For many of us on the West Coast of the United States, we were probably still in bed sleeping. I was awoken by my wife’s alarm clock at around 6am in the morning. The alarm turns on the radio and I was half awake listening to whatever was on the radio. Then I heard the radio personality announce that a plane flew into one of the World Trade Center towers (I’m paraphrasing here). I immediately sat up in bed and turned on the television to see if there was any news stations covering this, and that’s when I saw it. They were televising smoke billowing out from the North tower of the World Trade Center–it was 8:46am in New York (Eastern Daylight Time). At this point in time, it was just thought that this was a terrible accident, but then the unthinkable happened, at 9:03am Eastern Daylight Time, another plane flew into the South tower of the World Trade Center. This scene was played on every news station all throughout the day and for many days and weeks after, the image of these jets flying into the World Trade Center towers is something I will never forget. The following video clip is what I remember seeing when I switched on the television that morning. I’ve only included this first clip in the series, the actual news broadcast starts at time code 1:30.
After the first jet hit the North tower, more and more news crews were on the scene and they had videos from every conceivable vantage point. Here’s a short video showing the 2nd jet flying into the South tower.
Although the World Trade Center gets most of the press due to the shear magnitude of the event, we must not forget all those that lost their lives at the Pentagon and Pennsylvania sites. American Airlines flights 77 and United Airlines flight 93 respectively.
All together, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives on September 11, 2001.
I really don’t remember anything in particular about that day, except that I was watching a lot of different news stations. And remember, back 10 years ago, we didn’t have Facebook or Twitter to get up to the minute news tidbits.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Nova just aired a great episode called “Engineering Ground Zero”. I enjoyed it because it was a behind the scenes look at what’s going into the building of “One World Trade Center” and the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2119539367
The City of Manhattan Beach, California had a dedication ceremony on September 11, 2007 on the corner of 15th St and Valley Dr. in front of the Manhattan Beach Fire Department. The two sections of the World Trade Center beams were donated to the city so they could construct a memorial site. Here are some photos that I took of this memorial.
If you’d like to read more about the City of Manhattan Beach memorial, you can visit their website:
http://www.citymb.info/index.aspx?page=386
I am going to skip posting for this coming Friday, but will have a teaser for you the following Sunday.
Following are a couple YouTube videos I found on the web that meld together photographs and music. The first was put to Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” and the second to Jo Dee Messina’s, “Heaven Was Needing A Hero”.
If you’d like more details on the September 11, 2001 attack, visit the wikipedia.com link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
