September 11th, 2001:
When the news started to break, I was sitting in what was the Media Lab, on the first floor of Flaxman Building. I worked in that department, back in the days of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, before the Faculty of Arts Media & Design was formed, and as the news broke I was finishing a packed lunch, sitting in front of a TV monitor, watching the lunchtime news as usual.
The details at first were very sketchy, the newsreaders were saying that a plane had struck the World Trade Centre. There was a visual of a skyscraper with a hole in the side of it, but even the newsreaders didn't seem to have much of an idea of scale because the impression being given was that of a small craft, like a Cessna. But then the second plane hit, live on tv, and the scale suddenly became clear.
The sense of panic was palpable, not just on the streets of Manhattan but on the airwaves too. An international tragedy was unfurling in real time on tv screens around the world, and we were transfixed in horror, unable to look away. Lives were being lost right before our eyes, the world was changing, never to be the same again.
Throughout the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, word was spreading fast, and before long the Media Lab was filling with academics, admin staff, technicians, management. We had five or six TV screens on, each one showing a different network. At that time, the Media Lab's freeview system could take feeds from Fox News and CNN as well as the BBC, so we were able to watch the news from both sides of the Atlantic, the afternoon news here and the breakfast news from over there. VHS tapes were loaded into machines, and the news feeds recorded, recording that went on for several weeks from that point.
The news then broke of the plane hitting the Pentagon, and then of the plane coming down in Pennsylvania. We were watching as facts were reported alongside wild speculation, the realisation of it being a terror attack giving rise to a wave of paranoia and misinformation. Reports of planes being missing all over the world, of potential targets in global capitals, of fighter jets scrambled to shoot down unidentified jets. Planes being grounded all over, take-offs aborted on the runway, transport systems grinding to a halt. We watched as the Twin Towers collapsed, more lives extinguished in moments before the watching lenses of the world. We watched as the workers of Manhatten emerged from the dust, covered head to toe in grey ash, tearful, shellshocked, uncomprehending. We watched the emergency services doing their best to deal with everything at once, the chains of command stretched to breaking point, the Emergency Plans going out of the window. Everything unfurling in real time.
Home time came around, and very few people left the Media Lab. I don't remember what time we eventually closed it down for the night, but I do remember the amount of quiet in there. The room was full of people sitting, standing, watching, yet voices were largely absent. Nobody really felt like saying anything. For all of the voices that were silenced that day, the absence of ours seemed fitting.
Ten years on and we reach the anniversary. The rebuilding work is progressing slowly, the site is now a place of pilgrimage. I went over to New York in April of 2008, and I went to Ground Zero to pay my respects and have a moment of silence. I remember the sense of loss that I felt, and I remember very well the simmering anger I felt towards those standing nearby who were selling souvenirs of the tragedy. The site is surrounded by businesses, tower blocks, shops and roads, and yet there's a quietness about the place, as if those lost voices are muting out the sounds of the world around them.
Rest in peace, you will never be forgotten.
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