[Laneco]

We didn't have the radio on at work on the day of the attack on the OK Federal Building. I worked for a commercial satellite (business, not home tv) installation company. We had seven or eight dishes on the roof pointing at various satellites. It was always easier to tell an engineer in the field what was playing on the satellite feed to confirm he had the right alignment (e.g. - Cspan on channel 9, etc). Anyway, we always had the raw footage coming in from different news feeds.

This came on. The helicopter was panning over the top of the building. There was no audio with this feed, just video. We all figured it was in some foreign country, then the helicopter got close enough to a car to see OK license plates... Started scrambling for some audio and found that the building had been bombed (and found out WHICH building). The roof on that building was a rubber membrane roof. We had contracted a local fellow (I still remember the guy's name after 15 years!) to install a satellite dish and had to go through quite an adventure to be allowed to place it on this rubber membrane roof. The corner of the building where the dish was had been destroyed. It was very surreal to see this from a helicopter's view of distance and then closer and closer, until I couldn't stand the sight of what I saw, and wanted to scrape the sounds of frightened, hurt people from my ears.

I was sure I would never feel like that again or see anything like that in this country ever again. Guess September 11, 2001 proved me wrong...

angela