I have been reading the skepticism of those not alive during that time. They don’t understand about our shared ‘ trauma’.
That it seems ‘ too much’.
Arial view of WTC in March of 2001
uturistic_Fudge
@FudgeFuturistic
Sep 4
People born pre-9/11 have such a weird, worshipful attitude about it.
7:06 AM · Sep 8, 2026
I think they should sit down and be quiet.
The media landscape was far different in 2001 than it is now. Social Media was different. Basically non-existent.
The trauma of that day.
I can remember that I was pulling into my job when I heard a snippet from the local CBS All News Radio Channel: 780AM
A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Like so many others, I thought it had to be small plane, that had lost its way.
It literally took the second jet hitting – which anyone who had been watching the coverage of the first hit SAW IN REAL TIME.
THAT is when we realized that we were UNDER ATTACK.
ON AMERICAN SOIL.
@ThoNg676733
🎼🌺Music Love♥️
@ThoNg676733
The 17 Minutes That Changed the History of America and the World
Surely, many people still remember September 11, 2001 — the day images from New York were broadcast around the world and became one of the defining memories of the modern era.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into floors 93 through 99 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At the time, many people still had no idea what was really happening. But just 17 minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 struck floors 77 through 85 of the South Tower.
The appearance of the second aircraft completely changed the way people understood what was happening. This was no longer an isolated aviation accident, but a coordinated and deliberate attack. From Brooklyn Heights, cameraman Park Foreman captured one of the most widely recognized images of that day, as the Boeing 767 slammed into the South Tower and a fireball erupted.
After that, events unfolded at a speed few people could have imagined. Just 56 minutes after being struck by the aircraft, the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed as well.
According to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the collapses were caused by a combination of the aircraft impacts, the dislodging of fireproofing from structural steel members, and large fires spreading across multiple floors. Together, these factors severely weakened the buildings’ structural systems, ultimately leading to their collapse.
In less than two hours, what had once been an iconic part of New York had become a site the world would later come to know as Ground Zero. A total of 2,977 people were killed in the September 11 attacks. At the World Trade Center alone, 343 members of the New York City Fire Department, 23 NYPD officers, and other law-enforcement personnel died while responding to the disaster.
But the attacks did not take place only in New York. At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the western side of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, home to the U.S. Department of Defense. The attack killed 125 people inside the building and all 59 people aboard the aircraft.
Meanwhile, United Airlines Flight 93 was heading toward Washington, D.C. After learning what had happened through phone calls with family members and people on the ground, a group of passengers decided to fight back against the hijackers. Their attempt to regain control of the aircraft ended when Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the aircraft’s intended target may have been the U.S. Capitol or the White House.
After that day, America began to change in ways that perhaps no one could have imagined that morning. In aviation, Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act on November 19, 2001, laying the foundation for the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and establishing a new federal system for screening passengers and baggage.
Those changes extended far beyond airports. On the international stage, the United States launched its war in Afghanistan in 2001 and later expanded its military intervention into Iraq in 2003. The Costs of War project at Brown University has documented the enormous human, financial, and social costs of the post-9/11 wars, as well as consequences that continued long after major military operations officially ended.
Looking back at September 11, 2001, what makes the event such a historic turning point is not only what happened during those few short hours. It is also what changed afterward: how a nation viewed security, how people moved through airports, how the United States exercised military power, and how the world understood the threat of terrorism.
And perhaps that is why, more than two decades later, images from that morning still make people stop and watch. Because sometimes history does not begin with a grand declaration. Sometimes, it can begin with just 17 minutes — the span of time between two aircraft striking two towers, yet enough to change America and open an entirely different chapter in world history.
6:20 PM · Sep 7, 2026
https://x.com/ThoNg676733/status/2097102635375775871
Hadn’t thought about this for a long time.
Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸
@BarnabyHistory
🇺🇸 The Boatlift That Was Bigger Than Dunkirk
At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant named Mike Day keyed a radio in New York Harbor and said the only sentence that mattered.
“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”
The boats were already coming.
The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subways were dead. South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to walk. Some jumped into the Hudson. Some stood on seawalls that were never meant to be docks and waited for anything that floated.
Dunkirk took nine days to pull 338,226 Allied soldiers off a beach in 1940.
On 9/11, roughly 800 mariners on about 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours. Ferries. Tugs. Dinner boats. Pilot boats. Yachts. A retired fireboat. Rubber dinghies that held two people. The largest water evacuation in history.
NY Waterway did not wait for the official call. After the second plane hit, the whole fleet moved. Captain Rick Thornton nosed his ferry against a seawall that was not a slip and started taking people off. Some of them he pulled out of the river. His company alone carried about 158,000 people to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.
On a normal Tuesday they carried 34,000.
The Staten Island Ferry moved more than 50,000 people and came back the other way with water, bandages, and men who still had work to do in the dust.
The old fireboat John J. Harvey, already retired, tied up near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, took civilians off the seawall, then pumped water when the hydrants downtown died.
Lt. Day later admitted what the day required. “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”
In raw numbers it was bigger than Dunkirk. No boat went down. By nightfall the southern tip of Manhattan had been emptied by people who were not on anyone’s list of heroes when the morning started.
They were tug captains. Ferry deckhands. Pilots. A lieutenant with a microphone. Ordinary boats answering one sentence.
All available boats.
https://x.com/BarnabyHistory/status/2097067384523706398
Continue reading →
