The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [34]
Unlike the New York Stock Exchange, located at a relatively safe distance from the Trade Center, its cousin the American Stock Exchange was jolted by the second strike. The towers’ collapse left its offices filled with debris and remaining staff—the chairman and the president included—trapped for hours, covered in soot and dust. Seeing the exchange afterward, a leader of commerce would recall loftily, was like “visiting a third world country.”
Its communications cut, NASDAQ’s corporate offices closed. The New York branch of the Federal Reserve Bank was evacuated, not without a moment of comedy. The building had never before been left unmanned, and no one present knew how to lock up.
Many key financial figures were far from the decision making on the morning of 9/11. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was in the air halfway across the Atlantic, returning with colleagues from a meeting in Switzerland, when U.S. airspace closed down. His airplane, like others in mid-flight, had to turn back. Frantic calls to the White House eventually got Greenspan back to Washington courtesy of the military, part of the way aboard a U.S. Air Force tanker.
The minders of the American economy wrestled for days with problems ranging from sustaining liquidity to averting the nightmare scenario—potential public panic if the cash at ATM machines ran out, which in turn might spark a run on the banks. New York City, meanwhile, faced the daunting costs that had been inflicted in less than two hours. Reporting a year later, New York’s comptroller would calculate the economic cost to the city at between $83 and $95 billion.
ON 9/11, after the second collapse, there was at first a long, empty moment, a vacuum in time. Then the start of an epic, heartrending, recovery operation.
NINE
“AMBULANCES GOING THIS WAY, ESU TRUCKS FLYING DOWN THE street … Nobody had any idea what was going on. Where is the command post? Where is staging? We had no radio … You looked where you thought the buildings should be, and if they were there, you couldn’t see them … disorientation … I had already seen my third skyline in forty minutes.”
Fire Department lieutenant Michael Cahill, on the period after the second Trade Center collapse. A time of “absolute panic … absolute panic … Most of us were just too tired … out of it … disorganized … Stuff in our eyes, cuts, bruises, equipment lost. Half the people we came with were lost.”
Off-duty firefighters, former firefighters, men who worked in construction or salvage, all rushed to Ground Zero to help. One of them, crane operator turned fireman Sam Melisi, was one of the first would-be rescuers to pioneer routes through, over, and under the rubble. He had all the expertise and experience one could wish for, but was forced time and again to retreat.
It dawned on Melisi that the “tremendous devastation” of the Oklahoma City bombing, which he had worked six years earlier, had been nothing compared to this. “Visualize fiftyfold or a hundredfold, no matter where you turned … You can never quite prepare for something like this … on this magnitude. We started searching … We were hoping to find many live victims. But as time went on we realized there weren’t going to be that many.”
There were only a few. Twenty people were rescued after the collapses, all but one emerging in the first twenty-four hours. Two civilians, trapped at first in what had been a shopping mall beneath the plaza, managed to squeeze out through an opening. Next out were twelve firefighters, a civilian, and a Port Authority policeman—thanks to “the Miracle of Stairway B.”
When the North Tower collapsed, Captain Jay Jonas and his crew had been four stories up