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September 7 - September 30, 2024
I also recall him saying, “Look, nobody’s coming. Nobody is coming for us. Any of the firemen or rescue people who are tasked at getting people out of the building—they are dead. If they were in the street, they are dead. If they were in the buildings, they are dead. Nobody is coming to get us. We have to get out on our own.”
The unprecedented collapse—the first time a high-rise building had ever fallen—was witnessed by millions around the world, on television, and in person across the New York region, including by those who had already evacuated from the World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan.
The South Tower collapsed at an estimated speed of nearly 124 miles an hour, and later estimates held that the winds generated from the collapse of the World Trade Center peaked as high as 70 miles per hour, driving the accompanying cloud of debris scores of blocks away as the hurricane-force wind spread devastation throughout Lower Manhattan.
Ada Dolch, principal, HSLPS: That was the moment when I said, “OK, this is the end.” I saw this tsunami wave of dust and debris coming in our direction. It was coming fast. It felt like pins and needles on your back. It was beyond frightening.
Lt. Joseph Torrillo, director of fire education safety, FDNY: As I was running that air caught the back of my helmet, and I saw my helmet fly away. My helmet was flying faster and higher, and I could see it as I was running. It was like The Wizard of Oz. At that point, as the building came down lower and lower, the air pressure was so strong—they estimate almost like a tornado force—the air pressure lifted me off of my feet and I was flying through the air.
Chief Joseph Pfeifer, Battalion 1, FDNY: I heard all the crashing and the steel and then the street went totally black. As a firefighter, you expect blackness inside a burning building. Outside in broad daylight, you don’t.
Bruno Dellinger, principal, Quint Amasis North America, North Tower: In about five seconds, darkness fell upon us with an unbelievable violence. Even more striking: there was no more sound. Sound didn’t carry anymore because the air was so thick.
Dan Potter, firefighter, Ladder 10, FDNY: Then it started—the rain of the debris. Everything hitting around you. I dove to the floor, covered myself up. I figured: This is it. The force buckled the metal doors of the firehouse. They blew out every window. The ambulance that was up in the front there was crushed.
Capt. Sean Crowley, NYPD: I’ve never heard screaming like I did on that day. It was all men. It was unbelievable screaming. I’m thinking about how I’m probably going to die and about my kids.
Tracy Donahoo: In the academy, they said, “If you think you’re gonna die, you’re going to die.” So I’m not gonna die here. This is not my day, I’m not dying here.
Det. Sgt. Joe Blozis, crime scene investigator, NYPD: After the building collapsed, there was a calmness that I’ll never forget. When the dust cloud came, you heard nothing and you saw nothing.
Capt. Sean Crowley, NYPD: Picture taking a handful of flour and sticking it up your nose and in your mouth. That’s what breathing was like.
Underneath the North Lawn of the White House, the vice president and assembled aides attempted to comprehend the crisis from inside the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a.k.a. the White House bunker, and tried to figure out how many more hijacked planes were in the air. They knew of at least one: United Flight 93.
Dick Cheney, vice president: In the years since, I’ve heard speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.
Condoleezza Rice: My first thought was, Get a message out to the world that the United States of America has not been decapitated. These pictures must have been terrifying. It must have seemed liked the United States of America was coming apart. My test was to keep my head about me and to make certain that people around the world didn’t panic.
Matthew Waxman: There was this stark contrast between the chaotic information bombardment about what was happening around Washington, around the country—some of it accurate, some of it inaccurate—and the calm and careful deliberation of a lot of the senior decision makers.
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the 1st Air Force, NORAD, Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida: We can’t see the aircraft. We don’t know where it is because we don’t have any radars pointing into the U.S. Anything in the United States was considered friendly by definition.
Matthew Waxman: That really grabs you by the collar, when you hear the vice president giving the order to shoot down an unidentified aircraft flying toward the national capital. That stands out as one of the most frightening moments of the day, partly because it highlighted the sense of continuing danger. There was also the realization of the enormous dilemmas that faced decision makers at that moment with very little time and imperfect information.
Josh Bolten, deputy chief of staff, White House: Vice President Cheney was very steady, very calm. He clearly had been through crises before and did not appear to be in shock like many of us.
Dick Cheney: As bad as the events of 9/11 were, some of us had practiced exercises for far more dangerous and difficult circumstances—an all-out Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. That helped—that training kicked in that morning.
With the order from Vice President Cheney, the military scrambled to find planes it could bring into the fight—even if that meant launching them unarmed, launching them on a kamikaze mission to crash their own fighters into hijacked airliners. It was an unbelievable and unprecedented mission, the weight of which was not lost on the pilots gathered to take it on. What was not yet widely known was that the United 93 passengers were planning, at the same time, to take the plane over themselves.
Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville: I was thinking, Wow, we’re in a little trouble here. Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: Sass and I fully expected to intercept Flight 93 and take it down. Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville: I was going into this moral or ethical justification of the needs of the many versus the needs of the few. Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off. If we did it right, this would be it.
Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing to sacrifice themselves.
Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville: They made the decision we didn’t have to make.
A few minutes before 10:00 a.m., United Flight 93 passenger Edward Felt, a 41-year-old married father of two who was traveling as part of his job as a computer engineer for BEA Systems, called 911 from the plane and reached emergency dispatcher John Shaw in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. It was the first tip to Pennsylvania authorities that there was trouble in the skies overhead.
Alice Ann Hoagland, mother of United Flight 93 passenger Mark Bingham: The uniqueness of Flight 93 is that it was in the air longer than the other flights. People on board were able to find out about the fate of the other three flights and mount an effort to thwart the hijackers, even if they weren’t able to save their own lives.
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the 1st Air Force, NORAD, Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida: We did not know that was the last plane. The war was still on as far as we are concerned.
You train for nuclear war, but then you get into something like this. All the money they pumped into us for training, that worked.
Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser, White House: I called the president, and he said, “I’m coming back.” I said, “You stay where you are. You cannot come back here. Washington is under attack.”
Sonya Ross: I was nervous. I was thinking—it seems really morbid—but I was thinking, What if they come after the president? We all turn into “and 12 others.” No one knows your name if you go down with the president. But Eric Washington, he was the CBS sound guy, he had his seat reclined, his feet up. He said, “What are you worried about? You’re on the safest plane in the world.”
Since the mid-1990s, two squads of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, known as I-49 and I-45, had been carefully tracking the rise of a terrorist group known as al-Qaeda. Even though his name was new to most Americans on September 11, the organization’s leader, Osama bin Laden, had been on the FBI’s radar for some time, having been added to its Ten Most Wanted list in June 1999 for his role in planning and financing the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In 1999, careful work by law enforcement intercepted an al-Qaeda plot to attack the United States during the
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At 10:29 a.m., 102 minutes after it had been hit by American Airlines Flight 11, the North Tower collapsed, its level-by-level pancaking almost exactly the same as the South Tower’s. Hundreds were caught inside the building, including many people trapped in or above the impact zone. Thousands more who had just evacuated, or were watching the events unfold, were caught in the vicinity around the World Trade Center.
Families across the country struggled to understand what the attacks meant for their loved ones, while those directly affected continued to scatter and make their way home—sometimes without knowing how their own families had been affected.
Bruno Dellinger, principal, Quint Amasis North America, North Tower: When I arrived home, on my apartment door there was a Post-It from one of my interns who left a funny note: “If you’re alive, I’m still alive.”
Lt. Joseph Torrillo, director of fire education safety, FDNY: Eight hours later, I woke up and I didn’t know where I was. I realized I was on the eighth floor of the hospital, in a room, but I didn’t immediately know because I couldn’t see. I’m like, I don’t know if I’m dead or alive. That night, they found my car behind the firehouse. I was declared dead that night.
Chris Mullin, firefighter, Ladder 1, FDNY: It was a depressed, dismal, miserable mood. Hundreds of firefighters, thousands of civilians are gone as quickly as you blow out a match. Gone.
At Ground Zero, firefighters and rescue personnel continued to swarm over the wreckage, looking for survivors. These efforts remained haphazard, filled by an army of volunteers, many of whom had no official rescue duties. Indeed, it was two U.S. Marines, Jason Thomas and Dave Karnes, who had traveled to the site on their own volition, who made the evening’s sole incredible discovery.
William Jimeno: As they started pulling me out on the gurney, up this hole, I remember looking around, and I said, “Where is everything?” Because I could see the moon, and I could see smoke, but I couldn’t see the buildings. That’s when a firefighter said, “It’s all gone, kid.” That’s the first time I cried that evening.
As night descended on a country transformed and the calendar flipped from 9/11 to 9/12, lawmakers, first responders, government officials, and stricken families tried to make sense of the day they’d just experienced. Fear and uncertainty permeated everything, and across the country many faced a sleepless night. In Washington, the fires at the Pentagon illuminated the night sky, an ominous sign of a nation newly at war.
Across the country, those whose lives had intersected with the attacks experienced a wide mix of emotions as they came to understand the full impact—both personal and global—of what had occurred.
In New York, at what workers and rescuers called “The Pile,” teams searched for the dead and the living, and bucket brigades began sorting and clearing debris, a process that would ultimately encompass 1.8 million tons of wreckage and stretch until May 30, 2002.
Genelle Guzman: I got into the ambulance with a guy, and he said, “We’re going to take you to the hospital now, OK? You’re going to be fine.” I made it to the hospital. I asked the nurse, “Am I going to go home now?” She said, “Oh no, honey, you’re going to be here for a while.” Then someone said, “Do you know how long you’ve been there?” I said, “I don’t.” They said, “You’ve been buried for 27 hours.” She said, “Do you know that you were the last survivor that they pulled out?”
Sal Cassano, assistant chief, FDNY: We lost 343 members. That was 4,400 years of combined experience. We had to rebuild the department from the ground up.
Dr. Charles Hirsch, chief medical examiner, City of New York: We were ready to start receiving the dead on 9/11. It went pretty much as we had planned. The only major difference from the standpoint of our agency is that in spite of all the planning, we had never conceived of a situation in which hundreds or thousands of people would be fragmented. We had no specific contingency plan for a mass disaster in which DNA would be the major source of identification.
In Pennsylvania on Wednesday, September 12, investigators began sifting through the wreckage of Flight 93, looking for clues in the case that the FBI would call PENTTBOM, for “Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation.” For weeks afterward, the quiet town of Shanksville was the center of a 24/7 operation, broadcast live by hundreds of media outlets from across the globe.
On September 13th, the engine of America’s economy began to chug back to life, and air traffic controllers—under strict security—began restarting air travel.
On Sunday, September 16th, President Bush spoke to the press after a weekend war council meeting at Camp David. He noted the resiliency of the American spirit and that the New York Stock Exchange would reopen Monday after its first prolonged closure since the Great Depression.
Sgt. Joe Alagna, aide to the chief, NYPD: You didn’t even realize how dangerous it was. They would dig down and there’d be a void and you could see the beams glowing. They were still on fire and we were standing on top of it. It was tedious, hard work, and nobody complained.
Thomas Von Essen, commissioner, FDNY: The emptiness from the losses that day has never left me, not for a moment.
Even as the U.S. launched a war in Afghanistan aimed at destroying al-Qaeda, the terror group responsible for the attack, in October 2001 the victims, coworkers, and family members affected by the attack tried to bring a sense of normalcy back to their lives, though returning to “normal” often required a redefinition of “normal.”
