The Days That Shook New York by Pete Hamill New York Daily News 9-16-2001 The morning was fresh and clear, after a night of heavy rain. All over the city, the first voters entered polling places to cast ballots in a primary election, that symbol of our imperfect democracy. Ballots cast, most went off to work. Some went to work in the gleaming complex of seven buildings that we call the World Trade Center. The buildings were spread over 16 acres and were dominated by the 110-story twin towers. The first — 1 World Trade Center — rose 1,368 feet into the sky; 2 WTC was 6 feet shorter. When the towers opened for business in 1975, they overwhelmed the old skyline, and dominated the vertical city. From high floors of the twin towers, tenants and visitors could look down with a certain haughtiness at the other buildings in the Center. Number 7, after all, was a mere 47 stories (and housed a $13 million emergency crisis center opened in 1999 by Mayor Giuliani to cope with any form of New York disaster). The rowdy commodities exchange was in 4 WTC, the U.S. Customs House in number 6 and the Marriott Hotel faced the Hudson River. All seemed puny compared with those towers of steel and glass, scraping the sky. From up there, too, workers and visitors could see in the distance the other great towers of New York, from the nearby Woolworth Building to the Chrysler and the Empire State. Or they could look down upon the rooftops of St. Peter's, the oldest Catholic church in New York, and St. Paul's, where George Washington worshiped when New York was briefly the capital of the United States. And they could glimpse the clumsy bulk of the Church St. post office, opened in 1935, when the mayor's name was LaGuardia. In short, through a combination of scale and location, the World Trade Center symbolized New York's extraordinary present, dense past and apparently limitless future. From its extravagant heights, people down there on the streets looked like ants. Vast Global Marketplace On Tuesday morning, most who worked in the center's buildings had little time for sightseeing or social condescension. They were simply too busy. As always, office lights had burned through the night. Along with all the Americans, there were hundreds of workers from Britain, Australia, Japan, China, India, every European country, all working in their own small bazaars in the vast global marketplace. Through the early morning, where it was 70 degrees at 8:30, a steady stream of New Yorkers arrived by subway or bus, bought coffee, bagels, pastries and newspapers in the shops of the World Trade Center Mall, and entered the high-speed elevators. There they were joined by men and women who had come by car pool from the suburbs, or rose into the mall on the escalators of the PATH trains from New Jersey. As always, they were wrapped in concentration, as if girding themselves for the uncertainties, struggles and routines of the coming business day. What was happening to this economy? Were we in a recession or not? None could have imagined the coming horror. While New Yorkers of all nationalities were entering the buildings of the World Trade Center, two airplanes were being readied for flight at Boston's Logan Airport. American Airlines Flight 11 was a Boeing 767. It was 159 feet and 2 inches long, with a wingspan of 156 feet, 1 inch. Empty, it weighed 176,200 pounds. It carried 13,900 gallons of jet fuel. The crew was composed of two pilots and nine flight attendants. On this day, it was scheduled to carry 81 passengers to Los Angeles. Among them were five men who called themselves Walid al Shehri, Wail Alsheri (aka Waleed Asheri), Mohammad Atta, Aabdul Alomari and Sataam Sugami. They were a team, all of them young. Atta knew how to fly airplanes, a skill perfected at a school in Florida. The other airplane was also a 767, United Airlines Flight 175, also bound for Los Angeles. It was staffed by two pilots and seven flight attendants, and would carry 56 passengers. Among those passengers were men who called themselves Marwan Alshehi, Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri, Hamza Al Ghamdi and Ahmed Al Ghamdi. Another team. The passengers, boarding cards in hand, moved through metal detectors under the eyes of $8.50-an-hour security guards. Walking separately and casually, each member of the two teams made it through security. They had small carry-on bags. And some of them — nobody yet knows how many — were carrying plastic-encased box cutters. At roughly the same time, at Newark Airport, 38 passengers were boarding United Airlines Flight 93, bound for San Francisco. This was a Boeing 757. It was 155 feet, three inches long, with a wingspan of 124 feet, 10 inches. Empty, it weighed 126,250 pounds. It carried 9,370 gallons of jet fuel. On board, there were two pilots and five flight attendants. And among the passengers, another team: Ahmed Al Haznawi, Ahmed Alnami, Ziad Jarrah and Saeed Al Ghamdi. And at Dulles Airport, outside Washington, 58 passengers were boarding a 757 bound for Los Angeles, American Airlines Flight 77. This plane, too, was loaded with fuel for the journey across the continent. There were four flight attendants on board, and two pilots — along with another team: Khalid Al Mihdhar, Majed Moqed, Hani Hanjour, Nawaf Alhamzi and Saleem Alhamzi. Armed and dangerous. Four airliners on a lovely Tuesday morning in America, carrying 266 human beings on long, drowsy journeys across the continent. Nobody then knew that 19 of those passengers were fanatics, seething with death. Intruders Speaking Arabic American Flight 11 lifted off the Logan runway at 7:59 a.m. Two minutes later, at Newark, United's Flight 93 rose to the skies. In Boston, United Flight 175 took off at 8:14 a.m. The American flight from Dulles lifted off at 8:10 a.m. The day that would horrify the world had begun. We might never know what happened in the desperate hour that followed. On each of the two Boston flights, five men almost certainly rose from their seats after takeoff, armed with box cutters they had carried through the porous security. Somehow they got into the cockpits. Two of the intruders — at least one in each plane — were trained as pilots. All were speaking Arabic. Some donned red headbands. Very quickly, passengers understood what was happening, and the hijackers either didn't notice that some were using cell phones (or the credit-card telephones on the backs of seats) or were encouraging their victims to say their goodbyes. One of the passengers on the Dulles flight was Barbara Olson, a former federal prosecutor who had become well-known as a commentator on CNN. In the flight's final minutes, she made two calls to her husband, Solicitor General Theodore Olson. It was his birthday and she had changed flights to be with him before he left for work. In the first call, she said that the plane was being hijacked, passengers forced to the rear of the cabin. The call was then cut off, and her husband called the Justice Department command center. His wife called back a few minutes later, very composed, asking, "What do I tell the pilot to do?" Again the call was cut off. Olson would never speak with his wife again. Mark Bingham, on United Flight 93, called his mother in San Francisco: "In case I don't see you again, I want to let you know that I love you very, very much." A flight attendant named Cee Cee Lyles from the same flight called her husband, a cop in Florida. She told him she loved him and their boys very much. A passenger named Peter Hanson, on United Flight 175, called his father, saying that flight attendants had been stabbed and the plane was going down. Word Was Getting Out Slowly, word was getting out. At 8:35 a.m., the military command center at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado received word that an American plane had been hijacked. It's not yet clear what they did with this news. At that moment, in Sarasota, Fla., President George W. Bush was leaving the Colony Beach & Tennis Club. He was on his way to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School to make a speech about education. Within 10 minutes, the world — and his presidency — would permanently change. The first blow fell with shocking simplicity and ease. At 8:47, American Airlines Flight 11 roared across the Hudson River from the northwest and became a missile. At 8:48, it smashed directly into the face of the north tower of the World Trade Center, between the 96th and 103rd floors. Thousands of gallons of jet fuel exploded. The building shook, then shuddered, and seemed to stabilize. Those below the fire line began to flee. They hurried down smoky stairways, making Dante-like descents that took those from the highest floors almost 45 minutes to complete. People stumbled, called out in the acrid darkness. But there was no panic. As they moved lower, they saw firefighters passing them, loaded down with gear, some of them panting, climbing and climbing. Those firefighters were proof that within minutes, the machinery of professional life-saving had begun to work. Immediately after the first crash, the fire company on Liberty St., just below the twin towers, rushed toward the burning north tower. It had one primary task: Save the people. That mission is drilled into every firefighter in New York: people first, property second. For years, the members of this company had drilled for the possibility of calamity in the twin towers. That fearful day had come at last. Now they were moving up into the smoke and fire. Other downtown fire companies began scrambling toward the site. Sirens split the morning air with the sound of distress. Giuliani was on his way to City Hall when he heard about the first crash. He ordered his car to go to the scene. First Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota jumped into a car to race six blocks to the scene. For a few naïve minutes, it seemed possible that this could have been an accident, a modern version of the 1948 crash of an airplane into the fog-shrouded Empire State Building. Visibility on this morning was perfect; but, still, perhaps this was some terrible human error. Then a second airplane came out of the northwest, a relatively small black silhouette in contrast to the immense skyscrapers. This was United Flight 175 from Boston. This Was No Movie In the streets, thousands were gazing up at the smoke billowing from the north tower when they saw this second airplane coming. To many, what followed reminded them of a scene from some dumb, computerized Hollywood fiction. But this was no movie. At 9:03, the second airplane hit between the 87th and 93rd floors of the south tower. The speed, weight and force almost drove it through the building. The loaded fuel tank exploded into a garish orange fireball. Falling debris hammered people who had escaped the smoke and panic. An eerie blizzard of paper rose above the tower, while shattered windows fell hundreds of feet and killed people on the ground, splitting some human beings as if they were cleavers. Hundreds began emerging from the smoke, gasping for air, running toward open streets. Others believed a man with a bullhorn on the 40th floor who insisted the building had stabilized. Most of them died. But now, everybody knew: These were deliberate acts, the work of terrorists. In a holding room at the Booker School in Sarasota, Bush was briefed (over a secure phone) about the first crash by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. He went into a classroom to talk to 16 selected children before addressing a larger group in the auditorium. Then, at 9:05 a.m., White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card entered the room and whispered into the President's ear about the second plane. Bush tensed and nodded. He kept talking to the sixth-graders. In a larger auditorium, 200 more children (and some adults) waited with the media. Bush arrived late, and then started to speak: "This is a difficult day for America ..." When he finished his short announcement of the disaster, Bush was seen smiling thinly, and then was engulfed by the Secret Service. Meanwhile, American Airlines Flight 77 was heading to Washington, dropping steadily in altitude, but increasing its speed. Near the end of its flight, it flew so low that it clipped the tops of some trees. At 9:41 a.m., it smashed into the west entrance to the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. The symbol of American military power was partially engulfed in burning fuel, twisted metal, screams. The fire would burn for another 30 hours and 160 men and women would die, along with everybody on board the airplane. The raging impotence of mindless terror had escalated into a kind of war. At the World Trade Center, dense black smoke was now billowing from both stricken towers, rising into the once-clear air, forming a cloud that was visible for miles. Hundreds of men and women rushed out of the street level of each building. They were the safe, the living, the lucky, almost all of them stoic and cool, glancing up at the burning buildings, coughing smoke, running north. The firefighters and police kept moving into the smoky darkness. Sirens now screamed as if they had become the voices of the burning towers. Trading stopped on Wall St. at 9:40 a.m. Eight minutes later, the White House and the Capitol were evacuated. A minute later, the Federal Aviation Administration closed every airport in the nation, something that had never before happened. Airplanes still in the air were ordered to land in Canada. Scenes of Horror But now, captured on video or by still photographers, we began to see another form of horror: men and women trapped above the burning floors. Their faces were blurred behind the girders of the tower facades, those steel and glass curtain walls. Men and women. Blacks and whites, Asians and Latinos. All trapped above the shadow line between hope and despair. The flame and smoke rose implacably toward them. Then, one by one, some of them began to jump. They tumbled head over heels through the grainy air. As if choosing the manner of their own deaths. Making choices that we can never completely understand and absolutely never will be able to judge. At one point, a man and woman held hands and jumped together into eternity. Then at 9:50, there were small popping explosions from the burning floors of the south tower, cracking sounds, a bursting snap. The upper floors seemed to rise for a second, and then bow at a 30-degree angle; suddenly, shockingly, violently, down came the building. One floor pancaked into the next, all 110 floors vacating their space, making the great roaring sound of an avalanche. Steel was bent, splayed, twisted and ripped; thousands of windows exploded, showering glittering fragments of glass on the living and the dead; paper fell more slowly, a kind of ghastly confetti; human screams mixed with the distant sirens. A gigantic opaque cloud exploded from the base of the collapsed tower, the cloud itself 10 stories high, a mixture of shredded wood, pulverized plaster, crumpled concrete, destroyed wire lathing, the cloud billowing violently in all directions. On the streets, men and women ran, dove into doorways and under trucks or cars. Some tripped and fell, then rose again. The cloud was relentless, as if filled with demonic wrath, rolling over everything in its path. There was no time for fear. Only survival mattered. The fear would come later. And when it settled, or rose into the sky, death was everywhere. Nobody yet knows who died in the collapse, and how many of them were cops and firefighters and emergency workers, and how many were citizens who had left a few hours earlier for another Tuesday at the office, and would have been luckier had they been two hours late. Meanwhile, as the streets of New York grew vivid with horror and the beginning of rage, a desperate struggle was underway on United Flight 93. One passenger called an emergency dispatcher in Pennsylvania, saying, "We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" Other passengers had heard about the assault on the WTC; some of them vowed not to die without a struggle. Jeremy Glick, 31, called his wife, Liz, after the terrorists had taken over the airplane. His uncle, Tom Crowley, said they "decided that if their fate was to die, they should fight." A passenger named Thomas Burnett, a 38-year-old businessman from California, said the same thing in four cell phone calls to his wife, Deena (who conferenced in the FBI). "A group of us are going to do something," Burnett said. Somebody had already been knifed. He did not himself sound as if he would die. "He was coming home," his wife said later. "He wasn't leaving." The plane was then heading toward Cleveland, and air traffic controllers could hear someone in the cockpit shout, "Get out of here." Then a sound of struggle, and another "Get out of here." Then a voice, speaking in what was described as "broken English" said: "There is a bomb on board. This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport." It's now thought that this flight, which banked sharply before Cleveland, and then turned south, was aimed at the White House, or Camp David. If so, this terrorist mission failed. It seems certain that some kind of struggle took place. At 10:10 a.m., the plane crashed nose first, and with extraordinary violence, into a field 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. It was the only one of the four hijacked airplanes that did not kill people on the ground. There were brave men on that doomed airplane. About this time, the United Nations building on the East River was being evacuated. Secret Service agents with automatic weapons were deployed in Lafayette Square in Washington, across from the White House. The State and Justice departments were emptied of people, along with the World Bank. By 9:55 a.m., Bush was in Air Force One, beginning a curious odyssey that would take him to Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana, then to a bunker near Omaha, at Offutt Air Force base, home of the Strategic Air Command. He would not arrive in Washington until after dusk. In New York, some people wondered why he was on the run. Giuliani's Finest Hour The President's invisibility was underlined by the performance of Giuliani in New York. He rose to the occasion, after many dismal months of personal wretchedness. Even those who despised him said this was his finest hour. From the first hour, he was on the scene. In fact, he almost lost his own life. His expensive disaster command post was unreachable, so a temporary command post was set up at 45 Barclay St. He and his aides were there when they heard the roar of the pancaking first tower. They dived under desks, rolled toward walls, and could not breathe from ash and powder. When the roar ended, and the earth steadied, they went down to the street. Giuliani and the others donned breathing masks and started north on foot, like hundreds of other New Yorkers. At 10:28, the north tower of the WTC wheezed, shuddered, and came down with obliterating speed. Again: floor after floor. Again: a ferocious cloud so opaque it looked solid. More screams of shock, more running, more falls, more hundreds of mangled and pulverized human beings. And then another cloud of powder and ash. Giuliani had absorbed firsthand the incredible dimensions of the disaster. And he did what had to be done. Orders were already racing around the city. There would be no ballroom bands or last hurrahs tonight: The primary election was indefinitely postponed. Schools were closed, museums evacuated, subway lines shut down. Streets were sealed off below 14th St., and orders were given to evacuate everyone below Canal St. Police erected barricades, secured areas for rescue operations, anticipated the immense task ahead. And all the while, the vile ash of destruction fell steadily upon Manhattan, stinking of charred paint, laying a fine ash on streets and trees and parked cars, on dogs and children, on the living and the dead. Thousands and thousands of people stood on the streets of Manhattan, looking south, when the immense plumes of smoke rose from the stumps of the WTC, as if snarling in triumph. Work stopped all over the metropolitan area as millions watched television. One astonishing fact greeted them all: The twin towers were gone. And at 2:49 a.m., Giuliani, hitting a perfect note of stoic sorrow, answered a question about casualties: "I don't think we want to speculate about that." A beat. "More than any of us can bear." Down at the site of the disaster — which quickly acquired the shorthand name of Ground Zero — it was more than anyone could bear to understand what had already happened. It was more than anyone could bear to learn that the entire top brass of the Fire Department had been wiped out. It was more than anyone could bear to learn that at least 350 firefighters were missing, entire companies, complete bands of brothers, along with as-yet-uncounted numbers of police. The dead businessmen, secretaries, pizza clerks, bankers, shoe-shine parlor operators, subway clerks, shoe salesmen, sushi chefs, delivery boys, computer geniuses, stock analysts, book salesmen and others who worked in the buildings were surely in the thousands. More than anyone could bear. The seismograph at Columbia University had registered the collapse as a mini-earthquake. Thousands of the dead might have been pulverized by the overwhelming power of 110 floors collapsing upon them in a matter of seconds. One grieving fireman said: "There won't be anything left to bury." At 5:20 p.m., 7 WTC wobbled and then collapsed. The disaster center vanished in the rubble. There was still another explosion of ashen powder, like the venting of a furious volcano. Fires blazed from the rubble of the other buildings, those sheared stumps that would be called The Pile, as contrasted with The Pit, a hole in the earth a hundred yards away. A visitor could see lone men walking through the fog of ash, in a cityscape that for a few square blocks resembled Berlin in May 1945. Bush finally arrived at the White House at 6:54 p.m. and started preparing to address the nation and the world. The Pentagon was still burning. By then a morgue was being set up at Brooks Brothers, on the other side of Church St., and engineers were swarming the surrounding buildings to examine their structures, and firefighters kept coming to the scene, and so did cops, and so did other people: civilians, retired cops, old firemen, and then ironworkers, ready to cut steel — fearless, furious, ready to work. They worked through the night, as the power failed all the way to Worth St., as far east as Broadway. In came portable generators. In came improvised lights. We saw the first face masks, and citizens bringing water to slake the thirst of workers. Nobody down there saw the President speak at 8:30 p.m. They were too busy trying to find the living, clawing at ruined metal, at broken furniture, peering into voids. Now they were finding bodies they did not want to find. If you were down there, you saw some very strong men weeping. The days that followed were among the finest in New York history. Baseball was gone for a while, of course, and so were all other sports, and the Broadway shows, and all the other activities that make up the civilization of New York. But almost everybody seemed to rise to the occasion. Thousands lined up to give blood. An army division of volunteers offered themselves, their skills, their very bodies to help those who had fallen in harm's way. On the streets, people were courteous, even gracious. A vast hush fell upon the town. For a day, New Yorkers spoke in whispers. They called the people they loved and told them how they felt, as if inspired by all those trapped passengers on the airplanes, their lives compacted into such brief, abrupt farewells. Some of us received E-mails of concern and solidarity from Ireland and Japan, Italy and Mexico and Paris, notes from people who belong to the party of life. When television began sapping genuine feeling with its clichés and repetitions, others sought comfort in the blues or Billie Holiday or Bach: the music of the triumph over grief, of art over mindless zealotry. By Thursday, a tough proud spirit moved through much of the city. Citizens in Greenwich Village were cheering the police. Shrines appeared at the doors of wiped-out fire companies. All the minor irritations of New York life seemed dwarfed by the scenes at the World Trade Center. It seemed evidence of a mad vanity to complain about anything at all. People who hadn't prayed in years tried to remember the words. Votive candles were lit in churches and burned in windows. People who had spent their lives thinking that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels found themselves waving American flags. By Friday, stores were opening, streets were crowded, people jammed restaurants. Bush finally arrived at the site of the disaster, behaved reasonably well and departed. The digging went on. On Tuesday, New York was knocked down. On Wednesday, it was groping for its mouthpiece. On Thursday, it was on one knee, picking up the count. On Friday, it got up.