It was a beautiful fall morning without a cloud in the sky - in my part of the country and in New York City.
I was 29-years-old and asleep. Being a night owl at the time, I had been asleep for maybe three hours. When the phone rang, I was irritated. After all, we lived together and she knew my sleeping habits.
My irritation turned to concern when she said something happened at one of the towers. At the time, it wasn't a terrorist attack. Just something horrific. I turned on my TV in my room but eventually migrated to the front room. I was sitting on the couch watching when the second airplane hit the other tower.
At that moment, everything had changed. I looked outside the window. Everything had changed but nothing had changed outside. It was a quiet morning on Crystal Avenue in Lombard, Illinois. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't meld the two together.
I turned back to the horror on TV. Smoke, debris, papers falling from the sky like confetti. New Yorkers look up in horror with tears streaming down their face and hands over their mouths. I listened to the confusion, horror, and panic in their voices.
Unconfirmed reports of other attacks. The Pentagon reportedly had also been struck by a plane too and evacuations began at the White House, Capitol Building, and complex and other governmental buildings. Any significant buildings in every city were also evacuated. My cousin's wife worked in the Sears Tower and was sent home. My sister, who worked for the state of Illinois, was sent home. I got on the phone with my family to see if anyone was traveling. One of my cousins was flying from Texas to Florida.
Meanwhile, on the television people cried out in horror and grief as people above the impact points began to jump out. Their bodies were a tiny speck against the size of the building. What I thought was debris hitting the ground was their bodies. I flinched every time I heard it. So many were jumping that it wasn't safe for first responders and people evacuating the buildings had to take cover.
Truthfully, I don't know if I saw this in real-time or in the footage shown afterward. It all melted together in one horrible scene. It seems like one long nightmare.
President Bush was at an elementary school reading to school children. Andy Card, the Chief of Staff, came up and whispered in his ear. His face betrayed no emotion and afterward continued reading. I remember being outraged that he didn't stop immediately. He needed to address the country! I now recognize that he was showing leadership. If he had walked out then and there, it would've caused panic and confusion. The visit was cut short, though. Stopping at military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska, he would return to the White House at 6:48 pm.
Despite the horrors, the World Trade Center towers remained standing. There was much debate over whether they would collapse (and the general consensus was they wouldn’t.) That ended when the south tower collapsed on itself. Thick smoke, dust, and debris having nowhere to go surged down streets and around corners with people trying to outrun it. Shortly after, the north tower also fell. People close to Ground Zero were seen walking from the scene covered in white dust in shock and grief.
During all of the chaos in New York and Washington D.C., there was a fourth plane that had been hijacked that had turned toward Washington D.C. The people on board, using cell phones available through the airline, found out what was going on. Todd Beamer and some other passengers decided to attack the cabin. They prayed and Todd said, “let’s roll.” They overcame the hijackers and crashed the plane in a field in Shawshank, Pennsylvania.
This one had a personal connection to it. Todd Beamer grew up in my hometown of Wheaton, Illinois. Though she had never known him, he attended Wheaton College around the same time my sister was attending. It is a small private Christian college with a close-knit community. Todd was married to his college sweetheart and had two young sons with a daughter on the way.
That is what I remember from that day 20 years ago. It didn’t happen in an organized way - or as organized as how I wrote it. Nor does what I wrote convey the emotion, chaos, shock, and grief that happened. The next few days and months were hard. I cried through all of the stories of the victims, our lost innocence, our vulnerability, our pain, and our grief. I cried. A lot. It was on my mind constantly as I went about the next few days, weeks, and months.
Every year since then, I still have that sense of surrealism and wonder how people could go about their day as if this wasn’t the anniversary of the largest terrorist attack on American soil. For years after, cable news aired the news reports as they happened on 9/11, documentaries, and painful remembrances. I felt compelled, as an American, to sit and watch it all. It was the least that I could do to honor those who died. As we got further and further away, they stopped.
I was also inspired by how we came together as a country. We were one. We were all Americans. Stores ran out of American flags. We stood as one. We didn’t shout about all the personal freedoms we had to give up when we had to take off our shoes and undergo physical and electronic screenings before boarding a plane. We understood it was for our safety. We adjusted to all the security measures that needed to be done in order to make our country a safer place to live. It would’ve destroyed other countries. The intent was to destroy the United States. Al-Qaeda failed...it only made us stronger. If the attack happened today, we would be destroyed. The first reaction would be one of pointing fingers and calls for resignation.
I do miss those days where we could all have different political differences but still recognize that we were one as Americans
Later that night on September 11, 2001, the CIA had determined that the attack was caused by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization al-Qaeda. This was not the first attack against the United States from them. In fact, it was not the first attack on the World Trade Center towers. On February 6, 1993, six people were killed when a car bomb explodes under the towers. On June 25, 1996, another car bomb killed 19 American soldiers and injured 400 others at a US military housing complex in the city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia. On August 7, 1998, truck bombs exploded at U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that took 224 lives, including 12 Americans. Bill Clinton named bin Laden as the biggest enemy of the United States and launched cruise missiles in Afghanistan and Sudan. But bin Laden wasn’t finished. On October 12, 2000, the warship of USS Cole, in the Aden harbor, Yemen, had a hole blown into the hull when suicide bombers in a boat pulled up next to her. We lost 17 sailors that day.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, we declared war on Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and bin Laden were being harbored by the Taliban. Instead of locating and neutralizing terrorists, we changed our mission to nation-building. We lost sight of the objective, stopped looking for bin Laden and allowed it to drag on for 20 years while hiding the corruption and failure. By the end of Bush’s second term, he had stopped looking for bin Laden altogether, despite the fact that there were dozens of more attacks carried out by them. Finally, on May 2, 2011, Obama announced that Osama bin Laden was killed in a Navy SEAL ambush at bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is still being held at Guantanamo Bay, and a trial has yet to start.
It led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security with the mission to protect the United States within, at, and outside its borders. Many already existing agencies were absorbed under DHS and others were created. Today it is the umbrella agency for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Transportation Security Administration, United States Coast Guard (during times of peace,) United States Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, Federal Protective Service, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, and the Transportation Security Administration, among others. The TSA, in particular, was created and is chiefly concerned with air travel and employs screening officers in airports, armed Federal Air Marshals on planes, mobile teams of dog handlers, and explosives specialists.
The breakdowns and numbers:
~ The number of people who were pulled out alive after the World Trade Center collapse: 23 (including 15 rescue workers.) The last survivor was pulled out of the North Tower rubble 27 hours later.
~ The number of people who have yet to be identified: 1,106 with two identified just in the summer of 2021. Around 40% remain unidentified. More than 22,000 body parts were recovered from the site. The work still continues...
~ The total number of people who died on September 11, 2001: 2,996.
~ 265 people on the four planes (including the 19 terrorists.) American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston’s Logan Airport en route to Los Angeles had a crew of 11, 76 passengers, and five terrorists. It hit the north facade of the North Tower. United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston’s Logan Airport to Los Angeles had a crew of nine, 51 passengers and five terrorists, hit the southern facade of the South Tower. American Airlines Flight 77 departed Dulles International Airport en route to Los Angeles with a crew of six, 53 passengers and five terrorists hit the western facade of the Pentagon. United Airlines Flight 93 with a crew of seven, 33 passengers, and four terrorists crashed into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
~ 2,606 at the World Trade Center (including 344 firefighters, 23 New York City police officers, 37 Port Authority officers, eight EMTs, and paramedics from private hospital units.) More specifically, an estimated 200 people died by jumping or falling, 1,402 people died in the North Tower at or above the floors of impact (floors 93-99) and in the South Tower, 614 people were killed at or above the floors of impact (floors 75-85.) Three companies located at the World Trade Center lost more than 100 employees: Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees, Marsh and McLennan lost 295, and the Aon Corporation lost 175. 90% of those who died had been at or above the points of impact.
~ And remember, it’s called the World Trade Center. Excluding the terrorists, people from 77 different countries died numbered around 372 identified foreign nationals representing 12% of the deaths.
~ At the Pentagon, 125 people were killed - 70 civilians and 55 military personnel. The Army lost 47 civilian employees, six civilian contractors, and 22 soldiers. The Navy lost six civilians, three civilian contractors, and 33 sailors. Seven civilian employees from the Defense Intelligence Agency and one from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, who was a contractor. Lieutenant General Timothy Maude, a Deputy Chief of Staff from the Army was the highest-ranking officer to perish.
It’s easy to just see the numbers. Each and every number represents a person’s life. Each person left behind family and friends. Each life mattered. We need to never lose sight of that fact.
And see the faces of those who survived the attacks, those who were there to rescue, those that there were there to clean up the site, and those that lived, worked, and studied there. They were all exposed to toxic material and human remains from the pile of rubble. Over 400,000 are thought to have been exposed. Immediately after they fell, 90,000 firefighters, paramedics, police officers, and others from around the country rushed to the scene.
As time passed, those hailed as heroes were forgotten and significant health problems increased months and years later. People returned to work, students to school, and people to their homes in the months following the attacks. The dust they breathed in during that time was extremely toxic. There was pulverized concrete and more than 2,500 other contaminants. There were construction materials, massive amounts of glass, asbestos, lead, mercury from fluorescent lights, toxins from the fires that burned there for three months. These exposures have led to debilitating illnesses. The city failed to provide the correct equipment and the EPA insisted the air was safe when it was not.
New York City simply failed to prepare adequately for the protection of workers at Ground Zero. There were many, many lawsuits filed against the city of New York, the EPA, and other agencies. In 2010, Congress set up the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. This fund stopped operating in 2004 (as planned) but in 2010, lawmakers started pushing to reauthorize it to provide medical care and financial aid to emergency personnel, volunteers, and survivors who inhaled the toxins at Ground Zero. It began processing claims again in 2011 and was renewed in 2015, allowing claims to be submitted until December 2020. In 2019, the funds were quickly being depleted and likely did not have enough money to pay claims.
Jon Stewart, a fierce advocate for the first responders, began a media blitz to bring attention to the issue, culminating in testifying before the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee of the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, where he urged a bill to pass a bill that would allow the fund to pay benefits for the next 70 years, called the Never Forget the Heroes Act that was passed in July of 2019. Even to this day, though, it is hard for people to get care if they live outside of New York City.
There are thousands of deaths that are casualties of September 11, 2001, that didn’t die on that day, and they continue to that day. Around 250-300 responders are dying every year. That number does not include civilians. Those who lived in Manhattan, those who returned to work and breathed the same toxic air.
Really, it shouldn’t be too hard to take care of the people who are now literally giving their lives.
Timeline for September 11, 2001:
7:59 am – American Airlines Flight 11 takes off from Boston’s Logan International Airport en route to Los Angeles.
8:14 am – United Airlines Flight 175 takes off from Boston; it is also headed to Los Angeles.
8:19 am – Flight attendants aboard Flight 11 alert ground personnel that the plane has been hijacked; American Airlines notifies the FBI.
8:20 am – American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. en route to Los Angeles.
8:41 am – United Airlines Flight 93 takes off from Newark International Airport en route to San Francisco.
8:46 am – American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into floors 93-99 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
8:50 am – White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card alerts President George W. Bush that a plane has hit the World Trade Center; the president is visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida at the time.
9:03 am – United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into floors 75-85 of the WTC’s South Tower.
9:08 am – The FAA bans all takeoffs of flights going to New York City or through the airspace around the city.
9:21 am – The Port Authority closes all bridges and tunnels in the New York City area.
9:24 am – The FAA notified NEADS of the suspected hijacking of Flight 77 after some passengers and crew aboard are able to alert family members on the ground.
9:31 am – Speaking from Florida, President Bush calls the events in New York City an “apparent terrorist attack on our country.”
9:37 am – American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. 9:42 am – For the first time in history, the FAA grounds all flights over or bound for the continental United States. Over the next two-and-a-half hours, some 3,300 commercial flights and 1,200 private planes are guided to land at airports in Canada and the United States.
9:45 am – Amid escalating rumors of other attacks, the White House and U.S. Capitol building are evacuated (along with numerous other high-profile buildings, landmarks, and public spaces).
9:59 am – The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.
10:07 am – After passengers and crew members aboard the hijacked Flight 93 contact friends and family and learn about the attacks in New York and Washington, they mount an attempt to retake the plane.
10:28 am – The World Trade Center’s North Tower collapses.
1:00 pm – At Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, President Bush announces that U.S. military forces are on high alert worldwide.
5:20 pm – The 47-story Seven World Trade Center collapses after burning for hours.
6:58 pm – President Bush returns to the White House after stops at military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska.
8:30 pm – President Bush addresses the nation, calling the attacks “evil, despicable acts of terror” and declaring that America, its friends, and allies would “stand together to win the war against terrorism.”
October 8, 2001: President George W. Bush announces the creation of The Office of Homeland Security.
