Tuesday morning at 8:45 a.m. there was a coordinated attack on two American cities and their symbols of American power. Two passenger planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and a short time later another crashed into the Pentagon.
While the damage to the Center appeared at first to be confined to the upper levels, first one tower and then the other completely collapsed about an hour after the attack. At 5:20 p.m. the Center’s Building 7 also collapsed. Around 50,000 people were supposed to be working in the Center; additionally, countless rescue workers were lost in the collapses. Witnesses reported people jumping from the windows of the Center shortly before the whole building went down. Lower Manhattan was quickly buried under a layer of dust and debris. Wall Street closed following the attack and New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani ordered the evacuation of the lower part of the city up to Canal Street. All exits from Manhattan Island were then closed off.
The combined effect of the Center attack and that on the Pentagon, plus rumors of a car bomb at the State Department, led the government to be fearful of a full-scale assault. Most government operations shut down and the White House, the Congress, the State Department and the U.N. were evacuated. President Bush, who was in Sarasota, Fla., called the incidents “an apparent terrorist attack on our country” and ordered a full-scale investigation to “hunt down the folks who committed this act.” Bush spent the day traveling from site to site: first to a military base in Louisiana, later to Nebraska and finally to Washington, D.C., for his Oval Office address.
The four flights involved in Tuesday’s tragedies had been hijacked and rerouted. American Airlines flight 11 left Boston for Los Angeles with 92 people aboard and crashed into the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. United Airlines flight 175 departed Boston for Los Angeles with 64 on board; it crashed into the Center’s second tower at 9:03 a.m. At 9:40 a.m. American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon; the plane was leaving Dulles International Airport near Washington en route to Los Angeles, carrying 64 people. Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, was included in the passenger count. United flight 93 departed Newark for San Francisco and crashed in an uninhabited area southeast of Pittsburgh at 10 a.m. The craft was carrying 45 people.
U.S. air traffic ceased soon after news of the crashes. Domestic flights were ordered to land at the nearest airport and international flights were re-routed to Canada. All European airlines canceled flights to the United States and recalled planes already in the air. As an added security measure, the Mexico-U.S. border was closed while the Canada-U.S. border remains under close surveillance.
U.S. armed forces in Europe and Asia were put on high alert and Israel closed its airspace to foreign flights. NATO and European Union institutions took special security measures, including partial evacuations. Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C. and New York City remain in a State of Emergency for the foreseeable future.
The National Guard and Air Force were called into the capitol city and warships and aircraft carriers have been brought into New York harbor while the rest of the nation mobilizes for relief as the rescue efforts continue.