First off, a brief recap of life since last Thursday.
Friday after work I got a call from Alex — turns out that it was his 23rd birthday, and he invited me to go out with him. Sounded cool to me, so at about 10pm I met up with Alex and his friend Melanie (who remebered me from The Lost Abby and Gig’s in Anchorage) at The Vogue. We hung out there for a bit until Nate showed up, then we all went over to The Mercury, a tiny little members-only goth/industrial club underneath an auto shop. I’d heard about it from Chad before, but this was my first time there — turns out it’s just about three blocks away from my apartment. Cool little place, too.
Friday night Alex and Melanie slept at my place, and we ended up spending all day Saturday bumming around town. That evening we went over to Casey’s place, and while neither Casey nor Chad were home, we spent a pleasant evening talking with Dez and ended up crashing out there.
Sunday I got dropped off back at my apartment (after a wonderful waffle breakfast compliments of Dez), and spent the rest of the evening doing laundry and relaxing at home. I did make one jaunt out to a local used book store and picked up Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hoftstadter. I’d tried to read dad’s copy years ago, and it was way over my head — now I’m trying again.
Monday was fairly uneventful all the way around — just another workday.
Today, however, has been all sorts of bizarre, for reasons which should be fairly well known by now.
At about 9am EST this morning (just as I was getting up, at 6am here), in an amazingly coordinated terrorist attack, hijackers took control of four commercial airline flights. While one apparently missed its mark, crashing in the Pennsylvania countryside, one plowed into the Pentagon, destroying much of one side of the building, and the other two were piloted into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, which both eventually collapsed.
Only nine hours later, reports are still coming in. The President addressed the nation about half an hour ago — I’m not sure I’m too thrilled with his speech. While not too terribly ludicrous, it was a little to militaristic in tone, and it’s too easy for me to see this escalating until we could be looking at a major war, if not handled carefully. This whole things got me extremely worried — it’s definitely going to be fascinating watching how events unfold from here on out.
My neighbor just got home — I’m going to see if I can watch the news on his TV as soon as he’s off the phone.
It’s almost 9pm now — about 15 hours after the first strike. I spent the past few hours next door watching the news reports with Damon. Scary, scary stuff — there was one video taken by a cameraman that just happened to be at street level and caught the second plane hitting the WTC. It’s amazing — you can watch the plane fly into the building, and at first (except for the speed), it looks like it’s just flying into a hangar as it disappears into the building. Then the explosions rip through the walls of the skyscraper and debris comes tumbling down to the street.
The video continues and cuts to the point when the tower started to collapse. At first there were the flames that had been shooting out of the floors that had been hit by the plane, then suddenly more dust clouds started shooting out as the top section of the building started collapsing into the lower floors. From there the building just fell floor by floor onto itself, sending huge roiling clouds of dust and debris into the air.
The cameraman kept filming until you suddenly saw dust clouds coming towards him just a block away, when he put the camera down and started running. The camera was still on and pointing behind him as he carried it, though, and you can see the conflagration literally chasing the camera’s view down the street. It looked for all the world like some of the destruction scenes from Independence Day — only all the more horrifying because you knew that it was real.
Current rough death toll estimates are upwards of 1300 at the very minimum — an estimated 800 killed at the Pentagon, 266 among the four hijacked airplanes, and there were around 200 fire, police, and rescue workers in New York that responded after ther first airplane hit, and were lost when the buildings collapsed. And adding those numbers up to roughly 1300 doesn’t even include the thousands of possible victims from the two WTC towers.
For the first time in history, the FAA today ordered the grounding of all airplanes within the United States. They did this as soon as it became apparent that the airplanes were being used as weapons in the attacks. It may be noon EST (9am here) tomorrow before planes are allowed to fly again. In addition to the thousands of stranded passengers across the nation, the disruption of shipping may create additional problems for the already struggling economy, and no-one seems sure what long-term effects that may have.
All and all, it’s been an absolutely incredible and tragic day. The single biggest terrorist attack the world has ever seen, with repercussions that can only be speculated about at this early stage, and only the weeks to come will show where things go from here.
And on that note — it’s time for bed. I’m sure I’ll hear more about this in the morning.