I haven't seen this site before, this is very well done. I was in middle school at the time at a camp away from school, so I never saw the broadcast until later in the afternoon. Extremely stressful to watch the time period between the coverage of the damage from the first plane and the second plane hitting the South Tower. It really captures that nearly extinct feeling of switching between channels frantically to keep up with the coverage.
9/11 in Realtime
51–60 of 160 posts
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#52I didn't find out this story until years later but still amazes me every time I see it.. regular people stepping up and saying "I have to help"
Tom Hanks narrates the epic story of the 9/11 boatlift that evacuated half a million people from the stricken piers and seawalls of Lower Manhattan.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#53I'm retired from American Airlines, September 9th,2001 we were vacationing with our children in Florida. I tried to talk my wife into staying an extra day and fly home on the 11th. Thankfully she talked me into going home on the 10th as planned. We got home late from the airport and everybody slept in on the 11th except me. I was messing around in the garage when my wife hollers at me to come look at the tv. At first…
Thank you for sharing your story! It is always interesting to hear different perspectives from these events. Regarding your VCR tapes. I understand it may be difficult for you to watch, but I encourage you to get them digitalized soon, while you still can. Perhaps even upload them in full length online somewhere for other people to look at.
If what is recorded is a news channel, the Web Archive already has the major news channel's coverage of 9/11 available for free: https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#54[deleted]
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#55I just love these real time real life retrospectives, yesterday I thought I'm not going to spend time watching these again but here I am.. Any other good ones around? I've watched the Estonia[0] a few times (easier as a Finn), I think I've seen one about the 2004 Tsunami one but can't seem to find it (or might remember wrong), and Apollo 13[1] as well.
edit: On second thought I don't think the tsunami one might make that much sense, probably was just a collection of videos and news captures.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5tbah19qo8 [1] https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you need to "start it off" by pushing "Go" on the Controls window after you set a time. That seemed to then line everything up. Note that the Menu Bar time widget does not reflect the Timeline time tho!
OK, the menu bar was throwing me off... makes no sense. Thanks.
I think some of the time stamps, but not all, are adapted to the local time zone. Very confusing user interface overall, it’s trying something very ambitious but not succeeding on the execution.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seemed like overreactions to me at the time, and it seems like overreactions to me now. I was 18 at the time and I was already old enough to know that you don't make big decisions when tired, angry, or stressed. What's the point of checks and balances and the rule of law if they all go out of the window as soon as an adversary does something bad enough to make enough of us sufficiently angry? Those aren't laws and…
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson
Call me crazy, but if our entire machinery of government can't function well enough to control itself internally to preserve human rights better than Mike Tyson, maybe we should toss the whole thing out and start over.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#58If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of c…
That was the intended effect. This is the context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda War is strategic. But soldiers won't kill for strategic reasons. They will fight when given an ethical basis. The objective truth never provides this.
Intended by who? Are you saying the US government knew it meant war and had the foresight (and bandwidth) to arrange a coordinated propaganda campaign on the spot?
People just being naturally angry seems like a simpler and perfectly sufficient explanation. We humans are pretty much hardwired to respond like that: when we believe we've been wronged, a special brain mode kicks in that pushes us toward taking action (ideally a constructive one, but brain hardware doesn't enforce that).
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#59If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of c…
I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right.
But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
The debate nowadays always seems to hinge on this question of whether they lied about the WMD thing or were "just" mistaken about it. But from my perspective living through that time as a young person, that WMD thing was not the problem, the problem was this mass fearful hysteria that our leaders (either cynically or because they were themselves in the grips of that hysteria) were able to use to get overwhelming popular support for an unrelated invasion, essentially just out of peoples feelings of righteous anger and spite.
It isn't just ugly in hindsight, it was ugly ugly ugly then, in the moment.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#60Hmm the times are somehow all messed up, current time shows 4:xx PM, the timeline shows things happening from 2:xx AM, and the controls show 8:xx AM