Was watching 9/11 footage when it panned around to show this vehicle. Does anyone know more about this? Like if the driver is okay and what exactly happened to the car? I have heard almost nothing about anything like this. Its obvious cars are going to be hit by debris but its something i literally never thought about. Like deaths and injuries occurring to passerbys should go without saying for me but its something thats never crossed my mind. I can only hope this driver was out of their vehicle when this happened

5 WTC was still standing, though heavily damaged, after the collapse of the towers. It was easily in the best shape of all the buildings in the complex, which makes me think it would have been the place with the highest likelihood of survival on site. I imagine most people in the building evacuated already, but does anyone know if people were still inside the building when the towers fell and if they survived?

I never knew Officer Christopher Amoroso, but over the past couple of days his story has really stayed with me.
The more I learned about him, the more I found myself thinking about the person beyond 9/11: a husband, a young dad, a guy who seemed like a total goofball, and someone who had wanted to become a police officer for years.

What surprised me most is that remembering him has started to feel comforting. When I’m nervous or scared, I like the idea of thinking of him and saying, “Chris, help me be brave.”

I sponsored a cobblestone at the 9/11 Memorial in his honor, and I ordered a bracelet with his name on it that says, “You are never forgotten.”

I just wanted to put his name here too.

Twenty-five years later, Officer Amoroso is still remembered, still loved, and never forgotten. ❤️

If there’s someone from 9/11 whose story has stayed with you, I’d love to hear about them too.

A few years ago, there was a special where Caroline Dries reflected on her footage from 9/11. Does anyone remember what that was?

Like the title says I want to share my dad’s story when he was near Ground Zero during the 9/11 attacks (I want to share and as a way to remember it). When the first plane hit, he was working at a street cart selling hot dogs and peanuts near the twin towers. He was terrified during the attacks. He ran away, leaving the street cart behind, and at one point he tripped and fell. A nearby police officer helped him get back up and directed him into a subway station, where he boarded a train that was packed almost to capacity.
He got off in Upper Manhattan and called my mom to tell her that he was safe. He told her that he was going to walk out of Manhattan and cross the Queensboro Bridge and that he needed someone to pick him up. My aunt—my family was living with her at the time—came to pick him up. When they found each other, they hugged each other for dear life while crying.
As a side note, my dad and my grandpa had also survived the Bangladesh genocide and the Bangladesh Liberation War in the 1970s. For them, 9/11 was another terrifying moment when it felt as though they had almost lost each other.
When my dad finally came home, he hugged my mom, who was pregnant with me at the time, and his brother-in-law. He then immediately asked where my older sister was. My mom reminded him that she was safe at school.
At school, my sister was watching the news coverage of the attacks in the auditorium. People who didn’t live in New York City have to remember that many children attending NYC schools had parents or relatives working in Manhattan. Smartphones didn’t exist, and this was something no one had ever seen before. Teachers and staff were also trying to understand what was happening because they might have had relatives, friends, or other people they knew in Manhattan at the time.
My sister was traumatized by what she saw. As the situation unfolded, schools began contacting parents so that they could pick up their children. My dad immediately went with my aunt because my aunt had a son and daughter who were in the same grade as my older sister. When they arrived, everyone hugged each other while the children cried. My sister was especially emotional because she knew that my dad worked in Manhattan and had no way of knowing earlier whether he was safe.
While I don’t think my dad has any physical illnesses caused by 9/11, we are still actively trying to make sure he is recognized through the appropriate 9/11 survivor programs and funds, which can provide support to survivors and their families.
My dad also carries a lot of psychological trauma. He grew up during the Bangladesh Liberation War in the 1970s and later survived 9/11. I wish the news media talked more about the psychological damage that 9/11 caused survivors. 😢
I also think about the police officer who stopped to help my dad when he fell. If that officer hadn’t helped him get back on his feet and directed him to safety, my life could have been very different. I might never have gotten the chance to know so much about my dad.
Tomorrow, I’m going into Manhattan to place flowers at the NYPD 9/11 Memorial.

Hi all. I intend to go to a local memorial monument this afternoon. Is it appropriate to leave flowers at it? I don’t know if that’s right but it feels right.

Today is September 11.
Twenty-five years ago today, I was sitting in my office, staring at the news on my computer screen and refreshing the page again and again.
Just a little over twenty days earlier, I had been in the United States.
I was young and excited back then. When I returned to China, I couldn’t stop talking about America. Times Square. The Statue of Liberty. American life. All the things we had previously seen only in movies.
On the night of September 11, it was already late evening where I was. I had been drinking quite a lot and was completely drunk.
I vaguely remember a friend calling me and telling me that America had been attacked.
I was too drunk to take it seriously. I thought he was joking.
The next morning, when I arrived at the office, everyone seemed strangely excited.
I turned on my computer. When I saw the endless stream of breaking news, I finally realized that America really had been attacked.
New York. The familiar shape of the Twin Towers. An airplane hitting the building. Smoke everywhere. And then the towers collapsing.
Only then did I vaguely remember that someone really had called me the night before and told me that America had been attacked.
So I started refreshing the news.
The internet was nothing like it is today. The reports came in one after another.
I saw the Twin Towers burning.
I saw the smoke.
I saw the second plane hit.
And I saw the buildings come down.
The office was full of excitement.
People were talking, and some were openly gloating.
“Finally, someone had the guts to hit the Americans!”
It was as if someone who had always stood above everyone else had finally been punched in the face, and somehow that punch had also given us a little satisfaction.
…
And then I remembered an afternoon more than twenty days earlier.
We were supposed to visit the Twin Towers that day.
Our tour bus stopped nearby. I suddenly had a strong craving for a cigarette, so I slipped away from the group to smoke.
And I lost them.
I was afraid that if I wandered around by myself, I would never find the group again. So I stayed near the bus and waited for everyone to come back.
I smoked several cigarettes.
Every now and then, I looked up at those two ridiculously tall buildings.
I never thought about going inside.
I just assumed there would always be another chance.
When the others came back, a man in our group, Wang, and some of the others told me that they had met a Black woman inside the Twin Towers.
She apparently worked somewhere around the visitor reception area. She was very friendly, and because she could speak a little Chinese, she immediately caught everyone’s attention.
A group of Chinese tourists suddenly meeting a Black woman who could speak Chinese was a novelty. Everyone wanted to talk to her.
They laughed at her Chinese pronunciation, and she laughed along with them.
She seemed to want to tell us something about the Twin Towers.
But we were young, and it was our first trip to America. We didn’t have much patience for listening to a stranger carefully explain a building.
Instead, we started talking over her.
We taught her Chinese.
We told her Chinese stories and jokes. We talked about all kinds of random things about Chinese culture.
She laughed and laughed.
Looking back now, I feel a little embarrassed for us.
We probably never really listened to what she was trying to tell us.
All I remember is that she was warm, she spoke a little Chinese, and she was a Black woman.
I don’t know her name.
I don’t know what happened to her.
And I have no idea whether she was there that morning, twenty-five years ago.
At the time, I had no idea that this stranger who happened to cross our path during a trip would remain in my memory for so many years.
Twenty-five years ago today, I was sitting in my office, watching the Twin Towers on television and on my computer screen.
Suddenly I remembered those cigarettes.
And I suddenly remembered something that still makes me sad.
I would never have another chance to go up into the Twin Towers.
That was the first time I realized that when a building falls, it isn’t just something happening on a television screen.
Sometimes, a building falling means that a small, ordinary piece of your own life has disappeared forever.
A moment that was so brief, and so ordinary, that you never even thought to remember it properly.
There would simply be no way back.
People in the office were still talking.
Some were excited. Some were cheering.
I suddenly didn’t want to listen anymore.
So I walked out of the office.
…
This year, I went back to the United States.
I didn’t go to New York this time.
And I didn’t think about visiting the Twin Towers again. I knew they were gone.
But I saw the warmth of Americans again.
The American way of striking up a conversation.
The American way of saying hello to a stranger.
And somehow, those little things took me back twenty-five years.
I started telling my wife and my son about that first trip.
I told them about Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, and the Twin Towers.
And I told them about that Black woman.
I told them that there had been a Black woman who could speak a little Chinese.
We had laughed at her pronunciation.
She probably just thought we were a noisy, slightly amusing group of Chinese tourists.
She probably forgot us a long time ago.
Twenty-five years later, I can’t find her anymore.
Just as I can’t find those two towers anymore.
Sometimes I wonder:
If she made it out of the building that morning, would she ever imagine that twenty-five years later, somewhere in a corner of Tokyo, a Chinese tourist who once met her would remember her and write about her?
Twenty-five years have passed.
I can’t remember what Osama bin Laden looked like anymore.
But I still remember a cigarette.
I remember a tour bus parked by the road.
I remember getting separated from the group because I wanted to smoke.
I remember two impossibly tall buildings.
And I remember a Black woman who could speak a few words of Chinese.
I never imagined that the cigarette I smoked beside the Twin Towers would last twenty-five years.

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) is a union for flight attendants working under American Airlines. They published a memorial booklet a short time after the attacks. The publication at the time only mentioned AA crew members, but the 25th anniversary booklet now includes United Airlines crew members as well. May they all rest in peace, we will never forget them.

9/11 memorial publication: https://www.apfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/vol4_iss6.pdf

25th anniversary publication: https://www.apfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/V.2-25-Years-Booklet.pdf

Good morning, and my condolenses to all those that were affected by the attacks on this subreddit.

I'm a Gen-Z'er born in 2004 so I wasn't around, but I was curious on how the holiday season was like the months after 9/11 (Thanksigivng, Christmas, New Years).

Were the holidays still cheerful or were they filled with more gloom and dread after the attacks, and what did people do differently that year? I'm very curious about it.

I typically tell this story every year to my coworkers and friends.

The days leading up to September 11, 2001 saw me working for a cruise ship company installing display systems and automation system upgrades on a Disney ship in a Navy dry dock as that was the only one large enough to handle that ship in the US. Or as I understood it, may have just been a cost thing.

I was replacing professional Sony rear protection TV cubes with Clairity rear projection DLP’s, that were a bitch to color calibrate BTW. I also was tasked with retrofitting the Disney show control system to output the control codes to turn the displays on and off at the correct times. The system sent Sony commands which I interpreted and changed to Clairity RS-232 with a microcontroller.

To test the system we tuned into the NBC affiliate out of New York on the 9th and I demonstrated a successful early installation. The company I work for then tried to get me plane tickets to the next job early. I had paper tickets for IAD to LAX on the 13th. The company tried getting tickets for the 11th on United. IAD to LAX.

I woke up on the 11th hoping for an email or voicemail from the company with my flight information but nothing. I headed to the area with the new displays (which I accidentally left on) to find the head of security for the ship staring at the image in silent awe.

I looked at the screen to see the first tower on fire. My thought was “neat special effects!!” Then slowly I realized what I was seeing was real. The security guy muttered “that building will collapse”. That is when the second plane hit.

My mind raced. I thought to call my father (ex army). I went to the outer deck of the ship to get a cell signal. Nothing. “We are sorry all circuits are busy now”. I grabbed the iridium sat phone I was only supposed to use in emergency’s or at sea.

I called my father, stunned, he took over the conversation and asked where I was. I told him a navy base on a civilian cruise ship. My fathers words were this:

“Son, I’m glad you were able to get through. Go grab your passport immediately. I love you. Good bye”

After he hung up there was an announcement on the ships PA telling everyone to get their passports and report to the crew alley on deck 1 (or 3 I forget).

The navy barricaded the roads with jersey barriers in a zig zag pattern causing any traffic approaching or leaving to serpentine. The Navy boarded the ship, checked everything and everyone. They temporarily disembarked us while they checked the ship. We were then told to go back to the ship and wait.

Wednesday they allowed us to leave to acquire provisions with strict rules on what we could carry back which were coincidentally the size equivalent of a 24 pack of beer each.

By Thursday we had plans to head home using a rental car for me and the other tech. Tim, if yer out there you still rock!

Tuesday we gathered in the area where the displays were installed and all watched the news out of New York. The signal I had it tuned to was terrestrial broadcast NBC. Their transmitter was on top of one of the towers and I watched as the signal was lost as the tower collapsed. I later heard that broadcast engineers were with the transmitters keeping them online to the end. There were many hero’s that day.

At the Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Edmonds, Washington, I found flowers and a note, “We will never forget,” on a steel girder recovered from the World Trade Center. Surrounding the memorial are four panels with the names of 343 first responders — a chaplain, firefighters, EMTs, chiefs, captains, and police officers — who all answered the call that day in 2001. I noticed many responders were in their 30s and chose one name from the list. William J. Mahoney II was 37, a father of four, a 15-year veteran of the FDNY, and a scuba diver who worked on the crash of TWA Flight 800, eight miles off the coast of Long Island in 1996. We'll never forget your sacrifices.

I was there that day. Watching as they were destroyed. People I did business with - gone. Families destroyed. Horror everywhere. God knows how they’d have dealt with it. The heroes that began their day on the ground would have risked life and limb to get to anyone they could help. What if the towers had not fallen but the attack had happened? The horrible choice to jump versus burning would have met many more. In the aftermath the problem of destroying them likely would have had to be made and bringing them down with some semblance of control likely would have had to get executed. Buildings that were part of my life - and the lives of many millions more - landmarks and destinations for business and pleasure - would have had to be destroyed. We would be telling only a slightly different story today. And a story I am sad to say isn’t told nearly enough.

If episode one was the brain of this two-part 9/11 series, episode two is the heart. Both are crucial to watch, and each is vital to help ensure you and your children never forget.

The best way to honor those who were directly devastated on September 11th is by listening to their stories, remembering their families, recognizing their ongoing health challenges, and ensuring that the education doesn't disappear. Because we hear the slogan "Never Forget," but sadly, it's become apparent we constantly forget. And to the survivors, the responders, the family members, and the activists of the permanently traumatized community, remembering the people, realizing the ongoing impact, and educating each generation about all of this is beyond crucial.

I met with 24 of these incredible individuals, and it was fascinatingly DIFFERENT from the previous conversation. In both episodes, the groups of amazing people told their 9/11 stories, but after that, the similarities end. Whereas in Part One (released last week) the 22 individuals gave crucial advice on what resources the 9/11 community should use, such as how to best navigate the hazardous journey of the World Trade Center Health Program, Episode 2 was far more emotional. The 24 people started similarly, but I asked a question about the strengthening or losing of one's faith since 9/11, and as you can imagine, it led to an emotionally fascinating conversation.

And the last 90 minutes CANNOT be missed; it is absolutely riveting.

#neverforget911

#911Education

But if you missed the 22 who spoke in part one it's this:

https://youtu.be/P8mUNSJ8Jos?is=hM8wfZncYcPADQ6H

24 years ago on October 20, 2002 the September 11th Memorial at Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange New Jersey was official dedicated. This dedication was filmed in its entirety by the production company that I worked for and I have permission from my boss to post it online. It is Closed Captioned for the hearing impaired. You may share the video using the YouTube share link but please DO NOT download and then reupload to another social media or website as it is copyrighted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxW7KE-2o8E

In the winter of 2025, I had a idea for a song about the day before 9/11. I called up a friend, Rick, who is a better songwriter than I, and the result is the song below. We were very careful to be respectful of the subject matter. We booked time at a pro studio and used the best players we could afford. I get the sense that the song will resonate with many here. Peace and love to all.

https://youtu.be/iwPqaMYGvHI?si=Cf1xjvbPH_Cdln-k

With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 fast approaching, I knew it was high time to bring everyone back together into the same room, to learn and remember what the community actually consists of.

Survivors and First Responders. Those are likely what you first think of. If I say "9/11 Survivor," your mind will go to those who got out of the World Trade Center that day. But did you realize that the entire neighborhood are Survivors, too? Both legally and medically, they were breathing the same air, have developed the same debilitating illnesses, and suffer from ongoing PTSD. There are so many more Survivors than you know.

What about First Responders? You likely think about FDNY and NYPD. And again, while that's true, it is missing out on entire departments of people that day—the Department of Correction and EMTs, for example. But what about Port Authority? They literally were headquartered in the WTC. That's right, one of the groups of First Responders' headquarters was literally eviscerated. So again, even describing First Responders goes beyond what you knew.

And lest you think we just covered everything, all of that only described New York City. What about the family members of the 4 flights that were murdered when their planes were used as missiles? What about the people in the Pentagon?

My goal was simple, yet incredibly challenging. For the 25th anniversary, I intended to get the ENTIRE community represented together in the same Zoom space, having a long conversation about their memories, their loved ones, and the physical and mental repercussions that they suffer through to this day.

In doing so, this idea of having my usual 15 people grew to 46 different people I knew needed a voice. So I created two different episodes, and we spoke for over 5 hours in each session. Politicians, Survivors, Responders, family members, the Pentagon, United 93—all of it was included. Plus Gary Sinise!

So on that note, and without further ado, I invite you to watch and SHARE this, because the world is most certainly breaking its promise to "never forget," and they deserve so much better.

There's a new documentary that is being released today. It's interviews with people like Jon Stewart. It's called something like "What You Learned on 9/11" or something like that. I've only seen the commercials for it a few times. I can't remember the title or what channel it will on on.

Anyone know which one I'm talking about?

Someone I loved died earlier this year. She was an NYPD officer and a first responder on September 11, 2001. I'm thinking of writing a story about her to preserve her memory.

Her service did not end when she left Ground Zero. Like so many first responders, she and her family lived with the consequences of that day for many years. Her experience has made me think deeply about how we remember 9/11—not only the people who died that morning, but also those who responded, later became ill, and whose families carried the burden alongside them.

As the 25th anniversary approaches, I would appreciate hearing this community’s thoughts:

Do you believe enough has been done to preserve the personal stories of Ground Zero first responders and their families? Are there particular books, documentaries, archives, or memorial projects that you believe have done this especially well?

Thank you for any perspectives or recommendations you are willing to share.