I had been with the police department for about 4 years and was, at that time, a 911 Police/Fire dispatcher. I had worked a 12-hour shift 2pm-2am. I had stayed up for a couple of hours after I got home, that job always keyed you up and it was hard to just go to bed, so I stayed up until my ex-wife, wife at the time, got up around 5am to get ready for work. I made coffee and we talked for a few minutes. Back then we worked completely opposite shifts and rarely saw one another awake. I went to bed around 5:30am with the intention of sleeping until about 11am then getting ready for another shift. Right after the first plane hit, my wife called me on our home phone, sounds strange now having a home phone..., but she called me and told me to turn on the TV, she was quite upset. I turned on the TV and was watching when the 2nd plane hit. I told her I had to get a shower because I would be getting a phone call any minute. Sure enough, I had just gotten out of the shower when the PD called and announced it was all hands on deck for all divisions, all shifts, and we were to report to work immediately. I got ready very quickly, I remember listening to the radio I kept in the bathroom as I was shaving and just being completely blown away by the developing story. I got to work around 10am and the activity at the PD was like nothing I'd ever seen. SWAT team members were loading rifles, getting ready to go out with the patrol guys and girls, our admin people were all walking around with TAC radios. I walked into dispatch and it was complete chaos. All the 911 phone lines were lit up and as soon as one line went dark, it lit up again. There were already about eight dispatchers working and not enough stations for us all to take calls so the dispatch supervisor had plugged in all the emergency old style phones and she threw one of those at me and told me to start taking calls and writing them down.
People were fighting at gas stations, they were fighting at the grocery stores, they were fighting about anything. Things started to calm down around 3pm but then the air force sent up a 2-plane CAP around our area and as soon as people saw the F-16 Falcons flying around the city, here came hundreds of 911 calls with everyone thinking the fighters were going to crash into buildings. All in all, we all worked from around 10am until almost 3am the next morning, our dispatch supervisor never took a break and started letting us go home in shifts around 10pm that night. I don't think the dispatch manager went home for almost 48 hours straight. She kept everything organized and did an amazing job coordinating about a million different things. I don't think I had been or have ever since been that tired when I got home around 3:30am that next morning. Other than talking about the events with my fellow dispatchers when time permitted all the previous day, it still hadn't really sunk in until I got home that morning. I just sat and tried not to think for a couple of hours, the police and fire radio traffic still ringing in my head and ears along with the shrill rings of the 911 phones. I remember thinking about a good friend of mine in high school who had gone on to fly AH-64 Apache attack choppers. I wondered if he would be going to war, because that's something we all knew was coming. One of my other friends enlisted in the army immediately after 9/11 and he was active duty for the next 10 years. He has stories that are absolutely chilling.
It was definitely the start of a new dawn in the country and things would never be the same at our police department or in our community. I mostly remember how surreal the planes looked and still look when I see footage, flying into the WTC. It never ceases to give me a bad case of the chills.
