9/11: A day to remember

All of us have days in which events happened that we won’t forget. For example, I remember the day when Canada declared war on Germany. It happened on September 10th 1939. I had just left my home after finishing my lunch and was about to walk to school (I was in grade one) when I saw thousands of leaflets the size of post cards floating down from the sky. Written on them were words stating that Canada had declared war on Germany.

I remember when Japanese planes bombed Hawaii on December 7th 1941. I was living in a small mining town in the center of British Columbia and when the attack took place at 7:48 in the morning, it was 10:48 in the morning in our town and I was outside playing in the snow when I heard a neighbour yell that she just heard on the radio that Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbour. I was eight years old then.

When Germany surrendered on May 7th 1945, we in the small town during the early hours of the morning of the following day heard the air raid siren (which also was a fire alarm) go off. Then we heard people yelling that Germany had surrendered. I was 11 years old then.

When Japan surrendered on August 15th 1945, again we heard the siren going off in the early hours of morning of the 14th (remember the time zones are different) and people were yelling that Japan had surrendered. I was still eleven years old then.

When President Kennedy was shot to death on November 22nd 1963, I was working in an office in downtown Toronto when a woman from another office ran into our office and yelled “President Kennedy has been shot.” I was 30 years old then.

On July 20th 1969, the first manned mission to land on the moon took place. At that moment, I was a group counsellor at a young offender’s facility in Brampton, Ontario and we stopped talking and watched the landing on the moon taking place. I was 36 years old then.

9/11

However none of these events had the same impact on me as what took place on the morning of September 11, 2001 when Al-Qaeda-affiliated hijackers flew two 767 passenger jets into the World Trade Centre buildings, one into each tower, in a coordinated terrorist attack. I didn’t see the first plane crash into the north tower because I was getting dressed to go to a meeting of the Disabled Liaison Committee of the Toronto Police Service in which I was a member of that committee. I was 68 years old then.

The opening salvo in the escalating series of horrors was when the first jet passenger plane smashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 am. By 9:00 am, television stations across the globe had gone live with the story of the disaster in Lower Manhattan. Soon after that just as I was about to leave my home to attend that meeting, our phone rang. It was my wife calling me from work. She told me to turn on the TV and turn it to CNN. When I asked her why, she told me that she and the others at her work had been told that a passenger plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. I turned on the TV and sat in front of it until late in the afternoon. I was as they say, glued to it.

The jet that hit the North Tower flew into the tower perpendicular to the tower's northeast face, and impacted around the center of the 95th floor, producing an impact gash that extended from the 92nd to the 98th floor. Most of the plane apparently lodged in the tower's core structure, the only piece of aircraft to emerge from the opposite side being a dense piece of landing gear. The burning jet fuel, atomized on impact, spilled out of the impact gash and through broken windows on the southeast side. Of course, I didn’t see that impact but when I turned on the TV and switched to CNN, I saw the smoke rising from the 92nd floor. At that time, we all thought that it had been an accident.

Many cameras were rolling when the South Tower was impacted by a second jet at 9:03 a.m., producing brilliant fireballs. The jet that hit the South Tower, 18 minutes later, veered to the right just before impact and hit the rightmost third of the tower's southwest wall, producing an impact gash that extended from the 78th to the 94th floor. The diagonal trajectory through the building allowed most of the plane to miss the tower's core structure, and much of its fuselage appeared to emerge from the east corner, while a great deal of the fuel escaped from the northeast and southwest walls. This produced huge fireballs that developed outside the building, in contrast with the greater containment of the fireballs in the North Tower impact.

I saw this impact and was just as horrified at seeing that building burning as I was seeing the North Tower burning. By then, everyone knew that we weren’t watching an accident. We were watching an act of terrorism.

In the early 1980s, I was conducting an investigation with my boss as a private investigator in New Jersey and he told me that I could take a day off from the investigation to visit Manhattan. I went to the World Trade Towers and the one that I and the other tourists went to was the South Tower because it had an observation deck that was located at the top of the building 107 floors up from the street. One the floor below it, we could walk around the inside of the perimeter of the building and sit on cloth-covered continuous cushioned benches and look out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the other buildings far below us. In the 1990s, I took my wife and two daughters to the South Tower so that they could also see what I and millions of other tourists had seen when we all went to the top of that building.

At around 9:39 a.m., after both towers had been hit but before either had crashed to the ground, a 757 approached the Pentagon. Having flown over the capital from the north, it ultimately approached the west block of the Pentagon from the southwest, after making a 270-degree turn while descending 7000 feet.

The jetliner was less than 100 feet overhead as it swooped over stalled traffic on the highway adjacent to the large lawn and heliport on the west side of the sprawling building. Some eyewitnesses said that the plane banked left and its left wing hit the heliport. Witnesses variously describe the plane crashing into the facade, hitting the ground in front of the facade it and exploding, disappearing into the building, and being swallowed by rings of smoke. They agree that there was a huge explosion and fireball, and torrents of smoke in the wake of the strike. Some describe small fragments of aircraft raining down around them.

United Airlines Flight 93 was the plane that that crashed into a field next to a forest near Shanksville, Pennsylvania that same morning. Flight 93, with 38 passengers and a flight crew of five flight attendants and two pilots was a 757-200 passenger plane on a scheduled flight from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco. It took off at 8:42 am, 41 minutes after its scheduled departure time. Flight 93 flew about as far west as Cleveland Ohio before turning around and flying in the direction of Washington D.C.

Flight 93 was unique among the four flights commandeered on 9/11/01 in the number of cell phone calls made from it. News reports document the receipt of phone calls from at least 13 passengers on Flight 93. The reported cell phone calls were all short. In contrast, a reported call from passenger Todd Beamer lasted for 18 minutes. According to the account, Beamer attempted to call his wife in California on an airphone but instead ended up talking to Verizon supervisor Lisa Jefferson. Beamer related details about events on the plane, and concluded by describing the passenger revolt immortalized by the words, "Let's Roll!" That was the signal that the male passengers were going to attack the terrorists who had commandeered the plane.

Flight 93 crashed by flying into the ground at a speed of more than 600 miles per hour as a result of a struggle between passengers and the hijackers. Everyone in the plane was killed. The impact was so great, searchers had trouble finding the plane even though they were standing at the edge of the hole in the ground where it crashed.

The damage to the Twin Towers

The jet impacts destroyed sections of perimeter wall columns on the faces of the Twin Towers they hit. Although the collisions left imprints that extended out to the wingtips of the jets, the ends of the wings destroyed only the aluminum cladding covering the perimeter columns, not the steel columns themselves. The South Tower's wall was damaged less than the North Tower's, since the columns at its impact zone were made of thicker steel.

The North Tower impact destroyed from 31 to 36 of its perimeter columns, and the South Tower impact destroyed about 23 of its perimeter columns. Since each tower had 240 perimeter columns, the impacts destroyed only about 13 and 10 percent of the towers' perimeter columns, and only on a few floors.

Jet fuel was the biggest factor in bringing down the towers. News reports emphasized that the transcontinental flights were fully loaded with fuel, while later government reports stated that the 767s were carrying about 10,000 of their 24,000-gallon capacity, and that most of the jet fuel likely burned off within five minutes. Thus, the jet fuel primarily served to ignite the post-crash fires rather than sustain them.

The buildings survived the impact and the explosion but not the fire, and that was the problem. The 35 tonnes of aviation fuel will have melted the steel... all that can be done is to place fire resistant material around the steel and delay the collapse by keeping the steel cool for longer.

Eventually raging fires melted the supporting steel struts, but the time delay allowed hundreds of people to escape. The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of each other.

1535ºC (2795ºF) is the melting point of iron and 1510ºC (2750ºF) is the melting point of typical structural steel. Jet fuel burns at 800º to 1500ºF, which is not hot enough to melt steel (2750ºF). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse; their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength and that required exposure to much less heat than what would have been necessary to melt the steel structures.

I believe that the intense heat softened or melted the structural elements; that is the floor trusses and columns so that they became like chewing gum, and that was enough to trigger the collapse of the floors that were subjected to the heat of the fires in both towers.

The south tower fell at 10 a.m. and the north tower at 10:29 a.m.

Experts, including structural engineers, asserted that the Twin Towers were destroyed by a ‘pile driver’ effect, in which the top of the buildings crushed the rest of the buildings, from top to bottom. From then on, the collapse became inevitable, as each new falling floor added to the downward forces. Further down the building, even steel at normal temperatures gave way under the enormous weight which was an estimated weight of 100,000 tonnes from the upper floors alone. None of the structures of the floors below them could stop the floors above them from crashing downward, each floor adding more weight as the floors above it crashed into the floor below it. The towers' central steel spines were weakened by the intense heat from the burning aviation fuel, and eventually gave way when they could no longer support the weight of the floors above the crash zones. When those upper floors began to fall, they forced everything below them to collapse in a pancake manner.

The collapsing of each of the Twin Towers was hidden behind dense clouds of crushed concrete dust that billowed out from the moment each towers' top began its plunge. These clouds first emerged from the towers from around the crash zones, and grew rapidly as they descended. The clouds grew to several times each tower's intact volume before they even reached the ground, and continued to grow after each of the towers had vanished.

As I was watching the collapsing of the two buildings, I was shocked because from having seen buildings demolished in the past, I had never seen the manner in which the clouds of dust billowed outwards as they did with the collapsing of the two Twin Towers.

The dust clouds reached the ground about 12 seconds after each tower started to collapse. Then they raced out in all directions. The explosion of the South Tower at 9:59 a.m., took bystanders by surprise, and many had to run for their lives. Some reported being picked up by the dense cloud. New York Daily News photographer David Handschuh recalled: "I got down to the end of the block and turned the corner when a wave; a hot, solid, black wave of heat threw me down the block. It literally picked me up off my feet and I wound up about a block away." Others escaped into the temporary shelters of storefronts. All reported that there was complete darkness once the dust cloud had overtaken them.

During the emergency response, there was minimal communication between the NYPD and the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), and overwhelmed 9-1-1 dispatchers did not pass along information to FDNY commanders on-scene. At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed, 56 minutes after being struck. Only 14 people escaped from the impact zone of the South Tower after it was hit, and only four people from the floors above it. They escaped via Stairwell A, the only stairwell which had been left intact after the impact.

The towers contained approximately 50,000 computers each made with four to twelve pounds of lead and this does not take into account the five other buildings that were destroyed. The tens of thousands of fluorescent light bulbs each contained enough mercury to contaminate a quarter of a city block. PCBs reached 75,000 times their previous record. The smoke detectors contained radioactive americium 241. In early October, 2001, Dr. Thomas Cahill of the University of Davis at California found levels of very and ultrafine particulates that were the highest he'd seen of 7000 samples taken around the world including at the burning Kuwaiti oil fields. Months after the disaster, the EPA recorded hitherto unseen levels of dioxin. This would explain why so many people who were on the scene helping those in the immediate area began getting extremely ill later.

At the time of the attacks, media reports suggested that tens of thousands might have been killed, as on any given day upwards of 100,000 people could be inside the towers. Estimates of the number of people in the Twin Towers when attacked on September 11, 2001 range between 14,000 and 19,000.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 resulted in 2,996 deaths, including the 19 hijackers and 2,977 victims. The victims were distributed as follows: 246 on the four planes from which there were no survivors, 2,606 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon along with the 64 people who were on that plane that crashed into the Pentagon. All the deaths in the attacks were civilians except for 55 military personnel killed at the Pentagon. These numbers do not account for the unborn killed with pregnant women.

Before the Twin Towers collapsed, an estimated 200 people fell to their deaths from the burning towers, landing on the streets and rooftops of adjacent buildings hundreds of feet below. To witnesses watching, a few of the people falling from the towers seemed to have tumbled or leapt out of broken windows.

It is conceivable that no one would have died that day if it wasn’t for the mistakes that were made. I will detail them now.

Airline security

There were two major mistakes in the security industry that made this terrible event in history happen.

The first mistake was permitting the hijackers to board the planes with box cutters in their carry-on luggage. The terrorists used the box cutters to injure, kill and otherwise keep the passengers and crew at bay. The hijackers had one of their members of each plane carrying explosives attached to their bodies. We now know that they never would have exploded them while the planes were still in flight because that would have thwarted their original plans to smash into buildings. However, with the exception of the plane that crashed into the ground, this threat would have deterred the passengers and crew of the first three planes from attacking the hijackers. It was only when the passengers and crew in the fourth plane were convinced that the hijacker in their plane that was carrying the explosives around his body had no intention of setting it off because the passengers learned that three of the other planes had crashed into buildings.

When the 9/11 ringleader, Mohamad Ata was checked in at the Logan Airport in Boston, his name triggered an alert on the airport’s security system and yet his bags were never put in the plane’s hold. He was allowed to carry them into the plane as carry on luggage.

The pilots let the hijackers into the cockpits

The second mistake was when the airline pilots opened the doors of their cockpits and the hijackers swarmed inside. Had they not done this, the hijackers would not have got into the pilot’s cockpits and taken over the controls of the planes. We know however that the passengers in the fourth plane used a food cart to smash their way into the pilot’s cockpit so that they could grab the terrorist who was in control of the plane so that possibility may have been available to the other hijackers of the other three planes but we will never know for sure.

What this means is that the doors to the pilot’s cockpits have to be secure enough to withstand any force used to smash them open. Fortunately for the passengers and crew of a plane flying over The Philippines, the door could be smashed open. It seems that there had been a commotion in the rear of the plane and the pilot sent the co-pilot to the rear of the plane to see what the problem was. The co-pilot then called the pilot and asked him to join him. The pilot put the plane on auto-pilot and after leaving the cockpit, he closed the door behind him which became locked by itself. When they tried to get back in, they couldn’t. Imagine the fear on the faces of the passengers as they watched the two pilots attempting to smash the door down with a fire axe. Eventually they succeeded and got control of the plane again.

There generally is a peephole in the cockpit door. That in my opinion is not sufficient to determine if it is safe to open the door. There should be a closed circuit camera outside the door which will show the pilots inside the cockpit as to who is just outside the door. Further, there should be a second door that leads directly to first class seats. When any member of the crew wishes to enter the cockpit, that door should be closed and locked so that no passenger can suddenly rush into the cockpit while the cockpit door is open.

The use of the fire retardant in the two twin towers

The third mistake was in the building of the Twin Towers. As I mentioned earlier, the fires in the Twin Towers soften the steel cross beams that held up the floors. They were previously coated with a fire retardant but the retardant didn’t do its job properly. The steel beams should have been more heavily coated with the retardant than they originally were. Because they weren’t, the cross beams bended downwards, thereby putting more pressure against the connections between the cross beams and the columns.

The securing of the cross beams to the vertical beams

The fourth mistake was with respect to the connections of the cross beams to the columns. The cross beams were secured to the columns but not sufficiently enough. Many of them broke free and that lessened the holding power of the structures. If the cross beams had been secured enough so that they wouldn’t break free, the floors wouldn’t have collapsed upon one another. It took only 12 seconds for each tower to collapse to the ground.

The roof access doors were locked

The fifth mistake involved the doors leading to the roofs. Some of the occupants of each tower above their points of impact made their way upwards toward the roof in their building in hope of a helicopter rescue. The roof access doors were locked. Port Authority officers attempted to unlock the doors but the system would not let them, and thick smoke and intense heat would have prevented rescue helicopters from landing in any case. However, they crew in the helicopters could have lowered large buckets at the end of large cables so that the people on the roofs could take turns in entering the buckets and being raised to the helicopters.

People in the South Tower were told to remain on their floors

The sixth mistake was that workers who were in the process of leaving the South Tower after the North Tower had been attacked were told to return back up to their offices. It was announced on the (PA) public address loudspeaker system that the building was secure and that it was safe to return to their offices. Many did return and many lost their lives after the second plane struck. That was a terrible blunder. They should have been evacuated even if the authorities didn’t know that a second plane would hit that tower 17 minutes after the first plane hit the North Tower.

The communication system in Manhattan was faulty

The seventh mistake was the condition of the communication between 911 operators, New York Fire Department and the New York Police Department responders who ended up being disorganized. For example, because of that failure in the communications, most of the people who were trapped in one of the Towers were unaware of the passable status of Stairwell A and were instead told to wait for assistance by rescue personnel, rescue that would not come to them in time. The communication systems have since been improved.

The firefighters in the South Tower should have been evacuated

The eighth mistake was when the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. The firefighters in North Tower should have been immediately evacuated. It had to be obvious to their bosses that if the South Tower had collapsed, the North Tower would do the same thing. It collapsed 21 minutes later.

Miracles occurred

After the collapse of the towers, only 23 survivors who were in or below the towers escaped from the debris, including 15 rescue workers. The last survivor to be removed alive from the WTC collapse debris was Genelle Guzman-McMillan, who was removed at 12:30 p.m., on September 12th, 27 hours after its initial collapse. She was a Port Authority employee who worked on the 64th floor of the North Tower. It is credible that she could have survived the downward crushing of the floors above hers. The search for survivors did find others who had survived for days under the rubble pile. Two firemen who had been in a stairwell when the South Tower collapsed around them, survived also.

Other interesting facts about what happened on 9/11

Three hours before the attacks, a machine called the Random Event Generator at Princeton University predicted a cataclysmic event was about to unfold.

Of all the persons killed in the Twin Towers, only 291 bodies were found to be intact.

It took firefighters 100 days to extinguish all the fires ignited in the immediate area of the Twin Towers.

The number of children who lost a parent in the 9/11 attacks numbered 3,051. Seventeen babies were subsequently born whose fathers had died in the attacks.

The total amount of art lost in the Twin Towers was worth $100 million.

Workers sifted through the more than 100 million tons of debris of the Twin Towers and found 65,000 items which included 437 watches and 144 wedding rings.

Five of the hijackers stayed in a motel that was right next to the National Security Agency just days before the attacks.

Property developer Larry Silverstein purchased a 99-year lease on the World Trade Centre just six months before they were destroyed. He paid $3.2 billion for the lease. Because his insurance covered possible terrorist acts, he was able to recover his losses.

Of the nineteen Al-Qaeda hijackers that were killed during the attacks, 15 of them were Saudi Arabians. The Twentieth hijacker could get on a plane. The number of first responders that died in the World Trade Center were as follows; 23 NYPD officers, 343 firefighters, and 37 Port Authority employees.

On September 11, 2001, with United States airspace closed due to the terrorist attacks, Gander International played host to 39 airliners, totaling 6,122 passengers and 473 crew, as part of Operation Yellow Ribbon. The community of Gander came to the aid of the passengers and crew and made sure that everyone of them had beds to sleep on and food to eat. Many of the homeowners opened their doors to the passengers so that they could have showers. Greyhound Bus in the US was so grateful for the hospitality the Canadians gave those who had landed in Canadian airports; it offered Canadians who wanted to visit the US an opportunity to cross the United States for the sum of only $99.

The Aftermath

The shock of 9/11 sent the United States into a paroxysm of fear from which it has yet to fully recover despite the recent killing of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist who sanctioned the attack on the United States in September 11th 2001

In the aftermath of 9/11 the U.S. has spent as much as $4 trillion waging wars in Afghanistan, and more dubiously in Iraq, in the name of fighting terror, The conflicts have left 225,000 dead. Beyond that, Washington has pumped $400 billion more into homeland security. These are heavy burdens of U.S. treasure and largely foreign blood.

Canada, too, has struggled to cope with 9/11 and its aftermath. We are still deeply engaged in Afghanistan with no clear victory in sight. We face endless American pressure to upgrade border security. And to trade off cherished civil rights to counter terror here at home.

Canada now spends $13 billion more a year on defence (including the current Afghan training mission) and security than we did before 9/11. It is estimated that 9/11 has cost Canadians $92 billion and the lives of 157 brave soldiers, plus a diplomat, two aid workers and a journalist. Few U.S. allies have borne a heavier burden, proportionately.

Despite the fact that none of the 9/11 attackers came from Canada, Canadians are still facing demands from Washington to step up security. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama are now working out the details of a new North American security initiative that we can only hope reverses our so-called easy-to-cross border that threatens our $650 billion trade, and causes grief for 300,000 travelers daily. Even so, demands for passports, heavy screening and slowdowns have become routine on what once was celebrated as the world’s longest undefended border. Air security, with its body scanners, sniffers, pat-downs and inflexible “no-fly” lists, grows more oppressive by the day.

Canada has faced domestic Islamist terror threats since 9/11, notably the ‘Toronto 18’ who planned to attack Parliament and other sites. And the threats on New York and Washington are reminders that we must remain vigilant. Even so, Canada’s Chief Justice and federal judges have cautioned repeatedly that Ottawa does not need to trample civil rights to effectively combat terror. The security services and police have managed to identify, disrupt and jail terrorists without resorting to draconian powers. That’s how it should remain.

This sad anniversary is, in part, an opportunity to reaffirm the Canada that the 9/11 attackers sought to rattle, and its values. Without being complacent, Canadians and Americans alike should move past the fear that 9/11 generated, and learn from the excesses that it provoked.

Today, bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is in ruins. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are winding down. And the youth-driven Arab Spring that has toppled despots in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya is proving to be a stronger agent of change than Al- Qaeda’s murderous nihilism. Young Muslims who are dissatisfied with their lives at long last have a positive ideology to embrace. That is why it is important that we support the reformers. It is also the reason why Canada and the United States and other nations as well must look to invest prudently so that opportunities will be given to the youth in those countries that will sway them away from seeking a terrorist way out.

In 1985 while addressing a United Nations crime conference in Milan, Italy, I put forth a very strong proposal that terrorists who commit violent crimes should be tried for their crimes as soon as possible and if convicted, executed within a day thereafter. I haven’t changed my views on this. There is no place on our planet for these kinds of people. The sooner we get rid of them, the safer we all will be.

I would be less than honest however if I didn’t admit that at the same time, I like what the Americans are doing with the terrorists they arrest and convict. They are sending them to a high-security prison where they are spending the rest of their lives in solitary confinement.

The only exception they made was with respect to the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh. His bomb killed 168 people including 19 children under the age of 6. The Americans were so outraged; putting to death this horrible man seemed to be the only way that justice could be served. I don’t take issue with that at all. As a result of that bombing, the U.S. government passed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. This Act would make it easier to convict terrorists. It was this kind of response to terrorism that I had in mind when I gave my speech in Milan. This may have also been the reason why the Navy Seals were under orders to kill bin Laden as soon as he was in their sights.

By the way, the Americans also did what I proposed in my speech. I said that after the terrorist is executed, his body should be dumped into the sea. The Americans did this with bin Laden's body when he was dropped into the sea from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson so that no others of his ilk can pray over his grave. Bin Laden’s body is rotting at the bottom of the sea where it belongs with the other bottom feeders.

His death is a day we will all remember.