There was a traffic jam on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, so I had bailed out for surface streets. I was headed down MD197 about to get back on the Parkway when I heard Carl Kasell on NPR say that an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York.

By the time that I got to my lab at Goddard Space Flight Center, folks were gathering in a conference room to watch CNN. The second tower was hit just as I walked into the room. A few minutes later, one of the engineers I worked with came to the conference room and said that she had been talking with her brother at the Pentagon when something had happened. Soon, we could see smoke rising to the south.

We were ordered to evacuate a short time after the second tower collapsed. My normal commute home takes about and hour and fifteen minutes. It took over three hours to get through the jam that day.