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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Twenty-five years later, Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source invited reader input<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The smell of jet fuel<\/p>\n \u201cI 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. \u2026 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. <\/p>\n \nWhen I got out of my delivery truck in that area, I smelled the jet fuel in the air. It sent chills through my body.\n<\/p>\n I will never forget what that air smelled like and what happened to all of those innocent people on Flight 93.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Margaret Bungard, auto parts advisor, West Mifflin<\/p>\n Hasn\u2019t flown since<\/p>\n \u201cI was 8 years old when 9\/11 happened, going to school at the former East Hills Elementary in Pittsburgh. \u2026 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\u2019t been on a plane since, I don\u2019t really think I will ever get over my fear of flying.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Damian Butler-Buccilli, human resources generalist, Penn Hills<\/p>\n Dad kept the gritty shoes<\/p>\n \u201cI 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. \u2026 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. \u2026 9\/11 also became a big source of trauma for my dad. <\/p>\n I think a lot about how my dad couldn\u2019t throw away the shoes he wore that day, even though they were caked in dust and grit.<\/p>\n Besides the fact that the city was in complete disarray, my parents no longer felt comfortable bringing me into the city as a child. \u2026 It certainly changed America in ways that continued to reverberate for years. There are obvious ways \u2014 the way our airport security works, for instance, is completely different nowadays \u2014 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 \u2018evil,\u2019 with an influx of racism occurring towards everyday Muslim Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Melissa Lee, content updates manager for a sleep health website, Forest Hills<\/p>\n The beginning of the \u2018payback\u2019 era<\/p>\n \u201cThat morning was the first time we took our 9-month-old daughter to the Pittsburgh Children\u2019s Museum. \u2026 <\/p>\n \nThe skies were so beautiful over Pittsburgh that day, yet things had gone so very wrong and not so far away.\n<\/p>\n I was glad I wouldn\u2019t need to explain it to our daughter crawling placidly in the yard. \u2026 I remember the early speculation. \u2018Who did this?\u2019 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 \u2018payback\u2019 for 9\/11. That mentality now rules the day in too many places in our world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Anna Loney, artist, formerly of Beechview, now Minnesota<\/p>\n Get me off of this coast<\/p>\n \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n \nI guess it made me rethink my priorities, because as we saw, it could all fall apart in an instant.\n<\/p>\n \u2026 I don\u2019t 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\u2019t make it worse, but it did allow everyone to say more of the quiet part out loud.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Jennifer Walker, senior bioinformatics scientist, Wilkinsburg<\/p>\n Inspired to work in security<\/p>\n \u201cI 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. \u2026 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).\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Kenneth Kissel, security guard, Brackenridge<\/p>\n Awakened to human rights<\/p>\n \u201cBefore 9\/11, I wasn\u2019t much interested in human rights issues. Since then I believe that all issues are human rights issues in one way or another.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Judi O\u2019Connor, janitor, Bellevue<\/p>\n From unity to \u2018Lord, help us\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cI recall both houses and parties in Congress standing on the steps of the Capitol singing \u2018God Bless America\u2019 \u2014 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 \u2014 but at best it seems quaint today. \u2026 The world has only gotten \u2018smaller\u2019 over the past 25 years, in spite of the worldwide understanding of the scope of 9\/11 and COVID. Lord, help us.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 The Dilly family, retired, Washington, Pa.<\/p>\n Rich Lord is the managing editor at Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tMORE STORIES\n<\/p>\n Help us continue telling stories like this one.<\/p>\n We\u2019re Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source, an independent, nonprofit newsroom. That means we rely on donations from readers like you to help us report accurate, timely and impactful stories for the Pittsburgh region \u2014 available to everyone without paywalls. <\/p>\n Everyone deserves access to credible information to understand and help shape the region they call home, which is why we work hard everyday to deliver fact-checked stories on education, environment, health, local government and more.<\/p>\n We’ve seen our journalism prompt widespread change<\/a> in the Pittsburgh region \u2014 but none of it would be possible without the support of our community. If you found this story valuable, consider “paying it forward” by making a gift today<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whether they were close enough to smell burning jet fuel in Somerset County or spent the day glued…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5466,73,75,74],"class_list":["post-284424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-leadstorynoshow","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}