September 11 Stories You Didn't Know

On September 11, 2001, 19 militants affiliated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four planes and attacked several targets in the United States. Two planes were sent into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, a third plane crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

Фото: Depositphotos

Almost 11 people died during the September 3000 attacks, including 400 police officers and firefighters. We decided to remember the facts that many people forget about - stories of eyewitnesses to the tragedy, heroic deeds and simply unnoticeable, at first glance, events, writes NEWS.

Steve Buscemi returned to his fire brigade

In the early 1980s, the star of Reservoir Dogs, Armageddon, The Big Lebowski and many others worked as an ordinary firefighter in New York before starting his Hollywood career. And, perhaps, we would never have remembered this if it had not been for the September 11 terrorist attack.

That day, Buscemi returned to his former unit and worked with other firefighters for several days, looking for survivors from the rubble of the World Trade Center.

“I had to do this. It was great to connect with my team and some of the guys I worked with decades ago. It would have been much more difficult for me to survive those events if I had not been directly involved in them,” Buscemi himself later said.

Picasso's destroyed works and other valuables

Experts estimated art losses after the tragedy at more than $100 million. The history of the bright red Bent Propeller sculpture by Alexander Calder, which stood at the entrance to the World Trade Center, is indicative. The thing, like most human lives, could not be saved. At least in its entirety - only forty percent remains. But the firefighters' tenacity in saving the relic is amazing. At first, parts of the object were located on the territory of Kennedy Airport, and then were moved to the memorial museum located at the site of the tragedy.

In addition, during the destruction of the towers, the extensive collection of sculptures and drawings by Auguste Rodin, owned by the brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald, was lost. The works of Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Le Corbusier, belonging to various companies with offices or enterprises in buildings, were also destroyed.

Guide dog named Rosella

Michael Hingson, a sales manager for Fortune 500 company Quantum, was on the 78th floor of the North Tower at the time of the terrorist attack. In addition to the general panic, smoke and fire, Hingson had another problem - he was blind.

But next to him was his friend - a faithful Labrador dog named Rosella. The animal was able to find a way out to the escape stairs, after which a painfully long descent began.

“We started to go down and I smelled a strong smell, a little like kerosene. Suddenly I realized what it was. I've flown all over the world and I've smelled this smell on the runways. It was the smell of jet fuel. Then I thought... what if the plane crashed into the building?,” Hingson later said.

Hingson continued to follow the Labrador, listening to the rhythm of her breathing. He recalled that soon the smell of aviation fuel became so strong that it literally burned his eyes. When they went down to the 70 floor, Michael was already beginning to control how he breathed as the temperature grew.

An hour later, Rosella brought out the host, and after a few minutes, the North Tower collapsed.

“Then we were swallowed up by a monstrous cloud of sand and gravel. It filled my throat and lungs, but I tried to breathe. We continued to run and Rosella guided me beautifully. She never stopped,” Hingson said.

As a result, Rosella lived another 10 years, and the man wrote a book about her.

Boats of hope

The Twin Towers were located on Manhattan Island, the business center of New York. Therefore, after the terrorist attacks, when all public transport stopped working, boat owners managed to evacuate more than half a million people from the island.

More than 150 ferries, tugboats, coast guard ships and private pleasure boats worked together to bring people to other parts of the city. The united actions of the owners of personal boats during the day can be compared to the evacuation of 339 thousands of soldiers from Dunkirk during World War II, which lasted nine days.

Speaking to CNN in August 2017, New York Police Officer Tyrone Powell spoke about the scope of assistance:

“We had Noah’s Ark. We were all on this boat. We had animals. We had children without parents. Everyone was covered in soot."

A few years after the tragedy, sailors helping people in Manhattan began to become seriously ill. An estimated 120 ship captains and boat workers are enrolled in the World Trade Center health program. They suffer from various respiratory diseases - from asthma to cancer.

Stress in dogs

During the debris after September 11, search and rescue dogs found so few living people that it caused them great stress because they believed they had failed. Conductors and rescuers had to regularly hide in the rubble to please the animals and support their spirit.

Many dogs continued to suffer from stress and depression after surgery. For example, Worf, a 12-year-old German shepherd in the first days found the bodies of two firefighters, and then refused to work, lay down and curled up in one place. In addition, she did not eat anything and refused to play with other dogs. Mike Owens, her partner, had to return with her to her native Ohio.

“There was so much death there. It was mentally difficult for the dogs,” said the rescuer.

"Falling Man"

Perhaps the most symbolic image of 9/11 is the photograph taken by Richard Drew, informally called "Falling Man." It shows a man, still unidentified, flying headfirst from the World Trade Center tower.

It is estimated that on that day around 200 people jumped out of burning towers. First, through the cracks that struck crashed planes, and then people themselves began to break the windows, realizing the hopelessness of their position.

They jumped to escape the smoke and fire, to avoid falling under the collapsing ceilings and floors, to breathe freely for the last time before death. On average, the fall lasted about 10 seconds. Some tried in vain to use the curtains as parachutes - none of them survived.

“Perhaps this is one of the most striking illustrations of human despair, unparalleled in the power of emotional impact in modern art. The whole essence of it is crystallized in just one photo,” said theologian Mark D. Thomas.

Time lapse

The daughter of 9/11 hero William Gormley, Bridget, is raising money to help those struggling in the aftermath of the tragedy. Her father is a fireman, and after the terrorist attack he was at the epicenter of events, but returned home alive: “We thought we were so lucky because everyone was alive” (five other members of the Gormley family worked as rescuers), but soon after that the father of the family diagnosed with cancer.

Gormley spent several months in Ground Zero and died at the age of 53 years from a disease caused by the terrorist attack. Bridget has launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Indigogo website and plans to raise around 35000 dollars with her to create a documentary film about the problem. She is convinced that 3000 people who died directly on 11 in September of 2001, are not the only victims of the terrorist attack:

“The death toll from the aftermath will eventually exceed the death toll of 11/XNUMX.”

As of June 2018, 9795 people live with cancer associated with the effects of 9 / 11, and another 420 people with a similar diagnosis died. Diseases are caused by smoke and toxic dust, which was in the midst of the tragedy.

View from space

Frank Lee Calbertson, an astronaut, has been aboard the International Space Station for a month when the September 11 attacks occurred. And he could follow the events of the day from a height of more than 480 kilometers above the Earth.

It so happened that at the time of the terrorist attacks, Calbertson was the only American in space. On September 11, he transmitted pictures of New York to Earth, taken with a Kodak DCS 460c digital camera.

“It’s hard to describe what it’s like to be the only American to leave the planet at this time. The feeling that I should be there with all of you, dealing with this, helping, is overwhelming,” Culbertson wrote in those days.

9 / 11 also became a personal tragedy for him:

“I learned that the captain of the American Airlines plane that crashed into the Pentagon was Charles Burlingame, my classmate at the United States Naval Academy. What a terrible loss, but I'm sure he fought bravely to the end."

Algorithm for family communication

The names on the memorial to the victims of 9 / 11 are arranged by kinship, not alphabetically. This was done using a special algorithm to preserve the bonds of family and friendship, and show the connections between people who changed each other’s life that day.

Фото: Depositphotos

“This is about making the memorial meaningful not only for the people who knew the victims, but also for the people who go there to honor their memory. In this way, visitors can explore human relationships and stories under the names themselves. If, for example, you see 650 employees from Cantor Fitzgerald, you realize that the entire company was almost destroyed. If they were arranged in alphabetical order, this meaning would be lost,” said one of the authors of the project, Jake Barton.

Read also on ForumDaily:

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In New York, opened a subway station, which was destroyed during the September 11 attacks

Bin Laden's son married the daughter of the 11 terrorist attacks in September

A US court ordered Iran to pay compensation to relatives of victims of the 9 / 11 attack

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