I’m going to write today about a few things I would have written about last year if I’d had somewhere to write it. WindyPundit is not a diary blog, but I figured that on this anniversary of a very sad day I could indulge myself in a little bit of memory. I hope you’ll understand and bear with me.
First Word.
I had lost my job on Friday the 7th, and I was determined not to get lazy while I was laid off. On Monday the 10th, I got up, went out for some exercise, did some laundry and cleaning, and signed up for unemployment compensation. The date is my wife’s birthday, so we must have celebrated, but I can’t remember it at all. On Tuesday the 11th, I planned to exercise and then go to the bank to start setting up a business account for a one-man consulting company.
I was still lying in bed when my wife called to tell me that she’d heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. As I got up, I wondered if it was an accident or deliberate. It seemed unlikely that it would be deliberate, yet what were the chances of hitting one of the towers amid all the other buildings in New York? By the time I got up and flipped on CNN, I had my answer: both towers were burning from being hit by two planes. That had to be deliberate.
Passenger Jets.
I watched the replay as the second plane flew in from the right and passed behind the towers. I was wondering what we’d see when it hit. After all, the towers were still standing, so how hard could it have hit? A few seconds later an angry red fireball erupted from the side of the tower, spewing an enormous cloud of smoke and debris. I had never really understood how the word “angry” applied to fire before, but now I understood. The fire seemed almost malevolent. I knew that hundreds must have died, and I remember feeling the heat from a rush of adrenaline.
When I first saw the plane hit, I could see that it was big, but I didn’t think it was a passenger plane. There hadn’t been a hijacking in many years, so it seemed unlikely that someone had smuggled weapons onto two different planes and hijacked both of them. I figured maybe someone stole a few cargo planes from some airfield. That seemed a lot easier because the security for a cargo plane wouldn’t be as tight as for a passenger plane. I realized I was wrong when there was a report that several passenger planes had left their flight plans. Somebody had used planes full of people as weapons.
I remember wondering how the planes were flown. There’s no way a pilot would do that, no matter how much he was threatened. He’d have nothing to lose by fighting back, and pilots are generally pretty brave folks. Even if the terrorists somehow found the only pilot in commercial aviation so cowardly he would rather crash into an inhabited skyscraper than face a gun, there’s no way they could find two of them. The terrorists must have known how to fly a plane. Having seen too many movies, I pictured some disturbed and angry former pilot from some Middle Eastern air force.
While I was watching the coverage, word came from a correspondent at the Pentagon that they’d just heard an explosion. A few minutes later it was confirmed that the Pentagon had been attacked somehow, possibly another airplane. Then my wife called me. I could hear how frightened she was. She asked me if I thought this could happen here in Chicago, and I told her I thought it was possible. She worked far from the downtown area, so I figured (correctly) that she was safe.
Collapse.
As bad as things were, I was still mentally O.K. because the way I thought of it, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center had failed. I had seen a movie called Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing, about the first attack on the towers. The bombers had been almost laughably inept. The bomb was a hodge-podge of different explosives like some kid might make. The terrorists all talked about bringing down the towers, but in the end all did was kill six people who were standing next to the bomb when it went off. At the end of the movie, terrorist mastermind Ramzi Yousef looks at the towers and boasts that next time they will bring both of them down.
Well, it hadn’t worked. Oh, it was bad, there were hundreds dead on the planes, and probably hundreds more dead on the floors that had been hit. It seemed likely to me that many people above the impact floors would be trapped and might also die. Still, the towers had survived the impact. It was another fuck-up. They hadn’t won. Somehow that made it survivable. There wasn’t any noticeable flame, so I figured all the jet fuel had burned up in the initial fireballs. The towers would smolder for a while until the fire department got enough men and hoses to the fire floors to put them out, or until the fire ran out of stuff to burn. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and didn’t realize that a jet fueled for thousands of miles of flight would have created a much bigger fireball if all the fuel had burned. The smoke from the fire was much heavier than it looked to me. The fires were much larger than I thought.
I had been talking to some friends on the phone when I glanced back at the television and noticed that there was a large dust cloud where the top of the second tower should be. It was growing and moving as I watched. I realized that I had to be seeing the collapse of one of the towers. How far down would it go? Well, there was dust everywhere all up and down where the tower had been, so it must have collapsed all the way, the top part collapsing on the bottom. Jesus. What I had just seen must have killed hundreds rescue workers in the street below…and many more in the tower itself.
So what had happened? It could be that the airplane damaged it almost, but not quite, to the point of collapse, and that little pieces of it had been failing since the collision. A popped-rivet here, a cracked beam there, until finally something crucial gave way and the whole structure collapsed. The problem with that theory is that it seemed like the plane had to hit it just right. Even slightly harder, and the tower would have collapsed on impact; even slightly weaker, and the tower would stand for months. How unlikely is that? Far more likely that the impact had triggered a slow but progressive failure mode. A raging fire seemed like the obvious explanation. Eventually the fire burned or melted or weakened the structure to the point of collapse. This was bad news. If the collapsed tower had been hit just right by luck, it was unlikely that the other tower had also been hit the same way. But if the problem was fire, as I suspected, the same process was probably happening in the other tower. Sure enough, the other tower collapsed a little later.
I remember watching the crowds of rescue workers come pouring out of the smoke clouds. They all drifted to a stop and just stood there for a while. Then they gathered their gear and marched slowly back toward ground zero.
Thoughts.
I thought about whether I or my family were at any particular risk in case this was only the opening move in a campaign of terrorism. The worst-case for us would probably be someone setting off a small nuclear weapon in downtown Chicago. It would probably go off at ground level, and I live about 10 miles away, so I’d be safe from any immediate blast or flash effects. My parents are equally far from downtown, and my wife worked far away in the north suburbs. On some level I knew this was just a case of having seen too many movies. Only in fiction do terrorists begin with a small attack and then wait before launching the big one to give the authorities time to catch them. In real life, they hit with everything they’ve got all at once. Normally, I don’t think of Chicago as a high-risk target, at least not while Washington D.C. is still standing.
Anyway, somehow determining that I and my loved ones were safe from fictional nuclear terrorists seemed to calm me down. With both towers down, and all four planes crashed, there was nothing more for me to see. I went to the bank, and later I went for my walk in the park. It’s a stupid cliche, but I wanted to finish the things I had planned, so the terrorists wouldn’t win. I remember that the walk in the park was disturbingly quiet. I live right under the flight patterns for Chicago’s O’Hare airport, but there wasn’t a plane in the sky. Every once in a while, I’d hear a little noise from a jet engine, but I couldn’t see a thing. I guess it was a military flight, perhaps an F16 flying a patrol over the city.
Sometime during the day, I remember hearing about the crash of flight 93. It was kind of shocking how the crash of a commercial jet could be only a sidebar to the main story.
I had just read a novel in which a terrorist killed everyone on a plane filled with passengers, which seemed pretty terrible at the time. But now terrorists had done that four times in a single day, and the passenger fatalities weren’t even the worst thing that had happened that day. Reality had become more shocking than fiction.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many people could have escaped the towers. It looked pretty bad. In the movie The Siege, a building gets bombed and 600 people die. I knew the World Trade Center held 50,000 people. This was worse than any movie I’d seen. We would thank God if only 600 people died. I knew the timeline, and I could guess that New York fire codes probably require fire stairs to handle 45 people per minute, so the biggest variable was the number of stairwells, which I didn’t know. My best guess was that there were 20,000 people still inside the buildings when they fell. It eventually turned out my guess was high by a factor of ten. I don’t know what I figured wrong, and I don’t care.
It was beginning to sink in that this wasn’t just another terrorist incident. We were at war.