It's been 16 years since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
But for millions of Americans, haunting memories of that day are still fresh,
and many lives were changed forever.
On 9/11, terrorists hijacked four planes and were able to
crash two of them into the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York and one
into the Pentagon.
The remaining jet crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers
overpowered the hijackers.
A day that started out with clear blue skies ended with a
mass of twisted, smoldering metal where the Twin Towers once stood, leaving
2,977 people dead in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, along with the 19
hijackers.
September 11 happened over a decade ago. The Washington
Post's Aaron Blake tweeted that one-quarter of Americans are too young to
remember it. I have three kids who have no memory of it at all — they weren't
born yet.
But we certainly don't want to forget, even as we get on
with our lives. So in memory of that day, here are 7 images that capture what
no American should forget. And as someone living in New York City at the time,
here's what it was like to witness the tragedy as it unfolded.
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were a familiar
sight to New Yorkers
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 serious 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 nonmilitary flight in US
airspace was ordered to land.
Thousands of people were trapped in the upper floors of the
towers. Many died when 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.
Compiled by Matthew DeBord
Matthew DeBord is a Business Insider senior correspondent,
covering transportation. A regular contributor to KCRW radio, he has written
for The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and
CBS Interactive. He has commented on the auto industry for a variety of media
outlets, including MSNBC, Radio France, KPCC, and "America Now With Andy
Dean."
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