Portions of this post are from last year when I wrote about where I was on 9.11.01. I’ve added more thoughts so this is definitely worth a second look.
September 11, 2001 – One of those days you’ll never forget where you were. I was working at a Detroit television station, WDIV, producing the noon newscast.
At the time the first plane went into the North Tower, I was out of the newsroom.
One of our videotape editors ran toward me when I came back into the newsroom and started pointing at one of our TV monitors.
He said “check out the wild pictures from New York.” At the time, we weren’t aware that a plane had crashed into the building and it wasn’t an accident! We talked about how hard it would be for firefighters to fight a towering inferno.
There weren’t a lot of people in the newsroom at the time because most people didn’t arrive until around nine o’clock in the morning. By this point, all of the television feeds we got from NBC and CNN were on the towers.
Some people started coming in and rushed to see the TV’s, they’d heard the story on their car radio.
It was about that time when another plane slammed into the South Tower and then we all knew something wasn’t right, we were under attack.
I saw so many co-workers with tears in their eyes. These are people who deal with death everyday. Murders and other unexpected deadly accidents we deal with them every day and have to bring that news to people who watch our station. It’s sad you somewhat get immune to death. It’s not that every death doesn’t have an effect but you have to block it a little. This was different, this was an attack on America, this was something no one had ever experienced before. How could you deal with such a breach of our nation? How could you cope with the potential mass casualty? The world changed forever. The lives of an entire generation of people changed forever.
Six years later, Osama bin Laden is still a threat and has just released two videos. They are the first that have surfaced from him in three years. Airport security is still high even though some critics still say the U.S. have much more to do to protect.
I’m reliving some of the horror of this day by watching MSNBC. The cable news network is replaying the coverage in real time. I do recall the hunger for information and how little it trickled out on that day. We all couldn’t do any work. We just sat at our desks watching coverage on televisions with our mouths literally gaping open watching in total disbelief.
It’s a day none of us can or will be able to forget. We must not also forget the innocent people who lost their lives and their families who have to endure the pain of not having them each day and every anniversary of 9/11.
Classic Song Flashback: Only Time – Enya
