I was in the kitchen of my house in Oxford, England, getting ready to move out a few days later into a smaller house preparatory to coming out to Belize. I had the kitchen TV on while I did things, and whatever was on was interrupted with footage of the immediate aftermath of the first impact. I stopped whatever I was doing (I hadn't been watching the TV) so was watching when the second plane struck. Extraordinary to think that I watched it as it happened. It didn't seem real, but after the first impact I phoned a friend to get him to watch. "What channel" he asked? "All of them" I replied, because it really was astonishing news for us in Britain and all programmes had been stopped. We're well used to terrorism, but not on that scale. My friend immediately asked "what tower" and I had no idea. Turned out a group of close colleagues from his office were high up in one of the towers at a conference - he would have been there but for some trivial reason. They all died. My brother also lost maybe 10 people he regularly worked with, all together at another meeting. Wrong place, wrong time.
In many ways the most remarkable aspect was that so few people died. This was in the middle of the working day in an enormous city, with the two largest buildings destroyed. 3000 is dreadful, but how many might it have been if it hadn't been handled so well?