God bless them

I knew (through association) one guy that died. A firefighter was in the same racing club I was in, we had a fundraiser for his family but even though people said I knew him I drew a blank.

I knew another guy who was in the building the night before. IT guy, had to debug a computer network that got virused. He got out about an hour before the first plane hit after working for 16 hours. He turned off his phone when he got home and slept through the whole thing. People thought he was dead all day and couldn’t reach him.

Another guy I raced with witnessed the 2nd hit in person. Had a plumbing shop down near SOHO. Guy was changed after that. I lost track of him over the years but he definitely had PTSD of some sort. He actually walked the length of Manhattan that day, (SOHO to Harlem) thinking the nukes were gonna hit any minute.

I actually had to drop my mom off at work because we were sharing a car, I had just sold my project race car online over the weekend and I had to get some paperwork from the DMV. She worked in Greenwich CT and the DMV was in White Plains NY. Somehow I got into the DMV before everything got closed. They were calling out reports by word of mouth because the DMV didn’t have a TV, I guess someone had a radio on in the back.

Chaos didn’t start until I left, they were shutting all businesses in town and evacuating. Anywhere else in the country, White Plains would be considered a pretty large city, but in the shadow of NYC it’s just a suburb. Still the panic of the day, nobody knew if it was a target or not.

 

19 years ago I was living with my mother in Batavia,Illinois(40 miles west of Chicago) when the skies were eerily quiet. Normally on a clear summer’s day there would be airliners circling over the area preparing to land at either O’Hare or Midway Airport or private airplanes landing at DuPage Airport. That day, I woke up to find out that the FAA had shutdown the airspace nationwide and our country’s air transportation system was forever changed.
Never forget. In Memoriam:
American Airlines Flight 11
American Airlines Flight 77
United Airlines Flight 175
United Airlines Flight 93
World Trade Center
Pentagon