Time passes, but their memories of September 11, 2001 still live with them. After 20 years, Quebeckers in New York that day remember going from incomprehension to horror.
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When a plane crashed into the first tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m., many first thought of a tragic accident.
“The panic set in when the second plane hit, when we realized that it was not a piloting error,” recalls Sylvain Guimond, at the time a biomechanical consultant for the Rangers hockey team. from New York.
At that time, no one yet knew that terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda had hijacked four flights in the suicide bombings that would become the deadliest in contemporary history.
Reassure loved ones
In the hours that followed, Americans, but also many Quebecers who were in Manhattan, fled the scene and tried to communicate with their relatives who were worried.
AFP Photo
A policeman and other citizens roamed the dusty rubble after the Twin Towers collapsed.
“My mother thought she had lost her son live,” recalls Philippe Cannon, who was on the phone with her when the first tower collapsed, one street from her hotel.
After managing to reach her, the production manager spent the rest of the day finding as best he could the hundred Quebecers who were preparing an important cultural showcase scheduled for that week.
“From the moment you lived [les attentats de près], you relativize more easily when you face crises, ”he observes, with hindsight.
A hair’s breadth from death
For others, the terrorist attacks they narrowly escaped served as a stark reminder that life hangs by a thread.
Mr. Guimond, for example, was saved by a last-minute change of plan.
A hotel room was waiting for him at the World Trade Center the day before, but he had finally spent the night at Madison Square Garden, about 3 miles away.
“I was lucky to be able to come back [en vie], he said meditatively. I had children not very old at the time, and I tell myself that there are a lot of parents who never came home that night. “
Deeply shaken by his experience, he subsequently composed several poems to “free himself a little” from the weight of memories.
An “epiphany”
September 11 also changed the course of life for Line Gros-Louis, a Huron-Wendate, who was staying in a hotel opposite the Twin Towers with her partner.
As the couple rushed to leave New York City as quickly as possible, “we pulled over and a little voice said to me, ‘if you were dead you couldn’t make pottery.’
It was a bit like this “epiphany” that he convinced her to devote herself full time to pottery, an art that she still practices today.
She and her partner then returned to New York in November 2001 to collect their urgently abandoned suitcases.
“This is where we saw the scale of the disaster. It was a desert feeling, as if the soul of the city was no longer there, ”she testifies, evoking the thick layer of dust that covered the surroundings.
To each their own story
If these three Quebecers were in New York that day, direct witnesses of a historic event, Philippe Cannon underlines that everyone has “their” September 11th.
You will also be able to read in the next pages the memories of several public figures who have agreed to confide in what this date has changed in their lives.
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