Whether they were close enough to smell burning jet fuel in Somerset County or spent the day glued to a TV screen, people across the Pittsburgh region carry vivid memories of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Twenty-five years later, Pittsburgh’s Public Source invited reader input on the tragic day when hijackers crashed planes into the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and (thanks to a passenger revolt) a field near Shanksville. We also asked how the event changed their lives, and how it changed America. Here are excerpts from some reader responses.
The smell of jet fuel
“I was working as a delivery driver for an auto parts warehouse on September 11, 2001. Part of my delivery route included Somerset County. As news broke of the plane hitting the first World Trade Center tower, I thought it was just an accident. Then, we found out about the second tower being hit. … When I arrived at work, we found out about what happened to the Pentagon. Then news came about Flight 93 going down in Somerset. I was encouraged to not go to my Somerset delivery stops. I went anyway, because it was my job to make these deliveries. One of my delivery stops was down the road from where Flight 93 went down in Shanksville.
When I got out of my delivery truck in that area, I smelled the jet fuel in the air. It sent chills through my body.
I will never forget what that air smelled like and what happened to all of those innocent people on Flight 93.”
— Margaret Bungard, auto parts advisor, West Mifflin
Hasn’t flown since
“I was 8 years old when 9/11 happened, going to school at the former East Hills Elementary in Pittsburgh. … I remember watching the constant footage of the towers collapsing and [the] plane hitting the south tower and people falling from the towers, and I remember telling my parents I was afraid to go to sleep. I haven’t been on a plane since, I don’t really think I will ever get over my fear of flying.”
— Damian Butler-Buccilli, human resources generalist, Penn Hills
Dad kept the gritty shoes
“I regard 9/11 as the first actual memory I have. I was only four years old at the time but I lived in the Bronx. My dad worked downtown, and part of one of the airplanes hit the building he worked in, and he had to safely lead his team out. … I remember my dad being gone for a few days after 9/11, because he went back to be part of the clean-up efforts at Ground Zero. … 9/11 also became a big source of trauma for my dad.
I think a lot about how my dad couldn’t throw away the shoes he wore that day, even though they were caked in dust and grit.
Besides the fact that the city was in complete disarray, my parents no longer felt comfortable bringing me into the city as a child. … It certainly changed America in ways that continued to reverberate for years. There are obvious ways — the way our airport security works, for instance, is completely different nowadays — but there was also a massive spike in post-9/11 nationalism that openly encouraged young people to sign up for the military. There was a big cultural shift, and suddenly, violence was the answer, everywhere you looked. Additionally, there was a new face for ‘evil,’ with an influx of racism occurring towards everyday Muslim Americans.”
— Melissa Lee, content updates manager for a sleep health website, Forest Hills
The beginning of the ‘payback’ era
“That morning was the first time we took our 9-month-old daughter to the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. …
The skies were so beautiful over Pittsburgh that day, yet things had gone so very wrong and not so far away.
I was glad I wouldn’t need to explain it to our daughter crawling placidly in the yard. … I remember the early speculation. ‘Who did this?’ people asked. And some were so quick to point fingers, while others were willing to wait, to defer to investigation. And the speed with which our country, our president, was ready to go to war on behalf of ‘payback’ for 9/11. That mentality now rules the day in too many places in our world.”
— Anna Loney, artist, formerly of Beechview, now Minnesota
Get me off of this coast
“I was an undergrad at Pitt then. I was in my junior year in college and was applying to grad schools. I wanted to get as far away from the East Coast as possible. I wound up in Washington state.
I guess it made me rethink my priorities, because as we saw, it could all fall apart in an instant.
… I don’t know if the countries we wound up attacking (War on Terror?) were responsible for the attacks. I just know that they were a convenient scapegoat that a lot of people saw as something they could demean and be rewarded for it. Just louder racism. It didn’t make it worse, but it did allow everyone to say more of the quiet part out loud.”
— Jennifer Walker, senior bioinformatics scientist, Wilkinsburg
Inspired to work in security
“I just got out of surgery two days earlier on my left kidney tube and was one of the very few kids to actually witness the attacks live on TV as soon as my grandmother told me that a plane hit the first tower in NYC. … It was one of the reasons I started watching the news more frequently and it is also a reason I became a security guard after my retail stint ran out. It is hard to think of just one thing that 9/11/01 changed forever. The main one is how security (as a whole) changed (not entirely for the better).”
— Kenneth Kissel, security guard, Brackenridge
Awakened to human rights
“Before 9/11, I wasn’t much interested in human rights issues. Since then I believe that all issues are human rights issues in one way or another.”
— Judi O’Connor, janitor, Bellevue
From unity to ‘Lord, help us’
“I recall both houses and parties in Congress standing on the steps of the Capitol singing ‘God Bless America’ — hard to imagine 25 years on. I do recall in the weeks afterwards, Muslim communities in many places opened their doors to the public, including in Burlington, Vermont, where we lived at the time. In retrospect, it was an opportunity for more religious/ethnic tolerance — but at best it seems quaint today. … The world has only gotten ‘smaller’ over the past 25 years, in spite of the worldwide understanding of the scope of 9/11 and COVID. Lord, help us.”
— The Dilly family, retired, Washington, Pa.
Rich Lord is the managing editor at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
