story9116.xml

story9116.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-03-01

September 10th, my sister and I had gone out shopping. We both had spare money, and decided to check out some fall clothes. Therefore, on September 11th, I didn't want to get up as I had been up most of the night. I did drag myself out of bed finally and started off to work from my home in Front Royal, Virginia. At that time, I worked for Air BP at Dulles International Airport. I left for work about the time the first plane hit the WTC tower. I heard Elliot on DC 101 say something about the World Trade Center, but I lost transmission of the station briefly as I was heading East on Rt. 55. I thought they were perhaps discussing the bombing of the WTC back in 1993 (which was the year I graduated High School).
When I was able to hear the radio station again, I heard Diane exclaim that another plane hit the WTC. Now I was floored. Suddenly I was wide awake and tense. The magnitude hadn't hit yet though, hearing it on the radio, and then seeing the staggering video later I came to learn were two different things. I am listening carefully to them reporting that two unknown plane types had crashed into the building. I remember a listener calling in and saying that he suspected Bin Laden and a terrorist organization, and I remember the radio personality saying they would not comment on that at this time. I can recall intermittently talking to my mother on my cell phone, and listening to the radio in between panic calls.
I know that in the beginning Air travel was suspened over New York first. There was a tense moment when apparently a fighter jet was mistaken for another plane, but those details fail me simply because there were so many events happening seemingly at once. We were listening to eyewitness reports from NYC saying that major bridges and freeways had been shut down when a caller on Route 1, near Crystal City/Alexandria called DC 101 and reported that a plane hit the Pentagon. Elliot asked him if he was sure, and the caller said indeed he was he was sitting in the final leg of morning rush hour and had gotten off SR 110 and saw the plane fly close next to the overpass and hit the side of the Pentagon. At this point I was coming through Manassas, Virginia, and I was freaking out. This caller identified that plane as an American Airlines plane. That is when I knew that this all was totally no accident or no freak thing. I heard them report that all air travel was suspended, I was looking up in the sky and watching Lufthansa Airlines do a U turn above us and head back to Dulles. I was getting on Rt 28 and nearly to work when I saw four more planes landing one right after the other at Dulles. My office was next to one of the runways, so I was watching this as I am driving along. I get into my office, and get upstairs in time to stand with four others and watch the first tower fall. No one said a word. It's one of those situations where you are so used to joking around and laughing, but you have never seen the people around you so grief stricken and in shock. Dulles was on lockdown. Washington DC was evacuating, and our company decided we should do the same. That was the morning that rush hour ended one way in the metro area, and almost immediately began again. I managed to beat most of the traffic home, but phone lines were jammed for the rest of the day. On my cell phone, I couldn't call out, the circuits in the network were just overloaded. Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine that phone networks could never handle a volume of calls of that magnitude. It's just one of the many things that we took for granted I suppose. I know that my father had called me on my cell phone prior to evacuation throwing a fit and demanding I start home, he knew I was on the airport and close to the Jet Fuel tanks. I finally managed to get a call out to my mother and I told her to page my brother and tell him to get home, I knew he was in Reston, VA. When I got home, I got my boyfriend, who slept through it all, and went to my parents house where I stayed the remainder of the day. I crawled in my old bed because I felt safe there, maybe I just wanted to be a child again. We were off work the next day, Dulles remained closed for nearly a week. It was a crime scene, and there was much to be investigated. I know that those days at work were the strangest and most disturbing. When you work around an airport, you become immune to the planes taking off constantly. Even when it shakes the building you think nothing of it. However, for several consecutive days, we were greeted with silence. An airport that was so busy, and so vibrant and alive was like a ghost town. I can only imagine how National Airport felt as it was closed for a much longer duration. When Dulles reopened, all of us had to get used to the planes taking off again, and it was difficult to watch them as we did before. We often wondered things about them that I will not type here. There were many false alarms for the rest of the year. Within a few weeks, the Anthrax scares began, and we found ourselves in terror again. Somehow, I don't think we have really ever recovered. Today is March 1, 2003, and I am still afraid. I no longer work at Dulles, but I work near it still. I survived all of that, and then this past year being in the center of the sniper shootings as well. I don't believe we can stand much more.