"Behind the Scenes of 9-11" – ABC video

(Clips about Shanksville and Val McClatchey @ 35:28)

Google video link

(Pic @ 36:00)

"Photo Gallery" - PittsburghLive.com

On Sept. 11, Val McClatchey instinctively snapped this photograph of smoke rising over her neighbor's barn from the crash of United Flight 93 in Somerset County. The photo is now on sale at a local store for $20, with $18 benefiting the families of the victims. (Keith Hodan/Tribune-Review)

http://livesite.pittsburghlive.com/pages/terrorism/photogallery_yearlater/shanksville/index.php?photo=3

"The day that changed America" - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

(Snippet. Emphasis mine.)

The day that changed America

By Robb Frederick

TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

~

Val McClatchey heard the 757 roar over Indian Lake, three miles east of where it would crash. She had been watching the "Today" show, with footage from New York, and now the Pentagon.

She looked out the window, above the red barns. She caught a glimpse of it, like light off a watch face. Then nothing, and then a boom that nearly knocked her off the couch.

The lights went out. The phones, too.

She grabbed her camera. She stepped onto the front porch and shot one frame of the smoke cloud, a charcoal puff in a pure blue sky.

That image — "End of Serenity," she called it — caught the essence of Somerset County that day. The barns, the blue sky, the open slope of pasture — it's a postcard, except for that fat, black cloud, swelling like a smoke signal, warning that something horrible has happened.

"I thought it was an accident," McClatchey says, a Time and a Newsweek and a Reader's Digest in the binder on the coffee table, the pages with her photo marked with Post-Its. "I thought it was a small plane. I figured they were just trying to get out of the air."

She didn't walk up that road, toward the hole in the tree line. She could hear the sirens; she knew it was bad. She didn't need to see.

She went into the kitchen and put on barbecue for the rescue crews.

~

The people of Somerset County lost something else, something that cloud crowded out of Val McClatchey's photograph. She realized it that night, in bed, listening to the hum of the emergency generators. The lights up the hill came through the curtains.

"You go along, day to day, and you never think much about your situation in life," says her husband, Jack. "Something like this, it changes your outlook on things. You're waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"This area will never be the same," he says.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_90823.html

Note that the plane Val hears over her area flies almost in the opposite direction as officials said Flight 93 flew in before it crashed:

(Map source: popularmechanics.com)

"In the sky, a heroic struggle aboard hijacked United Flight 93" - U.S. News

In the sky, a heroic struggle aboard hijacked United Flight 93

By Samantha Levine

~

It has been awhile–most agree since the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 (in which settlers rioted against excise taxes)–that the country even knew the town existed. "It used to be, 'Where the heck is Shanksville?'" says Valencia McClatchey, who lives near the crash site and snapped the oft-reproduced photo of a plume of smoke hovering over an old red barn and staining the morning sky. It's not a place most would know about. The town of 245 people sits nearly two hours east of Pittsburgh in the middle of Somerset County. There are two ski resorts and two state prisons in the county, but you don't have to go through Shanksville to reach them. Its relative obscurity allowed residents to burrow deep into their quiet community, and its serenity attracted people like McClatchey and her husband, John.

~

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/9_11/articles/911shanksville.htm

"Lives changed in countless ways" - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Lives changed in countless ways

By Andrew Conte

TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Sunday, September 8, 2002

~

Val McClatchey, 46, took a now-famous picture of the crash's black smoke hanging over a neighbor's red barn. She snapped the picture instinctively but then could not bear to look out her windows again for three days.

She drove out recently to the memorial site in her black Camaro convertible to meet with television reporters from one of the national networks. Her picture sells for $20 at Ida's Store in Shanksville, with $18 going to a fund for the victims' families.

"There are some people who just can't get past it, and they are out here every day," she said, visiting the memorial for just the fourth time. "It can get a little overwhelming."

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_90214.html

Val McClatchey snapped this photograph of smoke rising over her neighbor's barn from the crash of United Flight 93

On Sept. 11, Val McClatchey instinctively snapped this photograph of smoke rising over her neighbor's barn from the crash of United Flight 93 in Somerset County. The photo is now on sale at a local store for $20, with $18 benefiting the families of the victims.