I’ll never forget 9/11, but to be honest, I completely missed it

Given that the 9/11 attacks occurred in the evening Australian time, the first I knew of them were the following morning.  I’ll never forget ascending ladders to enter a control room and seeing operators talking about them in disbelief.  It was then that I scanned the newspapers and disbelief invaded my countenance.

The previous night I went to bed early, and my diary also reveals an argument with a family member that led us both perhaps to be distracted from what was occurring on every television channel globally.

In the minutes of my first reconciling of the events of 9/11, I recall meeting with a bunch of engineers, managers, and designers as my role was to lead a Hazard and Operability Study on a sulfuric acid manufacturing plant.

Of course, we were all mesmerised and transfixed by what we were witnessing 12-hours later as the events unfolded.  Like the pandemic has been constantly in our newsfeeds, the 9/11 attacks were constantly in the news for the months and years after the fateful day—like it was the virus and then the vaccine, for 9/11 as I recall it, it was the attacks, the recovery, and then the war on terror.  It was never not in the News.

Like everyone alive, there was no amount of exposure to the 9/11 attacks that ever made those events normal.  Every dimension, from the human loss, to the colossal scale of two 100-plus-storey buildings collapsing, to planes flying into them, to people jumping out of them, was and still is beyond the human mind’s capacity to comprehend.

Twenty years on, it can seem like that war on terror was a waste of time.  I don’t think all of it was.  But the attacks, even as they were perpetrated politically, run well beyond it, into the stratosphere of our common humanity.

343 firefighters lost their lives among the nearly 3,000 who perished that fateful day.  Famously, it’s said, all gave some, but some gave all, making the ultimate sacrifice, knowing that their last breathes would be their last.

Twenty years on, we still pinch ourselves.  Yes, it really did happen.  Time stands still just long enough for us to hug our loved ones just a second or two longer.

Life is precious.