9/11 (memories of that day in Houston)

[Lone Star Rooster]

I was living in Greenville, SC at the time. Was already at work at a bank that morning when I heard about the first plane hitting. The initial reports I heard were that it was a small private aircraft, so I wrote it off as a random accident. My boss had a TV in his office, and we were watching (along with a few others in our group) when the 2nd plane hit a few minutes later. We were all sent home. I recall being more mad than afraid; living in a smaller town gave me somewhat of a sense of security, I guess. The reality began to set in that this was both a physical and emotional attack on our country.

On the way home from the office, I stopped to gas up my car. Gas station workers were busy updating the price on the sign out front. As insignificant as that was compared to the death and destruction I had seen play out that morning, that's when it really first occurred to me...this event was also going to bring about economic and geo-political changes for decades to come.

[Burnley]

I was in 3rd grade at the time at school and the teachers actually made us watch the airplanes hitting the towers footage live on TV in the classroom... You aren’t supposed to do that to an 8 year old kid...

We were dismissed early from school because the galleria area was in an evacuation zone since the Williams Tower was considered to be a target.

I won’t forget how beautiful the weather was in Houston that day. Very sunny without a single cloud in the sky.

[RocketSci]

I was working at JSC, and had just arrived right after the first plane hit. In one of the manager's offices the TV was on CNN, and I had gone to my desk to try to find more information on the internet, but the servers were all jammed so I went back into the office and found out that the 2nd plane had just hit. After that we were just dumbfounded and talked about what might be happening. Then when the news came out about a fire at the Pentagon and suspected (later shown as false) other fires in DC, my thoughts immediately were that we were at war and I did not know what the scale would be, so I decided that I had to leave JSC as it was a major government facility (it wasn't until later that the rest of JSC thought the same thing and released a tidal wave of employees all at once).

When I was at home I got a call from my daughter's school that she had forgotten her homework assignment, so I went to the school with it and many parents (especially NASA astronauts and managers) were picking up their kids, but in my mind school was the best and safest place for them to be. Many of the teachers were crying, but the kids of course just kind of went with it.

I had a cousin who worked with a security firm in NYC and was unreachable. One of my brothers lived in NOVA, and his wife worked in Arlington but was OK. They knew several people who worked at the Pentagon, but as far as they knew all were OK.

I called my parents in Buffalo, and spoke with my father. He said that my mother was in Canada on a senior trip to a casino, and that the US had closed all the bridges so he didn't know when she would be able to get back. My father was also a WW2 veteran, and had participated in D-Day, and I asked him if this is what Pearl Harbor had been like at the time, and all he said was "Yep."

It was the last time I spoke to my father, as on 9/12 he died of a heart attack. I have always thought that the 9/11 attacks played a part causing that, even though his health had not been the greatest for several years.

It was about 2 in the afternoon on 9/12 when I got the call from my mother, and after calling my wife and other family I waited for my kids to get home from school. I realized that planes were still grounded, and that we must drive to Buffalo - a quick calculation showed that we needed to leave almost immediately in order to arrive in time for my father's wake on Friday. So we left at 6pm on mostly empty roads in an overloaded Ford Focus, and looked for a larger vehicle from a rental agency while on the road. There were no rental cars anywhere near the big cities, as all got taken when the planes stopped - but we luckily got a van in Texarkana, and were told it was the last rental vehicle between Dallas and Memphis. We stopped again near Cincinnati, and rested a few hours in a nearly empty hotel. My wife had twisted her ankle during a rest stop, and it was swollen so badly that she couldn't drive by this point.

We arrived in Buffalo and went directly to the funeral home. At that point I found out that my sister had managed to get a flight from Miami carrying airline employees, but the closest she could get was Pittsburgh and none of her bags made it. So, an Uncle who knew Pittsburgh and I left for the 3-1/2 hour drive each way, and we didn't get back until after midnight.

There were so many emotions wrapped up in that week, it is still difficult to sort them all out.

[timtemtym]

I was home in Clear Lake and got a call from a friend. They cancelled classes at UH for the day and I think the day after. People were freaked out and everyone was saying "Houston might be next with all the oil infrastructure." I went with friends out to a ranch in north montgomery county for the rest of the day into the next day. I think every city was saying the same thing. No one knew if it was going to continue or what.

The weirdest thing was going back to classes at UH and one professor was from NY and he was a total ass to several girls in the class who were muslim and had their heads covered. They sat there the whole class too and never left or argued with him. Finally, some of the other students started to speak up and he got upset and let us go early.

Our Palestinian neighbors across the street in Clear Lake took down their Palestinian flag that had hung in a window on the 2nd floor and replaced it with an American flag and one of those little lamps that looks like a candle. Then they put american stickers all over their cars. I think they worried people would bother them. They were nice neighbors.

[Space City Native]

I was talking to a student about this recently (I teach English overseas now, but am a native Houstonian). On 9/11, I was sitting in our living room in our house in Sharpstown with my ex-wife and 2 year od boy-the OP mentions the temperature that day-I turned on TV Channel 2 because they usually had the time and temperature displayed on the lower right corner of the screen, and I wanted to see what the temperature was.

It must have been between 10 and 11 in the morning-as soon as I turned on the TV, I saw NYC streets covered in dust and they soon said that planes had hit the WTC-at first I thought it was something staged, but quickly realized it was real. I called my wife Kim over and told her that the United States had been attacked-she started to cry and asked me if it was the Russians-I told her no, the Russians wouldn't be that stupid, it must have been Muslim terrorists, which of course it was. I told her not to cry too much yet, because I was pretty sure there was more to come.

We looked out our front window, and there were cars parked along our street to pick up children from the elementary school a half block away, as the school was being closed. We didn't go anywhere that day-the Metro transit system closed down, stores closed. The thing that I thought was striking was that for the next few days, there were no airplanes in the air at all-only the police helicopter (Fox) and F-16 fighters from Ellington Air Force Base flew overhead, sometimes pretty low-we never saw fighter jets in that part of Houston.

I remarked to my wife how ridiculous it was in the US that we had off-duty cops working security in the grocery store, school district police in the schools, constables patrolling our neighborhood, and no police on airliners to protect the passengers and those expensive airplanes from terrorist bastards armed with boxcutters (and these planes still aren't sufficiently protected). I was also apalled that most alert jets were unavailable on that day, and the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group from Ellington had to fly all the way to Florida to escort Air Force One. I stayed glued to the TV for days trying to figure out what had happened and what was going to happen next.

[Johnhw2]

I lived and worked in Houston on 9.11 but was in Fairfax, Va on a business workshop scheduled for two weeks. We had about 120 employees from all over the globe involved in the workshop. During opening speeches for the meeting we were interrupted by reports a plane had hit one of the WTC towers. We had a TV set up in the break room and all ended up watching the second plane hit. Rumors were rampant so our building was vacated on a rumor of another plane coming to DC points unknown. We sent everyone back to the hotel upon that rumor.

I remember 3 or 4 members of the workshop had relatives or close friends working in WTC. One had a son who just graduated and was in NY for an job interview in the WTC< he could not remember which tower or when so we waited and watched as phones falled to get through. We later learned all were ok.

We continued our workshop with no planes to get us out of DC metro. International workers were petrified we might be bombed being so near DC so they rented cars to drive to Canada to fly home. Several who worked and lived in Dallas rented a car and made that trip home. The rest of us did not get out of DC until the following week when flights resumed. We got one of the first flights out of Dulles, it was empty not many people flying or planes active yet.

My flight to the workshop left Houston monday afternoon late on 9.10, we landed at Reagan around 10pm Monday. My cab driver took us by the Pentagon on the route to the hotel. The cab driver was ethiopian and the route took us what seemed very near the Pentagon.

It was good to get back to Houston with my family after those 9 days in Fairfax watching and wondering.

I watch the 9.11 coverage of the events each year in the safety of my home and wonder how were hit so hard and nothing much has happened since by luck or have we really made things safer or has the enemy weakened or ....... I remember thinking if one was wanting to damage the country and its economy would the refinery complexes of Houston be a top target?..... I retired to Plano in N. Tx for a variety of reasons not this wondering.

[bohunak]

We were living in Staten Island, NY. I remember my husband getting ready for work (Downtown, close to WTC) when first plane hit. We didn't know right away. He called his customer to confirm their appointment and he told my husband to turn on TV. We just couldn't believe what was happening. A lot of people who lived around us died that day. You were able to see WTC over the water from SI before, not anymore...I remember the same day later, they closed Verrazano Bridge and this long line of Excavators drove thru Staten Island to WTC. Looked like never ending line of Excavator trucks.