The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [33]
THE SILENCE WAS BROKEN by the high-pitched tones of locator alarms, the devices that are triggered when a firefighter goes down and does not move. Three hundred forty-three men of the New York Fire Department would never move again.
The number of firefighters killed on 9/11 was almost a third of the total killed since the department’s inception in 1865.
Chief Ganci had been killed near the North Tower, and his body was one of the first to be found. Chief Pfeifer’s brother Kevin would be found dead in the rubble, his fireman’s pick at his side. Firefighting runs in families in New York, and fathers and sons, brothers and in-laws, would search for fallen comrades and kin for months to come.
Thirty-seven Port Authority police officers, including their superintendent, Fred Morrone, had died. Five of their bodies were found grouped around that of a woman in a steel chair, a device used to carry the disabled. They had died, it seemed, trying to carry her to safety.
The New York Police Department lost twenty-two men—and one female officer. She had brought an injured person out of the South Tower, only to be killed when she went back in to help another.
“THE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES,” New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, “will be more than any of us can bear.” Government officials would at first suggest, in a serious overestimate, that as many as seven thousand people had been killed in the city. The death toll was nevertheless stunningly high.
The number of fatalities in New York was eventually to stand at 2,763. That figure included the people in or near the Twin Towers, the passengers, crew, and hijackers aboard the two flights that crashed into the complex, and firefighters, police, paramedics, and other emergency workers. The highest number of casualties was in the North Tower—1,466, the majority of them above the point of impact—followed by 624 in the South Tower, all but 6 of them above the point of impact. One hundred and fifty-seven people died aboard the two planes.
Rarely mentioned, if at all, is the fact that this was not exclusively an American catastrophe. Five hundred and eleven nationals, perhaps more, from more than two dozen other countries, died in New York. They included dozens of Hispanic immigrants, delivery men, cooks, and dishwashers, with no work permits. They are almost all nameless now, remembered on no memorial.
THE TRADE CENTER COMPLEX rapidly became known as Ground Zero, for good reason. Assault by airplane had transformed it in an hour and forty-two minutes from iconic landmark to sixteen-acre wilderness. “All that remained standing,” wrote Atlantic Monthly correspondent William Langewiesche, “were a few skeletal fragments … vaguely gothic structures that reached like supplicating hands toward the sky. After the dust storms settled, people on the streets of Lower Manhattan were calm. They walked instead of running, talked without shouting, and tried to regain their sense of place and time. Hiroshima is said to have been similar in that detail.”
The towers had thrown mighty shards of steel and rubble to the ground and—such was the force involved—beneath it to a depth of thirty feet. Vehicles on the surface were flattened, power and telephone systems crippled, subways and watercourses severely damaged. Even before the collapse, plummeting rubble devastated nearby buildings.
The lesser giants of the complex had been known by numbers. Trade Center 3—the Marriott Hotel—was now wreckage. Great chunks of debris had fallen on Trade Center 7, which collapsed into its own footprint in the late afternoon. Trade Center Buildings 4, 5, and 6 suffered serious damage and were later demolished. Eight more structures, including World Financial Center 2 and 3—American Express—the Winter Garden pavilion, Bankers Trust, a City University of New York building, and Verizon Communications, were damaged but not beyond repair. Tiny St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, in the shadow of the South Tower, had been flattened.
The attackers had succeeded