The Hudson River Miracle Five Years Later

So, exactly five years ago today I was waiting at a car shop while my car was getting an oil change.  There was a TV in the corner of the waiting room, tuned to a national broadcast station and showing an afternoon talk show.  I was on my Blackberry reading my Twitter feed.  Suddenly I saw tweets from an NPR reporter that I follow that included news of an airplane which had just crashed in the Hudson River.  Then a couple of tweets appeared with images, dramatic images from Janis Krums showing a crowd of people standing on the wing of the plane with the New York skyline looming in the distance.  

It didn't seem real.  I keep looking over at the TV - nothing about a plane crash.  More and more tweets were rolling in on the plane crash and then finally later the afternoon talk show was interrupted by a breaking news story.  I remember thinking in that moment about the power of Twitter and that this medium held tremendous potential for citizen reporting. 

I blogged about the event five years ago and also recorded a podcast about my thoughts on that night - check them out here.  Interesting to looks back on that day five years ago.  Amazing.

Here is an interesting story, published today, on how Janis Krum's life has been impacted since he took that iconic picture.