9/11 Attack: a personal reminiscence – An interval of peace amid the 2020 campaigns – Evening statistics
It is the 19th anniversary of the famous attack of 9/11/2001 upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many people have personal stories to tell of that time, particularly those who resided in New York and Washington DC. My own experience is not, perhaps, especially striking or dramatic, but it is one of the few times of my life that I was personally involved in an event that was reported on the national news, and it is not surprising that memories of it recur now.
I was working at that time on a project that was developing a weather satellite for NASA. The office was in Greenbelt, just a few miles from the Goddard Space Flight Center. On the 11th of September members of our group were attending a weekly meeting there, which was a progress review that reported on issues uncovered during the preceding week, assigning the resolution of these issues to various engineers, and monitoring status of the work completed on the issues that had already been assigned. These meetings were among the few during the course of my career that I actually looked forward to attending with eagerness. The reason for this was the Project Manager, Bonnie Seton, of whom I must say a few words.
Government agencies vary greatly in their treatment of the contractors they employ. Some hold the contractors at arms’ length; they are not at all unpleasant, but there is little or no mixing and camaraderie among the two groups of the agency’s employees and the contractors is not encouraged. Others, among whom NASA and the FAA stand out in my memory, have the opposite approach; they go out of their way to make the contractors feel comfortable working alongside their own subordinates and to abolish, at any rate to the extent possible, any suggestion of a caste system. For example, it was the custom of the EDOS project (which is the name of the satellite for which we were developing software) to hold catered office parties at the completion of various milestones, and to these celebrations Bonnie Seton issued a pressing invitation via her counterpart in Northrop Grumman for the engineers in his group to attend. It would not be a team, she insisted, if we were to feel excluded. These celebrations were not especially elaborate but they were very enjoyable and they did contribute to our bonding with the NASA engineers on the project with whom we were working.
But apart from her personal qualities there was another reason that it was a pleasure to be working on a project under her direction. Quite simply, she ran meetings better than anyone else I have ever seen, either before or since.
Engineers have a tendency, when confronted with a technical issue, to attempt to solve it on the spot, not always regarding the fact that they may not possess the necessary data to do so and that it may require more research before such an attempt even becomes feasible. Without losing her temper or even raising her voice – she was always polite to everyone – she quietly, but firmly made it known that the purpose of the meeting was to identify issues and then to assign them to the engineers best qualified to solve them. If they could be solved quickly, so much the better; but they were to be solved outside of the meeting itself, which had many different items to cover. In this way we did not get bogged down on one particular item at the expense of all of the others. The meetings she ran were among almost the only ones I have ever attended in the confidence that the last items on the agenda would receive as much attention as the first.
I have striven, when I had meetings of my own to run in later years, to imitate her example; but it seems in such matters administrators are born, not made. I managed pretty well, but I never flattered myself that I was at her level.
At all events, we had assembled, both the contingent from NASA and the contingent from Northrop Grumman – all except one engineer, whose absence occasioned some surprise, for he was punctual in his habits and he had not called in to report himself ill that day. We waited a little, but then as there was much to discuss we decided to begin without him. About fifteen minutes after the meeting began he came bustling in, breathless and apologetic, saying that there had been a great deal of traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (which has an exit ramp leading directly to the Goddard Center). There had been an incident, it appeared, on the national news, an attack of some sort, or possibly an accident, about which the details were uncertain. We thought no more about the matter and continued our discussion when, shortly afterwards, a knock was heard at the door and Bonnie Seton, upon answering it, was called out of the room. We tried to go on with the meeting during her absence – which, however, did not last long. Shortly afterwards she re-entered and, without saying a word, turned on the television set that was also used for video tele-conferencing.
And there we saw it – the first of the Twin Towers to be struck (the North Tower), all in flames, as newscasters reported the surreal-sounding story of a plane that had crashed into its façade just a few minutes earlier. It was not even clear whether or not it was some unaccountable sort of accident. And as we were trying to assimilate the knowledge of the damage that had been done and the number of lives that must be lost, we watched in horror as a second plane headed – mercilessly, inexorably – to the South Tower and crashed on its façade as well, igniting yet another deadly fire.
We could hardly speak at first. We looked at each other in mute shock, with disordered feelings, with agitation that was none the less intense for being silent.
And then all at once our tongues loosened, talking almost at random. Who had done this? And why? And in the meantime the footage and the reports continued with relentless intensity: shots of people running frantically along the Brooklyn Bridge for safety, shots of people trapped on the upper floors of the South Tower electing to jump and die quickly rather than endure a prolonged death by fire; reports of a third attack – on the Pentagon this time – reports of a plane crash in Pennsylvania suspected to be a hijacked plane that failed in its mission, reports of fires spreading along the entire district of Wall Street. There seemed to be no end of new developments, each more horrifying than the last.
And all the while we engineers from Northrop Grumman had an uneasy feeling that our presence was no longer needed that morning, that we were in fact very much in the way. Signs of activity were becoming apparent in the Goddard facility; sounds of many footsteps were heard in the corridors; various people were evidently being summoned for emergency decisions. The area in the Twin Towers area had to be scanned for any data that could be obtained, and discussions were being held about the numerous satellites that were eventually deployed for this purpose. (In fact, the EDOS satellite was used in subsequent days; several of our own engineers participated in this effort to obtain and interpret the data.) Any idea of continuing our weekly meeting was, of course, not even a matter of discussion. Presently, indeed, the director of the project on the Northrop Grumman side called all of us together in one corner of the room and told us quietly that, as non-Government personnel, we would oblige the NASA administrators by leaving as expeditiously as possible.
This directive we were not at all sorry to obey, for by now it was apparent that staying on any Government facility at such a time could be hazardous. For all we knew, there could be dozens of additional hijacked planes on their way to various targets in the DC Metro area. It took us a while to get out, of course, for we all had to drive via a single exit and there were several non-Government personnel besides ourselves who had been directed to leave.
Eventually, however, the security guard waved at me to let me through; and, thoroughly drained, I returned to the Northrop Grumman facility. Here I asked my supervisor if it were possible to take my work home and complete it there. The concept of working outside of the office was much more rudimentary then and he appeared a little surprised at this request but, after some reflection, he agreed. I felt that I could not sit in the office that day. The nature of the work was such that I had no difficulty in completing it outside of the Northrop Grumman facility and, indeed, I finished it more quickly than I would have done in the office, because I had no interruptions to contend with. I was sorry for it in a way, for the more I plunged into my assignments the easier it was to drive the images of that morning from my mind; but it unfortunately was finished only too quickly and then it was impossible not to dwell on the events I had witnessed. One picture in particular lingered, and it haunts me to this day: the footage of a man standing on a ledge, sweaty, disheveled, his necktie askew, briefly folding his hands together (possibly in prayer), casting a last despairing look at the building in flames and then at the depths below, before plunging to his death.
Such is the story of my personal involvement in the events of 9/11. It is, as I say, not especially dramatic, though the impressions it left behind were sufficiently vivid. I certainly experienced nothing as harrowing as what my cousin and his family in New York endured. They had a close friend who was a firefighter at a station not far from the Towers; and when my cousin heard the news of the attacks and learned that the firefighters in the area had rushed to the scene, he knew at once that he would never see his friend again – and so indeed it proved. This friend was only in his early forties and was the father of small children. To this day, my cousin will not go to World Trade Center site (Ground Zero) or visit the museum there, even though his own mother (my aunt) works there as a docent; the memories it arouses are too bitter.
The remembrance of the events of 9/11 has injected a rare note of civility and good manners in the Presidential campaign. Donald Trump delivered a speech in Shanksville, PA, the site of the crash of the plane that passengers had wrested from the hijackers, with the knowledge that their own lives would be forfeited in the process. The President made a speech honoring their sacrifice, and it must be impartially recorded that the speech was an excellent one, without a trace of the superciliousness or boorishness he had displayed earlier towards the Marines who had fallen at Belleau Woods. Joe Biden spoke at New York, delivering a speech with equal appropriateness. Mike Pence was also present at the ceremony, and he and Biden greeted one another amicably. We should savor this rare moment of concord, for the days to come will be full of vituperation on both sides.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 28,637,592; # of deaths worldwide: 918,892; # of cases U.S.: 6,634,305; # of deaths U.S.: 197,361. Sadly, we are back to the old numbers: a case increase of more than 40,000 and a daily death toll of over 1,000. We can’t seem to achieve a deceleration that lasts more than a few days at a time. Italy, once the country that was the object of the greatest amount of pity, now has a slightly lower death rate than our own (589 per million inhabitants in Italy, 596 per million in the U.S.). At this point we have entered the category of countries that have seen more than 2% of its entire population become infected with the virus.