When did you learn that the twin towers were hit?

Within a minute of the first we got a phone call from a family member watching the news. Went to an office and watched the second one hit. Not a nice feeling.

My mom was watching TV when it first happened, so as soon as it hit the news she saw. I was stepping out of the shower, and she called me in to see what was going on. Pretty much immediately.

I was getting ready for work and my husband called me. He heard it in the radio. I turned on the TV about 10minuets before the second plane hit.

Very shortly after it happened while inspecting a hotel in South Carolina. The lobby television was on a news channel, and we caught the first images telecasted. The initial thought? What yahoo flew their small plane into the building?

Shortly after the first tower was hit. My husband heard about it on the radio and turned on the TV.

I thought it was a terrorist attack.

Right away. I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR. As soon as they got the news, they reported it, and as soon as they reported it, I knew. I, too, went upstairs to watch, and was pretty sure it was about terrorism, especially after the second plane hit.

It was on the news when I walked into my first class in highschool hours later. I originally thought it was just an accident, until I was informed otherwise.

Heard about it on the radio on the way into work. “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center.” I thought it was very clumsy of two (what I thought were) small planes to hit a big building.

While I was at work, I received a phone call from home that the disaster was in progress. My office had no TV and internet connections to New York were unavailable. My daughter’s high school class watched it on TV.

@janbb That is interesting! I was already at work and a co-worker’s son called to tell his mom. We turned the TV on and they were announcing that it was a small plane. However, like @wundayatta , everyone must have had a strong suspicion right from the start or the news wouldn’t have spread so fast, and everyone wouldn’t have been so interested.

It was on the news when I walked into work. Everyone was huddled in a conference room glued to the TV, so naturally I stuck my head in to see what was going on.

After school, about an hour after the first plane hit.

I didn’t understand it at the time – I was in kindergarten. I remember my family watching the news in our living room after school…my mom was very edgy, and I didn’t know why. My parents sort of shielded me from it, but I remember my teacher teaching our class the Pledge of Allegiance later on.

I was just a little kid.. I just remember sitting on the couch, while my mother and father talked about it. Then we went to get my siblings from school…

I probably heard the first one hit, but didn’t notice because there was watermain work going on below at that time, and backhoes were dragging steel plates around in the street.

A friend called and asked if we were ok, I asked why wouldn’t we, and she said there was something going on at the WTC.
Then my wife can in the door screaming about the WTC being hit, the flames, the people. She was on her bike on the sidewalk next to tower one when it got hit. It took were maybe fifteen minutes to get back home past the rubble and God knows what all else was on the street near tower one.
On the TV nobody quite knew what was going on yet, except that a plane had hit tower 1 – maybe an accident.

We turned on the TV and not all that later we saw, and heard, the second one hit.
In that moment all doubt about this being an accident evaporated.
It was a sound I’ll never forget. It was like the woof a gas stove makes when it’s lit, only it lasted about fifteen seconds and reverberated among the skyscapers between us and the towers about a half mile away.

My husband called me just a few minutes after the first plane hit. I jumped out of the bathtub and ran to turn the TV on. I thought that it was an accident, but my husband sounded really panicked about it, so it made me jumpy. I watched all the reports coming in until the second plane hit, then I knew it was a terrorist attack.

I was on my way to work from a early morning dentist appointment and heard it on the car radio. I thought it was an Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds type broadcast for a second. Then I was really scared and wanted to be with other people instead of alone in my car. When I got to work, everyone was somber and gathered in the executive editor’s office watching on television in silence. My husband was working at the Pentagon and I became very sick when I heard it had been attacked.

I was getting ready for work and turned on the tv… they had live feed of the first tower and were speculating that it might have been a communications problem between the pilot and air traffic control. Then the second plane hit while I was watching. The newscasters didn’t react at all for a minute or so, I think because they weren’t watching it… and I kept thinking “that didn’t just happen, did it?” But of course, it did.