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Lindsey Kriete, 24, of Wellesley was scheduled to leave Reagan National on a 10 a.m. flight to Boston. About 9:30 a.m., all hell broke loose, Kriete said, as airport personnel began running through the terminal, telling passengers to leave quickly. By the time Kriete had rounded up her belongings and tried to calm people who were crying, all the taxis were gone and the subway had shut down.
She walked and hitchhiked miles back into the capital, using the Washington Monument as her point of reference. The trip was surreal, Kriete said, because there were so many police on horseback, motorcycles, boats, and in helicopters, but almost no passenger cars on I-395.
Earlier, Mary Lyman, 47, of Alexandria, had been driving on the same highway, passing the Pentagon on her way to her job as a lobbyist in Washington. She witnessed the crash.
''I saw a plane coming what I thought was toward National Airport, which is very close. You see that all the time,'' said Lyman, an Andover native. ''But this one looked different. It was at a very steep angle, and going very fast.
''I had been hearing about the World Trade Center before I left, and wondered, is this part of that? Then the plane disappeared, smoke started coming up, and traffic came to a complete stop,'' Lyman said. ''We all got out of our cars. We heard another couple of explosions, and I ran and got back in my car.''
''The police came and had us drive back the wrong way on the highway.''
Shortly after watching the second tragedy, I heard jet engines pass our building, which, being so close to the airport is very common. But I thought the airport was closed. I figured it was a plane coming in for landing. A few moments later, as I was looking down at my desk, the plane caught my eye.
It didn't register at first. I thought to myself that I couldn't believe the pilot was flying so low. Then it dawned on me what was about to happen. I watched in horror as the plane flew at treetop level, banked slightly to the left, drug it's wing along the ground and slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon exploding into a giant orange fireball. Then black smoke. Then white smoke.
Submitted By:
Jack Harvey, [email protected]
Class Year:
1975
Date:
Friday, March 15, 2002 12:26:55
MESSAGE:
1st Hand Account [X]
2nd Hand Account
Support/Encouragement
I work for the General contractor, AMEC Construction Management, Inc., who was renovating the Pentagon before September 11th, as the Safety Manager for the project. On sept. 11 I flew out on Reagan National Airport on the 6am shuttle to NY, to attend a corporate safety meeting. We were on Broadway near 40th st at 8:40am and could see the twin towers down the hill, when we entered the building. Ten minutes later we heard that the twin towers were hit and then the day started spiraling downhill. Later we heard about the Pentagon and then that there were 4 of our people missing(later they were accounted for). We then got out of the city 0n the 12th by train, after we got home and we heard that the train station had been closed due to a bomb threat 1/2 hour after we left. Arrived at the Pentagon at 6am on the 13th and have been at the Pentagon rebuilding the damage since then. Working around the clock 7 days week, it is amazing to see what kind of work can be done when everyone mixes pride and patriotism together to show the rest of world that you can knock us down but we will heal ourselves put things back together as good if not better than before. The goal of our project is to have people back at there desk looking out of there windows at the world outside the Pentagon on September 11, 2002 at 9:38am.
Originally posted by LaBTop
Btw, Craig Ranke, I interpreted the '73 date wrong on the Christine Peterson alumni page, it means in the US, the Class Year they got their degree and not their birth year. thus, she worked 28 years after graduation in Washington up till 9/11.
So we have to add about 24 years to her age on 9/11, which will be around 52 years then.
posted by LaBTop
I did not post that image, SPreston did in this post:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
He added those two pictures, one supposedly from Christine Peterson and one from Penny Elgas, to my quoted post which had those pictures not in it.
'I saw the faces of some of the passengers'
By Kimball Perry, Post staff reporter
As former Cincinnatian James R. Cissell sat in traffic on a Virginia interstate by the Pentagon Tuesday morning, he saw the blur of a commercial jet and wondered why it was flying so low. ''Right about the time it was crossing over the highway, it kind of dawned on me what was happening,'' said Cissell, son of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Jim Cissell.
In the next blink of an eye, he realized he had a front-row seat to history, as the plane plowed into the Pentagon, sending a fireball exploding into the air and scattering debris - including a tire rim suspected of belonging to the airplane - past his car.
''I've been in life and death situations before ... You can't count your thoughts. It was very surreal. It wasn't slo-mo. It was surreal. I think I was in kind of a state of shock,'' Cissell said.
A former photojournalist who, for the last three years, has worked for the Freedom Forum Museum in Arlington, Va., Cissell was listening to his car radio and the news of the planes slamming into the World Trade Center while sitting in traffic.
''I was thinking, 'If anything happens to the Pentagon right now, I don't have my (photo) gear with me,' '' he said today.
He usually cuts through the Pentagon parking lot to get to work, but was stuck on Interstate 110 because of extra security at the Pentagon following the attack on the World Trade Center.
''Out of my peripheral vision,'' Cissell said, ''I saw this plane coming in and it was low - and getting lower.
''If you couldn't touch it from standing on the highway, you could by standing on your car.''
In the next seconds dozens of things flashed through his mind.
''I thought, 'This isn't really happening. That is a big plane.' Then I saw the faces of some of the passengers on board,'' Cissell said.
''I remember thinking, 'The World Trade Center was just the beginning, there's going to be more.' ''
He remembers the helipad the plane flew over before smacking into the Pentagon was close enough to him that ''I could have thrown a baseball at it and hit it.''
Then the plane, which was taking out telephone and power lines on its way in, hit the building.
While he remembers seeing the crash, Cissell remembers none of the sounds.
''It came in in a perfectly straight line,'' he said.
''It didn't slow down. I want to say it accelerated. It just shot straight in.''
Publication date: 09-12-01
The Daily Camera
Workers recount day of horror in nation's capital.
By Jessica Wehrman
Scripps Howard News Service.
WASHINGTON — Americans on their way to work in Washington, D.C., today found that living in the nation's capital had changed in frightening and sickening ways. Here's where some of them were and what they saw:
Marine Commander Mike Dobbs was standing on one of the upper levels of the outer ring of the Pentagon looking out the window when he saw an American Airlines 737 two-engine airliner strike.
"It was an American airlines airliner. I was looking out the window and saw it come right over the Navy annex at a slow angle. It looked to me to be on a zero-to-zero course. It seemed to be almost coming in slow motion. I didn't actually feel it hit, but I saw it and then we all started running. They evacuated everybody around us."
Terrence Trepal, who works in the Defense Department's office of legislation. "It sounded like what would happen if a plane was passing over the building, but it was way too low. And then to us it sounded like a sonic boom."
September 12, 2001
The worker, William Middleton Sr., was running his street sweeper through the cemetery when he heard a harsh whistling sound overhead. Middleton looked up and spotted a commercial jet whose pilot seemed to be fighting with his own craft.
Middleton said the plane was no higher than the tops of telephone poles as it lurched toward the Pentagon. The jet accelerated in the final few hundred yards before it tore into the building.
"My sweeper has three wheels. I almost tipped it over as I watched," Middleton said.
In those first minutes, he thought he had seen a plane in trouble, not a terrorist attack.
Middleton and his co-workers at Arlington continued to work Sept. 11 as Washington offices closed and buildings emptied. The cemetery crew had no choice. Funerals were scheduled and burials had to be completed, chaos and all.
As Middleton labored, he could see the destruction less than a mile away at the Pentagon, where the U.S. military mobilized for war.
Another Arlington worker who declined to be interviewed in front of the media told a story that the military historians had not heard in the 244 interviews they had conducted through last week. The man said a mysterious second plane was circling the area when the first one attacked the Pentagon.
In a blur.
The Air Force had scrambled fighters nationwide within moments of the attacks. In the cockpit of one of those F-16s was Lt. Col. Brad Jackson, a 22-year veteran of the Minnesota Air National Guard's Duluth-based 148th Fighter Wing.
He had arrived at his base about 10 minutes after the second plane hit the World Trade Center. "When the first one hit, I figured at worst some guy had strayed off course," he said. "With the second one, everyone put one and one together: This is not an accident. Some serious stuff is going to go on in the next 12 hours."
The next few hours passed in a blur as crews got the wing's 15 fighters ready to fly, trying to round up as many of the wing's 35 pilots as possible.
About 5:30 p.m., the initial order came: Fly south to accompany Air Force One on its way back to Washington, D.C. But almost as soon as the 148th's fighters were in the air, the order was canceled and the pilots were directed to Chicago. Jackson sipped coffee as he circled the city for the better part of five hours.
Bill Gates No Longer World's Richest Man.
"" Warren Buffett is the richest man on the planet.
Riding the surging price of Berkshire Hathaway stock, America's most beloved investor has seen his fortune swell to an estimated $62 billion, up $10 billion from a year ago. That massive pile of scratch puts him ahead of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who was the richest man in the world for 13 straight years."" - Forbes (03/05/08)
So where was Warren Buffett the morning of 9/11 and what was he doing?
Mr. Buffett was reportedly at his home in Omaha, Nebraska watching TV when he heard about the terrorist attacks. He was getting ready to host his "last annual golf charity event" which just happened to be at the U.S. Strategic Command headquarters located at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha. Offutt AFB is, coincidentally, where President G. W. Bush flew to on Air Force One later in the day for "safety." This early golf charity event hosted by Mr. Buffett was to include celebrities, professional athletes, and a small group of business leaders in which one of these business leaders became a very lucky person.
This very lucky person was Anne Tatlock, the CEO of Fiduciary Trust Co. International. Now what made Mrs. Tatlock such a lucky person for being invited to this charity event that morning? Mrs.Tatlock not only works in the World Trade Center, but her offices were right where Flight 175 crashed into the South WTC Tower.
She was escorted by military officers to an officer's lounge with TV to watch it happen.
Fiduciary Trust Company Description
A subsidiary of Franklin Resources, Fiduciary Trust Company International specializes in private banking and investment management for individuals and families; to a lesser extent, it serves institutional investors as well. The company caters to its target clientele of wealthy families by providing a range of integrated services (investments, trusts, estate planning, private banking, and more) under its Family Resource Management banner. It also offers trust and custody services. Fiduciary Trust, which has been increasingly involved in international investments since it entered that market in the 1960s, has some ten offices around the globe. Founded in 1931, it was acquired by Franklin Resources in 2001.
Copyright 2001 Denver Publishing Company
Rocky Mountain News
(Denver, CO)
September 12, 2001
Wednesday Final Edition
SECTION: NEWS/NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 49A
LENGTH: 221 words
HEADLINE: ALAMEDA GRAD MISSES CHAOS AT PENTAGON BY 10 MINUTES
BYLINE: M.E. Sprengelmeyer, News Washington Bureau
DATELINE: ARLINGTON, Va.
BODY:
If he had been on schedule, a former Lakewood man might have been on the bottom of the Pentagon rubble.
Michael James, 37, a Navy information technician watched in horror from
his car Tuesday as an airplane careened off a helicopter pad and smashed into the side of the Pentagon, where he spends about half of his day. "I was supposed to be in the Pentagon underneath all that rubble," said James, pressed into service directing gawker's away from a road leading to the compound. "If it would have happened 10 minutes later, I would have been down there."
He is often in the lower Corridor 4 offices of the Navy telecommunications center around 6 a.m., but Tuesday he was away taking a physical fitness exam.
After the workout he went home to shower and that's when he saw on TV a
hijacked airplane smash into the World Trade Center.
As he rushed to get ready, he and his wife, Isabelle, saw the plane veer toward the Pentagon.
"The plane came over the top of us and brushed the trees, " he said.
"Then it looked like it hit the helicopter pad and skipped up and went right into the first and second floors."
His offices are in the general vicinity of where the plane crashed.
"No, I don't feel lucky because I still can't account for my people, six of them," said James, an Alameda High School graduate.
NOTES:
AMERICA UNDER ATTACK: COLORADO
LOAD-DATE: September 14, 2001