In Portugal, the afternoon of September 11, 2001 began like any other. People were working, returning from lunch, watching television in cafés and at home, and in schools classes were proceeding normally. At 1:46 PM, time in mainland Portugal, many saw the first images: a very tall tower in New York with a huge wound of smoke. The initial reports spoke of what appeared to be an isolated accident. Seventeen minutes later, at 2:03 PM, another plane entered the South Tower live on air, and there were no longer any doubts. The cafés fell silent, in workplaces people stopped to watch televisions or listen to radios, and phone calls multiplied. Many parents picked up their children from school with a feeling that something had changed.
On that morning of September 11, four commercial planes were hijacked by members of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. The first struck the North Tower at 8:46 AM, the second crashed into the South Tower at 9:03 AM, a third hit the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth went down in a field in Pennsylvania. Before heading to Boston, Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari had stopped at the American Airlines counter at Portland International Jetport in Maine, where employee Michael Tuohey handled the check-in and later recalled that Atta appeared irritated and uncomfortable. At 9:59 AM local time, the South Tower collapsed, and twenty-nine minutes later the North Tower fell, transforming the site into an immense cloud of smoke, dust, and debris. Nearly three thousand people of dozens of nationalities died.
September 11 profoundly changed the world. It changed airport security, United States foreign policy, and gave rise to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Before the 25th anniversary, the New York City Council made available more than 170,000 pages of documents about air quality and the authorities' response following the attacks, after years of pressure from survivors, families, and associations that criticized the lack of transparency about the risks of toxic dust at Ground Zero.
For those who watched the events from a distance, in Portugal, a very personal memory remained: the place where they were, the television on which they saw the images, the person they called, the silence that settled in. Twenty-five years later, New York has rebuilt the space and on the site of the former towers there is now a memorial with the names of the victims. But the question remains alive: where was each one on September 11?
