Thoughts of 9/11 (better late than never)

So September 11th has come and gone, and with that date, and the reminders of the media, my thoughts turn back to that fateful day when so many lives were changed. Where were you on that day in 2001 when the Twin Towers in New York fell?

I remember that morning very vividly as Connor was 1 1/2 and we had just gotten back from the Maritimes less than a month previously. At the end of August, I had shaved my head for a Kids with Cancer fundraiser so I looked like Uncle Fester. I was laying in bed, listening to the radio, half asleep when they announced that a passenger plane had crashed in to one of the World Trade Center Towers. It sounded like a navigation error originally so I told my husband, Tim, when he came out of the shower what had happened. I jumped in the shower myself, did my usual morning thing, getting Connor ready for his day home as I had to get to work and made it downstairs in time to see the second tower get hit. The realization that this was not a navigational error put both Tim and I in shock. I was working at WestJet at the time, as a Travel Agency Accounting person and although I knew that this was not affecting our airline immediately, that there would be some sort of hubbub that day.

I proceeded to drop Connor off at his day home and commuted to work, about a 20 minute drive from our home in Airdrie. The accounting department (fondly called and labelled "Bean Land") was abuzz with the news. A co-worker was watching streaming video and there was a cluster of us watching, transfixed with what was happening. News came that there were other planes en route to other strategic locations and the skies were being shut down with all flights diverted to the nearest airport that could accommodate them. It was then that the company wide call came out. The emergency action plan was to set up an outbound call centre to contact guests about cancelled and redirected flights. Anyone that had call centre experience that was not on call centre duty was called in to help. As both Lisa and myself both dealt with inbound calls with Travel Agency, and I did an 8 month stint in the Call Centre when I started my career at WestJet, we answered that call. I think it was 5 or 6 days before the skies opened again. It was surreal, seeing all these planes on the ground, tip to tail on the runways, where ever there was space. Some people were upset to have their travel plans disrupted, some were stranded in foreign countries and there was absolutely nothing we could do to help them except to contact them and update them as and when we could. It was a crazy time. Then all the new security protocols came down when the skies were opened again. It changed the industry forever. I don't think it has fully recovered since then.

So that is my memory of September 11, 2001. When they show all the different conspiracy theory shows, survivor shows and just revisit that devastating day I think of that terrible loss of life, the great stories of heroism and survival and the war on terror that followed and wonder where we would be now had it never happened.