9/11 - Before, During and After (sensitive footage)

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oh honey nobody just sounded [Music] on a perfect almost achingly beautiful late summer morning in early September 2001 a day of seemingly infinite visibility one man later said characterized by the rare and exquisite flying conditions airline pilots call severe clear life in New York and much of the rest of the contemporary world was changed irrevocably in the space of less than two hours in my years in the in New York was obviously nothing like nothing comes close as a newspaperman I've seen other horrors Wars and the earthquake in Mexico in 85 which killed 20,000 people but that was an act of nature not a man the combination of the death is spectacular event of the two skyscrapers collapsing and the motivations behind it all those things I think made this something that just struck a knife right into the heart of every New Yorker knowing that we'd never be able to look at our city the same way first of all it's a surprise on a beautiful day at the center of this powerful nation which has not been attacked on its own shores or its own land a foreign power in almost two hundred years so that's a new thing secondly the public focus on this never in the history of the world had there been anything even close there's not really a second place the second place probably be the assassination of President Kennedy you know a world event where the world is focused on that story but nothing like this where it's seen instantaneously as it happens but tens of millions of people around the globe [Music] in a little less than two hours with an almost poetically horrifying symmetry the symbols and instruments of the cities uniquely err minded culture and of globalization itself skyscrapers jets and the mass media would be turned back against themselves with a devastatingly lethal impact and effect we were utterly struck by by the fact that nothing here fit with any prior experience and of course people were talking about how it looked like something in a disaster movie we could only think in terms of life imitating art because we had no other thing to compare it to so people went to the movies and and compared it around 8:45 a.m. on the morning of September 11th 2001 people along the west side of Manhattan heard the piercing whine of a jet plane moving south down the Hudson everything about its trajectory was wrong heading south along an airway normally reserved for northbound traffic it was moving much too fast and much too close to the ground nearly 500 miles per hour at an altitude of just 900 feet more than twice the speed permitted for aircraft that low it took less than 90 seconds for American Airlines flight 11 to hurdle the entire length of Manhattan Island a little after 8:46 a.m. the huge 137 ton Boeing 767 measuring more than half a football field in length from wingtip to wingtip and carrying more than 9,000 gallons of highly inflammable jet fuel flashed across the final 20 blocks from Canal Street to the World Trade Center and tore through the north wall of the North Tower between the 94 and I need floors instantly killing everyone on board and wreaking incomprehensible carnage across five full floors of the building witnesses on the upper floors of the South Tower we're stunned to see a wall of flame burst through the South windows of tower 1 130 feet away followed by a shower of disintegrating desks files furniture computer terminals airplane parts and burning bodies if you were just below where the plane hit your ceilings fell you saw the glint of the plane going overhead there's an overwhelming feeling of terror and you were probably knocked off your feet and of course if you were in the zone itself you may have died instantly but even very close and this is very tragic very close to the regions of impact there were people who lived for long minutes as they sought refuge from you know the building flames - tremendous Heat a couple of them even were able to phone and then often in that region their lives ended quickly in the fire or they chose to leap from the tower that airplane straddled several floors and it delivered a hell of a punch the building swayed we know that when that punch was delivered the the swaying took the form of waves that ran vertically up and down the building multiple times sort of echoing up and down the building and really the incredible thing is considering the speed with which those airplanes were flying enormous weight enormous speed rather than decapitating the buildings or pushing them over the building's absorbed the impact entirely they took the hit and they stood I was heading for the Holland Tunnel which has a four-block concourse if you want to call it leading to the tow boom and as I turned into the first it was four blocks and I looked up as oh my god there was a hole in Tower number one my first thought was can't be a helicopter the hole still be and the second was my god it can't be a commercial plane because they're instructed to fly into the river if they have problems I knew that by 855 an army of firemen police officers emergency medical personnel and government officials including the mayor himself had begun to descend on lower Manhattan along with an army of reporters photographers and television accruals as the machinery of the largest media apparatus in the world began to focus on the 16 acre site at 9:02 a.m. little more than 15 minutes after the attack millions of people in the metropolitan region and tens of millions more across the country and around the world we're staring intently at the smouldering skyline of lower Manhattan when a dark shape appeared on the horizon above the New Jersey Logan's and came hurtling across the upper bay I got out of my car other people did and suddenly I saw a plane number two coming from the south or the Statue of Liberty going very fast they say between 500 and 600 miles an hour [Music] and I saw it smash into the south wall number two an oblique a the nose came out on the north side my first reaction like God has poor people who love because they're gonna wipe out all the staircases and all the sprinkler systems that ever just one sliced right sure powers such a big plane at that speed and from all my credibility's to the people then and a credible anger feeling that somebody had deliberately deliberately rammed into his towers poor innocent people I were in there I was at the Tweed courthouse on Chambers Street right behind City Hall I grabbed a notebook and ran to the street in time to see the second one hit I knew right away obviously was terrorism this amazing firewall they came roaring towards Broadway and people on the street corner just going oh oh oh that expression must have been uttered like ten million times that just astonishment than what they were looking at we know that when the airplanes hit there was an instantaneous release of energy in the form of fuel vaporized that caught on fire there was fire instantaneously across multiple floors that fire which was a kerosene fire jet fuel fire burned very hot but it also burned very fast we're talking to three to five minutes but what it did is it ignited a simultaneous office fire in both cases across multiple floors an office fire the like which had not been imagined before in all cases and office fires many things burning partitions carpets in particular computer cases but paper mostly paper and if you look at the dynamics of the collapse what you find is that in both cases that was the paper fire that was sustained long enough because of the amount of paper in there to cause the steel the weekend to cause the collapse and hammering down in both cases I mean paper on that day was a constant presence it rained down on the city as if in mockery of the kind of busy that was done at the trade center here have some of the paper and it burned and it brought the buildings down the second plane had struck the South Tower at 9:02 54 a.m. just 16 minutes after the first plane went in by then the first teams of firemen and rescue workers had already arrived at the foot of the North Tower when they were greeted by a scene of horror and devastation that defied the imagination on the Austin Tobin Plaza there were corpses everywhere the mangled bodies of men and women who had already jumped or fallen from the upper floors of the building and the charred remains of passengers from flight 11 some still belted into their seats far above in the upper reaches of the towers themselves the gaping black holes where the planes had gone in marked a stock dividing line between life and death in the North Tower the plane struck at the center and also struck much higher up and because it struck at the center the fuel immediately went down the shafts and created a much broader fire the flames were much more intense the number of floors that were available to move up and down were many fewer so what happened who has people were breaking windows in the North Tower desperate to get air and there was no place to go because there were no stairwells that were open up and down people were stacked four or five on top of each other at the broken windows despard's breathe and other people were were hanging on to each other across the the steel columns from window to window hanging out of the windows desperate to breathe and just you know grasping each other to keep hold of the building one of the most horrific scenes in history of the nation took place a thousand feet above lower Manhattan and it took the lives of people who were staring down at safety you know at the most populous city in the nation civilization at its peak but they didn't have anywhere to get there and it's really there's really few words to describe how terrible that must have been [Applause] [Applause] by nine-thirty ordinary life had all but ceased across the city as millions of New Yorkers and hundreds of millions more around the world looked on in shock and disbelief the nightmarish images unfolding in real time on TV you usually can gauge things you know within a few minutes you know so that they may start getting worse but at one time you say well this is what they are but this was something that started getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse at 9:38 word came the terrorists had commandeered a third jetliner and crashed it into the Pentagon killing everyone on board and 126 people on the ground and not long after that a fourth plane had crashed into a hillside in rural Pennsylvania brought down by some of its own heroic passengers before it could reach its intended target in the nation's capital what struck me at the time I think is the most significant part of that was when they came on and said that the Federal Aviation Administration or the whole air traffic in the United States to be grounded I knew that had never happened before you know there are tens of thousands of planes in the United States at any one time and to say they have to land down what hit me was that this is really beyond whatever I had thought [Music] and then on a morning of hideous surprises already without precedent in the city's history something happened that no one had ever thought possible before something beyond comprehension something that had never happened in the history of tall buildings since the first skyscrapers had gone up at the foot of Manhattan over a century before [Music] high up in both towers the raging fires were now generating three to five times the heat of a nuclear power plant and the interior temperature had soared in places to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit at 9:58 a.m. having withstood the ferocious heat of the inferno within for nearly an hour [Music] the floor trusses on the 80th floor of the South Tower began to give way Collins along the east wall began to buckle upwards when the entire bill began to come down as the quarter-mile call structure dissolved into a massive shroud of smoke invested thousands of people in the surrounding streets began to cry out in horror and disbelief then ran for their lives pursued by an enormous billowing cloud of dust and debris it never occurred to me that these two buildings would come down so that when they did it was the most shocking moment maybe they never had that the South Tower began to tick forward and then righted itself and came down and what in memory seems like a slow-motion moment [Music] what happened in ten seconds ten seconds it's a knockout in boxing the whole thing came down [Applause] was just to me still it's a staggering moment in in New York in any history in world history for a place that had never had anything like that happened to whatever before the Empire State Building didn't come down you could 93 the four thousand pound bomb goes off in the basement doesn't come down this time it came down this time they figured out and I thought oh man something news happened here [Music] at 10:28 a.m. 30 minutes after the South Tower fell the television antenna atop the North Tower began to give way followed a fraction of a second later by the upper floors of the building itself as the entire North Tower now came down to then there was a release of heat that was off the scale fires ignited crushing and tearing was going on and chaos mostly just chaos on some mathematical level was happening you can't even describe it physically because it was too big too chaotic it was a cataclysmic release and it released back into the city in 10 seconds in each case but the surprising thing to me has always been how concentrated it was they came straight down as if they were aimed directly at their foundations and of course anything that was directly underneath no longer existed afterward the so-called bathtub that ran six floors underground below Street absorbed the brunt of the energy inside that bathtub during those twin 10-second pulses what was really happening nobody could have even imagined we know what the results were the results were we were grappling with results inside that hole for the following nine months we're in a sense probably will be grappling with the results for years to come I was upstate New York when I heard of the towers being destroyed his side of me was not believing it it was a very strange blend of feelings one was the sorrow the horror at witnessing human life being obliterated for no reason like that and I felt something beyond words I felt almost in a live part of me being squeezed to nothing being extracted an evisceration almost it's an interesting question when you saw those two giant towers collapse almost cleanly on themselves where did they go I have read in some architecture article that they were made mostly of air if you consider the space between the solids molecules still the concrete the class the aluminum that was a lot of air was mostly actually and they disappeared and that it's where did they go was part of the the disbelief that I was feeling because I can make a two hundred thousand tons of still disappear it's unbelievable in the end the half million tonnes of concrete steel glass and aluminum in each tower had hurtled to the ground in a virtual freefall traveling at a speed of 125 miles an hour shockwaves from the twin impacts were picked up more than 40 miles away by seismic instruments used for monitoring earthquakes the immense columns of rubble and dust drifting away from Ground Zero could be clearly seen from outer space I have to tell you I didn't know whether the buildings were empty or whether there were tens of thousands of people in them I just had no idea and I was I was totally devastated by the fact that all those people are in there in this building that I had designed was I was falling on them [Music] the buildings were not so important to me I I'm good at buildings but people are another better it was a terrible event absolute urn but I think you can measure the impact it's absolutely enormous everybody felt it but of course those who felt it most and will never get over the effects are those who lost people and the sheer numbers are so appalling and the horror of the attack is so appalling that in one sense New York will never be the same [Music] with the collapse of the second tower any required descended on New York by 11 o'clock hundreds of thousands of dazed and disheveled office workers many covered in ashes and dust could be seen marching north from the financial district straggling uptown along the West Side Highway we're heading over the bridges to Brooklyn down at the site itself hundreds of firemen and rescue workers groped their way across a surreal landscape of smoke and flames at the edge of an immense seven storey pile of tangled steel and debris searching desperately for any signs of life all day doctors and nurses in emergency rooms around the city braced for the anticipated onslaught of injured survivors that never came those who got out got a one nurse later said those who didn't died [Music] around 5:20 in the afternoon building number seven a 47 story tower on the north side of Vesey Street succumbed to a raging oil fire within and fell to the ground [Music] one of the surprising things you could call it almost they a sad poetic justice is that the only buildings that were completely destroyed by this collapse were the buildings that carried the Trade Center label buildings 137 no other buildings with the exception of the small Orthodox Church there that dissolved were destroyed and every building that carried the label died

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Channel: kounterfeet

Views: 15,755,798

Rating: 4.4175115 out of 5

Keywords: Jumpers, 9/11, WTC, Eyewitnesses, how, people, escape, the, Impact, Zone

Id: y2LxmESkV0Q

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Sat May 19 2012

Reddit Comments

I've heard him in a lot of other games and such, he's got a good voice. :)

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/GoshTruth 📅︎︎ Oct 27 2015 🗫︎ replies