2001 world trade centre attack
Day of terror The events of the day that shocked the world. A passenger jet flies into the north tower of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan shortly before 9am. As viewers watch live television coverage of the disaster, they see a second passenger jet fly into the building's south tower 18 minutes after the first crash. Within the hour , a third plane hits the Pentagon, causing part of the building to collapse.
A fourth plane crashes near Somerset, Pennsylvania. More than 10,000 rescue personnel in New York rush to the scene of the collapsed World Trade Centre. The entire downtown area of Manhattan is evacuated. The scale of the attacks are compared by almost everyone to the Japanese attack on PearlHarbour in December 1941. American Airlines said two of the planes belonged to it: flight 11, a Boeing 767 from Boston with 81 passengers and 11 crew on board; and flight 77 from Washington Dulles airport, a Boeing 757, with 58 passengers and six crew on board. Both planes were en route to Los Angeles. United Airlines claimed the other two planes: flight 93, a 757 heading from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco, carrying 38 passengers and seven crew was the one that crashed in Pennsylvania; and flight 175, a Boeing 767 bound from Boston to Los Angeles with 56 passengers and nine crew on board. The four planes were hijacked with a total of 266 people on board.
Shortly after 10am the World Trade Centre began to collapse, with both towers reduced to rubble and scattering debris and dust across the city By the afternoon a third, 47-storey building close to the trade centre collapses. President George Bush interrupts a visit to a children's school in Florida. He flies to Barksdale air force base in Louisiana then to a military base in Nebraska and finally to Washington in the late afternoon. Bush promises: 'Freedom itself was attacked this morning and I assure you freedom will be defended. Make no mistake. The United States will hunt down and pursue those responsible for these cowardly actions' For the first time in US aviation history, all commercial flights are grounded. 20,000 people were believed to be inside the World Trade Centre The death toll was unknown but New York authorities reported some 3,600 people injured. US placed military forces and facilities in the Gulf region and Europe on the highest level of alert. US navy sent aircraft carriers to New York and placed battleships along the east coast. 'This is an act of war, there's no doubt about it' James Kallstrom former deputy director of the FBI declared. Tony Blair announces all flights will be re-routed so they do not fly over central London: 'We therefore here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world' Osama Bin Laden , the Saudi-born terrorist wanted by the US for attacks on its embassies in east Africa in August 1998 was named as chief suspect by top US officials. Wednesday September 12, 2001 Geoff deLesseps was on the telephone at 8.45am, talking to his wife from his office on the 80th floor of the northern tower of the World Trade Centre in lower Manhattan. "I was meant to be going on a business trip tomorrow and she had this strange feeling about airplanes, I swear to God," said the 37-year-old chief executive officer. Then the first of the kamikaze planes hit the building a few floors above, cutting a cartoon-like outline into the 1,362ft building, once the tallest in the world. The most spectacular terrorist attack on the United States had begun. Twenty minutes later another plane hit the second tower of the complex. Soon people were hanging on for their lives - and falling - 1,000 ft above the ground under blue skies and a pale half-moon. Forty-five minutes later people were still clinging on to windows, clearly visible from the street below, still against the ruptured symbol of US power and influence, debris fluttering like ticker-tape and stricken birds, catching the sunlight as it twisted to the ground. Finally, the unluckiest of the thousands who work each day in the towers lost their grip or jumped from the smoke and flames. "I'm moving from this city," one man shouted as he ran. A homeless woman, shuffling along West Broadway, muttered: "They're doing this for what? To save the world from what?" Now both towers were ablaze, columns of smoke billowing into the blue. Schoolchildren stood in the streets; some of those working close by ran from the scene. Most just stared, in the middle of the broad boulevards, stung. But as the crowds stood paralysed, one of the towers then did the unthinkable: it suddenly disappeared into a cloud of its own making, and, in slow motion, collapsed to the ground with a deadly, horrible thud - punctured by screams on the streets: "Holy Shit - it's gone!" People sprinted north, chased by the grey-black smoke and rubble, mouths dry with terror and dust. In the urban maze of narrow streets cut between the cliff-like skyscrapers below, there was mayhem. First a stampede; flying glass cutting into flesh and ripping the clothes of those who fled - and no sign whatsoever of the authorities, only a police officer running about like a headless chicken (in the wrong direction) shouting: "Get outta here!" "Another explosion! Another explosion!" shouted a man clutching a briefcase with blood streaming down his face, but apparently with no idea that behind him the second tallest building in America was falling into the dust of its own stone. Yards from the panic, a vast concrete girder crashed with a mighty sound into Church Street near a group of children - none of the little ones stopping to break their screams or to wonder who or how many were crushed beneath its ruthless weight. It would have been impossible to see anyway, such was the tidal wave of smoke that engulfed the stream of terrified humanity as it ran north, in no direction but away from the towering monsters behind. "I work opposite, in the Woolworth building," said Malcolm Bloom, an attorney, caked in dust and staggering up Church Street to call his wife, "and I was just saying to my colleague: 'What a great morning'. Then the plane came by, right in front of my face, and into the trade centre. Next thing I saw, there were people either jumping out of the window, or else blown out into midair - I don't know. Just flying people coming out of a building on fire." As police officers fanned out to the clear the streets, a woman with a child carrier hurled herself at them, shouting: "My baby is there! My baby's in there!" Then everyone settled down to look back at the airborne grime plugging the canyons between the buildings. New York police officers who thought they had seen it all stood for a while and looked south, hands rubbing their faces. Other people, many of them in tears, wandered around aimlessly; more stood gape-jawed and rigid; couples, their shoulders hunched and anguish marking their features, drifted wordlessly from the scene. When the other tower came down, it did so almost quietly until hitting the ground. There it erupted, and blind panic was back. "Come on, let's go, run on the street," the cops yelled. "On the street and run. There's something else." Now all downtown Manhattan was swept beneath a thick blizzard of dust and a pall of smoke; the sound of screams and weeping echoed off the walls; buildings around the towers were either crushed beneath them or else left stripped to their iron skeletons. Between 40,000 and 50,000 people work each day in the twin towers and there were reported to be 20,000 people inside when the planes hit. At morning rush hour, the famous twin towers - tall, clean, elegant and familiar steel hallmarks of the city's skyline - had stood at the epicentre of new global economy. An hour later they had vanished, burying and crushing huge crowds below and bringing down with them thousands of panic-stricken workers, stranded on stairs or in their offices. The scene was an urban undergrowth made of the wrecked intestines of supposedly invincible buildings: iron girders, jagged concrete, steel strips. Fire escapes were gnarled and twisted; from one of them, a woman screamed in pain and confusion; a fireman clambered up to reach her. In the minutes that followed, there were further thuds and explosions, and a stampede as survivors made their last leap for life and ghoulish onlookers realised what was really happening. One woman was trapped by her own skirt. Another struggled to move, her leg gashed, until she was helped into an ambulance. Fire engines and fleets of other ambulances screamed and screeched past, diving into the inferno. From behind a mask of tears, one distraught secretary said: "There were so many running down the stairs; running over each other and screaming and pushing and trying to get out. And that was before the tower came down. That was before I learned that my traders and friends were still up there, on the 92nd storey, and I don't reckon I'll ever see them again." Through this deathscape, firemen and paramedics now worked with crazed zeal - attaching oxygen masks and drips to the flagging, pale, often apparently lifeless remains of humanity lucky enough to be free of the nightmare still hidden within the thicket of fire. The full rescue operation was slow to arrive, but a frantic and bloody business when it did. Firefighters, police officers and eventually the National Guard were scavenging under the rubble for the panting, blood-splattered injured and the lifeless, rubbery limbs of the dead. One man, barely alive, was humped into the back of an ambulance with his foot hanging loose by a couple of tendons. One firefighter said he had "thrown himself in the direction of a voice, when a beam came down, and cut me off. I tried. I tried". "I was going to class in Lower Manhattancollege, and just finished at 8.15," said Dana West, aged 15. "I was just walking down the street when someone shouted: 'The building is going to collapse! It's going to come down!' So I had to run. Then I heard an explosion above my head, and that was it - it was coming down - and I had to run in the other direction, back the way I came. "As I ran, I saw people covered with blood, I saw people fall." One second-year law student attending a job interview, Yelda Basar, was running up Seventh Avenue without any shoes after seeing the towers collapse from just two blocks away. "People just started screaming," she said, "and running away." The plane's hijackers had achieved where the bombers of 1993 failed: when the air cleared, where once the twin towers of the World Trade Centre had stood since 1970, there was a void in the Manhattan skyline. "It's a little bit of a bullet," said Mr deLesseps, the executive from the 80th floor, amazingly calm as he relived the most startling moment of his life, caked in masonry dust, his blue sleeves rolled up. "Suddenly in my office I heard a great whooshing, a big sound of air being sucked. Debris was coming through and the building shook and then swayed heavily. We went out but the elevators were out and there was thick smoke on every staircase. We went down three floors below where there's a TV studio and then there was another explosion. How can this happen? Of course we didn't know what it was, how can you measure something that size? "In the TV studio below we were watching footage of our own building and the big hole in its side. Yeah, it was bizarre. I was fairly calm. Your adrenalin kicks in. It took us one and a half hours to walk down, sure, that's 80 floors. "I was trying to calm a woman down and tell her the worst was over when a huge piece of debris fell through the ceiling. There was a violent eruption and the building was rumbling. That was another test of wills. Then all the lights went out and the building was blacked out. We just couldn't see a thing and all the time there was water coming like a flood behind us, and smoke and fires. Traumatic "We got down to the outside and it was an apocalypse. I can't imagine what an atomic bomb is like but maybe this it. We thought we were done then but we had to work our way through piles of debris and all the trees were stripped in a four block radius. Now I need to see if I can find some of my people. I've only got four of them so far. "This is an amazing, traumatic day for our country. His colleague, 33-year-old Jeff Borenstein, said: "There were firemen going up as we were coming down. They were going up to heaven, effectively. We stayed calm because the other option wouldn't have done us any good. This is a fricking movie. I'll be happy when I talk to my wife, let her know I'm breathing because a lot of people died today, a lot of people." Around them, America's biggest city was paralysed. Lower Manhattan, the part of the island first settled by the Dutch, was closed completely. The city's subway system was closed, as were highways leading to it and rail and bus services were suspended. All government offices and the United Nations building were evacuated. People gathered on street corners and leaned into parked cars to hear radio reports on the attacks. People were trying desperately to get through on cell phones that were no longer functioning to tell friends and family that they were safe. International connections were impossible also and long lines formed at pay phones. Even the smallest sound now startled them, and certainly the noise of helicopters and military planes overhead, on a day when the big news was supposed to be the Democratic and Republican primaries to select candidates to run for the mayor's office. Even the smallest unrelated incident created conflict. A man who left his briefcase in the street was accosted by a cop. "What you doing? Hey, just keep walking." At a junction where the traffic lights had stuck on red a man in a flak jacket and combat trousers took it upon himself to direct the sparse traffic. At St Vincent's hospital on Seventh Avenue, medical staff had set up chairs and equipment in the street. Ambulances were coming from as far away as Columbus Presbyterian in upper Manhattan and the streets were full of emergency vehicles, including those from the bomb squad. Scott Russinof, an orthopaedic surgeon at the hospital, had stayed on after working all night. He had already treated several broken bones from the first few casualties who arrived from the World Trade Centre. "Everybody's rushed to the hospital here to see what they can do. The whole hospital staff is on alert." At the same time, hundreds of New Yorkers rushed to give blood or offer to help including Michael Carolus, an x-ray technician. An eerie sense of waiting hung over New York's major hospital by 6pm last night as hundreds of medical staff waited for those injured to arrive. Bernadette Kingham, vice-president of St. Vincent's Catholic medical centres, said that after treating 295 people hospital medical staff were expecting hundreds more. But she added: "It's really hard to move people out down there. The lower area of Manhattan is filled with debris." Of the 295 people treated about 45 were rescue workers injured in the line of duty. Eddie Gonzales, a 43-year-old mailman, was in his truck a block away from the World Trade Centre when the first plane hit its target. "You could see people holding on for their lives," he said. "Can you imagine the smoke and the heat. People don't want to burn to death. I saw about 15 fall or jump. First there was one, about two or three minutes later there was another. I had tears in my eyes. I felt the emotions. I'm shocked. "I heard the sound of a jet and a loud explosion. I looked up and saw the glass, metal. A lot of people down below were running for their lives. I jumped out of my truck and got behind a wall. I dragged two women behind the wall with me." An impromptu photographic festival had convened, people with cameras and camcorders everywhere, filming the clouds of grime and the people emerging from it T-shirts and tissues held to their mouths. Police, members of the World Trade Centre's security staff and staff from the mayor's emergency department tried to comfort distraught workers, who were variously bursting into tears and sitting silently on the kerbs of the sidewalks, not knowing what else to do. Anger was quick to take hold among the survivors. Forty-three-year-old Tommy O'Grady, bearded and with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, was working on a construction site at nearby Battery Park. "We were on break time when I heard a sound like an F-16, you know, a nice size of a jet, silver, and it got faster until he really gunned it at the building. What's wrong with our country? I feel hurt that our country can't do anything to stop this. This is terrible Whoever's involved, bomb their country so that they can't do nothing." A man, covered in dust, broke in: "Exactly right." Determined Mr O'Grady continued: "They were determined to get that building down. Our country, we're the strongest in the world and we can't defend ourselves. We're an elephant and we let these little peas come in here to do this. Enough is enough, man. Bomb these people. They're all in it together." One woman, a secretary panting her words through tears, had been on her way up to the 92nd floor having had her shift put back an hour. "That's the only reason I'm here," she said. "I heard an explosion as I was going into the building and everyone was running over each other down the stairwell. I saw people running and I don't expect my traders to be alive." By mid-afternoon, some 1,550 walking wounded had assembled in LibertyState park, opposite the world's most famous and familiar skyline - now belching thick smoke, with only the Statue of Liberty rising clear from the sunlit water. Refusing to give numbers, the authorities swayed to in their estimates. But a grisly reality was emerging from witnesses talking to the Guardian yesterday: that the authorities and the office managers had failed to evacuate the area around the towers as they burned, potentially causing thousands of deaths. One stockbroker, Alan Redmond, said he had arrived for work at the Nasdaq exchange to be told that there was a delay in opening, and to wait. "I was one of a number of folks, hanging out on the corner by TrinityChurch, watching them burn. I decided to get the hell out, but I left people there. "They'd have been right underneath the second building when it came down. A couple of million tonnes of steel and concrete right on their heads." One man was shooting amateur video from the foot of the burning tower, and was, he said, "told by the police just to wait there and not to go into the building. Then my brother said: 'We'd better get the hell away from this place,' and that was about the time to get out." It was only 20 minutes after the first tower fell that police officers moved the crowds north up Sixth Avenue and Broadway, followed by a rolling thunder as its twin collapsed, and with it a tidal wave of smoke. Luis Gonzalez was among a group of workers from a nearby construction site who went in to help, and recalls the bombing of the same building in 1993. He was trying to get at 25 port authority police seen going into the second tower to fall. "We were cut off by all the stuff falling around us, we got out two elderly men, but couldn't get in any further. All I can think about is those people stranded up there who could not get down. Can you imagine, just waiting to die?" All morning, those in flight streamed up the highways and over the bridges that ring the city. Mayor Rudi Giuliani made his official appearance in the early afternoon, to praise the rescue effort and promise that "the people of New York are much stronger than barbaric terrorism". Then he made a spine-chilling, logistical announcement, as school closing time approached: "If any children don't have parents come to pick them up," he said, "we'll be holding on to them at a special centre." Jackie Greene, a 45-year-old accountant from Jersey City, was at work at the Bank of New York opposite where the first plane crashed. "We just heard a boom. We opened a window and saw a fire. We got out of the building. We were standing about 50 yards away when the second one hit. I've never seen anything like it. I don't know where the rest of my co-workers are. I don't know what to do." Last night a 47-storey building which was part of the trade centre complex also collapsed, brought down by flying debris and fire. There were fears that a further building might come down too. Mr Giuliani said there was still no way of knowing how many people had died. And yet survivors as well as the pale lifeless bodies of the dead were still being uncovered from the dust-wracked rubble strewn across downtown Manhattan. Police finally threw a cordon sanitaire between a "search and rescue zone" and the rest of the city. Ghostly silence Inside the zone, a ghostly silence was pierced only by the screams of sirens, the shouts of firemen and paramedics upon finding any trace of survival and the weary plod of rescue workers changing their grisly shifts. One fire team from Brooklyn emerged from the still smoking debris of a building on Lower Broadway having lost one of their number to the crumbling of the second World Trade Tower - the faces now blackened, eyes red with smoke, strain and exhaustion. Richard Clayton, thick-set but worn out, had twice disobeyed orders to rest during the day but now sat on the kerbside of Gold Street, and hung his head between his knees after ripping off his mask. He said: "Some dead, some alive, most almost alive... one was just a little girl's dress with something that looked like a dead little girl in it ... what's with us," he said, "that people want to come crushing a little girl under a fucking building?" The scene around him looked like the world's end - fire trucks and ambulances grinding their way across a white lake of dust and debris from which the pall of smoke still rose a few blocks away. The fireman and paramedics caked in soot, their tunics torn, broke the eerie stillness by alerting each other with commands and cries urging one another into the pyrexia. "This, "said nurse Adam Cowes, "is what hell looks like, in case you'd ever stopped to wonder."
