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I can roll that day back like film.

I worked at the time for an airport transportation company. I drove a ride-share van taking people to and from SeaTac Airport.
I started work at 4 that morning. My first pickup of the day was in Auburn, two retired couples that were taking a vacation to the Caribbean. As we rolled to the airport, I had the news on low while the couples talked in the back.

All of a sudden, the news broke in with word that the first plane had crashed into the WTC. There was confusion...no one knew what kind of plane, how bad it was, or anything. The couples in the back just commented that it was rather tragic. Just before we arrived at SeaTac, the news broke about the second plane. The couples were silent, and one of the men said “That was no accident. That was deliberate.”

I dropped the couples off and wished them a good day. I doubt they had one.

I proceded to the staging area so I could get further instructions on where I was going to go. I was listening to both the van radio and our comm radio. After a few minutes of continually breaking news stories, one of the other drivers radioed in, “I heard that they closed the airport. Which one?” (He asked that because we had King County Airport/Boeing Field in our service area.) The dispatcher came back with “ALL of them!”. He sounded very stressed.

I was assigned to get a set of passengers from up in Lake Forest Park, north of Seattle. As I was driving through the SODO area, trying to piece together all that had happened so far, that’s when the radio broke the story about the Pentagon.

At that point, I felt very afraid.

I drove to one of the dozen or so Starbucks in the downtown area. I got to a payphone and called my wife. She heard about the attack when her radio alarm clock went off. She told me to be careful and I continued on. When I got to the Lake Forest Park area, I had the notion to call my guests and ask if they still desired to go to the airport, since by that time the news had gotten out that all planes were grounded for an indefinite amount of time. I had 4 groups of guests. I got a hold of all of them and explained what was happening. Two of them hadn’t even heard about the attack yet. None of them decided to go to the airport.

As I got back to my van to tell Dispatch what was going on, the comm radio came alive...”All vans, all vans...if you have guests inbound, turn around and take them home. It’s not likely there will be any flights today. If you’re clear (of guests), return to Port (SeaTac) to pick up guests and take them home”.

I tried to get on I-5 southbound to get back to the airport, but it was unusually jammed for that time of the day. I took Hwy 99 south instead, crowded, but not as badly as I-5. I remember that it was a gorgeous, sunny day. Not a cloud in the sky. As I approached downtown Seattle, I looked at the skyline....and I wondered if the next...and last...thing I was going to see was the flash of a nuke. I was filled with a sense of dread like I have never felt before.

I made it back to SeaTac and ended up taking one more trip of stranded passengers back to their homes or hotels. I finished my shift and went back home. There, my wife was sitting there with our 18-month-old son and our less-than-a-month-old baby girl, watching reports from New York. I sat with her for the rest of the day. We didn’t say much, just occasionally looked at each other with a “What now?” look on our faces.

I didn’t work the next day, and I had the option to not come in on the 13th. The company barely held on by the skin of it’s teeth, but they made it through without going bankrupt or closing. Quite a few other ride-share companies around the country weren’t so lucky.

Thank you for your story. I’m also in the Seattle area - and like NYC - it was a beautiful clear blue sky. It is my birthday and I was sleeping in. My wife had the TV on as she was getting the three kids ready for school.

When she told me the news I figured it was a small plane. Then she came in with the news that a second plane just hit - and it was huge.

Sitting with the kids watching it - I was thinking “this changes everything”. I thought that our economy would go in the tank - but thank goodness all of those firms had backup data, and that “only” 3,000 people died - I was expecting tens of thousands.

I remember going outside in the middle of the night when I heard the drone of the military radar(?) plane as it headed north and listening to it drone on. And then again an hour or so later as it would head south again.

The saddest one was we were at the kid’s start-of-school picnic - maybe the second week of school and ten(?) days after 9-11. Another beautiful day with no clouds. A hundred kids and families out on the playground having a picnic, playing around, etc.

All of a sudden a little girl (2nd grade or so) cries out “Look - an airplane!”. Not out of fear I don’t think - just it was the first one any of us had seen since 9-11. It just made me sad to think that those terrorists had even made the little kids aware of what they had done, and that seeing an airplane in the sky was so unusual that it got so much attention. (Everyone stopped what we were doing to watch it!)