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Hi There. Remember Anthrax?

zuzu

I don’t know for sure, but just doing the math, I’m guessing that Jill was a freshman at NYU during the whole post-9/11 thing. I always sort of wondered at what it would have been like to have been a freshman or first-year when 9/11 hit, particularly since I worked at the NYC Law Department at the time, and 9/11 was just one day after the 9/10 start of the first-years at the Law Department (i.e., their second day at work at an office just two blocks from the WTC).

After 9/11, my office was displaced and we weren’t able to get back into the office until the following April.

So, people in my office were already kind of paranoid about the 9/11 attacks. And then there were the anthrax attacks on various media types, specifically at NBC.

Now, my office was trying to do a displaced-office training session, mostly for the benefit for the poor first-years who were robbed of their normal training, at the time.

But when the anthrax attack was publicized, we called off the training, and that was that. But, in fact, our division assistant, a lovely woman named Doris who we used to test all our trial theories on (basically, if it didn’t pass the Doris test, it didn’t go to trial) started opening the mail with rubber gloves and a face mask.

So, basically, I have a fairly heightened sensitivity to anthrax. I just can’t shake seeing Doris with her gloves and mask opening the mail. So it’s a bit creepy to know that someone from New York has anthrax. Even though I know, intellectually, that the guy is a drum maker and probably contracted it from the skins he uses in his work.

But, you know, I still, five years later, get paranoid under a deep blue September sky.

28 thoughts on Hi There. Remember Anthrax?

  1. I know what you mean about the sky. I went to work that morning, about six blocks from the White House, and marvelled at how beautiful it was, and how wonderful it was to be alive on such a day. I know what you mean.

  2. THANK YOU! I’m so glad to see other people freaked out by the September sky.

    I know I felt a bit guilty being glad for the rain around 9/15, because I knew that even though it was going to change the scary clear blue sky, it was also going to make things harder for those digging in the site.

  3. I was ashamed at how afraid I had been, because it turned out that nothing happened to me after all, nor anyone I knew personally. While it was all going down I was online logged onto a mud, and everyone was watching a different channel or listening to a different radio station and calling out what was happening. There were all kinds of different numbers of planes unaccounted for and then someone said there was a plane coming up the Potomac. I’d never been afraid for my life before, but I was then. And later it was so… embarrassing to think of it. And I was so angry at the news people who had just reported any old rumor without bothering to verify it. (Fire on the mall? Bomb at the State Department? Anyone remember that?)

  4. And since you mentioned anthrax. In October, a week or two after the initial anthrax was reported, I got a job opening and sorting manuscripts for a journal. Didn’t even get hazard pay. I wasn’t scared because they had already stopped all the mail that had been in the system when it happened. Weeks and weeks later, it had all been irradiated or whatever they did to it, and it all came through almost at once. Whatever they did they were not fooling around, because one package had a zip disk in it that had melted. I showed it around the office for laughs. You know the kind of laughs.

  5. How chilling to reflect on those days. It’s a bit interesting to reflect on how brave the ordinary civilian response was in New York and Washington was. The elites had some panicky moments. The ordinary populace held it a bit more together.

  6. I was in res when it happened, and my best friend pounded on my door at about 7:30 and yelled “dude, you have to fucking see this.” So, I thought it better be fucking good if he dragged me out of bed for it, and as we were walking toward the lounge he said “dude, a fucking plane just flew into the World Trade Center”. And, like I’m sure half the Western world thought when they first heard it, I thought, like, a stray commuter plane.

    I walked into the loungue just in time to see the second plane hit.

    (Probably a replay, but it’s sound more dramatic that way.) And the first thing I thought was “holy shit, they actually pulled it off.” The WTC has been a target since the day it was built, and I felt some kind of historical depth watching the smoke and collapsing buildings and all that. I’m sure like everyone else, I felt like the shit had somehow hit the fan, even though I couldn’t really imagine how.

    The clearest memory I have from that day was talking to the Baha’i students at Club Days. Although they meant it in more….. I suppose more literal theological terms, we talked about how (on the global level) things are going to shit, and it has to go to shit before we can reassemble the pieces into something better. It was pretty heavy, but something I believed before, believed at the time, and believe now.

    Anyways. This is our generation’s Kennedy Assassination.

  8. Very true, KG, very true. I’d hate to use the the phrase “the end of innocence,” but 9/11 punctated an end for me. I had turned 30, and was trying to sort out what the hell had been happening in my previous 10 years, and this sort-of was the flash point for me to say “dammit, get living.”

    The lasting impressions from those days was the silence, and the waiting. Working underneath the flight line into Hancock Airport in Syracuse, and our office was always filled with the roar of jets or the buzz of propellers overhead. Nothing. I still remember the day when I saw the first Dash-8 flying in, and how beautiful this ugly, noisy plane looked in the calm September sky.

    I remember waiting for news as to the whereabouts of a friend from my college years, who spent at least half his day in the Pentagon. That no one could get a hold of him for nearly twelve hours, until he called his father from Frederick, when e had finally gotten far enough away from DC that his cell phone would work. He remembers drinking coffee outside of his building, joking about another friend and his flying habits, when the plane buzzed his building, clipping off their radio antennae, as it slammed into the Pentagon across the street…

  9. A student did a project on an anthrax-similiar culture in envelopes– seems ironing the mail for 5 minutes at 400 degrees kills the germs every time. And this was with a more heat-resistant thing than anthrax itself.

    It’s safe on paper, but would probably be bad for the zip drive…

  10. It’s funny. Yesterday, even before I was entirely conscious of the anthrax thing, I had had a minor 9/11 flashback. I was on the subway to work, hit 34th Street and for some reason the regular announcement of “all bags are subject to police investigation” rang in my ears. We all hear it every day, right? so it pretty much goes in one ear and out the other. For me, at least.

    But yesterday, I was brought back to how in the days after 9/11 I was so thoroughly fearful of getting on the subway to come into the office (my office then being on Broadway, just off Franklin Street). Every time the train stopped, I assumed a bomb was about to go off, or wind of deadly gasses would consume the car. And on top of that, the train I take into the city from Brooklyn goes over the Manhattan Bridge. So for days on end watching that gaping emptiness and the smoke rising out of it was gut wrenching. Even today I look over there and expect … well, I expect what’s not there.

    But, again, I don’t dwell on this. It was just some odd “twist of fate” that I was brought back in time. That (relatively) innocuous and canned announcement on the train made me realize how deeply our culture has changed since 9/11.

  11. I attended a seminar Thursday on Homeland Security designed for tradespeople and facility managers, so this has been on my mind. The presenter gave as one of his examples the changes implemented at the Wood River refinery—the very place I was working on 9/11.

    When my tool buddy came back from the smoke shed, he gave the rest of us a rapid-fire account of what happened—and nobody believed him. He had a quite the reputation for incredible lines of bullshit, so we blew him off—until getting back to the break trailer where there was already a crowd of people sitting in silence, listening to the radio news reports.

    My tool buddy leaned in and said, “you still wanna be here? Because I’m ready to go if you’re ready.” We split. About a half-hour later, everyone was officially evacuated except for critical refinery personnel. The drive home was eerie—looking up at that blue sky with no vapor trails. I’d never seen a sky with no vapor trails.

  13. I was working at Bellevue on 9/11/01. It wasn’t normally my job, but I spent the day hanging around the ER and later the blood collection area trying to help. At first everyone thought that there’d be lots of casualties coming in, but there never were more than a few–it was busy for a Tuesday morning, but not hospital-filling-disaster busy. In one way it was creepy to have so few injuries–a reminder that a lot of people were simply trapped and died there. On the other hand, it also meant that the evacuation of downtown was going really quite smoothly. As Robert said already, people didn’t panic, they left in a fairly orderly, cooperative manner and therefore we weren’t busy with secondary injuries (people getting trampled, run over, etc.). It is to the credit of the local authorities as well as the populace that the evacuation went smoothly. If Bush or any other federal officials did anything at all helpful that day, it wasn’t obvious from the ground.

    Moderately gross side note: At the time I lived on 13th Street. Near enough to smell the smoke coming from the wreckage for months. During that time, I noticed again something I first realized when taking surgery in med school: burning flesh smells the same whether it is cow, pig, or human. I’ve always wondered why barbeque restaurants in NYC didn’t all just go out of business after 9/11/01. How can anyone want to eat BBQ after smelling, well, roasting human, for weeks on end? (I warned you that it was gross…)

    If it makes anyone feel better, though, this guy who currently has anthrax sounds like the classic victim of naturally occuring anthrax. It’s very unlikely that it is another act of bioterrorism. Not impossible, of course, but really fairly unlikely.

  14. The sky is one of the things I remember about that day too. As I was figuring out how I was going to make my way home from downtown, I was walking, dazed, and thinking how wrong it was for the sky to be so clear and blue.

  15. I was a freshman when it happened. And I’d actually just turned 18 the night before. I vividly remember being huddled around the tv with my hallmates, watching the towers fall over and over and then thinking, “Great. The world waits until I officially become an adult to fall apart.” A very selfish moment.

  16. Yes – I remember walking in a daze around my school’s campus in CT, looking up at the sky and thinking how utterly unreal it was, that it should be such a beautiful day, without a cloud to be seen, on which such a thing happened.

    To this day, if it’s clear like that in the fall, crisp, warm and sunny, my skin prickles whenever I hear a jet overhead. Even if I’m in the middle of Podunkville, Michigan, with nary an office building in sight. Go figure.

  17. I lived in Alexandria, VA when the planes hit. My house shook in its foundation. Sometimes I stil freeze when I see a low-flying plane.

    I worked at a gym where a lot of people from Daschle’s office had memberships. Some days it seemed like the whole office was there. Anthrax vacation workout, they made jokes about it.

  18. The lasting impressions from those days was the silence

    That’s what I remember, too. I had been in New York for just over two weeks (your math was right, Zuzu), and had been initially struck by how loud the city was. I could barely sleep at night because of the noise, and the morning of Sept. 11th I was further irritated at what I thought was a loud garbage truck waking me up — turns out it was an extremely low-flying plane above my building. We watched it out our window. And I remember for the next week the city was jarringly silent. No car horns. No one yelling. People barely spoke on the street, but they made eye contact — something people just don’t really do here — and there was this sense of quiet understanding.

    And Zuzu, I also remember the sky that day, and how beautiful it was. Have you read the new Joan Didion book? I think she mentions that — how in tragedy, we remember these small, unusual details, like the September sky.

  19. I get paranoid when I see a yellow Ryder truck. Which is probably why all Ryder trucks in OKC are white, more than 10 years later.

  20. Here, this may help. Nerf-based security by Richard Forno. Not that it will help, since I think you’re basically saying that you know you’re not being rational but you can’t help yourself. 🙂

    I think Richard Forno, who’s a pretty good information security professional, will put your mind at ease.

  21. I remember desperately trying to find out what was going. I was in high school and the administration took out the TV and internet feeds into the school, for some stupid reason. I snuck to the science lab, and built a crystal radio.
    I also remember going home, and moving our TV into the dining room, so we could watch tv while we cooked and ate dinner. That was the only time we’ve even considered doing such a thing.

  22. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to be in NYC at that time. I myself was a freshman at Emory in Atlanta, just a block away from the CDC (where the keep all the dangerous pathogens like anthrax, smallpox, etc.), and that was pretty frightening for the next few months, maybe the remainder of the academic year. All over the news: “They’re going to strike with anthrax. And maybe smallpox. Be afraid!” And all over campus: “Do you think they’ll target the CDC? That’s the likely next target, isn’t it?”

    What I remember most about that day was for once being in Astronomy class at 10am (so it must have been a Tuesday) and not quite understanding what was going on. “What? Someone flew a plane in the WTC?” Then later, “Someone flew TWO planes into the WTC?” Then school was cancelled for the remainder of the day as well as the next, but word never got through to my Portuguese teacher so after sitting through that for what seemed like ages I went back to the dorm where everyone was gathered around watching the televisions, and someone explained the situation to me, and I just stopped and stared and thought “how is this possible?”

  23. The thing I remember most about September 11 is not having that kind of reaction. Granted I was in Massachusetts in a rural area, but I had previously lived in Boston which is I suppose reasonably urban. I remember thinking that I should feel weirded out by that bright blue sky, or the lack of contrails (we aren’t that far from Green Airport, so there are plenty of planes here), but I was just far too unsurprised by the whole thing. The blue sky was just Nature doing Her thing, and nothing whatsoever to do with us stupid humans, and why shouldn’t She keep making beautiful September days?

    When I saw it, and knew it for a terrorist attack, all I thought was, well, there it is. So very very not surprised, it was going to happen sooner or later. I don’t know if that’s why I’ve never felt paranoid or afraid since, either, at least from the possibility of a terrorist attack–though what the government and the media have done in reaction to 9/11 is another story completely. That for me, was the scariest part, seeing how predictably America reacted, and how even folks like Dan Rather were advocating revenge, and how these so-called “grown-ups” could call for retaliation and violence. I had really hoped we were beyond that.

    So, was I horrified, deeply saddened, fascinated? Yes. Surprised or angry? No.

  24. Oh, and what is the status of the anthrax investigations? I would hope there is something to show by now. Is there any information at all? Why has this story disappeared?

  25. In high school I lived not all that far from Fort Detrick. I can tell you no one wanted to even drive near that place and houses in that general vicinity became rather hard to unload for a period of time due to the supposed crazy scientist there that was suspected of having something to do with the Anthrax scare.

    I was in high school, living outside the Beltway but within shooting distance of the White House and near Camp David at the time of 9/11. The day of nine eleven the televisions were placed on in our classrooms prior to the plane hitting the Pentagon right after the second plane hit the tower. As soon as the Pentagon was hit and rumors of the fourth plane going down in PA occurred they locked us down for a time due to the fact that the whole fifty square miles around DC was a potential target I guess. It seemed not to affect me all that much until later as it was a surreal situation and nothing was all that clear. We of course all felt that if it was an attack on our country we would all be dead soon because they would probably nuke us.

    I know people in NYC were affected to a greater degree than those of us down there. I always found it amazing though that my friends in CA and Colorado and the Midwest seemed not to be affected by it at all or at least not in the same way as those of us that lived around the beltway.

  27. But yesterday, I was brought back to how in the days after 9/11 I was so thoroughly fearful of getting on the subway to come into the office (my office then being on Broadway, just off Franklin Street). Every time the train stopped, I assumed a bomb was about to go off, or wind of deadly gasses would consume the car. And on top of that, the train I take into the city from Brooklyn goes over the Manhattan Bridge. So for days on end watching that gaping emptiness and the smoke rising out of it was gut wrenching. Even today I look over there and expect … well, I expect what’s not there.

    You know what freaked me out most about the subway?

    The realization that the F train was the most reliable form of transportation in the city. That, and how silent everyone became when the train passed over the Gowanus and the fire came into view.

    Seeing National Guardsmen with rifles and night-vision goggles on the Metrazur balcony in Grand Central kind of weirded me out, too. I’ve gotten used to them now, though I don’t think they still carry rifles — or if they do, I no longer notice.

  28. That for me, was the scariest part, seeing how predictably America reacted, and how even folks like Dan Rather were advocating revenge, and how these so-called “grown-ups” could call for retaliation and violenc

    Me too. I was more afraid of what Bush might do than what else al Qaeda might be planning. My gut reaction on seeing (and smelling) the attacks was that attacks on cities were a bad thing–something that should never happen to anyone, anywhere no matter what. I suppose I was already pretty much against aggressive wars, but it took months before I would admit that it might be reasonable to fight back against a direct invasion again. And I’m still not sure that that’s right…I’m not sure that non-violent resistence a la Gandhi might not always be the best choice.

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