Remember Always 9/11

Wings at Ground Zero

Excerpted from MSNBC's Nachman, Sept. 11, 2002

NACHMAN: We join you tonight from our location just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan, where the skyline was forever changed one year ago today. As I’m certain I don’t have to explain to you, in this, the ninth week of my program, I’m not fond of syrupy stories or needless melodrama, but I want to tell you about something impossibly coincidental that happened this morning at ground zero. And, trust me, it was witnessed by many others.

At the exact and contemporaneous instant that this morning’s moment of silence began, something shifted in the air. A breeze stirred in what had been a windless morning. In seconds, as if gathering breath, the breeze quickened into a noticeable wind. Like a steam train chugging out of the station, it gained momentum and turned ground zero into a dust bowl.

The wind flapped through our location and forced us to cut down the tarp and coverings over our heads. It grew loud and insistent and ominous. In the pit, mourners leaned into it and were pushed around by it. In the press section, 10 stories above and across the street from what had been the Twin Towers, a collective chill and shudder passed through the electronic spectators.

It was a fable-like moment worthy of Steven Spielberg. But this was not special effect. News people and technicians looked at each other and shrugged in an affective nonchalance. Was it the whoosh of 3,000 ghosts or the flutter of 6,000 wings? These are not questions a mere journalist can answer."

Excerpted from MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield: On Location for Sept. 11, 2002

BANFIELD: Some images from earlier today, as the wind blew across Ground Zero. Family members of victims and survivors of 9/11 came back to Ground Zero for the first time. Many of them going to the sacred ground that’s now become a burial ground to remember those who they lost and to be there, the show of unity with a strange sorority and fraternity of those they would have never met otherwise and prefer they never would have met under these circumstances.

The procession of thousands bearing photographs, flowers, many overlooking this area as well. And it wasn’t just Ground Zero. The Pentagon was also an area where so many came to hear the president speak. The wind blew there as well, so much so that the flag could barely unfurl at the wall of the newly built area of the Pentagon, and it was just as windy in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, too, the site of United Airlines Flight 93 crash.

A blustery day as those came to remember there, too. Flags clearly flying, just as well as they can fly in the face of this. With regard to the winds, it really picked up at about 8:46 this morning, Eastern Time, which is exactly the time last year, one year ago where American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center site.

That was the time when the first moment of silence was observed here in New York City, and it was the time when that blustery wind really kicked up and started to push the dust at Ground Zero across that site.

We have this thought from one of our viewers, Scott. He wrote this about the wind. “The wind in New York, the wind in Washington, D.C., the wind in Shanksville, it seems as though God let 3,000 spirits touch their loved ones again.”