Shocking footage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is going viral again.
The visceral video shows the firsthand experience of a group of young onlookers as they try to comprehend the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
Caroline Dries was a student at New York University when she filmed the footage from her room at 200 Water Street.
Dries and her roommate were woken up at 8:46 a.m. by what she thought was an explosion.
When they spotted smoke coming from the World Trade Center, Dries started filming.
The two girls can be heard speculating as to what is happening while Megan tries to explain the situation to her mother over the phone.
When the South Tower was attacked at 9:03 a.m., the two girls realized it was a terrorist attack and evacuated their building.
But they soon returned, after they felt even less safe on the street.
“I just remember feeling, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ That feeling of being so vulnerable was so overwhelming; and so, we ran out of the apartment, took the elevator down to the street, and it was just kind of pandemonium with no one knowing what [was] happening,” Dries told CNN in 2011.
The camera was filming once again when the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m.
She said: “It took kind of ten years for me to understand why this footage is special. People, I think, want to remember the details clearly and to hold onto it because they know how significant it was. Sometimes I think it would have been nice to have not filmed it—to just have run and let time kind of erase all the details and it would have gone a little faster.”
