to about 20 min. Which was fortunate, because it'd be about 3 days before I could get back across the Hudson.

Oddball fact: in a backward way, I made money off it: My landlord, a civil engineer for the Port Authority who worked out of the WTC, had been on vacation in the early part of the month, so had only deposited my rent check in an ATM in the WTC on the 10th. The ATM hadn't been emptied before the 11th, and was just considered a loss after the attack and fires. The bank honored the electronic record of my landlord's deposit, but since they never processed the check, the rent money was never deducted from my checking account. It took a few months for me to double-check with him and sort out what must have happened. I donated the "boon".

It turned out that one of the people lost was the son of one of the proofreaders in my department. He'd been installing equipment at the top of Tower 1 when it was hit by the first plane. He left behind a wife and little girl. My sister lost a friend she'd worked with several years previously. I can practically give a walking tour of various locations seen in ground-level videos taken at the time.