At 9:59 AM EDT, 56 minutes after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175, the South Tower collapses
Ten years ago this morning? We all remember. It seems so long ago, and yet paradoxically it feels like yesterday. Hard to believe that in 2016, there will be people voting for a President who do not remember 9-11. Because of the location and scope of the buildings it was intensely personal for the rest of us, something we’ll surely never forget.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in my local office, one branch of hundreds for a large Wall Street firm that leased over a million square feet in 2 World Trade Center, also known as the south tower. That building was our corporate headquarters. I knew it well, I’ll always remember it as it once was, two silver towers sprouting out of the tangle of lower Manhattan. In 1991, as part of my initial training, I had spent a month living in what was then called the Vista Hotel in between the two towers. By 2001 I knew hundreds of fellow employees who worked in the second tower. It was lucky for most of them that the first plane hit the other building and hit high.
That wasn’t the only stroke of luck. Back in 1993, when powerful explosions rocked the basement of the south tower, my new junior partner was finishing up the last day of his month-long training in the worst place possible, eating lunch at the Windows on the World restaurant at the tippy top. He and everyone else with him got out safely from the 107th floor that day. They had walked down a hundred flights of stairs, with cloth napkins held over their mouths. Later he told me it took over an hour to get down, with his hand stretched out touching the shoulder of the person in front for guidance, step, wait, then step again, in the dim emergency lights as smoke hung thicker with every floor.
In a way that earlier terrorist strike would be a life saver. As a direct result all companies with offices inside the buildings, both the South and North Tower developed and drilled on evacuating the massive structures. As my coworkers sat silent in our local office on Sep 11, we each hoped, and soon learned, that those drills initiated in 1993 would indeed save thousands of lives in 2001. Estimates of the loss of life in the towers alone ranged as high as 25,000 people. Due in large part to the preparations made after the 1993 attack, less than a tenth of that would perish. It will never seem like a miracle to the friends and family of those who fell, but a miracle it was: in less than one-hour tens of thousands would walk to safety, among them dozens of personal friends of mine who got out with minutes to spare.
When the second plane burned in, to our building, that’s when it crystalized, that’s when we all knew this was an attack. One veteran broker, an ex-military officer, turned and said “That looks like Osama bin Laden.” I had heard of the name, knew vaguely he was some sort of terrorist asshole hell-bent on killing Americans. I remembered a TV news magazine piece, perhaps 60 Minutes, where a terrorist expert had mentioned rumors that terrorists had considered hitting the World Trade Centers with hijacked airplanes. It seemed obvious now that those schemes had come to fruition.
Then it happened. The second tower to get hit would be the first to topple. The shock of what we were watching transformed from horror to apocalyptic. The scene of utter destruction, which is now etched into the national psyche like a diamond lithograph in hard glass.
Looking back on the whole horrible decade that followed, with the rare successes and serial blunders that ensued, I must confess, the one thing that gives me some grim satisfaction is the thought that Osama bin Laden was shot down by US Navy SEALS in the middle the night, in his own bedroom tucked away safely, he believed, in a yuppie military suburb of Pakistan. Call me shallow, call me vindictive. But as events unfold this anniversery, there is a new, final element in the tragedy that wasn’t there in years past. The thought of the terror in bin Laden’s eyes is my sole source of comfort when reflecting on that terrible dark day that changed America forever.
Wow! So you were there?
Experience of a lifetime. I don’t think I can top that and I’m glad I can’t.
It sounded like a thump, as though someone had dropped something heavy on the floor above, and then as we looked out the windows on the west wall we could see a huge gout of fire spilling downwards. Looking up, we could see a gaping black hole, and curiously hundreds of completely unburnt papers fluttering in the air. As the fire came past our floor, a wave of heat permeated the building as though we were all standing too close to an oven. It was 11 floors from our corporate headquarters to the 78th floor skylobby; we made it down by the stairs and then switched to the elevators, luckily managing to find one almost immediately. There were thousands of people in the skylobby when we made our descent.
We made it out to an almost apocalyptic scene on the street. Small debris and papers were everywhere. Someone noticed an airlines life preserver and that was the first time we knew it was a plane instead of a gas explosion. Partway through crossing the street just south of the south tower in a daze, there was the scream of a jet from the sky. It was impossible to tell just how close it was, it could have been landing on the street for all we knew. I didn’t look up, I just ran for an overhang across the street as there was a huge crashing sound and the world seemed to shake. Turning, I saw a fifty-foot section of siding fall to the street. Going into the relative safety of the building (the Deutschebank building, I think?) there were hundreds huddled along the walls, some crying, some just staring, others trying to figure out what to do.
Over sixty of my co-workers died. There had been roughly a hundred of us in the building at the time, and since we were a fairly small company I knew most of them well. The firm survived and still exists, but it was never quite the same place.
I was in the property management office of one of the tallest office buildings in downtown Toronto, having just arrived from grabbing a coffee at the food court. My father was a firefighter, so I had a pretty shrewd idea what the emergency response would be like.
When the first of those two towers fell, after the flash of, “there were people still trapped in those buildings!”, I realized and exclaimed aloud, “That tower would be FULL of firefighters!”
Sadly, I was right.
I was teaching a class and my TA whispered in my ear that a plane had run into the WTC. I kept teaching. Later, she came over and whispered in my ear that a second plane had run into the WTC. I kept teaching.
So, I guess I was doing the same exact thing George Bush was doing!
Um… is there a reason my comment’s been sitting in moderation for two days while other comments have been posted?
I thought where I was might have been at least as valid as anyone else’s.
Oddly, I was watching TV, yet since I was watching the rebroadcast of the Sportscenter from earlier that morning and nobody in Bristol had realized it was time for “breaking news” to break in and jar me from the previous evening’s baseball scores, I didn’t hear about it until after the second plane had hit and my wife called me from work (my gf at the time I guess). I switched to CNN and we watched together until the first tower collapsed and she decided to come home. Here in the midwest we felt, rightly, that we were absolutely safe… yet I remember jumping at shadows the rest of the day.
I spent most of the rest of the day at Kaldi’s Coffeeshop in OTR (RIP Kaldis) drinking and smoking and getting into rhetorical fights with conservative friends.
It wasn’t until later than night that we got the phone call from my Father in Law, an economist who had been in NYC, in the WTC at the time and was luckily one of the first evacuated. Then we cried… tears of horror and relief at the same time…
I was working in downtown D.C. that day. My client supported mass media outlets, so when I got into work that day it was about 10 minutes after the 1st plane hit the north tower. I remember the guards talking about what kind of drunken idiot would have slammed into the WTC. Definitely surreal, but there was plenty of work to get done with the client.
I had barely started working when the TVs in the building started showing the 2nd plane hitting. A big chill ran down my spine, because this clearly wasn’t accidental at this point. We watched for a good 15 minutes before getting back to work not sure what to make of this. I had one of my team that was getting to work late that morning, so I called him and told him to stay at home at this point.
Sure enough, about 30 minutes later the pentagon was hit, and things started getting scary. I was too far away to see anything, but within 10 minutes all the main roads in DC were jammed with cars that weren’t going anywhere anytime soon (I had a good view from my client office to see the traffic). This was around the same time that the news channels were reporting that bombs were going off at the national mall. It wasn’t long past 10:00 that the landlines were completely congested, and I was unable to talk to my wife. Cell phones and my text pager were useless as well.
By 10:30 I was only able to send an e-mail to my wife, but my primary problem was that I rode the metro to work, and local news was reporting that the metro was being shut down due to the possibility of a gas attack as well as the State Department being hit by a bomb (the mass media was not doing well with verification of reports that morning).
Most frightening of all to me was that I had a team that I was responsible for. I really didn’t know if it was better to have my team stay or let them head home. Considering the news reports of bombs at the national mall, State Department and potential metro attacks, I was very much on the fence. Finally around 10:45 I made the decision to send my people home (my client was still debating staying or going themselves)…and hoping that I was making the right decision (no god to pray to since I’m an atheist).
I walked from the client site to George Washington University which was about 20 minutes away. One of my people had a friend that was willing to give us a ride out of town after he gathered his wife who was attending the university. On the walk out to the university, I remember hearing the rumble of fighter jets overhead…and I also remember wondering if that was a good thing (just flying combat air patrol) or a bad thing (heading to shoot down another plane looking to crash into another building). Still no cell phone service and public phones were still useless.
Once we were picked up, we drove by the State Department (which clearly wasn’t hit by a bomb) and headed over the Key Bridge that wasn’t congested by that point (probably 11:30 or so). You could still see all the smoke rolling out of the Pentagon at that time.
During this time, my wife had no idea what to think. Based on all the news reports of problems in D.C., she was very worried. She wasn’t used to checking e-mails regularly back then, so she didn’t get my last e-mail as I was headed out. My family back in the mid-west kept trying to call my wife to see if I was alright, but she couldn’t give them information she didn’t have.
Once we got into Northern Virginia a good ways, I was able to use my cell phone again. I was able to reach my wife and reassure her that I was fine and heading home (albeit slowly). I called my boss to let him know that everyone was headed home and found out that he was meeting with a different client in a building not far from the Pentagon and had felt the blast.
My friend drove me back to my car at a metro station, and I eventually made it home around 3:00 or 3:30.
Later that day with the kids home, my oldest son (about 7 years old at the time) who knew that his grandma was supposed to come visit in a few days had a rather interesting question. “Will Grandma’s plane crash into our house?”
Definitely not the harrowing story that DarkSyde had, but thought I would share.
Sorry, I had an unplanned several day long visit to the local emergency room.