Where were you?

What was your experience?


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Myself and a handful of colleagues were in our office on the 52nd Floor of Scotia Tower, the then 2nd tallest office tower in Toronto.


(brown building on the right with the bright red S).

We had a tech set up type office with a lounge that had a big screen TV so everyone was crowded in to that room as we watched it unfold live on CNN.

I was actually the oldest in that office at age 33 as we were a group that had taken our exit from our DotCom Fintech company and just set up this new office for ourselves a few months before.

As it became clear what was going on we immediately became very concerned as one of our younger founders of our company had left when we did but instead of joining us in the new office he took a job with a Wall Street firm that had offices in the World Trade Center. We did not know which building and our attempts to reach him met dead cell responses. Systems were overwhelmed in NYC.

We learned from him a day later, he was late walking into his office (WT4) and had just come out of the subway a few blocks away when the second plane flew right over his head and hit the second tower. He saw it all unfold from just a few blocks away as he was walking in. He just turned around and went home.

When it became clear it was an attack, and then that the Canadian gov't had agreed to take all US planes into our airspace and land them in Canada I made the call as the senior person in our office to shut down and send everyone home.

I took flack from those who felt it was an over reaction and while I considered it super low probability that we were at risk, my view was that if there were other planes that had hijackers on them and they suddenly realized their flight had been diverted from its original target they might just choose whatever best high value target they could see.

In Toronto that was, in order, First Canadian Place (BMO on it in the pic), our building Scotia Plaza, and then Brookfield Place towers.

So a plane coming in to Toronto Airport following the flight path over lake Ontario would pass right over the downtown and those towers.

Canadian Provinces from Coast to Coast took in (I think) every US airliner that could make it into Canada so they did not have to land in the US. I never fully understood that shifting of risk but some speculated it was because there was some belief a US ground invasion attack might happen after and thus getting those planes out of country was some level of protection.

If it was simply 'we do not know which may contain hijackers and crash next' it is hard to understand the 'send them to Canada then' logic??

The next few days we heard countless stories of people we knew directly or one layer of separation, who had died as many people who worked in Toronto financial sector would take jobs and go off to Wallstreet.

A good friend of ours worked in a Bond Trading firm in Toronto and an entire unit (team of 6), many of them his friends, had all quit one month prior a Toronto Bond trading firm and were taken in as a unit to work at Cantor Fitzgerald. That is the firm that had every employee killed that day who reported for work including (reportedly) all 6 of that unit.

That is my 9/11 story.

True story.

I was a pretty active rock climber at that point and as such know how to repel.



From that point on, i kept two 200 ft lengths of rope and a spare harness and gear in my office such that in the event of any incident where stairways and elevators were down I could at least repel myself down a few hundred feet at a time, in the hopes of reaching a point where I could access a working stairwell or get rescued.

Even though I do not work in skycraper towers anymore I have continually lived in Condo's on top floors of the tallest Condo's in most cities i choose to reside in. I love height and views. I currently live on the 31 floor of a tower in Vancouver and i have my rope and harness in the closet.

Old habits, die hard. lol.

And its not that I believe there is any high probability I would ever need it. I think it is near zero. But the way I look at it is that the cost of having it is near zero, and should I ever need it the cost of not having it will be fatal. So its an easy risk mitigation choice to make and good for a laugh when I tell people why i keep it.

My mom called me at around 9:30 in in the morning (I was still asleep) and told me to turn on the news. At that point only one of the towers was down and so I watched the other one (the south tower iirc) fall live.

I was living a couple miles outside of town and had just wrecked my car drunk on the 7th (I know it was bad)...fortunately I wasn't arrested and I was able to drive it to a safe location-- but the front axel was pretty messed up and it was basically undriveable- so I had bought the mountain bike that I still have today (which I've basically replaced most of it save the frame) on the 9th.

So I ended up riding it to my friend's house where I stayed a lot and going to Chevy's (Mexican chain in US) with two of them. There I was like "well we're going to war in Afghanistan" and I wasn't too much of a conspiracy person then and I basically argued the blowback theory that caused Bill Maher to lose his ABC job and got in a decent fight with my friend at Chevy's over that. We didn't speak for a month after that.
Later on I went with a different friend of mine to her house and recall talking to my great aunt who has since deceased on the phone (she was sort of like my second grandmother on my dad's side).
After that I don't really recall exactly what I did but it probably involved smoking weed and hanging out with my friends.
I had sociology classes at night which I skipped that day, and rode my bike back to my apartment where I watched ABC news and recall being impressed with the quality of their coverage.

I had voted in the local elections that morning, so I didn't know that a plane had hit the North Tower until I got to my office in midtown. As I was on my way up in the elevator, a plane hit the South Tower. My office faced downtown. I watched out my window as the giant cloud of smoke expanded and listened to the news for a while. I had walked down to someone else's office when the South Tower collapsed. I went back to my office and watched out my window as the North Tower collapsed.

At some point thereafter, people started leaving my office building. I walked uptown to a friend's apartment, and after a few hours, I walked several miles back downtown to my apartment, which was just outside the evacuation zone. The dust on my windows was noticeable, and there was an endless stream of emergency vehicles for several days. I didn't know anyone personally who died. I knew several people who were in the towers when the planes hit. Almost everyone who worked in the firehouse closest to my apartment died.

"...Almost everyone who worked in the firehouse closest to my apartment died..."

as a result of being in the Towers or on the ground when they collapsed? Or later due to extraneous but connected factors?

I was 19, working in downtown Boston, but the Friday before, I had got into a spat with my gf, who, at the time, was going to college in Kirksville, Missouri. I wanted to go see her, so I drove to Logan Airport and asked how much it was for a ticket to Kansas City. It was like 2k, so I got back in my car, and... drove there. 1,450 miles or so. I had printed out a map from Yahoo maps. Took about 24 hours, the map said 30, and I even took a nap.

Long story short, we stayed in a motel that week. I called into work on Monday, and made up some **** about family emergency. Tuesday, we woke up about 1pm, scrolling through the channels on a shitty motel TV, and I'm like, whoa, go back a second. Got back to CNN. That Tuesday was 9/11.

Quite lucky in retrospect that I drove, really. If I'd flown, I'd have stayed in Missouri for a lot more than a week. And also, my employer had better things to worry about than the fact I'd just disappeared for a week with 0 notice. On the way back, I put in cruise at about 100, like on the way there, and got like 3 tickets though, in Penn, Ohio, and NY, all like $300+ too. The cops weren't ****ing about that week.

We're the same age (I was 20) and also in Missouri.

Flying there tomorrow for $82.

Happy belated 40th, bro, mine is in 4 months.

I was abt to turn 20. Was in Costa Rica, my room mate woke me up, was still drunk when he woke me and watching that wasted wasn't my idea of a good time. Later at the bar all the Americans were raging and rightfully freaking tf out. Nobody could even fly home and the hotels and hookers were fully booked for a few more nights


My super hot room mate from Texas decided to fly home as soon as she could

This is the first time in my life I've been irritated by an exclamation point. Am I off base here or is the exclamation point in the title wholly inappropriate?

Is "Remember Pearl Harbor Eighty Years later!" different?

Pokerstars became operational on the morning of September 11, 2001. That is their anniversary, although I think over the years, they have fudged the date.

I got a few years before 40 but happy birthday to ya

The former.

Watching the one Documentary it just looked like many of those firefighters knew they may die that day. Also the scenes of folks jumping and the firefighters in the lobby hearing the thumps

Here in Canada I was just home and saw it on the news and was like WTF

Though I do remember how all those planes landed at CDN airports and they asked for people to house them and it was for a bunch of days. No one needed to stay in a hotel as people just welcomed them all in their homes.

Curious to hear from the grammer bro's on this outside of the wokescolders who may suggest nazi'ism, racism, etc as my interest is genuine.

Reading the above I would think 'Remembering 9/11 absolutely qualifies as an "exclamatory sentence that expresses strong or forceful emotion", (at least from me as the thread author, it does) thus the exclamation point is apt???

It makes me wonder that if a very similar scenario was to play out again today, and it very easily could with Hijackers merely spending the money to hire private jets and then taking them over, would the First Responders so willingly climb the stairs, time and again, to the top of these perceived imminent collapse towers, knowing they would get out the maximum people they could before they, themselves would die in the collapse.

Would we expect that type of heroism and sacrifice and would any one who refused be attacked as cowardly or derelict?

And i know First Responders put themselves at risk regularly and many die but it is rare for them to be put to the choice of 'knowing you will die' but go do your job anyway which is the layer i am adding here.

This type of 'ask' is similar to what they miners were asked to do at Chernobyl to stabilize the systems. Go in willingly, knowing you will die, but to save others.

On the west coast, I was on an NFL board looking at comments when someone typed in ‘a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center’.

I turned on my tv just before the second plane hit.

The faces on everybody in their cars on the way to work that morning was surreal.

They told everyone they could go home if they wanted to and set up monitors in the lounge so people could watch.

I worked at my desk to keep my mind semi sane, my boss walked by to inform the few of us that one tower had fallen just after they had shown people near the top looking out of windows.

The cherry on the top was later driving home listening to NPR and not picking up a smidgen of the dismay or outrage they exhibited after the 2000 election.

It's not about "heroism and sacrifice" vs "cowardice and dereliction", that's just Hollywood fiction and trying to cram something nuanced into a simplified narrative about heroes and villains. A far more apt description would be sense of duty vs sense of duty, saving lives vs saving lives. Different positions also have different perspectives. A lot of team leaders and officers after 9/11 have survived knowing they sent men and women to their deaths, many a very slow one from crippling ailments. Doesn't mean it was wrong, it just means real life is messy and rarely black and white.

I have trained and educated a fair bit of first responders. Typically you have to focus on mitigating risk in the training; the willingness to undertake serious risk (including too high risk) is the common trait. Firefighters in particular exhibit this trait from my anecdotal experiences, the urge to forego safety for the perceived chance to rescue lives is very, very high. It's one of those things that is at the same time be laudable, sometimes necessary, yet potentially detrimental (first line failure can ruin ongoing efforts and later efforts). It is not an easy equation.

But of course, in a scenario like this, there isn't much in the way of planning. There is a default to something else you know. It's not something you can really have a functional contingency for at the first responder level, it's just too massive. Basically it boils down to larger catastrophe plans at a macro-level; how well you coordinate the over-all efforts. For the first responder teams it will be "risk lives or not", and I wager the former will win out.

Regarding 9/11, it was shocking to hear the news and see the images. Coming from another country, the sentiment was still very much that of outrage and sadness. I had just finished my first stint of service and was drifting along as a carefree bohemian, but the world got ugly quick.

Good post.

I think I would bet the other way though.

If everything played out similar. If a large jet was flown into the Empire State Building and visually it looked exactly like 9/11 with the fires raging and the first responders arriving on scene, and them knowing (assuming) the building will soon fall but we cannot predict when, I think that if they did allow them to enter to try and bring out survivors they would cut it off much earlier and instead focus on clearing the people and ground around the imminent collapse zone to prevent those deaths there.

First responders will be prevented, by hire ups, from taking what would be seen as too high risks and i think this would be one. Plus there is an argument that focusing on the ground around base and lower floors might save as many lives as the time taken to go up to upper floors.

The old saying about firefighters ("they run in when everyone else runs out") is of course true. But in the case of 9/11, I don't the commanders or the street level firefighters expected the towers to collapse, at least until the North Tower fell.

You also have to remember how many firefighters were involved in the rescue effort. The psychological pressure to do your duty is immense when you are surrounded by a thousand other people who are doing their duty.

Very few civilians who had gotten out of the building died when the buildings collapsed. The grim reality is almost no one above the impact zone survived, and almost all civilians below the impact zone got out of towers safely. Most deaths from the collapse were people who were still trapped above the impact zone and emergency personnel.

What strong emotion are you conveying with it? just so I can understand because at first glance I don't get it.

It struck me as weird also but it's pretty obvious that he wasn't trying to trivialize the event.

One other anecdote.

9/11 of course was a very dramatic event for me because I lived in New York, but I had a difficult time gauging how significant an event it was from the perspective of people in other countries.

A few days after the event, a client in Mexico called to check in. I asked her what the reaction in Mexico was to the attack. After saying that she was shocked and horrified, she said, "To Mexicans, the U.S. is the giant. Someone sucker-punched the giant and knocked the giant's tooth out. But the giant is still the giant, and now the giant is very angry. Angry giants make people nervous."

That always stuck with me.