@RoninChaos, you asked people if they had 911 stories…i forget to post mine…i wasn’t anywhere near the towers, thankfully, but here’s mine anyway.
so i’m in the same apt i’m in now. i, from the south bronx, and from my high story window can see the twin towers, chrisler building, citibank skyscraper, and empire state building…i.e. all the skyscrapers in lower manhattan, believe it or not.
it was a cloudless clear day on 911 btw.
anywho…i woke up, turned on the radio to hear howard stern show, they’re just shootin the shit as always…i turn on the news, since its morning i wanns know the temperatures 4 the day.
15 minutes pass, all of a sudden i see on the new, breaking story.
you know what follows.
so, like 10 minutes pass on howard stern before anyone mentions on his show that a plane has hit the building.
howard stern and everyone else think that its an accident but then howard realizes that its a clear sky day and its impossible to crash your plane into a building on a clear day *they thought at first it was some small propeller plane, they didn’t imagine it was a jumbo sized passenger plane."
howard turns on the tv and says holy shi!
anyway they freak out! yadayada, …second plane hits.
they realize along with everyone else that its no accident and that its a terrorist attack.
they meaning peeps on the H. stern show and the newscasters and everyone else.
here’s the part that is the only reason i’m mentioning this.
so then i remember that i can actually see the twin towers from my window, i go take a look and i see the most surreal sight.
from my window pre-911, the twin towers looked like: the twin towers.
on 911, the twin towers looked like: 2 chimneys billowing out a ton of smoke. thats how the looked like from my window. like two chimneys in use. they didn’t look like building with people inside them at all.
just like…2 chimneys.
hence why i say it looked surreal.
my apt was too far away for me to see the huge fire,…just the smoke. so they looked like chimneys with smoke billowing from their tops.
so i’m looking at the news, hearing howard, and occasionally looking out the window…i see from the helicopter footage hanging over the insanity one of the building start swaying. and i mean seriously swaying …and i say to myself “uh-oh that can’t be good. that building is gonna go down any second. if it falls, the second one is definitely falling too” 10-15 minutes later, it did.
totally forgot to take look at the scene through my window.
1/2 hour later or whatever time frame it was, second one comes down.
remembered to look through the window. saw a huge massive just simply massive cloud of smoke originating from where the towers use’ta be.
just massive, and up against the bright beautiful blue sky, that black, brown, orange, grey, and red smoke…streaking to a northwesterly(direction how it seemed to be blowing to from my window) direction…looked so …
anyway, then my aunt called me crying and saying "-my real name-, its WW3! its the end of the world!"
then i had to call her hysterical ass down over the phone.
and a ton of passenger planes trying to land at LaGuardia airport all at once. since they ordered, cuz the army was ready to shoot down any planes that didn’t either respond to communications or not got out of the air asap.
then i remember the first news agency that was on point bullseye in regards to who exactly and which nation was behind the attacks were,…was bbc world news. they already had some afghani press rep denying everything.
i then also remember seeing cars going 100 to 110 if not faster on the freeway, in the ‘leaving manhattan-entering bronx’ part of the freeway.its a 2 way freeway btw. which was really stupid since the freeway is no where near the towers, and people were risking their lives driving that insanely fast.
oh and tons of firetrucks and cop cars trying to get at the scene on the other ‘exiting bronx-entering manhattan’ way of the freeway.
like 6-7 hours later is when the national guard military helicopters flew very near my building. so close i saw the dude behind the chain machine gun on the side like VietNam type shit ready to fire on anything that needed to be blazed on.
night came. like 11pm or midnight. there was a thunderstorm…with no rain.
probably due to the huge amounts of dust in the air from the destruction.
an unnaturally rainless thunderstorm.
think about it.
that was my 911.
its not a scary story of 911 since i was no where near wtc, but the surreal 2 chimney imagery of the twin towers i think was worth a mention.
i use’to work 1 block away from the towers 7 years before 01 though. i remember looking up at those two skyscrapers in awe of how insanely tall they were. way taller than the empire state building if anyone has ever been right beneath them and looking up at them,… thankfully for me in 94 and not 01. cuz to get off at that wtc train stop to go to work - on that day…hell no. god no.