today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 - what were you doing that day ?

David Butcher, David Butcher Photography

Hard to believe, but today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 (September 11th 2001), a very sad and awful day for many, with well over 3000 lives lost in just an hour or so.

I remember the day very clearly. I was at work (in our office in Bonn, Germany) and diagnosing a fault on the telephone with one of our customers (ARD-Hauptstadtstudio, Berlin), when their Graphic Artist stopped explaining to me what the fault was, and screamed “oh my God, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.”

I assumed that it was a light aircraft (6 or 8 seater) with tourists being flown around New York that made an error, so continued trying to diagnose the fault. The Graphic Artist didn’t want to continue helping me, and was in deep shock (they were watching the horrific images as everything unfolded).

About 45 minutes later, they screamed that a second plane had just flown into the second tower, and a plane had struck the Pentagon. It was then that I realised that this couldn’t have been an accident.

The Sales Director of our company (from the Head Office in Newbury) was visiting our regional office in Bonn (which was usually bad news for the Sales team, since one of them was being fired that day, but didn’t have anything much to do with the Engineering team).

I sent one of my colleagues home (he lived just a few miles from the office), and he returned soon afterwards with his TV set, and we than struggled to get an off-air signal strong enough to watch the news, to see what had just happened in New York.

We continued to watch the TV in the background for the rest of the day, including the amazing third tower that was completely unaffected by an air strike but suddenly decided to collapse for no apparent reason at all, just in sympathy with the other two towers.

What were you doing at the time that these terrible events unfolded?

David Butcher David Butcher Photography

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