trying to put into words how I'm feeling on this anniversary..... very complicated bunch of feelings.
It seems that things changed after 9/11 (not just in relation to the attacks, but in my life in general,) and to some extent it marks a anniversary of the beginning of a lot of personal loss..... At the same time, my own post traumatic response to the large scale of loss that day (none of which really affected me personally,) has been immense, making it difficult still to hear people's stories and tolerate all of the media this year..... And then there is America's shameful response around the world, and here at home civil liberties wise, which has messed with my mind, and made it nearly impossible to find a silverlining in all of it. So there, that's it, for now at least. How I'm feeling, nearly 10 years after.
I hadn't thought about it in those terms but I guess it also marks a generalized period of struggle for loss for me as well. And of course for many reasons a loss of innocence. Benny was only 3 months old & it was scary having an infant & wondering what might happen. I don't want to see those terrible images again though. I am by no means well versed in Buddhist theology ,but part of what I understand of it is that we can allow suffering to soften us and make us more compassionate or to harden us to the suffering of others. I hope that all of the suffering we've witnessed in the past ten years will be an opportunity for us, humanity, to soften us and orient us to peace.
Location: i believe, i believe, it's silly, but I believe Gender:
Posted:
Sep 10, 2011 - 11:33am
trying to put into words how I'm feeling on this anniversary..... very complicated bunch of feelings.
It seems that things changed after 9/11 (not just in relation to the attacks, but in my life in general,) and to some extent it marks a anniversary of the beginning of a lot of personal loss..... At the same time, my own post traumatic response to the large scale of loss that day (none of which really affected me personally,) has been immense, making it difficult still to hear people's stories and tolerate all of the media this year..... And then there is America's shameful response around the world, and here at home civil liberties wise, which has messed with my mind, and made it nearly impossible to find a silverlining in all of it. So there, that's it, for now at least. How I'm feeling, nearly 10 years after.
It was. Sadly, my life isn't quite as nice any more. I've always been interested in IT. Someday we should "talk shop" I enjoy talking about IT almost as much as politics.
It was. Sadly, my life isn't quite as nice any more. I've always been interested in IT. Someday we should "talk shop" I enjoy talking about IT almost as much as politics.
I've lived in Sterling, a few miles away from Dulles, since the early '80s and I visited it many years earlier for an air show when The Dulles Access Road was a one way express lane to and from the airport which sat in the middle of farmland as far as the eye can see. Ten years ago the North and East sides of the airport were developed, but the back side wasn't. Today there is little undeveloped area left in Eastern Loudoun. The Concorde was cool to watch land. They have one at the museum now along with a space shuttle and an SR-71. That's a cool plane! But I digress.
Cool indeed! I used to fly into IAD even though DCA was more convenient, just to see the Concorde in action.
At the time I owned a thriving ambulance service. We didn't do any 911 work but did Critical Care transports to higher level facilities as well as routine discharges and transfers. I was also a volunteer paramedic with the local rescue squad.
Nice! Sounds like a rewarding job.
I've never worked at a trauma center. What did you do there?
At the time I was just another IT manager. I was responsible for all of the desktop computers in the medical center (we had a professional building and neighborhood facilities). That made me the guy who spent most of his working day smoothing out the ruffled feathers of the star MDs and VPs.
I didn't know what a trauma center was until after I befriended the trauma chief, who was also the IT department's most vocal critic. I did a lot of work on that guy's systems. Even when he didn't have time to chat as I worked, where else could I pass time while software loaded by reading a medical text about gunshot wounds?
Have you been to IAD? It's in the middle of nowhere (no offense to the residents of Chantilly). It's also one of the airports that the Concorde used, giving it an unusually long runway that became a necessity when fuel-laden airliners, far above their maximum landing weights and lacking the time to dump fuel, had to land or face getting shot down.
I've lived in Sterling, a few miles away from Dulles, since the early '80s and I visited it many years earlier for an air show when The Dulles Access Road was a one way express lane to and from the airport which sat in the middle of farmland as far as the eye can see. Ten years ago the North and East sides of the airport were developed, but the back side wasn't. Today there is little undeveloped area left in Eastern Loudoun. The Concorde was cool to watch land. They have one at the museum now along with a space shuttle and an SR-71. That's a cool plane! But I digress.
At the time I owned a thriving ambulance service. We didn't do any 911 work but did Critical Care transports to higher level facilities as well as routine discharges and transfers. I was also a volunteer paramedic with the local rescue squad. I've never worked at a trauma center. What did you do there?
IAD? You sure? That's not the way I remember it. Maybe they changed the approach so that they were as far from populated areas as possible.
Have you been to IAD? It's in the middle of nowhere (no offense to the residents of Chantilly). It's also one of the airports that the Concorde used, giving it an unusually long runway that became a necessity when fuel-laden airliners, far above their maximum landing weights and lacking the time to dump fuel, had to land or face getting shot down.
At that time I had an office in an industrial building a couple miles from Dulles.
Out of curiosity, what kind of business were you in? You mentioned an EMT...
I finally took a breath and went to my office to just sit and gather my thoughts. It was quiet, too quiet. There were no planes. They had been using the flightpath outside my window all morning and now nothing. The busy boulevard outside my window was nearly deserted. It had a feeling of time standing still. I'll never forget it.
I was working at a Level 1 trauma center at the time, but was still at home because I had worked late the night before. When it became clear that the attacks weren't confined to NYC, I first thought "I need to get to the hospital ASAP". Just as quickly I realized that my department had no real function in mass casualty codes, and that one more car rushing to the hospital area might do more harm than good. I lived in the shadow (literally) of the John Hancock Center, so after several unsuccessful tries to contact the hospital, I decided to stand by to help if the Hancock was hit.
I had worked for a TV station that broadcasted from atop the Hancock, had been to the other transmitter facilities in the Hancock, and knew people who worked there. When WTC tower 1 fell, I knew that dozens of broadcast engineers spent the last moments of their lives making sure that the news got out, right up to the end. I would be there for my IBEW and NABET brothers and sisters...and everybody else.
Before I knew it, the airways were clear and I had nothing to keep me from going to work. I remember the drive up Lake Shore Drive, with the northern approach to ORD that was normally full of traffic full of nothing but blue sky. Car traffic was normal; that's one thing that never stops in Chicago.
When I got to work, everybody was just watching TV. But this was a working hospital, so it wasn't long before business as usual took over, and I gratefully slid into my familiar routine.
DCA, IAD and BWI took their fair share, meanwhile.
IAD? You sure? That's not the way I remember it. Maybe they changed the approach so that they were as far from populated areas as possible.
At that time I had an office in an industrial building a couple miles from Dulles. I used to watch planes come in on their final approach to the airport, landing just out of sight. Downstairs we had a dayroom where the crews hung out and watched TV and stuff when they weren't on calls. The personnel manager rushed into my office and asked if I'd heard about the plane hitting the WTC. I went down to the TV where a few others were watching a live news feed of the burning tower. While we were speculating on how someone could screw up bad enough to hit the WTC, the other plane hit.
Then I realized what was going on. I ran back upstairs and let everyone else know what was happening. Dispatch radioed the trucks on the road to give them a heads up just in case. Little did we know... Everything else became a blur. We heard there were other planes approaching the city. The Pentagon was hit. The towers fell. One EMT, Chrissy, was on the phone with her dad at the Pentagon when she heard a loud explosion and lots of yelling then the phone went dead. We were already calling in any available personnel but we immediately dispatched all the trucks we had staffed to go to the nearby hospitals to evacuate low priority patients to more distant facilities making room for the Pentagon wounded.
I finally took a breath and went to my office to just sit and gather my thoughts. It was quiet, too quiet. There were no planes. They had been using the flightpath outside my window all morning and now nothing. The busy boulevard outside my window was nearly deserted. It had a feeling of time standing still. I'll never forget it.
YQX is cool. been stuck there once in the 80s. niiiiiice people.
I think the answer being sought is that YOW was too precious to the nation that wasn't under attack to risk.
DCA, IAD and BWI took their fair share, meanwhile.
YQX is cool! I got to land there back in the '70s with the old terminal still showing reminders of the golden years of aviation. Lots of history there.
A lot of North American airports had planes land on 2001-09-11; they had no choice in the matter. Gander played a particularly heroic role, though. Historically, Gander was the last stop for trans-Atlantic flights until Shannon, Ireland. Even more importantly, it was the first landfall for westbound flights that had to fly many more air miles due to the jet stream. That made Gander a welcome sight for fuel-starved pilots.
On 2001-09-11, Gander airport accepted the overseas flights that had fuel emergencies and had to land immediately, or ditch in the ocean. The tiny by today's standards airfield kept on taking priority and emergency flights until there were no more. By the time the last plane landed, every single inch of apron and taxiway, and even parts of the active runway (!!!) were filled with airplanes full of people.
While the people remained stuck on the planes, waiting on a decision from Ottawa about what to do with them, the people of Gander, a town of 8,000 people, were hard at work preparing food and lodging for the stranded passengers. School gyms were turned into massive dining rooms, then sleeping quarters. Private citizens opened up their homes to complete strangers. When it was decided to leave the luggage on the planes, massive clothes drives commenced. Local stores opened up and allowed the stranded passengers to shop as they pleased for personal items like brand-new underwear, toothbrushes, medicines and anything else they needed. And the stores refused to accept any money for the goods.
For four days the population of Gander literally doubled. Gander International Airport hosted 39 jumbo jets, second only to Halifax International Airport, which took only nine more, in a metropolitan area 33 times as populated and equipped as Gander. (Ottawa refused all incoming flights on 2001-09-11.) The large metropolitan airports all over North America that took the instantly grounded flights deserve their props for doing what they were well equipped to do. But the people of Gander deserve special recognition for performing a minor miracle, given their tiny population and resources.
So forget about thanking Ottawa. Just pick up your phone and dial a number, practically any number in Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, CA and thank one of the true heroes of 9-11 personally.
(Long before 9-11, Gander played host to passengers of a stranded airliner in the fictional book "No Highway" by British author Neville Shute. The book was made into a film, starring Jimmy Stewart, under the original book title "No Highway in the Sky", which aired recently on TCM.)
Air & Space magazine has a brief but good retrospective on the thoughts of Air National Guard pilots who were sent to meet an unknown threat. One flight was sent to guard Cheyenne Mountain (NORAD). There wasn't time to load on any missiles, so they guarded the NORAD center with nothing more than a three second burst of machine gun fire. Another pilot was sent to intercept an airplane that wasn't landing with only training ammunition. His thoughts about how he might crash his plane into the other, if he would be able to bail out and how he might request permission to attack a plane full of US citizens were especially poignant.
