Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

by Mitchell Zuckoff

With time, news becomes history. And history, it’s been said, is what happened to other people.

Steve Coll’s excellent Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001; Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It; and Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

A Gallup poll17 taken on September 10, 2001, found that fewer than 1 percent of Americans considered terrorism to be the nation’s No. 1 concern.

earned a doctorate in cultural geography from the University of Minnesota.

“When people aren’t heard long enough,” he said, “they’ll resort to violence.”

None of the 9-1-1 operators Brian spoke with asked him how high he’d been inside the building, conditions on the upper floors, or details about which stairwell he’d used. As a result, they never learned potentially lifesaving information that might have helped firefighters or trapped people in the South Tower who survived the crash and then called 9-1-1 for guidance. Amid the chaos, overwhelmed 9-1-1 operators never learned that Stairwell A remained relatively intact above the South Tower impact zone, at least to the 91st floor and possibly higher. No evidence exists that any person who called 9-1-1 from above the impact zone was urged to seek out Stairwell A3 as a potential path to survival. One 9-1-1 operator, besieged by urgent calls for help from people trapped in the towers, vented her frustration to a colleague: “How can you have a big building4 and no way to get out of it? That’s ridiculous.” Emergency operators also weren’t told that rooftop rescues5 wouldn’t be attempted because of smoke, or that exit doors to the roof remained locked, even as some 9-1-1 callers mentioned plans to try to reach the roof. Some of those heading upstairs might have recalled the daring rescues of twenty-eight people from the North Tower roof by a New York Police Department helicopter after the 1993 bombing.

Communication

Authorities estimated that by the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, more people will have died5 of an illness related to Ground Zero than in the attacks.