10 Years Later

Today is the 10 year anniversary of the tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York. Everyone seems to be posting memories, so I thought I would too. I didn’t have a blog back then. I didn’t start blogging until June 2002. Twitter and Facebook weren’t around back then either. So I’m going off of memory.

At the time, I was working for a company located on the north side of the Fargo airport. It was a company that had weather modification projects in various locations in the US and in other countries. The projects involved having airplanes fly around and in clouds and thunderstorms for rain enhancement and/or hail suppression.

I found out about what was going on on a Dale Earnhardt Jr message board. One of my co-workers brought in a small B&W tv, and we watched events unfold on that. Not a lot of work got done that day. They grounded all air traffic, so that put a halt on the projects that were currently in operation.

I don’t remember a whole lot more than that. I do remember it being a little surreal being at the airport and not hearing planes taking off or landing.

Like I said, this happened before we had social media. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if we had had Twitter and/or Facebook back then. These days when major events happen, you find out more information on Twitter than you do from the broadcast networks. In fact, in some cases, the networks are using information that they got from Twitter live on air. I’m watching the coverage from 2001 on MSNBC right now. They were scrambling for information to pass along. If this had happened in today’s time, there would have been pictures and tweets and more information than anyone could disseminate.

We most certainly live in a different time 10 years later. I haven’t flown since before this happened, but I’ve seen enough stories on the news to see how strict things have become. I definitely have no desire to get on an airplane now, but that is because of the security stuff that you have to go through. In all honesty, I’m glad there’s all that security stuff in place. Yes, it is a pain in the ass for those who have to fly, but I’d rather have to deal with it than have to worry about someone hijacking a plane and crashing it into another building.

And it’s not just air traffic woes. We’ve pretty much been at war overseas since this happened. The “war on terror” seems never ending.

I hope to never see anything like this happen ever again in my lifetime (or any time after that either).