The morning of September 11th 2001 at 9:00 am I was working at home on a flash web project for The Japanese Telecom that a local ad agency was handling. Pretty usual for the computer graphics geek that I am. The news of something happening at the World Trade Center came over the television on the other side of the coffee table.

My first reaction, also being a photographer, was to go to my roof and take some pictures. The towers were visible from the roof of my building but there were some apartments one block down that ruined the composition. So I went to a friends house that I knew had a perfect view of the World Trade Center. He had selected his apartment because, as an architecture student, he admired the Twin Towers and had even written his senior thesis on them.

Arriving at his apartment on 9th Street between Avenues C & D I took some photographs then just sat back to watch. I missed photographing the first collapse because we did not think it was going to happen. In retrospect it is obvious that burning office furniture (according to FEMA) could not bring down these truly gargantuan structures, so we were completely surprised.

When the second collapse happened (the North Tower, WTC1) I captured it on my Olympus E-10. Now here's the interesting part, at the start of the collapse I felt a strong shockwave pass over me as we stood on the balcony - a single strong pulse of invisible energy. After I finished snapping photographs of the North Tower's collapse, I turned to my friend and asked, "did you feel that?" His stunned reply was "yes".

Later
Some people that came to my friends apartment organized supplies to take downtown and try to help. In a while I heard from a friend in China Town that only people in uniform were getting through, so he went through & volunteered. The hospital on the west side was quickly over-run with donations & volunteers.

Out my fourth floor window that night I saw a smog of white dust up to the second story. In the days to come everyone hacked phlegm and coughed, we called it the "WTC cough". It was good that it rained overnight, or it would have been worse.

The very strange burning smell continued for weeks and only slowly receded back downtown. For some days after it happened all car traffic was banned on Manhattan. Businesses stopped and the streets were dusty-dirty. It was a strange time.

Remembering
At the time it happened I was too stunned to think. In the following days, like most Americans, I accepted the explanations that the media put out. It was not until summer of 2002 that I looked at my photographs again and the memories of the shockwave came back. That resulted in some strong cognitive dissonance, implanting a bug in my brain that would not let me rest.

That summer I read "Day of Deceit" by Robert Stinnet and thought 'if the US Government (and media) could succeed in completely lying about Pearl Harbor for 50 years, why would would they not lie about September 11th?' After that it took six months of internet searching to find an explanation that made some sense of the events, January 30th 2003.

Since that spring my activism has been continuous, just not regular. So many people have gone through basically the same process, it is encouraging to see and have been a part of in various ways. There is a 9/11 initiation of sorts, stages of discovery that people go through, avenues of approach. Of course some knew as soon as it happened, but that was not me. It was the physical evidence that prompted me to search.

The high res photographs including a fourth frame can be downloaded here:
http://newguards.us/links.html
...online since May 2003

The blogger can be reached through the contact page here:
http://spork.nyc.ny.us/contact.html