The first report I received-from one of the attorneys in that office, made it sound like a commuter plane or private plane. After the second hit-which IIRC was televised (though I don't think the angle was such that we actually saw the plane impact the building), I called my brother in NYC. His office was less than a half mile from the plane strike. He noted that he saw injured people on the streets and he, like many, were out on the street trying to figure out WTF was happening since fire trucks and ambulances were streaming past his office. He later stated, some people he knew had been dining at the restaurant on the top of the building--IIRC none of the people in it survived. He also stated that a woman he knew had been in the lower level and was not injured but covered with soot and debris and she took refuge in his office
Red:
That morning, the restaurant had been reserved for the first day of a two-day an IT implementation conference the Risk Waters Group had planned.
Months before I'd been invited to present at one of the conference sessions. I was keen to do so as it would have helped my firm develop greater recognition abroad not only because it was good for business, but also because one of the things that moved me to start a consulting firm was the allure of international travel, which was something I've loved since childhood. By 2001, my business partner and I'd made a minor but well respected name for ourselves in our tiny niche of consulting, so the conference seemed like a two-pronged opportunity to build upon that and expand our network because most of the invitees would be from overseas.
Initially,
Risk didn't know whether they wanted to schedule me for the first or second day, but by the Moirae's grace, they settled on just before lunch on the second day. I ended up not being able to present because I was had to be in London that day. Obviously and ironically, I suppose I wasn't slated to be there either I also didn't go to that meeting. Fate.
Until you mentioned the restaurant, I'd totally forgotten about that. Lachesis and Aisa must have been arguing over me.
Aisa won as did I.
Each person's experience is as unique as that person, no matter how shared the experience.
Just to add some perspective to how relatively small contextual changes greatly alter one's experience of an event, I thought I'd post some images to try as I might to illustrate the role separation plays in shaping one's experience and one's understandings resulting from it. Fortunately, in most situations, the poignance isn't as puissantly palpable as it was on 9/11, but that event trenchantly highlights the theme's importance, be its application literal or figurative, and one's onus to heed it.
Here is where you were, in the open air some 300 to 500 feet away from Ground Zero.
The Woolworth Building, bottom left, vantage of the scene.
Ground level view where I was,
101 Hudson, about 2500 feet away and on the other side of a wall of windows.
I don't recognize the railing on which the fireman below leans, but based on the angle of the shot, I think it's somewhere at Exchange Place on the walkway at the river's edge. That would put 101 Hudson one block to his rear.
When the towers came down, the client lost a bunch of their operations servers, so they used ours in order get their business back up and running. We'd been taking daily dumps of the client's financial operations data to use for our prototyping and testing. Our data was current as of the wee hours of 9/11, so it became a key piece of the client's disaster recovery. As a result, the client cancelled my firm's engagement -- after all, one can't very well focus on improving what's going well when, abruptly, fate forces one into survival mode -- and I didn't for two years return to that site.
This is today's the view from there.
