September 11th will go down as one of the worst days in North American history. I can’t believe what happened yesterday. As I was getting ready to leave for work yesterday, I flipped over to CP24 to see what the weather would be like. It was about 8:55, and they were announcing that an explosion had happened at the World Trade Center. Reports started coming out that it was an airplane, and just as they were confirming it, a second airplane came into the frame, and smashed into the other tower. As I headed off to work, they reported that a third plane had smashed into the Pentagon, and then said that two other planes were not responding.
As the day went on, it got worse, the World Trade Center collapsed beneath it’s own injured weight. In the Pentagon, hundreds were rumoured dead. One of the two missing planes crashed in Pensylvania, and the other was rumoured to have crashed in Colorado…but has not been mentioned since. All air traffic was stopped in the United States, and diverted to Canada. Baseball games were all stopped, and the Film Festival in Toronto was cancelled. Most of downtown Toronto was evacuated as a precautionary measure, and by 3:00 this city was a ghost town.
I had to go downtown last night, and it took me 30 minutes to get from CTV to Wayne Gretzky’s…which is usually an hour drive. I was a guest on “The Wrestling Wrap” which will air late in September, and thankfully it was a nice break. I was able to get my mind off of the tragedy and just have a little fun.
Afterwards, I went to Char’s place, and we watched the rest of the night unfold. At some point last night I realized that between nine am and about 11:30 last night, I had not seen one commercial break.
Even today, there tons of fires going on in New York, a couple of the buildings around the area are on fire at noon today, and nobody know when it will end.
For me, the worst part isn’t the grand scale of the tragedy, it’s the individual stories that are coming out right now. One of the gentlemen on the plane that crashed in Pensylvania had called his mom before the plane crashed and said he and two others were going to attempt to overtake the hijackers.
That was tragic.
This was just a regular guy, with two kids, a wife, and a family who loved him. He was just going about his business, and this happened to him. There were people in the World Trade Center who were just doing their jobs one minute, and the next they were literally incinerated.
I seem to say this a lot lately, but “There but for the grace of god go I.”