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Saturday, September 11, 2004
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9/11/01
- ON THIS DAY -
On Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackers crashed two airliners into the
World Trade Center in New York, causing the 110-story twin towers to
collapse. Another hijacked airliner hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in
a field in Pennsylvania. Some 3,000 people were killed in all.
-From Today's New York Times
Three years ago I was working rotating shifts. 7 evening shifts, two days off, 7 midnight shifts, 4 days off. With that kind of a schedule, I was decidedly not a morning person. At 8:40 on the morning of Tuesday September 11, 2001, I was asleep. My evening rotation started on Tuesdays and I hated that rotation, particularly the beginning of it.
At about 9, my phone started ringing. Most people who know me, know my interest in politics, foreign policy and the merely spectacular.
"skippy," the phone calls invariably began, "a plane just flew into the World Trade Center."
"Really? It was probably a Cessna or something. Weird, but possible. Dammit, I have to work tonight and I've been asleep for less than three hours. I'll talk to you later." I should also note that I take massive amounts of Nytol to sleep, so when I do wake up, I'm less than fully coherent.
By the second or third phone call, I had given up any pretext of getting any more sleep and turned on MSNBC, which had started airing in Canada the week before. Then I saw the smoke billowing from the tower. Uh oh, I thought. A commuter plane wouldn't produce that much smoke (my job at the time required me to know a litle bit about fires, and I knew that that one was serious.)
I figured that an airliner had, for whatever reason, accidently hit the building. I immediately knew that everyone on the plane and most of the people on the five floors surrounding the point of impact were already dead. This was bad.
But I remembered the press conference that the Port Authority held immediately after the 1993 truck bombing of the Trade Center. That bombing was designed to knock one tower over into the other. If two 110 story buildings were to come down horizontally, it would take out most of Lower Manhattan and kill tens of thousands of people. The Port Authourity declared that the towers were designed to sustain an impact from a 747, the largest commercial jet in 1975, when the towers opened.
For those unschooled in structural engineering, a high rise building is designed around a core. The core contains elevator shafts, water, gas lines and the like. The rest of the building is literally built around the core. In newer buildings, the emergency stairwells are constructed with reinforced concrete and pressurized to minimize smoke in them. It's a pretty standard design code for modern high rises. As horrible as the death toll of the impact was going to be, I figured that the overwhelming number of people in the Trade Center would survive. I had calculated that, other than plane's passengers, the death toll might be in the neighborhood of about 200.
Unfortunately, no one knew what size the plane was or where the flight originated. The planes involved were 757 and 767's and fuelled for flights to the West Coast. The impact literally cut through the core of the building and all of the emergency stairwells. Anyone above the impact point was doomed. Anyone below, evacuating through the stairwells, as office workers are trained to do (I know, because I used to be involved in that training), faced the very real possibility of being doused in a cascade of burning jet fuel. You'd be amazed by the amount of smoke produced by even a small fire in a building like that. Just by watching on television, I knew that God knows how many people were dying, alone - even though they were surrounded by hundreds of others - in total darkness.
Then the second plane hit. Then the news came that the Pentagon had been attacked. Shortly after that, the news came that a jetliner had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. This was not an accident. It was an act of war, unseen in human history.
When nations attack one another, the traditionally use civilians as targets but not as weapons. I was also reasonably certain that this was non-state sponsored terrorism. From 9/11 forward, I felt that any tenuous links between the attacks and Iraq were ridiculous and that no serious person could believe such a link could exist. Even a psychopath like Saddam Hussien would know that complicity in an attack like September 11 would draw maximum retailiation. Even the passive knowledge of such a barbaric, unprovoked attack would result in such disasterous consequenses that no nation would be willing to risk it. This had to be an independent terrorist attack.
There was only one group that had the demonstrated ability to co-ordinate such a strike, al-Qeada. Some of the readers of this blog spoke to me that day and can tell you that I seriously contemplated the possibility of a nuclear strike on Kabul in the hours and days following 9/11. Anyone with a passing interest in foreign affairs at the time knew the that the Taliban government of Afghanistan was harboring, and therefore complicit in, the activities of al-Qaeda.
But there was all of that death. The human toll of the attack was almost incomprehensible. Even today, I cannot think of a single non-military attack that took so many lives. It was the most chilling thing that I have ever seen and will probably remain so until the day I die.
I'd like to think that my immediate thoughts were a lofty trestise on an appropriate foreign policy response, or even on the human toll of the attacks. They weren't. I knew that my girlfriend at the time's children were just waking up in Fremont,California, some three thousand miles and three time zones away, as the first tower collapsed. While I was pretty sure that they weren't in immediate danger, I couldn't help but think how my girlfriend would explain this to her 11 year old son. I can't tell you how much it hurt that I wasn't there to help her, or that I probably couldn't have even if I was.
The worst part is that most of those people didn't have to die. When the first tower was hit, building security advised those in the second tower not to evacuate. As I've noted, I know a few things about high rise building evacuations. Of the six people killed in the '93 Trade Center bombing, not one was killed by the explosion. They were killed by smoke inhilation. With just that knowledge alone, both towers should have been immediately cleared. That they weren't should have led to at least 1,000 charges of criminal negiligence causing death. That those in the second tower were told to stay where they were is as incomprehensible as it is unforgivible. Whoever made that decision should be in prison.
There were other immediate considerations in my mind as well. Within an hour of the second strike, the American government ordered the lockdown of all air traffic in the United States. Most incoming flights were diverted to Canada. Several of those flights were diverted to Pearson International Airport, just outside of Toronto. At the time, my sister lived just a few miles from Pearson. If al-Qaeda wanted to kill Americans, there were now hundreds, if not thousands, as a stationary target just miles from my sister's house.
That may sound ridiculous now, but consider this, if 4 planes could be hijacked simeutaneously, who could say that 14 couldn't? Or 40? As bad as security may have been in Boston and Newark, I knew that it was far, far worse in places like Manilia or Athens. At the time, I thought there was a very real possibility that planes could keep crashing for as many as 20 hours. And if they couldn't go down in the United States, where could they kill a maximimum numbrer of Americans? Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver is where.
As I went to work that day, I was stunned by the silence of the city. Toronto is a city of some 3 million people, and is as loud as a city that size can be epected to be. My trip to downtown on the subway was in almost total silence. The building that I worked in consisted of three very high profile tenants who had to step up their security procedures. Ordinarily, situations like bomb threats have a response that involve a gret activity and noise. September 11 was the quietest chaos I've ever seen.
Shortly after the President's address, which I listened to on the radio, I stepped outside to have a cigarette with one of the tenant's Coroporate Security heads. He asked me what I thought the death toll was. I had heard that, on an average day the World Trade Center had 50,000 people in it. I told my friend that it woud be a miracle if there were fewer than 10,000 people who left the site in body bags. Thankfully, I was wrong. But even with my mistake, there were 3,000 people dead. Tens of thousands of people had lost family in friends in the attack. Hundreds of millions of people had watched those people die on television.
Even today, it seems incomprehensible that 19 people could kill so many and, in so doing, change the course the human history. The results of the attack were visable wven from space.
I can't imagine that many people are reading stupid blogs like this one today. Hopefully they are remembering that day. I hope that they remember, and pray for those lost and their families.
God Bless America.
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