Community Corner

In the Tower's Shadow Days Before 9/11

Bud Webb took this photo of the World Trade Center days before two planes crashed into them on Sept. 11, 2001.

Bud Webb and his wife Vonda were on a cruise up the East Coast when their boat stopped in New York City Sept. 7. That day they took a tour of the World Trade Center, and on the way back to sea, he came out on the boat's deck and took this picture of the Twin Towers.

By the time the attack began on Sept. 11, Bud and Vonda were in Halifax, Nova Scotia touring a lighthouse.

"The lady at the counter said something has hit the trade center and thats all we heard until we were on the bus coming back," he said. Rumors swirled around that planes hit the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the White House.

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"I didn't even realize I'd taken the picture until weeks later when we got the film developed and found it then. I'd forgotten all about it" he said.

"The way the sun makes them shine, it's just sort of the rest of the building's lower and darker. It's almost like it's superimposed there. It looks sort of ghostly or something."

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Since then Bud has shared the picture with friends and enlarged, framed and given to friends who requested a copy.

Bud grew up in Imperial Beach, born three years after the Pearl Harbor, and served in the U.S. Navy during the Cold War. Back when he was in the Navy in the 1960s, Russia was the threat and the Berlin Wall was being built.

"We were stationed at North Island and flew on sea planes on submarine patrols," he said. "That was before the [Coronado] bridge, that was where our landing strip was, where the bridge is [now]."

Bud sent this photo after Imperial Beach Patch requested readers tell us . Looking back over the past 10 years, he said, a lot has changed.

"I think how it changed, if there was any dramatic change, it was that realization that something that you'd think would be not minor, but an isolated incident like an attack in two cities, would not only affect the whole country but the whole world. We went into a downspin on the economy, our thoughts of security have changed. We're much more vulnerable than I thought," Bud said.

"A hurricane may kill a couple thousand people and the world isn't affected but the twin towers killed a couple thousand people and the whole world has dramatically changed," he said.


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