The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were a familiar sight to New Yorkers. For decades, you looked up and they were there. It was a reassuring sight. I visited the towers many times and gazed upon them many more.
On the morning of September 11, I had just finished voting in Brooklyn when I looked up and saw that one of the towers was on fire. Just a few minutes later, a second plane crashed into the other tower. Something was very wrong.
President George W. Bush was at a school event when he was informed. The expression on his face says it all. No one in the government knew how serous the threat was.
The impact of the two jets was devastating, smashing through the steel structure of the towers and igniting fires that eventually brought the buildings down. Warplanes took to the skies. Every non-military flight in U.S. airspace was ordered to land.
Thousands of people were trapped in upper floors of the towers. Many died when then the planes hit and many more perished as the fires raged and when the towers collapsed. Some jumped to their deaths to escape the conflagration and the smoke. In all, 2,606 people died in the towers.
The sky was blue and clear on 9/11. The winds carried a massive plume of smoke out over the city and New York's harbor. "Manhattan looked as though it had taken 10 megatons," the British novelist Martin Amis later wrote.
The towers were so badly damaged structurally that collapse was inevitable. At the time, however, no one expected this. People on the streets about the World Trade Center fled in terror when the buildings went down, one after the other, and filled the streets with rubble and dust.
Fires raged for hours and smoldered for days in the mass of twisted steel and rubble. Lower Manhattan below 14th Street would be closed to traffic not involved in the rescue effort.
The area around the World Trade Center was a scene of utter devastation. Smoke and dust hung in the air. Countless cars, trucks, and emergency vehicles were destroyed.