More memories: The 9/11 Commission
: I find out today that I wasn’t an idiot.
When the South Tower of the World Trade Center fell, I was a block away on Liberty Street and I saw the top bend over to the south and I ran.
At today’s 9/11 Commission hearing in New York, they said that the tower took 10 seconds to fall. 10 seconds.
So I was engulfed in the cloud in mere seconds, with no light and no air.
I thought for the rest of that morning that the tower had not collapsed. I remember walking uptown with a businessman an hour later saying that the top of the building fell. I imagined that the rest still stood, burning, mortally damaged. But I couldn’t imagine that it has collapsed.
At the start of the hearings today, one of the FDNY brass who was in the lobby of the North Tower said that even though did not know the South Tower had collapsed. They thought something had fallen into the lobby. He kept repeating that he thought the firemen around him were the people at risk.
Even they could not yet imagine that the tower had collapsed.
