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story836.xml

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2002-06-27

September 12th 2001
Narrative of Tuesday Morning, September 11, 2001

I came up from the subway onto Wall street and into a blizzard of paper ? millions of sheets falling from high in the sky. A few were singed, but most simply floated here and there on the currents and eddies among the building. For a moment I thought it was a tickertape parade, but they?re held on Broadway, two blocks to the west.

High above the paper was a broad plume of smoke across a blue sky. Someone said it was coming from the World Trade Center, and that it had been hit by an airliner. It seemed unlikely ? perhaps a Cessna or a helicopter.

My temporary office is to the east, at Wall and Water street, but instead I walked north and west to the WTC plaza. All along the way the strange weather continued; paper was swirling in the streets, now with many sheets partially burned. I crossed the little park at the south east corner of the WTC plaza, Liberty and Church streets. The park is a block-long series of red brick paved terraces planted with trees. There are broad stone and steel benches scattered around, and a low border of ship's chains. I crossed the park diagonally and emerged from behind the large office building (1 Liberty Plaza) on the northern edge that hid the towers from view. I can?t remember any more paper falling that day, although it must have continued to fall thick and fast. The upper floors of the northern tower were in flames, spectacular, improbable, cinematic flames. Six or eight floors blazed, apparently filled completely, or nearly completely, with an orange glow that billowed out in huge puffs ? not at all the flames of a normal building fire. An ordinary building fire is mostly smoke, with tongues of orange fire lacing through it; huge balls of flame poured out of the tower ? billows of flame that rolled out into the sky.

The flames were perhaps 800 or 900 feet above the ground, and the foot of the tower perhaps 500 feet away, yet they were gigantic, utterly dwarfing the human scale. Terrified people in the floors above looked out and hung out from windows just above, barely noticeable in the vastness of the scale. Windows were shattered in floors above the flames ? the people seemed to be seeking breathable air, or trying to escape heat; it was impossible to tell. The flaming floors, and the relatively undamaged portion above, clearly still filled with people made up only perhaps a fifth of the building. Everything appeared to be intact.

Few people on the ground seemed upset ? a couple of hundred of us stood across the street transfixed by the spectacle, but most of us were oddly calm, as if watching news report of some distant disaster. A pedestrian falling on sidewalk or a minor traffic accident produces as much apparent alarm. There was little talking, no screaming, no ?Oh the humanity.? Among some, a snow-day mood was evident. Perhaps we were unable to feel, unable to imagine what to feel, at seeing those clinging to the windows leap, or pass out, or simply fall, and tumble slowly to the ground. It takes a long time to fall so far - plenty of time to see who they are, wonder about what they might be thinking and wonder if they are frightened. At the scale of the WTC, a sense of unreality is a nearly seamless defense against horror.

I don?t think any of us ? there weren?t very many at that spot, directly in front of the northern tower at the corner of John and Church ? heard or saw the second plane approach from behind the unharmed second tower. Certainly I didn?t. When the face of the second tower exploded it was flabbergasting ? there wasn?t the slightest hint until the glass and the metal facing ribs bloomed out riding the front of an immense fireball ? a mass of flame that seemed to form a roof across the whole plaza, closer the ground than the flames of the first tower, and immensely larger ? smaller than, but similar in scale to that of the buildings, which was almost geologic. We were at the corner of a side street two narrow blocks below the northern edge of the tower and no one had to be told to run, or which way ? there was nothing to hide behind. We sprinted, young and old. Several people fell, and those behind simply leapt over them, but the ugly panic one reads about wasn?t seen on that street. For everyone that leapt over or ran around, at least one other stopped. A tiny woman tried to pull a very fat black woman in a pink dress to her feet, hopelessly outmatched. I grabbed too and we hauled her up and drove her before us. Then an slender older woman sprawled face down a dozen feet ahead, not even struggling to get up. A man leapt over her and kept going. With the famous strength of panic, I simply grabbed her by the waist and literally set her on her feet screaming at her to ?run her ass off? and shoving her rudely. I could feel the mass of glass and steel coming after us ? the fireball seemed to stretch forever, but the debris never reached us. Every one made it safely to the corner.

The second building was now in worse shape than the first. The destruction was slightly closer to the ground, about 2/3 of the way up, and the billowing flames enormous. The first building seemed only to smolder in comparison. Large quantities of material had been ejected from the building across the plaza. Firemen still streamed toward it ? brave men, for the second tower was raining glass, steel, people, and the contents of half a dozen devastated floors down on the plaza. Few people seemed to be coming out ? certainly not crowds. I was looking for the flood of people one sees when a baseball stadium empties; this was a trickle, no greater than the numbers of firemen converging on the doors.

I went south again to the park at 1 Liberty Plaza behind the row of building that face the towers and screened them from view. Back at the southern edge of plaza it was instantly evident that it was not a bomb but another plane that had struck the tower: on the southern face of tower two was a clean, almost round hole six to ten stories high and wide that gaped on level with the blown out north and west faces. On opposing sides of the hole, tilted sharply from horizontal, were long slices where the wings had struck.

There was nothing to be done to help ? hoards of firemen and police were arriving. There were few obvious injured ? bodies littered the plaza, but the officials outnumbered the fleeing.

I moved back past Broadway, still directly opposite the towers, but behind a couple of blocks of buildings, watching the disaster from a distance. I chatted with a distinguished looking and confident man who pooh-poohed the idea that the tops might collapse. I told him I remembered the old west side piers that burned ? the steel looked like a mass of cooked spaghetti, but he was quite sure the WTC was built to withstand a fire. He said that much jet fuel might burn for hours. That much was believable. If there was to be a collapse, I pictured the tops falling off, like ice cream off a cone. Many people were horrified, but few were alarmed for themselves. Some still seemed almost gay, as if this, at last, was something really different.

I decided to leave, and walked further back, across the island to Water street, still directly opposite the plaza, but half a dozen blocks away. The pedestrian walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge, a few blocks to the north, is the surest way to get across the East River. From Water Street, one could see the top third of the towers ? enough to see the northern tower burning. The burning portion of the Southern tower was obscured by buildings. Incredibly, cars and delivery trucks still drove in the direction of the towers, going about their ordinary business as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring. A UPS driver honked, looking irritated, and turned West directly toward the WTC.

For many more minutes I stood watching from there. A woman approached and we talked about the disaster and watched. She told me she worked at Goldman Sachs further downtown at 1 New York Plaza - directly across from my own home office, as it happens. Mostly we watched quietly. Then as we gazed at the most awful thing we?d ever seen, the southern tower simply sank from view; it didn?t fall over, it just sank. An immense plume of dust and smoked erupted in its place, but it immediately followed the tower below the buildings, sucked down as fast as it had bloomed to fill the vacuum left by the sinking building. The sky was clear where the tower had been.

In seconds, far up John Street the mass of dust reappear as a solid wall rushing forward, filling the street, overtaking and instantly obscuring the pedestrians fleeing toward us. The air ahead of the cloud was crystalline, then people simply winked out as the cloud overtook them. The dust was so dense that it was as opaque as wallboard. The cloud came down the street like a piston, swallowing the terrified people fleeing it, coming faster than a car would travel. Attempting to outrun it was absurd, but that was most everyone?s instinct.

Drivers stopped at the traffic light tried to cross the intersection, despite the blocked traffic ahead. Several of us beat on their hoods and yelled to stop them from blocking the intersection. Successfully, surprisingly: they drivers fled, not even closing their doors. When the cloud swept over the intersection, it was opaque, but only for a few minutes. And just around the corner the air was almost transparent again. I pulled my shirttail over my mouth and nose and shouted for people to come, and many did. We ducked into a garage where the air was breathable.

In minutes it cleared sufficiently to see ten or twenty feet. I ran back out, and people were stumbling out of the obscurity choking and gagging. The radius of vision was only a few feet. I ran into the cloud, my face covered with my shirt. A pretty Asian girl wearing only her underwear ran into my view. She shrieked on meeting me in the gloom. She couldn?t be led, or even told ? she just shrieked and shrieked, recoiling from my approach and even my words. But in her fright she ran in the right direction, so I just let her go. Everyone was filthy, but her panic was exceptional. A few were stunned, but most were remarkably cool and understood instantly when told where to go. One woman, dusty white from head to foot, seemed genuinely puzzled and a little annoyed to be taken for someone who might be in need of directions. Very New York.

It cleared rapidly ? mostly it was dust, not smoke, and it simply fell to the ground or blew away. A young man, maybe thirty years old, was also running around dragging people into lobbies and shops. We introduced ourselves ? he was Angelo ? and ran together up John Street into the cloud, toward whatever was left of the WTC.

We stopped for a few seconds and he tore off the sleeve of his Tee shirt and gave it to me for a mask. The Tee shirt was hard to tear straight, so he opened his Swiss Army knife and cut it with scissors. We stopped again to loot an abandoned hotdog stand of a crate of cold Poland Spring bottled water, and carried it Jack and Jill style toward the towers. We opened the cooler and filled a milk crate with bottles. For an awkward moment I fumbled with some money to leave and Angelo laughed out loud. Along the way we passed out bottles right and left to crying choking people, or squirted their eyes clear and hustled them into doorways. Many were unable to see, their eyes caked with powder. People seemed not to think of the most obvious thing ? that it wouldn?t be so dusty inside and that the air would clear quickly.

We made it back to the park at the Southwest corner. The water supply was gone twice over. Hotdog stands across the island suffered at our hands. At the park there were a dozen firemen and many pieces of equipment, windows smashed, doors hanging open. The firemen were just milling around dazed and leaderless. Some of their crew were missing; most were missing, gone into the tower, but some of those left behind with the equipment were said to be missing too. The park was piled with debris, dust and trash as high as the benches in some places, as high as the hoods of cars in others. The fire trucks and police cars were badly battered and windowless. The long stainless steel ribs that sheath the towers were scattered everywhere. They?re big, about sixteen inches square, and a dozen feet long: stainless steel sheet bent into a sleek cover for the vertical ribs of the building. It takes two hands to pick one up. The wind born debris had pushed most of the trees over to about 45 degrees. The stainless steel sheathing was piled in heaps along with tons of paper, steel and concrete. The dust was ankle deep in some places, feet deep in others, and everywhere, huge amounts of paper. Tons upon tons of forms, manuals, letters. Everything was under mounds of gray dust.

A few firemen made a desultory attempt to look for their crews. They knew most had gone into the towers, but some were believed to be closer, perhaps buried, perhaps hiding or just separated. No one articulated these thoughts; the guys were just ?somewhere?. Angelo and I shouted and picked among the wreckage, calling for anyone who could hear us to make a noise, yell or bang, sing out. But there wasn?t a sound from the debris around us. On the south side of the park was an eight foot plywood construction fence in front of an old fashioned office building. Against it debris, paper and metal from the building were banked deeply, packing the areas between pushcarts and abandoned emergency vehicles, some with their motors still running. There used to be a narrow lane there, but you couldn?t tell beneath the debris. Everywhere it was deep enough to hide an injured or unconscious person.

We couldn?t see the remaining tower at all, or even the edge of the plaza catty corner across the street. Just across the street the true rubble pile seemed to begin, but it was impossible to tell in the dust ? one seemed to see part of a building in the cloud, but only as a dark mass looming. The visible world was tiny ? only fifty or a hundred feet in radius.

The first tower still hadn?t fallen, nor could we be certain that it would, but we were very aware of its presence in the gloom. We deployed ourselves under the assumption that it would fall. The first crash had demolished the park ? later it would be clear that it had damaged 1 Liberty as well, but the building had withstood the first, nearer tower?s collapse and it seemed an acceptably safe place to be should the second tower fall too. The remaining tower had burned near to the top ? it seemed unlikely to fall far enough from its base to land on us as a mass.

Light from the fires filtered through, but only as a glow ? nothing was visible. The destruction around us made the danger of a second collapse clear enough. A young man, oddly clean and casual, walked down the lane by the park. Not looking for injured, or on some mission - just looking around, as if inspecting a piece of property. I shouted to him that the other tower could still fall, and that he mustn?t go in front, but instead stay shielded by the building, and yelled to him where to hide when it did: there was a head-high wall and a long colonnade of I-beams supporting the overhanging second floor of One Liberty, each column large enough for a person to squeeze in between the flanges and be shielded from debris from the front, and shattered plate glass from the side. But he pointed to the wall next to him as if it offered plenty of protection. Apparently he didn?t grasp that it was just the glass wall of the lobby, adjoining the front wall, also glass. Then he just shrugged and continued around the front of the building onto Church Street facing the towers. I didn?t see him again.

I lost sight of Angelo. Seconds or minutes later the sliding, roaring sound of the second collapse began ? there was a deep trilling sound under it, like the rolling of a Spanish ?r?. It was the scraping sound that a dump truck of gravel makes when it unloads, but infinitely bigger. I dashed for the colonnade. There was no one else in sight, and no time to look around. Instantly darkness swept over from the plaza. It was inky black ? shockingly black to a city person, as black as a moonless night in the country. The roar of the collapse died down in seconds, but the air was so thick it seemed to resist motion through it. It fell so thickly that the air had weight. My shirt pocket got heavy with it in seconds. I started to draw a breath through the mask/respirator, which had somehow lost its patched up T-shirt filter, and I got a thick mouthful of ash and sand. I felt for the glass wall, inexplicably not broken, and felt my way down it to the revolving door, which was fortunately not jammed. Inside the triangular opening, light was faintly visible within.

A few people were in the lobby, all of us panicky, but we determined that to stay was pretty safe, and to leave almost impossible until the dust settled. The last dust had become passable in minutes, but this was far thicker.

But within five or ten minutes it was clear enough that an improvised T shirt mask enabled me to go outside with a bull horn and begin calling to people to come to the sound. But after several minutes no one had come. I literally stumbled over the dropped respirator and patched up the filter with more T-shirt. There was nobody to look for, and the North was impassible, so I headed south. It was still dark as night, although it was still mid-morning on a day of clear blue skies.

Below the WTC on West street, a block below the covered pedestrian bridge across the highway, firefighters, police and emergency crews were gathering. The road ahead was blocked with scores of burning trucks and cars. Everything was deep in ash ? several inches covered the tops of cars and walls. Sporadic explosions of gas tanks and car tires made everyone jump. A man was walking around poking at suspicious lumps under the ash and marking those that appeared to be parts of bodies with traffic cones and tape. An office telephone, handset and all, lay in the dust, its lines spun round and round the sleeve a man?s sport jacket. A little later the man came and marked it with a cone, for the jacket turned out not to be entirely empty.

Nearby one of the airplane wheels lay, tire and all, along with some of the attached gear, torn off in mid-axle. The tire was burst, but whole. Up the road, less recognizable if you hadn?t seen the whole one, lay another, bare of rubber and smashed. They must have come from the plane that hit the North tower. Pieces of sheathing, an airplane door and thousands of unidentifiable bits and pieces lay every where, blanketed by dust. In the middle of the highway is an underpass to nowhere ? it emerges again a hundred yards or so down town. Three policemen were shuffling down the road into it, kicking through the dust in line looking for a service pistol one of them had dropped when fleeing the flow of dust. A woman yelled down to them from the upper roadway to knock it off and go do something useful. The looked sheepish and left, despite the evident lack of anything to do until the burning wrecks were extinguished. It did look a little foolish.

I waited an hour or two for the flames and dust to die down enough to do something useful, but they sprang up again, and again, and the adjacent building seemed in danger of collapse, so everyone moved further back. I killed time dragging some of the bigger chunks of sheathing out of the streets so vehicles would be able to pass, but it was pointless work. Little fires burned unattended all around. Window were blown out of the surrounding buildings to a height of perhaps twenty stories. The numbers of official relief people had grown to the hundreds and no prospect of doing anything useful appeared likely for many hours. Too much fire and smoke, and too many chunks of adjacent buildings still falling into the cauldron of the plaza and surrounding blocks. I headed up the street away from scene of the disaster.

A couple of blocks away an old man was picking his way though the trash and debris. I had a last bottle of water in my pocket and I offered it to him. He said no thanks, he was fine, but could I direct him to an address on Liberty street. I laughed and said I didn?t think he?d have to go to work today, that everyone had gone home. But he told me he was a security guard there, and that it was necessary to report, especially now. He?d been there many years, but in all the smoke and trash he couldn?t find it. Neither could I. We had to ask a cop.