Day the World Changed

Day the World Changed

Kelly barely arrived at work when news started breaking of a terrible accident that involved an inferno in the crowded downtown. She instinctively grabbed her camera gear and headed out into the fray. Chaos reigned as some pedestrians and vehicle traffic ran toward the source to rubberneck what was happening while others ran the opposite direction in fear of what was happening. What was happening? Nobody seemed to know for sure beyond the bone-jarring crash they heard and acrid black smoke billowing upward.

Being a professional photographer, she had a job to do so instead of joining the pandemonium she selected to weave her way across the avenue and rise above the panic choosing the nearby building with a high promenade deck that offered a panoramic view.

Kelly was appalled at the unbelievable sight that greeted her. One of the tallest buildings in the world was afire at the top looking like a giant lit cigarette stuck upright in the ground back-dropped by a perfect late summer morning blue sky. With noise from the mayhem below shut out all seemed quiet until she heard a low flying plane approaching from her left. Not a small off-course private plane like others were speculating had crashed into the tower by accident but a full sized jetliner headed straight for the second tower. This was no accident!

Acting quickly she framed the iconic skyline in her viewfinder and waited until the black plane entered the wide-range view snapping the picture moments before the aircraft tilted its wings and exploded into several upper floors of the south tower of the World Trade Center. Her heart sank as she realized she had just witnessed hundreds of people dying. Yet the tragedy had only begun and in that inexplicable frozen moment the world changed!

Meanwhile, in the burning north tower, Tower Number I, hit minutes earlier in floors 93 through 99 out of 110 the mostly uninjured occupants above those destroyed layers were realizing all escape had been shut off because the three stair wells in the center of the building along with all the elevators had been eliminated by the force of the crash. Some waved white flags out of windows hoping for rescue from above. Some realized the hopelessness of their situation and rather than wait to be consumed by fire dove out windows and seemed to float to their deaths.

Later, beloved Father Mychal Judge, chaplain to the FDNY, offering last rights to a victim was fatally hit by falling debris at the base of the building. Another iconic freeze-framed photo shows his firefighting comrades carrying him out of the area on a chair. He officially became the first victim #0001.

Frantic callers plead for help to 911 centers but most were told to remain where they were for help to reach them according to the logical advice of known similar disasters. Of course, nothing was quite similar. Many that could evacuated through water and jet fuel slick, dark, narrow stairways inadequately built to handle such traffic especially as firefighters started climbing upward with fifty pounds of gear on their backs. Some good Samaritans carried down fellow evacuees confined to wheelchairs contributing even more to the congestion. Women were prone to kick off their high-heeled shoes to speed their descent but that created even more obstacles.

While the unfortunate occupants of the towers desperately struggled to escape more drama was unfolding in Washington D.C. as a third jetliner hit the Pentagon and a forth one crashed into a Pennsylvania field after the passengers tried to overpower the hijackers.

The White House Chief of Staff, in the middle of an educational promotion trip in Florida, searched for the right words to inform the U.S. President while he was reading to an elementary schoolroom full of young students without unduly causing panic yet conveying the urgency of the situation.

“America is under attack.” Andrew Card whispered in President Bush's ear.

Coolly and calmly the astonished Commander-in-Chief finished the story to the children then excused himself to attend to what became the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

All airspace in the U.S. was shut down so Canada initiated Operation Yellow Ribbon to accept international flights headed into the neighboring country.

Approximately 56 minutes after being bombed by a plane the South Tower, the second to be struck, became the first one to collapse. Anyone still inside that tower did not survive. The evacuees descending the stairwells of the North Tower felt the flimsy gypsum walls of the shaft shake and the ground rumble. Clouds of billowing ash and debris enveloped all of the surrounding streets creating ghost-like figures of fleeing refugees.

One such person was captured in a frame of photographer Stan Honda. He came into the lobby of a nearby office building to get out of the onslaught where he saw a young lady completely unrecognizable because of the ashes clinging to every inch of her. Not taking time to adjust for lighting the resulting snapshot gave an eerie ethereal yellow cast to all of her and her surroundings.

“I barely made it down from the eighty-first floor of the North Tower where I worked for Bank of America. Can you imagine walking down 81 stories? Then I walk into all this fallout from the other tower collapsing.” Marcy Borders lamented.

Stan was able to meet the twenty-eight year-old a year later to know she was okay. But in 2015 he saw an interview she gave a local magazine. “I was healthy then woke up one day with stomach cancer. Did inhaling all that toxic debris on that day trigger cancer?”

Marcy died at the age of 42. According to the Center for Disease Control the collapse of the towers exposed workers and the general public to harmful chemical carcinogens which resulted in thousands of cases of cancers among the survivors and first-responders.

Approximately twenty-nine minutes after the South Tower collapsed, the North one also progressively collapsed down on itself destroying the Marriott Hotel at the base of the two towers. Later in the day the forty-seven story World Trade Building Number VII would also fall due to damage from the other two collapsing. It had been totally evacuated.

No one above the ninety-first floor in Tower I survived but sixteen survivors were found in the course of the day. One man who had been knocked unconscious in a stairwell woke up at 3:00 PM on top of a pile of rubble suffering a strained ankle.

Identifying the deceased has been a twenty-three year marathon thus far and 1000 victims still have not been matched with the scarce DNA evidence.

The military did scramble some F-15 fighters when it was obvious additional planes had been hijacked but those flights had already crashed before found. One into the Pentagon and one in the Pennsylvania field. All totaled nearly 3000 souls perished in the four attacks. Osama bin Laden, arch enemy of the U.S., and his al-Qaeda network were labeled the likeliest suspects. Two wars with over 7000 American soldiers' deaths resulted from the resolve to avenge the victims.

As quoted from President George W. Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001:

"Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.

The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts...we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." (wikipedia/timeline of September 11)

If you survived being there that day, praise the Lord. Condolences to anyone who lost loved ones then or in the following wars. May peace be with you. If you served in any way, thank you.

A museum honoring the victims now is located at Ground Zero where the towers once stood. Many amazing artifacts found in the rubble tell the stories of those that perished including bloody high-heeled shoes, a winged lapel pin of an American Airline's stewardess, a crushed fireman's helmet, a battered Port Authority cap, a mangled pager belonging to a twenty-five-year-old Chicagoan thrilled to be visiting New York for the first time, and a portion of a Bible welded onto steel with the verse about an 'eye for an eye' readable. Lights beam upward into the night sky out of the acre-square footprints of the two towers to declare hope and renewal.

Rules for airline flight have since been changed and we Americans willingly gave up some of our treasured freedoms to allow for extra layers of protection. Now we

question if that was wise. Sadly, in some ways we have become almost immune to watching some of the horrors of today's war torn areas.

If you lived through this day you remember watching horrifying videos on twenty-four hour news coverage and seeing many gut wrenching photos that told of the agony and disbelief of what happened. Some, such as the three firemen hoisting the American flag on top of the pile of rubbish Iwo-Jima reminiscent, spoke of the resilience of a people, too. That one became a postage stamp image.

But Kelly Guenther's panoramic photo of the classic New York Lower Manhattan skyline with the jetliner, United Airline's Flight 175, aiming at the South Tower of TWC ran in most major newspapers around the globe the following day becoming one of the symbols for the day the world changed.