24 Responses to It’s been 25 Years Since 9/11. 25 Years

1. rikyrah says:

   September 15, 2026 at 2:59 pm

   Echoes of War
   @EchoesofWarYT
   The worst room in America on September 11, 2001 was the 78th floor sky lobby of the South Tower. A woman named Donna Spera walked out of it alive and called it a gore floor, and the name stuck.

   Understand first why that room existed at all.

   The Twin Towers were too tall to be served by one bank of elevators. You cannot run a single shaft 110 floors and move 25,000 people a day through it. So the design used sky lobbies. Express elevators ran from the ground floor straight up to a transfer floor, where you got off, walked across a large open lobby, and boarded a local elevator to your office. In the South Tower the sky lobbies were on 44 and 78.

   That meant the 78th floor was permanently full of people standing around waiting. It was the busiest room in the building and nobody thought about it any more than you think about a bus stop.

   At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 hit the North Tower. People in the South Tower watched burning debris and worse go past their windows and began evacuating on their own.

   Then the building’s public address system told them the incident was in the other building, that this building was secure, and that they could return to their offices.

   Some believed it. Some did not. It did not matter much, because either way the route ran through 78. People coming down from the upper floors had to transfer there. People who had been told to go back up had to transfer there. People who had ridden up from the street because they were told the building was safe were arriving there. And the express cars were jammed, so a crowd built.

   There were more than 200 people standing in that sky lobby when the 17 minutes ran out.

   At 9:03 a.m., United Flight 175 hit the South Tower at roughly 540 miles an hour, entering between the 77th and 85th floors, banked hard with the left wing low.

   The 78th floor sky lobby was inside the impact. The aircraft came through a room packed with civilians. The ceiling and walls came down on top of them. Aviation fuel atomized through the space and ignited, and more of it poured down the open elevator shafts and blew out of elevator doors on floors far below, burning people who were nowhere near the airplane.

   Of the two hundred plus people standing in that lobby, somewhere around a dozen got off the floor alive.

   The ones who did describe the same things. Total darkness with fire in it. The smell of jet fuel. Not being able to hear. And bodies, everywhere, in the wreckage and on what was left of the floor.

   Judy Wein had a broken arm, broken ribs and a punctured lung. Ling Young was burned over most of her body and walked with her arms held out from her sides because she could not stand anything touching her skin. Ed Nicholls was cut badly. Gigi Singer got out. Donna Spera got out burned.

   Two things saved them.

   The first is geometry. The aircraft hit off center. Stairwells B and C in the core were destroyed. Stairway A, in the northwest corner, farthest from the entry path, came through it marginally passable. In a building where everything else was severed, there was one narrow route down, and almost nobody alive up there knew it existed.

   The second is that a 24 year old equities trader named Welles Crowther, who had a red bandana over his face and had been a volunteer firefighter since he was 16, found that stairwell. He went down it as far as the 50s to be sure it went through, climbed back up to 78, and then stood in that room and shouted at the wounded that everyone who could stand should stand now and everyone who could help should help.

   Then he carried people down.

   Ling Young was eventually taken in hand by Fire Marshal James Devery. She and Wein and Singer and Nicholls reached a working freight elevator on the 40th floor.

   Here is the number that tells you everything about that floor. Roughly 600 people were at or above the impact zone in the South Tower. Eighteen of them got out. Every single one of the eighteen came down Stairway A.

   At 9:52 a.m., FDNY Battalion Chief Orio Palmer stepped out of Stairway A onto the 78th floor, having climbed 38 flights in bunker gear to get there, with Fire Marshal Ronald Bucca beside him. Palmer got on the radio in a completely level voice, reported two isolated pockets of fire he believed two hose lines could knock down, and reported numerous civilian dead.

   He was the last human being to describe that room to anyone.

   At 9:59 a.m. the South Tower collapsed. The 78th floor sky lobby, the people still in it, Palmer and Bucca all came down together into the plaza.

   None of it was a battlefield. There was no objective on that floor and no reason for it to exist except that the building was too tall for one elevator ride. It was a place where insurance clerks and tax examiners and traders stood every single morning holding coffee, checking their watches, waiting to change cars.

   For fifty six minutes on a Tuesday it was the most horrifying place in the United States of America, and almost nobody who was standing in it ever knew what hit them.
   11:54 AM · Sep 15, 2026
   https://x.com/EchoesofWarYT/status/2099904756634316907

   @EchoesofWarYT
   Echoes of War
   @EchoesofWarYT
   44m
   The former World Trade Center, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, used sky lobbies, located on the 44th and 78th floors of each tower.
   https://x.com/EchoesofWarYT/status/2099939925944611000

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2. rikyrah says:

   September 14, 2026 at 4:55 pm

   Bridge at Remagen 🇺🇸🚁
   @supertracpak
   WTC 9/11 deaths by floor
   https://x.com/supertracpak/status/2099563361373421596

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3. rikyrah says:

   September 12, 2026 at 2:21 pm

   Kristen Carney
   @KristenCarney
   Her scream at the realization ‘they did it on purpose’ is such a painfully guttural sound. It’s what true horror sounds like when the human soul recognizes evil before the mind can comprehend it. The sound of her innocence being ripped away in an instant. It was taken from all of us that morning and we’ve never gotten it back. #neverforget but #weforgot
   https://x.com/KristenCarney/status/2098483093577384183

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4. rikyrah says:

   September 12, 2026 at 2:16 pm

   U.S. Department of the Interior
   @Interior
   Forty voices. Forty lives. A story of courage that will never be forgotten.

   Standing 93 feet tall at Flight 93 National Memorial, the Tower of Voices holds 40 wind chimes, each representing one of the passengers and crew members of United Airlines Flight 93.

   When the wind moves across the Pennsylvania landscape, their voices continue to ring. We remember their courage. We remember their sacrifice. We remember the 40 lives lost 25 years ago.
   9:40 AM · Sep 11, 2026

   https://x.com/Interior/status/2098421366798033169

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5. rikyrah says:

   September 12, 2026 at 2:15 pm

   Echoes of War
   @EchoesofWarYT
   Twenty five years ago today, the first fire chief to reach the World Trade Center gave the order to go up, and one of the men who took it was his little brother.

   Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer had Battalion 1 in lower Manhattan. On the morning of September 11 he was out on a nothing call, a reported gas leak on the street, with a French film crew tagging along because they were making a documentary about a rookie firefighter in his battalion.

   He heard the engines, looked up, and watched an airliner go down the Hudson so low he could read American Airlines on the side of it. Then he watched it fly into the North Tower.

   The camera caught it. That is the only clear footage in existence of the first plane, and it exists because a documentary crew happened to be standing next to the one chief who was about to run the worst incident in the history of the American fire service.

   Pfeifer got on the radio immediately and transmitted what he had just seen, called for more alarms, and rolled to the tower.

   He was the first chief there. He set up his command post in the North Tower lobby, in a building with a fuel fire burning 90 floors up, no working elevators above the impact, and an unknown number of people trapped. He started sending companies up the stairs, one after another, with the only orders available to him. Climb. Get people out.

   And then Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer of Engine 33 walked into that lobby.

   Kevin was his younger brother. Joe had helped get him into the fire department.

   The two of them looked at each other for a moment in the middle of all of it. Joe gave him the same order he was giving everybody. Go up, evacuate the building, regroup on the upper floors and get to the people who are trapped.

   Kevin turned and went up the stairs.

   That was the last time Joe Pfeifer saw his brother.

   Joe stayed in that lobby for roughly an hour and a half. He was still there when the South Tower came down at 9:59 and blew the lobby apart around him. He got out of the North Tower shortly before it collapsed at 10:28.

   Kevin did not. He spent his last minutes helping other firefighters get out, which is what cost him the time he needed to get out himself. He was one of the 343.

   Joe Pfeifer went back to work. He spent the rest of his career on the problem, built the FDNY’s counterterrorism and emergency preparedness operation, and studied the command failures of that morning harder than anyone because he had lived inside every one of them. He was the last of the 9/11 chiefs still serving when he finally retired.

   He has said that 9/11 is made up of small stories of people making small decisions that turned out to be the difference between living and dying.

   One of those decisions was his. He told his brother to go up, and his brother went, and that is what both of them had signed up for, and he has carried it every day since.
   11:24 PM · Sep 11, 2026
   https://x.com/EchoesofWarYT/status/2098628812468531295

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6. rikyrah says:

   September 12, 2026 at 2:13 pm

   Echoes of War
   @EchoesofWarYT
   Twenty five years ago today, a woman trapped in the burning Pentagon could not scream because her lungs were full of smoke, so she clapped her hands. The man who heard her was an Army cook.

   At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 went into the west side of the Pentagon at roughly 530 miles an hour. Sixty four people on the airplane and 125 people in the building were killed.

   Staff Sergeant Christopher Braman was a cook. That was his job in the United States Army. He was also Ranger trained, which in this story turns out to matter a great deal.

   He had just walked out of the dining area when the aircraft hit. Everyone outside was moving away from the building, which is the correct and sane thing to do when a fuel loaded airliner has just gone into a wall. Braman turned around and went in.

   Inside was black. Jet fuel fire, collapsed ceiling, no visibility, and heat that was cooking the air. He crawled.

   Somewhere in there was Sheila Moody, an Army civilian accountant who had been working at the Pentagon for only a matter of days. The fireball had come through her office. Her hands were burned. She was trying to call for help and no sound was coming out, because the smoke had taken her voice.

   So she put her hands together and clapped.

   Braman heard it, followed it, found her, and carried her out.

   He went back in after that. And again. When it was over he had a Purple Heart for his injuries and the Soldier’s Medal, which is what the Army gives for heroism that has nothing to do with an enemy in front of you.

   Then he stayed. For four days he worked the recovery inside that building and helped bring out 63 of the dead. He was insistent that none of them ever touch the ground. Later he got sick with a chemical pneumonia from breathing jet fuel.

   He was not the only one.

   Lieutenant Colonel Ted Anderson, a field artillery officer who happened to work in legislative liaison, carried two people out, went back in through a broken window and got two more, then tackled a man whose clothes were burning, rolled him out on the ground, and carried him clear. When he tried to go in a fourth time, two firefighters physically grabbed him and would not let go.

   Anderson’s explanation afterward was one sentence. You don’t leave your comrades on the battlefield. To me, this was the battlefield.

   That is the part of September 11 that does not get told as often. New York had a fire department full of professionals whose entire existence is running into burning buildings. The Pentagon had accountants, staff officers, clerks, budget analysts and a cook, and within seconds of the impact, unarmed and untrained for it, they were crawling back through burning corridors on their hands and knees pulling people out by the sound of their voices.

   For years afterward, Sheila Moody called Chris Braman regularly. He said that was worth more to him than either medal.

   She is alive because a cook went the wrong way and because she thought to clap.
   4:58 PM · Sep 11, 2026

   https://x.com/EchoesofWarYT/status/2098531609666576448

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7. rikyrah says:

   September 12, 2026 at 2:12 pm

   @25YearsAgoLive
   2001 Live
   @25YearsAgoLive
   Fire Chief Joseph Pfeifer, in the North Tower Lobby, is distressed by the large number of jumpers he has seen.

   He attempts to make an address over the building’s public address system: “Please stop jumping. We are coming up to help you.”

   But the lines are cut and his voice cannot be heard.
   https://x.com/25YearsAgoLive/status/2098409687037132933

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8. rikyrah says:

   September 12, 2026 at 1:49 pm

   @japan_nobunaga
   NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依
   @japan_nobunaga
   On September 11, a town of fewer than 10,000 people looked up and saw 38 airliners coming down out of the sky toward them.

   Nobody had ordered them to take those people in.

   They took them in anyway. Every one. Into their homes. For five days.

   The town is called Gander, in Newfoundland, on the far eastern edge of Canada.

   At 9:45 that morning, the United States closed its airspace. Every plane over the Atlantic bound for America had to land somewhere, now. Gander sits on the point of land closest to Europe. In the Cold War it had been a refueling stop. By 2001 its runways were mostly quiet.

   Then the planes started coming.

   Thirty-eight of them. Wide-body jets from Frankfurt, London, Paris, Rome, Dublin. 6,122 passengers and 473 crew. Nearly 6,600 human beings.

   The town had a population of about 9,600.

   The mayor, Claude Elliott, said it plainly afterward. Every municipality has an emergency plan. There is no page in that plan that tells you what to do when 7,000 people decide to drop in for four or five days.

   So they wrote the page themselves.

   The passengers sat on the tarmac for hours. Some sat on their planes for more than a full day while security screened every aircraft. They had no idea what had happened. They were watching cell phones die. They were watching the fuel gauges and the faces of the flight attendants.

   Then they came down the stairs onto the ground of a town they had never heard of.

   Here is what was waiting.

   Every school in Gander was closed. Every nonessential business was closed. Not to hide. To free everybody up.

   The community television station put out a single message. Lend a hand. Do what you can.

   The town’s ice rink, the only refrigerated building large enough, was turned into a food warehouse. The mayor called it the largest walk-in freezer in the country. Sandwiches. Casseroles. Soup. Everything the town could cook was coming in faster than it could go out.

   The pharmacies filled prescriptions for strangers and did not charge them. Heart medication, insulin, whatever a person had left in a suitcase they could not get to.

   The phone company installed banks of free telephones so people could call home and say the words. I’m alive. I’m in Canada. I don’t know where.

   Schools, churches, the Lions Club, the Legion hall, the Salvation Army, all of them became dormitories. Cots, mats, sleeping bags on gymnasium floors.

   And when those ran out, the people of Gander opened their front doors.

   Strangers from Germany and Nigeria and Texas and Israel slept in the spare bedrooms of fishermen and schoolteachers. They took showers in the houses of people whose names they could not pronounce. They ate at kitchen tables next to children who kept asking them questions.

   Passengers who had money tried to pay. Nobody would take it.

   A woman on one flight later described the feeling she could not shake. She had landed in a place where nobody was going to let her be alone.

   On the fourth day, the American airspace reopened. The planes could leave.

   And the passengers did not want to go.

   One of them told the 9/11 Museum, years later, that they had been having a wonderful time with those Newfoundlanders. He said it without embarrassment. He had watched the worst thing he had ever seen on a television in a stranger’s living room, and the stranger had brought him tea.

   On the flight out of Gander, on a Delta jet, the passengers passed a hat.

   They started with $15,000, on the plane, that day. A scholarship fund for the students of the Gander area. Something for the children of the people who had taken them in.

   That fund has grown to more than a million dollars.

   Every year since 2001, a kid from Gander goes to college on money from strangers who slept on their floors for four nights.

   The town has been awarded the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador. A Broadway musical about those five days ran for years. And this week, twenty-five years later, thousands of the plane people flew back to Gander to see the families who took them in. The airport unveiled a mural. Grown men who had been terrified passengers in 2001 hugged grown men who had been teenage volunteers pouring coffee.

   Here is the part worth remembering.

   The people of Gander did not know if the planes on their runway were safe. They did not know if there were more hijackers. They did not know who was on board. They did not know how long this would last.

   They opened the doors anyway.

   The town’s emergency plan had no page for this.

   They wrote it with their kitchens. 🇨🇦🇺🇸
   12:25 AM · Sep 12, 2026
   https://x.com/japan_nobunaga/status/2098644049171489039

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9. rikyrah says:

   September 12, 2026 at 1:45 pm

   Cat 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇸
   @AllAmericanGrl1
   This commercial by Budweiser aired only 1 time in honor of those lost on 9/11/2001 ❤️🤍💙 #Neverforget
   https://x.com/AllAmericanGrl1/status/2098442147682824488

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10. rikyrah says:

    September 12, 2026 at 1:21 pm

    NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依
    @japan_nobunaga
    On September 11, a 24-year-old ran back up seventeen flights of stairs into a burning skyscraper.

    Three times.

    His mother did not know she was raising a man who would do that.

    She would not know for eight months. And when she found out, she dropped to her knees on her kitchen floor.

    His name was Welles Crowther. He worked on the 104th floor of the South Tower.

    At 9:03 a.m. the second plane cut through his building at 590 miles an hour, between the 78th and 84th floors. His floor was above the fire. There was no way down through that.

    Nine minutes later, at 9:12, he picked up the phone and called his mother in Nyack.

    She was not home.

    She would replay the message he left, over and over, for the rest of her life.

    “Mom.”

    A pause.

    “This is Welles.”

    A pause.

    “I want you to know that I’m okay.”

    Then he hung up. And he lied.

    He was not going to be okay. He knew it. And he was calling his mother to soften it.

    That is what that voicemail is. A twenty-four-year-old boy trying to protect his mother from what he was about to do next.

    What he did next was walk down toward the fire.

    The 78th floor sky lobby of the South Tower was where roughly 200 people had been waiting for express elevators when the plane hit. Most of them had died in the impact. The ones still alive were burning, or bleeding, or trapped under debris. Where the wall had been, there was open sky. Wind was coming through. Papers were on fire in the air.

    Ling Young came to on the floor.

    There was blood on her glasses. The people around her were on fire.

    She lay there and made a decision. She would breathe the smoke. She would go quickly. Because if she stood up, she was going to feel her own body burn, and she could not face that.

    Judy Wein could barely move. Her arm was broken. Three ribs cracked. Her lung was punctured. She could not draw enough air to shout.

    They were dying. They knew it. They had accepted it.

    And then, through the smoke, a voice.

    A young man stepped into that lobby. He was stripped to a t-shirt. He had a red bandana tied over his nose and mouth. He was carrying a fire extinguisher he had found somewhere.

    And he was calm.

    Not brave. Calm.

    That is the detail Ling Young, twenty-five years later, still cannot get over. There were dead people on the floor. There was fire on the walls. And this boy was calm.

    He set the extinguisher down. He looked at the people who could still move.

    Seven words.

    “Everyone who can stand, stand now.”

    Judy Wein stood.

    “If you can help others, do so.”

    He told them he had found the stairs. Follow me, he said. Only help the ones you can help.

    Then he picked up a woman who could not walk. He got her onto his back. And he started down.

    Seventeen flights. From the 78th floor to the 61st. In the smoke. Carrying her the entire way.

    He handed her, and the group, to firefighters coming up.

    And then he turned around.

    Stop here for a second. Picture him.

    His t-shirt is soaked through. His lungs are burning from the smoke. He has just carried a full-grown human being on his back down seventeen flights of stairs. He is 24 years old.

    And he turns around and starts back up. Toward the impact zone. Toward the fire.

    Not because anyone told him to. Not because anyone knew he was up there. Not because any part of his job description required it.

    Because there were still people up there.

    He climbed seventeen floors. Back to the 78th.

    He found another group. He led them down.

    Then he did it again. A third time.

    He went back up.

    Nobody knows if he made a fourth trip. Nobody knows the exact hour of his death.

    All we know is that when they finally recovered his body, on March 19, 2002, they did not find him upstairs.

    They found him on the ground floor. Next to the firefighters at their command post.

    He had made it all the way down. He had made it out.

    And on the ground, after everything, he had turned around one more time to help.

    For eight months, his parents did not know any of this.

    They only knew their son was gone. His father Jefferson kept a mostly finished application to the FDNY that they had found in Welles’ bedroom.

    They knew he had wanted to be a firefighter. He had told his mother once, “Mom, I want to help people.” He had been talking about leaving Wall Street.

    They did not know he had already been the firefighter he wanted to be.

    Then, in May 2002, his mother Alison sat down with the newspaper.

    The New York Times had published an oral history from survivors of the 78th floor. Judy Wein had described the man who had appeared through the smoke.

    A man in a red kerchief.

    Alison read that line.

    She stopped.

    Welles had carried a red bandana in his back pocket since he was six years old. His father had given him two handkerchiefs one Sunday morning before church. A white one for the pocket square. A red one for his back pocket.

    His father had said, “One to show. And one to blow.”

    Welles never took it out. Not through prep school. Not through Boston College. Not through the years of running as a volunteer firefighter alongside his father in the small town where they lived.

    The red bandana was in his back pocket every single day for eighteen years.

    Alison put the paper down.

    And she went to her knees on the kitchen floor.

    Her husband later described what she said, out loud, to the empty room.

    “Dear God. Take me now. Leave him here.”

    She was asking to trade places with her dead son. Retroactively. She was offering God her life for his.

    That is what a mother does.

    She got up eventually. She wrote down two phone numbers. Judy Wein. Ling Young.

    She mailed each of them a photograph of Welles.

    Ling Young opened her envelope some days later.

    She looked at the photograph.

    She stared at it for a long time.

    The face she had last seen through smoke. The face that had walked past her, again, going back up.

    She said one word.

    “Yes.”

    Judy Wein said the same word.

    The Crowthers finally knew what their son had done in the last hour of his life.

    They knew he had saved between twelve and eighteen people who would otherwise be dead. They knew he had reached safety, and turned around, and gone back up. Three times. They knew he had made it to the ground. And they knew he had chosen, on the ground, not to leave.

    They knew who he had been.

    The FDNY made him an honorary firefighter in 2006.

    Boston College plays a football game every September now called the Red Bandanna Game. His teammate at Boston College competed as a snowboarder in the 2006 Winter Olympics wearing a red bandana tied around his head.

    Four days ago, twenty-five years and one week after that September morning, the President of the United States placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor this country can bestow, on Welles Crowther’s name.

    His mother Alison walked up on the stage of the White House to accept it.

    She has told the story a thousand times since 2002.

    She still cannot get through the voicemail without her voice breaking.
    https://x.com/japan_nobunaga/status/2098652834699128981

    @HarJac2
    HarJac 💄💢📚⚔️
    @HarJac2
    7h
    He’s also one of the only people, if not the only person, to be on several FDNY memorials despite not being a firefighter

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11. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 4:26 pm

    Massimo
    @Rainmaker1973
    The people above the impact in the WTC’s North Tower on September 11, 2001, possibly faced the worst situation and death among all the victims of the attacks on that day.

    American Airlines Flight 11 struck 1 World Trade Center at a.m., roughly from the 93rd through the 99th floors. In that building the hit destroyed or blocked all three stairwells. Fire and debris filled the core.

    Anyone on about the 92nd floor and higher had no intact downward route. The South Tower, hit later, still had one stairwell that some people above the impact used. Below the North Tower impact, thousands also walked down. But above the wound, no one who was still in those offices after the strike got out.

    Roof rescue, which some expected from drills or from the 1993 bombing memory, was not available. Heat and smoke made a helicopter landing impossible. Roof access was not an open escape. Windows, smoke, and rising temperature left people with a fire they could not pass and a clock they could not stop.

    Smoke filled the upper floors. Flames advanced through the offices. People broke windows for air. Some fell or jumped.

    The North Tower stood until 10.28 a.m., a little more than an hour and forty minutes after the impact. That interval was long enough for phone calls and for the full knowledge that the end was near.

    Other victims that day died in the aircraft, in the South Tower, on the street, in the collapse, or as rescuers. Those deaths were not lesser. But the particular cruelty of the upper North Tower was that the building still stood long enough for people to know they would not leave it, as shown by these dramatic images.
    7:05 AM · Sep 11, 2026

    https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2098382315088904569

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12. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 4:25 pm

    Dave Hale – Concerned Republican
    @CountryFirstRep
    The speech that gave solace to a heartbroken nation…

    THIS is what a president sounds like when his nation needs him.

    #NeverForget
    https://x.com/CountryFirstRep/status/2098212257532354610

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13. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 1:14 pm

    Mila Joy
    @Milajoy
    Stanley Praimnath was at his desk on the 81st floor of the South Tower when a United jet grew in his window until he could read the letter on the fuselage.

    He dove under the desk.

    The plane hit.

    A wing stopped in a doorway twenty feet away.

    The ceiling came down. He was alive, deafened, calling for help.

    A stranger on the other side of a broken wall heard him.

    Brian Clark pulled him over the wreckage.

    Stanley kissed him on the cheek and said they would be brothers for life.

    They went down the one stairwell people had been told was finished. They walked out at 9:56 a.m.

    Three minutes later the tower fell.

    He was one of only a few who escaped from the impact floors.

    He still calls Clark his brother.

    If Clark had not stopped for that voice, both of them would have gone the other way.

    He should not have lived through that morning.

    He did.
    12:26 AM · Sep 11, 2026
    https://x.com/Milajoy/status/2098281981633273972

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14. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 1:11 pm

    Reading the message was chilling

    Turbine Traveller
    @Turbinetraveler
    ACARS message that went out in the New York airspace on September 11, 2001.

    25 years later, this remains one of the most emotional, descriptive, and painful messages ever sent to an aircraft.

    Deep words that captured the horror unfolding in the sky that morning.
    https://x.com/Turbinetraveler/status/2098285986186743919

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15. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 1:09 pm

    Yoni Leviatan
    @songsofyoni
    If you’re wondering where the generational split we have today comes from, it’s largely because of 9/11.

    There is a sharp dividing line between those of us who heard the news of a first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46am and thinking it was a small Cessna that crashed, then heard the news of a second plane hitting the south tower at 9:03am and understanding that we were under attack, then hearing the Pentagon was struck at 9:37am and understanding we were at war, and then watched with total shock as the towers collapsed live on TV.

    Those of us who experienced that day and were old enough to understand the symbolism of what had happened also understood that the world would never be the same – and it hasn’t.

    Those of us who spent the next week glued to the TV with tears in our eyes watching desperate family members walking like zombies around New York holding up signs of their loved ones searching for any drop of information about the people who had vanished into thin air will never forget the horror of the day that changed the world forever.

    Those of you for whom 9/11 is a history lesson that you watch on YouTube will never understand what was truly lost on that day – starting with the innocence of the greatest country in history – which is why so many of you are willing to tear it all down in the hopes of building a failed utopia that every time has been tried has taken down millions of people with it.

    That’s why those who see 9/11 through the eyes of its attackers because they experienced it as a TikTok trend after reading Bin Laden’s letter are so willing to give the reins of power to those who sympathize with Bin Laden.

    The world is divided between those who experienced the apocalyptic horror of 9/11 and those who were too young to have any sympathy for the victims, so they blame their government instead of the perpetrators who committed mass murder.

    Those of us who were there and watched the horror unfold in front of our eyes will never forget what was lost on that day, or the pain of tens of thousands of Americans and nationalities from all over the world.

    Those of us who grew up in the 90s felt it was boring at the time. It was full of angst, had no meaning and was considered “the end of history.” If only we knew what a blessed decade it was.

    May the memories of all those lost 25 years ago today forever be a blessing.

    We will never forget them.
    1:25 AM · Sep 11, 2026
    https://x.com/songsofyoni/status/2098296963775049759

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16. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 1:06 pm

    Sumit
    @Sumishiv1406
    We promised never to forget September 11, 2001 25 years already. But most importantly we must remember the innocent children whose lives were lost that day children who had done nothing wrong
    May they never be forgotten
    #NeverForget #NYC
    #11septembre
    https://x.com/Sumishiv1406/status/2098275647907140088

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17. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 1:06 pm

    Kentucky Girl
    RINO Removal Project
    @Kentuckygirl1
    “Miracle of Stairwell B”

    On the morning of September 11, 2001, NYC Fire Department Captain Jay Jonas and his Chinatown-based crew from Ladder Co. 6 were among the first responders to rush into the North Tower.

    They had climbed all the way up to the 27th floor on a search-and-rescue mission when the entire building shook violently.

    The South Tower had just collapsed.

    Receiving immediate orders to evacuate, Jonas and his men began heading down Stairwell B, a central staircase in the tower.

    When they reached the 20th floor, they came across Josephine Harris, a Port Authority bookkeeper who had been limping down from the 73rd floor.

    Josephine was exhausted, in pain, and no longer able to walk on her own.

    Jonas and his crew immediately stopped to help her, rather than leaving her behind to move faster.

    Firefighters Tommy Falco and billy Butler each took one of Josephine’s arms, while Jonas and Mike Meldrum led the way, slowly and agonizingly guiding her down the stairs.

    By the time they reached the 4th floor, Josephine collapsed.

    Utterly spent, she wept and urged the firemen to leave her behind and save themselves.

    The firefighters flatly refused.

    Suddenly, a deafening roar shook the stairwell, as the 110-story North Tower was collapsing on top of them.

    For 13 agonizing seconds, the building pancaked downward.

    Violent winds and heavy debris slammed through the stairwell, throwing the group around in complete, terrifying darkness.

    When it finally stopped, Jonas and his men realized a miracle had occurred: the small section of Stairwell B between the 1st and 5th floors somehow remained structurally intact.

    Though they were entombed under hundreds of thousands of tons of mangled steel and rubble, Jay Jonas, his 5 firefighters, Josephine Harris, and a Port Authority police officer were all alive.

    They were among 20 people inside the Twin Towers who survived the collapses.

    Had Josephine not collapsed on the 4th floor, the crew of Ladder Co. 6 would have been further down the stairs or out in the lobby- areas that were totally crushed and wiped out in the collapse.

    By slowing them down, Josephine had inadvertently kept them in the exact pocket of safety that saved their lives.

    Captain Jonas later said, “he put us in that position to be safe… she was our guardian angel.”

    The group remained trapped for 5 hours.

    When the debris and dust clouds shifted, Jonas looked up to see blue sky through the rubble, and said, “Guys, there used to be 106 floors over our heads. Now I see sunshine.”

    The group managed to dig themselves out and signal for help, and every single member of Ladder Co. 6 walked home to their families that night.

    What began as a rescue, became lifelong relationships.

    In the weeks following 9/11, the crew gifted Josephine a green firehouse jacket embroidered with “Josephine Our Guardian Angel.”

    Josephine remained incredibly close with her “brothers” from Ladder 6 until she passed away in 2011. At her funeral, the very same firefighters she saved served as her pallbearers, carrying her one last time.

    Her family kept the special green jacket for years, but recently returned it to the FDNY Ladder Co. 6 firehouse in Manhattan to be displayed as a permanent reminder of a bond forged in the rubble.
    5:26 PM · Sep 10, 2026
    https://x.com/Kentuckygirl1/status/2098176189236142453

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18. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 1:03 pm

    B’s Spin🐝
    @BsSpin
    911 – HE WAS THE JANITOR🔑

    And on September 11, 2001 the key in his pocket suddenly became one of the most important keys in America.

    His name was William Rodriguez.

    He had worked at the World Trade Center for roughly 20 years.

    That morning, Rodriguez was in the basement of the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building.

    Chaos erupted.

    A badly burned man appeared.

    Rodriguez helped him.

    Then he could have gotten out.

    He went back … Because Rodriguez had something almost nobody else in that building had:

    A MASTER KEY 🔑

    It opened the stairwell doors throughout the North Tower.

    Firefighters and police were rushing into a building thousands of terrified people were trying to escape.

    Rodriguez knew the building.

    And he had the key.

    So he went UP with the rescuers.

    Floor after floor.

    Door after door.

    Unlock. Open. Keep moving.

    People were coming down.

    Rodriguez kept going up.

    He reportedly made it as high as the 39th floor before firefighters ordered him to turn around.

    Think about that.

    The building had been struck by a passenger jet.

    Smoke was spreading.

    People were desperately trying to get OUT.

    And the janitor was climbing farther INSIDE.

    Rodriguez eventually made it back down and survived.

    But approximately 200 people he knew at the World Trade Center did not.

    25 years later he still carries the memories of that morning.

    And he still has the master key.

    We remember the firefighters.

    We remember the police officers.

    We remember the passengers who fought back.

    🔥We should also remember the janitor with the key.

    William Rodriguez wasn’t carrying a badge.

    He wasn’t carrying a weapon.

    He was carrying something much simpler.

    A key.

    And when America was attacked, he used what he had to help save whoever he could.

    Never forget William Rodriguez.
    5:56 AM · Sep 11, 2026
    https://x.com/BsSpin/status/2098365161421627475

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19. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 1:00 pm

    @BarackObama
    Barack Obama
    The Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
    @BarackObama
    If you were young in 2001, or weren’t even born yet, it can be hard to imagine what 9/11 felt like. The shock of that beautiful, cloudless morning. The heartbreak of the families whose loved ones were taken with such swiftness and cruelty. The realization that the forces of malevolence and violence were closer, and the future less certain, than we knew.

    But in the days that followed, we felt something else, too. Pride in the rescue workers who had rushed to the scene, and the passengers who had stormed the cockpit. Admiration for the men and women who left behind lives of comfort to serve their country. A deep resolve that nothing would break the will of a truly United States of America.

    Today Michelle and I are remembering those we lost that day, and those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the wars that followed. We pray for their families. And we hope Americans everywhere remember the true lesson of 9/11: that we can survive even our darkest days as long as we move forward as one nation and one people.
    6:57 AM · Sep 11, 2026
    https://x.com/BarackObama/status/2098380424749662664

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20. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 12:52 pm

    🇯🇵SAIGOU🇯🇵郷田剛士🇯🇵
    @oidonhagouda
    Most people remember the towers.

    Fewer people remember the water.

    On September 11, Lower Manhattan became an island with no easy way out.
    Roads were gone.
    The air was gray.
    People ran until there was only the river.

    Then the boats came.

    Ferries.
    Tugboats.
    Dinner boats.
    Private captains who were not asked
    and did not wait to be asked.

    The Coast Guard later called for every available vessel.
    By then, many were already moving.

    In less than nine hours,
    about 150 boats
    and about 800 mariners
    took nearly 500,000 people off that island.

    More people than Dunkirk.
    In one afternoon.

    No speech made that happen.
    Ordinary people with engines did.

    Twenty-five years later,
    that is the America I want to remember.
    Not only what was taken.
    What neighbors did when the streets were gone
    and the only road left was the water.

    From Japan,
    we have not forgotten.
    Made with AI
    8:00 PM · Sep 10, 2026
    https://x.com/oidonhagouda/status/2098214950275879410

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21. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 12:49 pm

    Chris D. Jackson
    @ChrisDJackson
    My Lord.

    @JoeBiden, 83 years old, battling Stage 4 cancer that has spread to his bones, stood for HOURS alongside @DrBiden as the names of 9/11 victims were read.

    Donald Trump fell asleep at the 9/11 event at the Pentagon.

    One showed respect despite his pain. The other couldn’t even stay awake.

    Trump is an embarrassment to the nation and the office he holds.

    Really says it all.
    10:25 AM · Sep 11, 2026
    https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/2098432766912156153

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22. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 12:48 pm

    British Royaltea
    @BritishRoyaltea
    25 years ago, Queen Elizabeth broke with tradition and ordered the US National Anthem played at Buckingham Palace.

    Today, by command of The King, that same anthem rang out again on the anniversary of 9/11.

    The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester stood in for His Majesty, joined by US Ambassador Warren Stephens.

    Never forget. 🇬🇧🇺🇸
    https://x.com/BritishRoyaltea/status/2098375129889640868

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23. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 12:45 pm

    Hillbilly
    @JamesHu27192912
    Delta Flight 15 takes off from Frankfurt at dawn.

    On board: 218 passengers. Families. Business travelers. A pregnant woman. Shirley Brooks-Jones, 65 years old, heading home to Columbus, Ohio.

    Five hours into the flight, a note reaches the cockpit.

    All U.S. airspace is closed. Land immediately.

    The captain says nothing about why. He tells passengers it’s a minor instrument problem. Privately, the crew already knows about the World Trade Center.

    Gander International Airport. Newfoundland, Canada. Midday.

    The plane touches down 400 miles off its route. Out the window, passengers count 38 other jumbo jets already parked on the tarmac.

    By nightfall, 53 international flights sit grounded here. Nearly 6,600 people are stuck, with nowhere to go.

    Nobody is allowed off.

    For 28 hours, 218 people sit inside that plane. No real answers. No word on what’s happening back home.

    Here’s what makes it worse: most of them don’t yet know if their own families are safe.

    Word finally spreads through the cabin. Two hijacked planes. The towers. The Pentagon. A field in Pennsylvania.

    The plane goes silent.

    Gander. Day two.

    Passengers finally step off the aircraft. They’re bused 45 kilometers to a town called Lewisporte.

    Population: just over 3,300 people.

    Lewisporte has no idea 218 strangers are about to double its guest capacity overnight. It doesn’t matter.

    The mayor puts out one call for bedding and food.

    The whole town answers.

    Schools close. Churches open. The Lions Club clears its hall and sets up cots by hand. High schoolers skip class to serve meals and translate for confused travelers.

    The pregnant passenger is placed in a home across the street from urgent care.

    Elderly passengers are welcomed into private houses, not shelters.

    Phone lines are opened for free, unlimited, day and night.

    When passengers try to pay shopkeepers back, the answer is always no.

    Nobody in Lewisporte will take a dollar.

    Local volunteers even bring out screech, the region’s famous rum, and host a mock “screeching-in” ceremony to make the exhausted travelers laugh.

    For three days, this town of fishermen and loggers cares for people it has never met and will likely never see again.

    Brooks-Jones later calls it something simple.

    She says: “the most beautiful experience I have ever had in my life.”

    Gander Airport. Three days later. Departure.

    Flight 15 is finally cleared to fly home.

    Before takeoff, Brooks-Jones asks the captain for one thing: permission to speak on the intercom.

    He hands her the microphone.

    She reminds everyone what Lewisporte just did for them. Then she asks for something back.

    Pledge sheets start moving up the aisle.

    Business travelers write checks. Strangers pass around pens. By the time wheels touch down in Atlanta, passengers have pledged $15,000.

    Brooks-Jones doesn’t stop there.

    Back in Columbus, she calls the Columbus Foundation. An anonymous donor hears the story and matches it instantly, doubling it to $30,000.

    In 2002, the fund gets a name: the Lewisporte Area Flight 15 Scholarship Fund.

    It’s built for one purpose. Send local kids to college.

    More than two decades later.

    The fund is still active.

    It has sent more than 300 students from the Lewisporte area to college and trade school. Doctors. Nurses. Engineers. Teachers.

    Some of them weren’t born yet when Flight 15 landed.

    Brooks-Jones has flown back to Newfoundland more than two dozen times since 2001. She still shows up for graduation ceremonies.

    The friendships that started on cots in a high school gym are still going, more than 20 years on.

    Most people who know this story didn’t hear it from a history book.

    They heard it from a Broadway stage. Lewisporte and Gander’s kindness became a musical called “Come From Away.” It has since played in cities across the world.

    Few people watching that show realize the scholarship fund behind it is still cutting checks to real students, every single year.
    5:40 AM · Sep 11, 2026
    https://x.com/JamesHu27192912/status/2098361036365578376

    @1OregonPatriot
    USA Patriot
    @1OregonPatriot
    3h
    When the sky closed and fear filled the cabin, Lewisporte did not ask who those 218 strangers were. It simply made room: homes for the elderly, a house across from urgent care for a pregnant traveler, cots in a high-school gym, free phone lines, meals no one would accept payment Show more

    @jmn101720
    Italianprincess1017 ⚖️
    @jmn101720
    3h
    Our Canadian neighbors have always welcomed Americans with open arms and even fought side-by-side after 9:11 in the war, assisted us with natural disasters in all states not just the ones that border their country. We owe a lot of respect and gratitude towards Canadians.

    @theresawoolley2
    theresawoolley
    @theresawoolley2
    3h
    Tears are flowing and under my breathe Dammit Canada!. Just to be clear the American people are against Canadian leaders not the citizens of Canada. @lewisporteacad to the people of Lewisport thank yo

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24. rikyrah says:

    September 11, 2026 at 4:48 am

    Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊

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