Spared the bombs and sieges that scarred nearly every other
world capital in the 20th century, New York
on Sept. 11, 2001, suffered
the most catastrophic attack on American territory since the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Thousands of civilian men, women and children were killed and thousands more
injured when two hijacked jetliners crashed into the World
Trade Center
at the beginning of what was to be just another day in pre-recessionary New
York. The famed twin towers, dominant features of the
downtown skyline since 1970, collapsed in a sickening heap about an hour after
the crashes.
Combined with a similar attack on the Pentagon, the
casualties for Sept. 11, 2001,
very likely will exceed the number of Allied casualties on D-Day, when 2,500
soldiers died and 10,000 were wounded.
“The number of casualties
will be more than any of us can bear,” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said during an
afternoon news conference. “There was a large number
of firefighters and police officers in harm’s way. We don’t know how many we’ve
lost.”
As night fell, thousands of families throughout the New
York area prayed for loved ones they had not heard from, fearing the terrible news that might come with a
phone call, or a visit from a clergyman. Downtown Manhattan,
symbol of the resurgent New York
which gleefully laid claim to the title of “Capital of the World,” had in an
instant been rendered an appalling slaughterhouse.
President George W. Bush, who was told of the atrocities
while he was reading to schoolchildren in Florida,
promised to seek out the groups or people responsible. The President was flown
to Nebraska, home of the
Strategic Air Command, and then returned to Washington
in late afternoon.
By midday, F-16
fighter jets were patrolling Manhattan’s
skies, and all other air traffic throughout the nation was grounded.
Sirens-suddenly reminiscent of air-raid warnings in London during the
Blitz-replaced the honking horns and chaotic sounds of midtown as streets were
shut down to allow access to emergency vehicles, some of them summoned from
towns in Westchester County and New Jersey.
Doctors in St. Vincent’s Hospital
were, by late afternoon, awaiting casualties that were slow in coming. Dr.
George Neuman, head of anesthesiology, said there was great concern about the
number of injured people trapped under the massive rubble.
The scene downtown was terrifying. People trapped in the
towers could be seen leaping from windows, as witnesses on the ground screamed
in horror. One eyewitness said one of the jumpers landed on a firefighter,
killing both of them.
Crowds gathered in City Hall Plaza, several blocks to the
northeast, to watch the tragedy unfold. At 10
a.m., they heard a terrible roar as the first tower, No. 1 World
Trade Center, collapsed. Acrid white smoke quickly enveloped City Hall, and
people began running north. Police officers shouted, “Move, move, move!” Some
people sought refuge inside a subway entrance. Within minutes, the plaza was
deserted. An ambulance was parked on a nearby street, seemingly abandoned.
Soon, emerging from the thick smoke, refugees began streaming north towards
City Hall. “I need a mask! I need a mask!” shouted an Emergency Medical
Services worker. Somebody else shouted, “It’s coming!”
Zdizislaw Zulinski, a Port Authority employee who worked on
the 74th floor of the 1 World Trade Center, said he escaped shortly after he
felt the building start shaking. It took him half an hour to walk down the
building’s fire stairs. “I saw windows falling from the west side of the
building,” he said. “I jumped into the fire stairs, and just was walking and
walking. There will be thousands of people dead.”
Keith Kooper, an employee of Sidley, Austin,
Brown & Wood in
1 World Trade Center, said he felt the tower begin to shake while he was on the
56th floor. When he emerged in the plaza below, he said, he saw several badly
burned bodies. A colleague at Sidley Austin, Quinlan Kato, said it took him
about an hour to get out of the building. “There were corpses everywhere,” he
said. “They were mangled.”
Just after the first tower collapsed, grim-faced emergency
workers and frantic family members tried to make their way south, while
distraught survivors wandered uptown along the West Side Highway and other
streets. Some of them were covered in dust and soot as they approached Warren
and Greenwich Streets, when they heard a huge explosion behind them. The second
tower had fallen. Their view obscured by smoke, some survivors screamed, “It’s
another plane!” Most people scattered east, west and north-everywhere but
south. But José Machado, a 56-year-old father of two, was trying to fight his
way toward the smoke. “My son’s there!” he said. “He’s in school. They won’t
let me through.”
Earlier in the morning, Mr. Machado had dropped off his
8-year-old son, Joseph, at Intermediate School 89 near the World
Trade Center.
He saw both buildings struck. “I looked at the first building, and I saw people
jumping out of windows from about 75 stories,” he said. “I saw those poor
people jumping, and I was praying to God. When the first building collapsed, it
blew up like a bomb.” He retrieved Joseph but was worried about his other son,
Matthew.
Along Second Avenue
on the East Side, people gathered around shop windows to
watch televisions or listen to radios, an image associated with another era of
strife. Scores of ambulances-many from the outer boroughs and beyond-raced down
the avenue, which was almost devoid of normal traffic.
With the subways shut
down, people wandered the sidewalks, eager for news. Many were talking on cell
phones, although placing a call was extremely difficult.
Manhattan
residents by the hundreds shook off their shock and went to nearby hospitals to
donate blood. Governor George Pataki visited Cabrini
Medical Center
near Gramercy Park
in late afternoon, thanking people who had lined up to give blood.
The Governor was in his car when he first heard news of the
bombing. “At first, you don’t believe it,” he said. “I immediately got on the
phone with the President. And then when the second one happened, you knew it
was terrorism.”
Frightened people passed
along rumors of further atrocities. Laurie Abraham was walking along West 42nd Street near Seventh Avenue,
en route to the Manhattan Bridge and home to her family in Brooklyn, when about 15 people came running towards here.
“I heard one of them say, ‘There’s a bomb on 42nd Street!’ So I headed back in the direction I came from,
and I saw a woman looking very flustered,” said Ms. Abraham, executive editor
of Elle magazine. ‘She said, ‘I hear
someone has a machine gun back there.’ I kept going, and someone else said,
‘Stay away from the Met Life building. There’s a bomb in there!'”
Police were summoned to a suspicious-looking car on East
64th Street between Park and Madison avenues. The
Police Department Bomb Squad took the car apart, but it contained only some
paint cans and car batteries. A police official said he expects nervous New
Yorkers to report many other such unfounded complaints in coming weeks.
Thousands of people left Manhattan
by foot over the Brooklyn Bridge,
turning the historic span into an escape route for shell-shocked refugees. Many
were covered in ash and could summon neither the energy nor the interest to
brush it off. One woman sobbed, “I saw the building just drop in front of me.”
Brooklyn’s Atlantic
Avenue was wreathed in smoke, and some of the
neighborhood’s many Arab-owned shops closed their doors. An anti-Israeli,
pro-intifada sign adorned the shop of Ahmed Ali, a Palestinian who owns Wafa
Translation Services and a 40-year American resident. “It’s our country, too,”
he said, of the United States,
“and we feel like any other American citizen living in this country. We have a
lot of friends in those buildings. We’re human beings, and human life is valued
more than anything else.”
Residents gathered along the promenade in Brooklyn
Heights, even as breezes blew smoke
across the East River. Two photographers carried a
three-foot poster of the Twin Towers
taken from the promenade vantage point. Several passers-by asked the
photographers to take their picture with smoke-filled downtown in the
background. One of them was a 60-ish resident named Dominick Rizzi. Mr. Rizzi’s
30-year-old son was working on the 36th floor in one of the towers when the
planes hit. “He got out,” Mr. Rizzi said, as his eyes filled with tears. “But
he said there was no way that anyone above where the planes hit could have
survived.” Mr. Rizzi posed for his picture. “Please send me one,” he told one
of the photographers. “Today is a day that life changed.”
“You cannot underestimate the damage this will do to all our
psyches,” said Mark Ackermann, senior vice president of St. Vincent’s
Medical Center.
