Quicksand Fans

And the 11th is just a few of them away. As a bona-fide survivor from the 101st floor, South tower, always proper to post a note to remember my 176 lost colleagues at Aon on that day. Never forget.

I will never forget this day. I was working as a parts picker when news stories started to come in. At one point there were rumours of upwards of 10 planes had crashed. I was working on getting components for oil debris sensor units for jet engines that day...

I remember that day. I just started a new job in another state. I was just getting my work computer up and online. The first image I saw was the towers blazing and smoking and finally collapsing! There was an eerie mood of foreboding on the entire staff that day!!

First heard this all on the local radio while on assignment. Announcer said the inital idea was a private plane had hit one of the towers, then the size of the plane got bigger and bigger with each update.... When it was confirmed it was a jet airliner, that's when the second tower was hit. Then reports from the Pentagon came out... and the crashing of Flight 93.... Then we were told the towers fell. The announcer got a little choked up then.

Back at the newsroom, we all stared at the TV all day, watching the hits and the collapse over and over, never quite believing it. Way too much to process. Looked like something out of a bad action movie. But it was all too real. We were all in shock for the rest of the day, with a number of people saying that was this generation's Pearl Harbour.

I try to avoid thinking about it. For some reason, it hit me harder than most folks who weren't actually there. I think part of it is having been a firefighter myself. I could picture myself climbing those endless stairs in full gear. Then there was the one firefighter who was buried alive- twice- once when each tower fell- and managed to survive. He had so much "survivor's guilt." May sound stupid, but so do I.
Another thing that got me was what one of my office mates heard. Her sister (I think) managed to get through to her husband, who was at Ground Zero that day (not in the towers, luckily.) He sounded really, really shook when she spoke to him before the first tower fell. "What's happening there?" she asked him. There was a pause, then in a dead voice he said "It's raining bodies." People trapped on the floors above the impact were being forced to choose between jumping 100 stories or so, or slowly being burned to death. If they jumped, they had between six and eight seconds to think about what was happening to them on the way down.
My company lost three that day. We had staff working at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) office in the Towers. Ignatius Adanga, Charles Lesperance and See-wong Shum didn't make it out. One was a floor captain for evacuation, and made one last sweep to make sure everybody got out. Another was last seen helping a woman who was having an asthma attack down the stairs.
Time for some rum, I think. We're sadly out of Coca-cola and Eggnog, so it'll have to be straight up. Oh well.