By ART CHANCE
Sept. 10, 2001, was just another day. I was a labor relations analyst IV for the Department of Administration, Division of Personnel, and I had an arbitration scheduled to begin the next day.
The hearing was with the Alaska State Troopers’ union and, as it was decades ago, I don’t have a clue what it was about. I think it was held in Juneau because the union representative was there.
Sept. 11 promised to be just another day at the office, at least if your office is an adversarial proceeding in front of a labor arbitrator.
I awoke at my usual 5:30 am, went to the kitchen and brewed a cup of coffee. I turned on the radio, as was my custom, and instead of the local announcer on KINY, it was an ABC network feed with Peter Jennings. I knew something was going on in the world, so I turned on the TV.
To this day I can’t sort out what I saw in real time and what was on tape; time is pretty elastic that day.
I do know that the first aircraft had hit the first World Trade Center tower at 4:45 am Alaska Daylight Time, so I began watching about an hour after the first impact and 20 minutes after the second tower was struck.
After the first tower was hit, there had been talk of it possibly being an accident. During World War II, a US B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center was built to withstand the impact of aircraft of the time of its design, the late 1960s. When the second aircraft struck the South Tower, that ended talk of accidents; it was evident that the world had changed.
I awakened my wife, told her we were likely at war, and quickly set off to work. I told her I’d see her when I saw her.
I wasn’t the first one at the office; everyone knew it was going to be an interesting day. You don’t know what you don’t know until people start asking questions you never even thought about. We knew enough about emergencies to know that this day was going to result in something between extraordinary security and martial law.
I got a couple of people working on how we exercised emergency powers and how we differentiated between an emergency and martial law and had someone get on the horn with the Department of Law to see who was in command if there was a federal declaration of martial law. I still don’t know a hard answer for that and I’m really glad we never had to find out, though we might yet.
Being bureaucrats, the first questions were of course who could do what and who was on top. Then the practical questions began to arise. As soon as the U.S announced the ground stop of all aircraft, it became evident that we had employees and State authorized travelers scattered all over Alaska and the United States.
Fortunately, we didn’t seem to have anybody traveling internationally; that luxury mostly passed with the mid-80s oil price crash. It also quickly became evident that we had no centralized way to know who they were or where they were and we had no reliable way to contact them.
Cell phones were far from ubiquitous in 2001, and the State didn’t issue them to any but very high-level employees; I was a direct report to a political appointee and I didn’t have a State phone.
The internet was still in its infancy. The State had a website and we could post information and notices, but it offered no real communications capability. We basically resorted to bureaucrat instincts; we knew we couldn’t direct it or control it, so we had to concentrate on making sure that whatever happened. we could fix it.
It’s been lost in the clutter over 20 years but there was no certainty that the threat was over. There had been chatter of an attack on the West Coast using trans-Pacific airliners, and Alaska was in the cross-hairs of that. Some airliners en route from Asia got to look at Elmendorf F-15s off their wings and were escorted to a ground stop at Anchorage Ted Stevens International Airport. Some major buildings were evacuated. In those days the State was pretty cranky about closing buildings. Our basic attitude was if the building is habitable, the State will inhabit it, and you will come to work or use your own leave.
After what we’d seen on TV that morning it didn’t seem that we should quibble about whether people should get out of tall buildings.
In something that seemed straight out of World War II, the Air Force put up a combat air patrol over most of Alaska. I’d been in a few conversations with law enforcement, emergency, and military people over the threat of an aircraft attack on the Valdez Terminal and its effect on the Alaska and US economy; we took it seriously.
Most of the day was a blur. Typical of bureaucracy, every question went up the org chart at warp speed; there was a helluva lot of “upward delegation” that day. Since there were only a couple of steps on the org chart above us, a lot of it landed on us, and we’d been around long enough to know we didn’t want to explain why we couldn’t handle it and sent it to the commissioner or the governor. I think we got most of it right, but some if it we just “winged it” and hoped for the best.
As I look back my most striking memory from that day other than the event itself was going out on the eighth floor deck of the State Office Building in Juneau for a smoke, (yeah, I smoked back then), sometime that afternoon and experiencing the astounding quiet. You don’t realize how much aircraft noise there is in Juneau in summer, and Sept. 11 is still sort of summer, until there is no aircraft noise and almost no traffic noise; things seemed to have just stood still.
I worked with a pretty rowdy crowd and long, busy, demanding work days often, even commonly, ended in an “after action analysis” at some local watering hole. It had been a long, hard day, but nobody wanted to do anything other than just go home and be with their family.
Don’t get me started on what I think of the current White House resident and the events of August and September 2021.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
I turned on the TV and immediately called my wife at work. I explained to her that it looked like two smokestacks puffing. As the morning wore on horror came across me. I became fearful for my family’s safety. Not knowing what to expect, I feared for the worst. I was living downwind of some nuclear facilities at the time and I went out and bought NBC hazmat suits for myself my wife and our child. I got gas masks, canteens with the little straw so that you could drink with the mask on. Food rations. You name it. We didn’t know if the other sleeper cells in our country we’re going to act in other ways. I tried to be proactive and I don’t think the terrorists. Fortunately, our government we’re able to stop the attacks that were planned after 911. I’m not counting Boston and a few other smaller attacks mostly masqueraded by crazies. We continue to have to be vigilant because we are still at war. Daily, future attacks are found out and squashed before the public has any idea of what almost took place. With the flood of who knows who coming across our Southern border, I’m pretty certain that sleeper cells exist in the United States, and are waiting for the phone call to activate.
I had been in the Army for 13 years on 9/11 and training in the Fort Richardson area. With Radio silence except for coded burst two times a day, any real world emergency communication unspecific to my team would be treated as an attempt to give away our position, so all calls were ignored. Little did we know that the calls to assemble at a given location was not a trap. Eventually vehicles and bullhorns would alert us to the severity of the situation and we gathered for transportation back to Fort Richardson team rooms for a brief of the emergency situation. The primary focus coming from federal and state government was infrastructure protection, water supply, port, railway, military installations and oil pipeline. So we proceeded to structure a plan that would accomplish that. The reality is, at the time we didn’t know how elaborate or how wide ranging, both time and space, the attack could/would be. And as a soldier, defending was not what was on our minds, it was attacking those who attacked us. As the group(s) responsible became known, the more laser focused we became. For a short period and I do mean short we were as United in this Country as we had ever been. But then the images of the towers had to be removed from the TV, people started talking like we were the ones at fault, the Tobey Keith song had a faction of people in this country saying we are the bullies. Quickly our country turned from wanting justice to tearing each other down with political divisiveness. The over intrusion of national security, the overuse of security at the airport and the internal spying set our Country on a course of government authoritarianism like it has never seen before. We have an entire generation that don’t even know the freedoms we lost on 9/11. That same generation has been conditioned for even more government intrusion without question. If anything can be said about 9/11, it was the beginning of the end of the United States. We lost more freedoms on that day than we can convey to those born after that day.
Well stated, Brian. Thank you.
Thanks for the memories Art. I can’t write of mine without 1. tears, and 2. a longer article than yours… I was one of the lucky ones that got to tell pilots flying in from the Bush that the national airspace was closed… We were at war.
When I see Mr. Chance’s picture, I’m, unfortunately, reminded of bill sheffield…….
Sorry, Mr. Chance.
Not the first time I’ve heard that but I’m a lot taller.
And a Better Man.
………and smarter!
George W. Bush was about to get his first real taste of leadership, while Dick Cheney was calling the shots from an undisclosed bunker in the Capitol. I repeatedly watched on tv, the two 767s
getting gobbled up by the Trade Towers. Tom Brady was just a few days within making his NFL debut. Hunter Biden was borrowing Joe’s Mercedes to score crack cocaine; and the days of purchasing cheap, one-way air tickets from third parties through the classified ads ……were over.
………and smarter!
The radical Muslims, and that is what they are, use terrorism as a tactic to achieve their goals. So please stop calling them “terrorists”. The Patriot Act followed the 9/11 attack and Senator Rand Paul warned us that we would eventually lose our freedoms under this piece of legislation. He was right. The Patriot Act now allows our government to spy on us, Americans. We need to repeal the Patriot Act–or the radical Muslims will win.
Muslims aren’t radical. Terrorists are.
Radical Muslims want to behead us. Moderate Muslims want the Radical Muslims to behead us.
I’m talking about your plain Jane ordinary Koran following muslim Art.
You CANNOT be a faithful Muslim and a loyal, Constitution-observing American. You’d be either an apostate Muslim or a disloyal American.
Art, this Country is full of disloyal Americans. The land of the brave has been brought to their knees over a virus with 99.7% survivability rate.
Late reading my MRAK this week, but absolutely LOVE that comment, Art. My daughter, who used to be married to a “moderate Muslim” would be applauding you.
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