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it's like being there all over again.

Where were you when it happened?

I was home in Long Beach, CA.

It was early.

We have a small World Trade Center in downtown Long Beach.

When I first heard "plane hits WTC", I thought maybe a small plane hit the one here (I hadn't had my coffee yet)

As the morning unfolded, I grabbed my guns and was ready for war. There were reports of car bombs, and I expected suicide bombers.

I thought it was Saddam, or this guy Osama bin Laden that I had heard about after the Cole bombing.

The streets were empty.

I live near the airport. No planes coming or going. Silent.

I knew the world changed that day. I expected frequent attacks.

I'm from New York. I know those towers. Saw them everyday.

I'll never forget 9/11.

Where were you when it happened

Working at a little Christian Book and Gift shop. The owner's husband telephoned and told us to turn on the TV. It was 11 something and we were already seeing a rebroadcast(I think). I cannot remember exactly what time the towers fell. After 9/11 the store started to lose business because the senior citizens from the center next door stopped spending ANY money. They thought it was a World War.

Our kids were 2.5, 2.5 and just-in-kindergarten. We are on the West Coast. I was up at 6:00 with one twin, Teresa, and we watched Mr. Rogers and were 10 minutes into Barney when someone knocked at the door. When I answered it, our upstairs neighbor Alex asked if I were watching TV and knew the news. When I said "we're watching Barney" he proceeded to tell me what was happening. I looked at him and thought "He's drunk". It was just too incredible.

He quickly convinced me that something of importance was happening, and I told my husband in the bedroom to watch the news. I went to the living room with the kids to watch Barney and whatever else was on, and get our oldest ready for school.
Someone else mentioned the teachers' behavior - I was in shock and could only think to shield my children from the shock of events that I could not yet explain to them. At our local elementary school, the teachers moved slowly, somberly, but went through their day normally enough to give the children a normal day: a great gift to me and my husband as we struggled to understand what was happening.
I don't understand anymore why I did, but I did go to work after seeing my oldest safely into her kindergarten class. I remember that on a freeway where the average speed is 80 mph, 15 mph over the limit, every car traveled at exactly the speed limit.

9/11 is a day that I will never forget. For me the day started as mundane as any other Tuesday morning. Got to the office at 6:30am so I could put the final touches on my presentations for meetings with Senior Mgmt that were in town that week. I remembering sitting in my office and seeing the sun come up and staring at the Sears Tower that was right across the street from my office.

The meetings started at 8am. Well into our meeting one of our EA's came in and announced "something" was happening in NYC; several of the attendees were from our NYC office.

We asked her to call our A/V folks to see if they could connect our meeting room projector to the news so we could see what was happening. In the meantime, I fired up my laptop Internet so we could listen to the radio. Soon after that were able to watch live TV. We were all sitting in stunned silence.

We also tried calling our NYC office to check their status. We were already getting "circuits busy" signals. We started wondering what we should do; e.g. continue with the meeting or cancel it. By that time we had most of the people on our floor in the conference room with us, so by default our meetings were canceled.

Probably 30-45 minutes into watching the news, another EA came into the conference room to inform us that the Office of the CEO had sent out an emergency email to all offices and employees (ca. 30k) to shut down all US offices immediately. We were all stunned. I thought to myself, "what the he** was going on"; e.g. as with most things that day, this was an extraordinary “order”.

Although our office was "officially" closed most people stayed in the conference room and continued to watch the news. However, rumors started on our local news that there were planes hijacked out of Milwaukee and were heading towards Chicago. Fighter jets started circling Chicago at very low levels. Now we started to get really nervous as the Sears Tower was right across the street.

People started filtering out of the conference room to pack up their gear had head home. I walked back to my office to make a few final calls and pack up my things. I hadn't been in my office for only a few minutes when all the building's alarms went off. It sounded like a "call to battle stations" on a Navy ship. After about 5 seconds either the CFD or CPD (I couldn't make out which dept it was) came onto the intercom and announced in a very authoritative tone to evacuate the building immediately.

I grabbed my things and headed towards the elevators. The lobby was full and so were all of the elevators. I told my remaining team members to head down the stairs.

Fortunately for us we were only on the 17th floor. As we exited the building there was mass pandemonium. The streets were filled with people attempting to get home. Police cars were racing around with sirens blaring. CPD riot vehicles were blocking the streets around the Sears Tower and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

On that day our company lost 12 employees who happened to be in the WTC meeting with clients.