I talk about it every year. I always think I won't, I think I'm over it, but then I do. Because how can you ever be over it?
It was just so sunny. That's what I remember. It was SO early and SO sunny when my boyfriend called me at 6am. At first he tried to calmly tell me to go get all of my money out of the bank and start driving, but when I questioned this extremely unorthodox request, he yelled "We're under attack! Turn on the TV!". I ran to the living room and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was the perfect outline of a plane in the side of one of the towers of the World Trade Center. What was worse, is that about 10-15 seconds later, I watched the second plane hit the other tower.
It was surreal. It seemed like a movie. The whole 4 minutes of this phone call, I just felt were a nightmare. I wanted to just stay calm, but he was adamant I needed to get OUT of Los Angeles immediately, this isn't an accident, it's an attack on the country. When I hung up, it was playing again on TV and the people on CNN and the LA news had no idea what was going on. My boyfriend was super into politics, I wondered if maybe he was just overreacting. It was hard to keep composed. I felt like I may have been witnessing the next Pearl Harbor. I called my producer to tell her she needed to get in the office right away. We had actually been working with people in New York so I knew people were already in our building starting their day even though we were 3 hours behind them. She didn't know what was going on. I called Adam to beg him to leave the city with me, but he refused. Always has to be the hero, that one. By the time I hung up with him and called my mom, the plane had hit the Pentagon and I was officially in panic mode. I grabbed 2 pictures of my family, my baby blanket and left. I literally didn't know at that point if I would be going back there ever again. That's how scary it all felt. Was this war? Had WW3 just started?
I sped down to our offices and I just remember the sun. It was so, so, so sunny on a perfect summery fall day. And I remember how bright the sun had been on TV watching the planes crash into those buildings. I called my producer back to let her know this was real, something really bad was happening. She didn't answer. Every radio station on the way there was doing a terrible job of keeping anyone calm. They just kept saying there was no telling where the next plane would hit. I knew we had crew members on flights from New York back to LA, I was desperate to remember the flight numbers and the times, but all I could do was stare up at the sky and look for planes. I remember running up the stairs of our building and telling everyone to turn on their TVs. There were stylists in the conference room and as soon as they saw the buildings, one ran out of the office and the other started furiously dialing the phone. They both had family in Manhattan.
I was just barely staying composed. One of our Executive Producers walked out of his office and said we would probably be next. This did not help. I said we needed to find out what flights our people were on, and which ones had crashed. At that exact moment, CNN announced another plane had went down in an unknown location. I was officially over it. I was leaving the city and heading to my boyfriend in Palm Springs. I ran into our production bay, grabbed the folder with flight information in it, wrote it down on a post it, thrust the folder into my producer's hands and left.
By this time, chaos was starting to take hold of LA and people were panicked. I took the quickest route down to the freeway which happened to pass by the federal building. There were police EVERYWHERE. They were trying to control traffic and they were trying to barricade the building from the passing vehicles. I remember a female police officer trying to stop me and the car in front of me and we didn't even think about it. She literally had her hands on my hood, making eye contact with me telling me to turn around and we both kept going, bumper to bumper, we were only about 4 blocks from the 10 and we certainly weren't heading back now. Getting on to the freeway was intense. I had never seen it move like that. Literally 5 lanes in unison at around 85-90 mph. Everyone had the same idea around the same time. And nobody held anyone else up. One of the assistants called me from the office, scared, asking if she could get a ride. I told her it was impossible now, I couldn't get off the freeway even if I wanted to.
The radio stations' news was still so ridiculous and borderline fear-inducing. In their defense, nobody really knew what was going on. It was all so confusing, I mean, nobody had even heard of Bin Laden or Al Qaeda back then. Timothy McVeigh was the only terrorist whose name I knew at that time. It still didn't seem real. They announced any and all flights in this country were being grounded at any available airport. Nobody wants to think they are greatly overreacting by fleeing their city, but nobody wants to be in a building when a plane crashes near it either. And I'll tell you, you never realize how weird it is to see zero airplanes in the sky until it happens. Nothing. Just blue as far as the eye could see. Not even a jet stream. And if you did see something, it was terrifying. You prayed it was just a bird.
I finally felt pretty safe once I was about 50 miles from the city. I mean, nobody crashes a plane into Ontario, CA, right? I was still so worried about Adam and everyone who stayed, but it seemed over now or like our military was taking action at least. The only good part of this drive is when I got the call that all the people we had flying back from New York were safe. Their planes had been grounded in other cities.
They had been on top of the towers the day before while sightseeing. The day before.
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