Maybe 9/11 shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Terrorists had already attacked New York’s World Trade Center once before, in 1993.
Then, in December 1999, authorities in Port Angeles caught Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber, coming off the Coho ferry from Victoria with a cache of explosives he intended to detonate in Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve.
Yet when those hijacked jets slammed into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, and another hit the Pentagon, and yet another crashed in a Pennsylvania field, the shock was so great that we knew the world would never be the same.
Later would come the fallout: the war in Afghanistan, the no-shampoo-in-your-carry-on airport rules, the thickening border. Victorians long used to going to the U.S. or Mexico without travel documents found themselves queuing up outside the overwhelmed Fort Street passport office, where the waits were so long that some paid homeless people to hold their places in line.
That first day was when life turned upside down, though. Hundreds of travellers were stranded at the Victoria airport as planes were grounded. Fighter jets from Cold Lake, Alta., repositioned to CFB Comox. The American Gynecology and Obstetrics Society cancelled its convention at the Victoria Conference Centre. The TC rushed an extra edition into print.
People were dazed, frightened, unsure of their feet as the day unfolded on screen. At noon, a crowd of 60 stood grim-faced and mute in front of the bank of televisions in A&B Sound on Yates Street, where they sold out of radios and portable TVs. Outside, a young man downtown bellowed racial slurs to the world at large. Elsewhere, a Victoria father admonished his young daughter not to let her classmates know she was Muslim.
Tears flowed at an interfaith gathering at the University of Victoria. Unbidden, a crush of donors packed the Canadian Blood Services clinic. Premier Gordon Campbell’s relief was obvious after learning his two sons in New York were safe.
In Qualicum Beach, a retired Air Canada pilot returning from a morning of fishing was waved down by a neighbour who he assumed wanted to talk about that week’s arrest of the gun- and grenade-wielding hijacker who had forced him to fly to Cuba 30 years earlier. No, the neighbour was bringing word of fresh, deadlier hijackings.
Most of us can recall where we were when we heard of the attacks, 20 years ago today.
We asked Times Colonist readers for their memories of 9/11. Here’s a what they had to say:
“It was a beautiful New York morning and I had just started a meeting with an architect for a project on penthouse on the upper west side. My cell phone rang with a call from my partner telling me that while he was sitting on our shop pier in Red Hook he watched a plane fly into the towers. I asked him if it was a small plane and he said, ‘No, a passenger plane.’
“I told my client and architect and we looked out the window to see the smoke billowing out of the tower. We were stunned to say the least. After some time we tried to carry on distractedly, then my partner called again telling me a second plane had just hit the other tower. At that point I knew we were under attack and told him to call all the guys and tell everyone to get home.
“I said the meeting should be rescheduled and we all went home. It was the most surreal moment of my life driving back to my midtown apartment seeing people walking the streets, still unaware of what was happening. Watching the first tower collapse was the most helpless moment I’d felt up to that point in my life, knowing people were still in the building. I watched people walking uptown throughout the day covered in ash, stealth bombers made runs up the Hudson and there was a stillness that Manhattan never has.
“The hardest part was the aftermath. One of my projects was a renovation of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, next door to a fire station. When I parked my truck in the lane a couple days after there was one firefighter there. I drummed up the courage to ask him if the guys were OK. He told me ‘they’re all gone.’ I couldn’t speak. I just got in my truck and wept.”
Tim Murphy
Esquimalt
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After the twin towers were hit, a friend called Terri Garbutt from Toronto to tell her that she had received a frantic email from a friend and work colleague on business in New York. “If they are looking for me, this is where you will find my body,” it read.
“He has never been found,” Garbutt writes. “His widow had their second son on my birthday in January 2002.”
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“As an Air Canada flight attendant, I was working from Toronto to Atlanta that morning. Mid-flight, the pilots called me up to the flight deck: having received a message that planes were getting hijacked, the captain instructed me to keep passengers out of the cockpit using ‘lethal force.’ How strange that was to contemplate!
“Air traffic controllers then radioed to say we should watch out for a rogue plane in our vicinity which was not responding: that turned out to be United 93. We banked sharply, the three of us scanning the skies, and high-tailed it back to Toronto.”
Colin Gardiner
North Saanich
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Sheila Kaye’s phone began ringing at 5:30 a.m. She and her husband had only arrived in Victoria a few days previous, having sold their Manhattan condo, and their children wanted to be sure they weren’t still in New York.
Turn on the television, the kids told them. They did so, watching in horror as the towers collapsed and people fell from windows.
“A few days later, I called my cousin in New York whose son is an emergency doctor, then working at Bellevue Hospital. He said the hospital had been preparing for hundreds of casualties but so few came as so many died or were missing.”
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B.C. Ferries employee Abdulla Kudra glanced up while cleaning the waiting area of the Swartz Bay terminal. “Multiple television sets were showing pictures of the two planes hitting the World Trade Center buildings. I was stunned. Even today it seems unbelievable.”
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Shan O’Hara had to fly back to Victoria early from a union convention in New Brunswick because he had a kidney operation scheduled on Sept. 11.
As he prepared to head for the Royal Jubilee that morning, the Q’s Ed Bain announced that a plane had struck a building in New York. O’Hara assumed the incident wasn’t serious, but by the time he came out of the operating room, the world had changed.
It was surreal to watch it unfold on TV from his hospital bed. “At first I wondered if it was really happening or whether I was still under the influence of the anesthesia.”
It was a good thing he had flown home from New Brunswick on Sept. 10. Other delegates were stuck there for two weeks.
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“After hearing about the planes in New York, I drove to a Tofino restaurant where they had a television,” writes Victoria’s Mur Meadows. “The big screen was showing what I thought was a movie. Though I have since quit, I started smoking when I saw the World Trade Center buildings fall.”
Meadows volunteered to shuttle devastated U.S. tourists to their hotels. He ended up making five trips.
“Everybody wanted to give me money, but I declined. A few months later I was cleaning my car and found over $100 behind my seat, left by the kind-hearted Americans I met that fateful day.”
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“I was only 15 years old in 2001, living in Sweden. Yet Sept. 11 had a profound impact in my life. It ended up becoming a turning point for me personally.
“I remember very vividly running back home from school around 3 p.m. and saw my whole family glued to the TV screen. A house that usually was very loud and chaotic suddenly became so quiet. No one really understood what was happening. And worst of all, this had been done in the name of our religion. “I remember asking myself some very tough questions. Was this really Islam? Is this what we stand for? Is this who we are? This ignited my passion and pursuit of knowledge about Islam and set me on the path of becoming the Imam I am today. The more I studied the more I came to realize how perverted people’s understanding was of this religion of peace. On that day I made a promise to myself to help people understand the true Islam, the one almost two billion people around the world peacefully practise today.”
Imam Ismail Mohamed Nur
Saanich
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For Saanich’s Helen Riske, 9/11 was a day of “awakening” that put a lot of things into perspective. “One month into a six-month chemo regime, I was feeling sorry for myself. But I realized that, unlike the individuals who died that day, I still had time to do what I wanted with my life. I could still see my loved ones again, I could run the errands at the end of the day, and I could still live my hopes and dreams. I still had those opportunities and I have been grateful to have been able to live life, on my terms.”
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Three months earlier, Saanich’s Lee Peacock had gone to New York. “A highlight was going up to the south tower’s 102nd floor observation deck. It was a beautiful sunny day and the views were spectacular.”
On Sept. 11 she wondered: how would the wonderful, welcoming people of New York cope?
“Five years later we returned to NYC and visited Ground Zero. I will never forget our tour guide showing usa photo of her son George, a firefighter who had died on 9/11.”
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Langford’s Brenda Watson awoke to her husband yelling, “You have to come down to see what is happening!”
She flew downstairs and, with her sons, watched buildings burn and collapse. “It was a terrible feeling of chaos and fear. Time stood still as we gazed at what appeared to be a disaster movie. I remember going through the motions of driving to work that morning where I would be seeing my students and realizing I would be having some very real and vulnerable conversations about the state of the world.”
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“My late husband and I had just returned from a six-week cruise to Alaska in our boat,” writes Saanich’s Alice Kool. It was a trip in which they would spend days anchored in small bays or floating below mountains and glaciers, awestruck by the beauty of nature. “The contrast between that and the reality of what was wrong with the world as represented by 9/11 will be forever with me.”
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In 2001, Sooke’s Reg Street and his wife lived in Newark, New Jersey, in a stack of artist lofts called The Toy Factory where everybody bickered. When Street built furniture there, sawdust would trickle through the floorboards, causing the painter below, an old acquaintance of Andy Warhol, to shout up at him angrily.
Then came 9/11, when they watched the day unfold from the roof of their building. Stealth fighters circled in the sky.
They eventually decided to leave. “At our moving-out sale, the painter came. We traded a painting for a table I’d made. This was the spirit we left behind.”
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“Jaws agape at the television screen, the drill crew and I were having breakfast at the Eagle Plains Hotel on the Dempster Highway in the north Yukon, arguably one of the most remote, road-accessible, full-service hotels in Canada,” writes Victoria’s Jack Dennett. “By 9 we had seen enough and our helicopter pilot left to call in a flight plan. He returned to announce the national shut down of air space. We were grounded.”
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As Barry Hill drove to his Richmond office, he could see two fighter aircraft escorting a large passenger jet to Vancouver International Airport. “I elected to set up a chair outside and watched the steady stream of incoming aircraft over the next number of hours,” the Oak Bay man writes. “By the end of day, every bit of available runway space at YVR was occupied by foreign planes (and their occupants).” To this day, he is reminded of the chaos all around North America on 9/11.
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James Bay’s Jerry Vizner and his pedicab would meet tourists coming off the Coho and Clipper. “On 9/11, as the ferries arrived, the look on people’s faces was unbelievable. Some of the women were in tears. Not knowing what to say, I tried to help them with a warm greeting to Canada.” For the rest of the day, people crowded around TVs in bars and restaurants. With flights grounded, visitors didn’t know how they would get home. “Some people even reserve my pedicab for tours, to keep their mind off of what had happened that day.”
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“I was in Halifax designing a production of the great American musical Gypsyat Neptune Theatre. The city was full of passengers from redirected planes and the theatre welcomed them to the final dress rehearsal.
“With way-laid, emotionally impacted Americans the show began. In one scene, a full-size painted drop of the Stars and Stripes appeared with an eagle in full flight. The impact on the audience was utterly unexpected. Many of them stood with their hands on their hearts. Some were crying and hugging. Some saluted. They almost stopped the show. At the end the cast got a standing ovation.”
Arthur Penson
Victoria
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Eva Eaton had recently moved to Fort McMurray from Victoria. On the afternoon of 9/11, fighter jets from CFB Cold Lake began flying low over the city. “We could clearly see the pilots and the undercarriages. As normally planes are not allowed to fly over the oilsands, this was something new. My girls were concerned about the noise and what was going on. I had to explain in terms they could understand that the oil sands plants where their dad was working were being protected and kept safe.”
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Esquimalt’s Mike Dupuis was teaching in Peterborough, Ont. “After morning announcements I was told to bring my Grade 8 class to the library. The librarian asked the class to be seated and told them a disaster had happened at the World Trade Centre in New York. A class of 13-year-olds is normally never quiet but when the burning towers filled the screen, absolute silence filled the room. When the South Tower collapsed there were gasps. As CNN tried to make sense of the event, I felt confusion, then disbelieve and finally shock. I knew we had witnessed a turning point in history.”
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Having made their annual trip to Ashland, Oregon for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Victoria’s David Sproule and dined with another couple Sept. 10, eagerly anticipating the plays they would see.
But the next morning brought shock and disbelief. “We had tickets to see a play that afternoon but expected the performance would be cancelled.” Sproule writes. No, the theatre company had voted unanimously to continue. “They were professionals after all and out of respect for the victims they played their parts. We saw two more plays but there was no joy on the streets or in the restaurants as the town was quiet and sombre.”
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Victoria’s Lynn Martin was working at Whitehorse General Hospital. “There was a rumour that a flight from Korea was coming in piloted by terrorists and that it was heading for Whitehorse, due to arrive in minutes. Staff at the airport, emergency services and the hospital were preparing for a disaster if the plane landed in the Yukon River valley instead of the runway.”
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R.I. Sutherland stood transfixed with horror as the television showed people jumping to their death. Fear and anger welled up. “Memories of World War II flashed through my head,” the Victorian wrote. “It took me days to stop running to the window every time I heard a plane overhead.”
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His flight from Calgary having just landed in Vancouver, Parksville’s Barry Knowles noticed crowds of people watching an overhead TV in the terminal. The screen showed a plane flying into a high rise building. He thought it was Hollywood movie. With his connecting flights to Nanaimo and Tofino grounded, he rented a car and caught a ferry.
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It was on day two of the PackExpo trade show when word whipped around George Zador’s Las Vegas hotel: “We are under attack, go check your TV.”
Vegas shut down — shows suspended, casinos closed, no way to get home. “Black Hawk choppers circled all day, the word out that Sin City may be next hit,” the James Bay man wrote. “It was another three days before we got a rental car and drove home to Vancouver, relieved to be safe.”
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Campbell River’s Bob Hillier was with the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa somebody said a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.
“As Foreign Affairs members, we knew our working lives were forever changed.” In the next 10 years he was involved with the repatriation of Canadian-Iranians from Iraq, the establishment of Canadian representation in the Baghdad green zone and the support of Canada’s diplomatic team in Kabul. “I was also proud that our government never committed to the illegal invasion of Iraq, although this precipitated a breakdown of our co-operation with our five-flags partners who were all members of the ‘coalition of the willing.’ ”
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McGill student Kate Soles reacted in the same way many did on 9/11: she reached out to family, struggling to get a land line connection home to Victoria. “Footage of the devastation consumed us for months but, as the dust both literally and figuratively settled, we saw that everything is impermanent. We suffered because we had to let go of the things, people, routines and sense of reality we need in order to avoid the brutality of change. We found that change finds us regardless. And, if anything positive emerged from such horror, it was that we learned to submit to reality, to show up with compassion, and to live with gratitude.”
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Victoria’s Ted Davies was at a company training session in Atlanta, Georgia. “About 150 colleagues and I watched together in horror as the second plane hit the second tower. I felt disbelief, then confusion about how such a horrible thing could happen.
“For some time, I have felt sadness about how the world has changed as a result of the attack. Now, looking back, I am heartened by how people came together and helped though the tough times.”
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Saanich’s Pat and Bob Young were over the Atlantic when the pilot announced there had been an incident in New York City and the plane was returning to Amsterdam.
“By the time we landed in Amsterdam the airport runways were crowded with airplanes of all kinds,” Pat writes. They spent three more days in Amsterdam before arriving home safely.
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“Early on Sept. 11th, while travelling in Newfoundland by camper van with our Newfoundland dog, we visited L’Anse aux Meadows, the Viking summer campsite established over 1,000 years ago. The staff seemed distracted because, we thought, UNESCO representatives scheduled to come for the opening of a new display hadn’t arrived. We didn’t know what the problem was until, that afternoon at a gas station, we watched a replay on TV of a plane flying into the second tower. Later we saw dozens of planes lined up at Gander airport, and met stranded passengers in St. John’s, who loved our Newfie.”
John and Sue Smith
Qualicum Beach
