Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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TUPF
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Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

Post by TUPF »

Holy cr@p, the wife and I were there on Saturday/Sunday to see my kid solo at Carnegie Hall. No one we knew were affected.
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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NYer here. My office is about 10 blocks away. Didn’t know until I checked my phone.

As with most things involving NYC, the rest of the country is more freaked out than we are. NYPD responded immediately and professionally. We go on with our lives.
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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enviro5609 wrote:NYer here. My office is about 10 blocks away. Didn’t know until I checked my phone.

As with most things involving NYC, the rest of the country is more freaked out than we are. NYPD responded immediately and professionally. We go on with our lives.
As a former New Yorker, I expected no less.

Glad you are safe.
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

Post by enviro5609 »

WaveProf wrote:
enviro5609 wrote:NYer here. My office is about 10 blocks away. Didn’t know until I checked my phone.

As with most things involving NYC, the rest of the country is more freaked out than we are. NYPD responded immediately and professionally. We go on with our lives.
As a former New Yorker, I expected no less.

Glad you are safe.
I had a tweet saved somewhere that went viral of a New Yorker after that bombing on the east side in 2016. Responding to an official NYC gov twitter account stating that 1) there was a bombing and 2) the suspect was apprhended after he was chased into NJ, the tweet asked “Ok, but is the subway running with delays though?”
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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New Yorkers are our version of Keep Calm and Carry On. 8)
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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TUPF wrote:New Yorkers are our version of Keep Calm and Carry On. 8)
I had several conversations at differing times during homecoming with members of our basketball program (players, various staff) about the trip to Spain, and the terrorist attack there inevitably got brought up. Each person said, while it was terrible, it's NOTHING like what you see on TV. Basically because, as is human nature and must happen, life goes on outside of that one or two block area. They all said they first heard about it when their phones started blowing up from back home. Nothing changed where they were and it didn't affect their trip whatsoever. Then when they got back to their hotel and turned on CNN or whatever, you'd have thought all of Barcelona was a war zone. Basically when something like this happens, the TV makes it feel like life has stopped in that whole part of the country, but the whole thing, when said and done, caused a shut down of one block of a large city.

It was sorta eye-opening to me as I've never been near a terrorist attack, but as I thought about it, it made sense.
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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As someone who was awoken on 9/11 by a plane buzzing my building (5th Avenue, which the first plane used for navigation, dead ended into my apartment building), before crashing into the WTC a half mile away, that’s exactly how things work Pete. Things were weird for a few days with lower Manhattan closed off so that I could take a nap on Broadway had I wanted to, and the of smell smoke in the air. But life got back to usual very quickly and wife all of the news of what was going on a half-mile away I started having very normal interactions almost by the next day. When my mother suggested I might want to come home for a while to get away from the anthrax scare I not only disagree I was truly shocked or surprised she would think I would need to leave. What look like a war zone to her on TV with my daily existence and relatively normal, and I never felt in any danger.
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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Nice summation, Pete. A few years ago I was at the Ankara Hilton with a gaggle of folks from my company for a defense conference getting ready to board one of those Mercedes minibuses for an evening gala. Suddenly all of our smartphones started blowing up with an automated system my company uses when we are on foreign travel directing us to report in safely. No idea what was up. Then one of the guys sees CNN International in the lobby bar showing scenes of a bombing at the entrance of the ornate building we were supposed to be going to in a few minutes. Later we learned that Kurdish separatists were responsible and were actually targeting the upper echelon of Turkish military and ministers who were to be in attendance. Fortunately the damage was confined to the building and the only injuries were due to flying debris.

Needless to say, we never boarded the bus and though it was a little rattling, the conference went on the next day, albeit the lines were a little longer at the metal detectors. The Turks took it all in stride. I’ve even had my smartphone alert me overseas when there was an earthquake in the other side of a country.
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Re: Another NYC terrorist attack...on Halloween

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I was working in downtown DC on 9/11/01, and I can tell you that the impact was appreciable. I was a bit over 2 miles from the Pentagon, and we could not see anything from our windows.
The Government shut down, and most workers headed home, but since I was in one of the safest buildings in town (it was constructed in the 50's to house the national archives in the event of nuclear attack, so the floors between levels are 5-foot thick reinforced concrete and the walls are several feet of reinforced concrete), I stayed at my desk. Nearly everyone else left, though. My wife, who worked a block from the White House, was ordered to leave, so she took the subway out of town (against everyone's "better judgement"). The TV was reporting that the roads out of town were clogged, and that people were abandoning their cars and continuing on foot (which was not true), so I was content to stay put.

I finally left for home after I had been alone for several hours (around 5:00 PM).

The streets of DC looked almost post-apocalyptic. There were roadblocks at every intersection, manned by 3 policemen/soldiers with automatic weapons. I was required to turn either right or left at every intersection; no going straight across. It normally took me (without traffic) about 15 minutes to get from my office to across the river--that afternoon, it took over a half hour (roughly the same as a normal rush hour). Along the way, the only other vehicles I saw were emergency vehicles--ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, and humvees with machine guns mounted on the roof. No sirens; the silence was eerie (as I said, "post-apocalyptic").

As I got out onto I-66, I was the only car on the road. Normally, that road is tightly packed, 24/7, but that day it was empty. I could not see any vehicles on the road as far as I could see ahead or behind. As I went by the Pentagon (about 1/2-mile away, on the Roosevelt Bridge), all I could see was the column of smoke rising into the afternoon. My trip from the bridge to my house, normally about 45 minutes, took me less than 25 minutes.

When I got home, my wife was there...she had taken the Metro to the end of the line, then caught a cab to the Mall, where she shopped for a few hours. Things were highly "normal" out there, 25 miles from the Pentagon.

The main difference was that for months afterward, there were armed humvees parked at all approaches to the Pentagon, Capitol, and White House, with a watch-stander sitting behind the machine gun mounted on the roof. But we got used to that very quickly.
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