9/11 ~ The World Trade Center ~ South Tower

At 9:03 am on September 11, 2001, 5 cowardly terrorists again used their twisted version of the Muslim religion as justification for mass murder, flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center’s South Tower (2 WTC).

We all knew then, this was no accident.

There were 60 passengers and crew on that flight. They were all killed instantly and the impact was caught on tape for the whole world to see. Although the South tower was hit after the North Tower, it collapsed first, likely due to the Boeing 767’s impact being 100 miles faster than Flight 11’s crash. The 599 people who died in 2 WTC, with the exception of those killed upon impact, suffered for 56 minutes before the building fell.

Only 4 people from the floors above the point of impact survived.

It is estimated that only 12 people jumped to their deaths from Tower 2.

• 0958:59 AM > The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses, killing everyone in the building as well as a number of people on the concourse, in the Marriott, and on neighboring streets. There is a sudden ear-splitting noise. “First, a sharp crack and then what sounded, oddly, like a waterfall, thousands of panes of glass shattering as the north side of the tower buckled,” recalled a reporter. The tower seems to list, and then begins to come down, exploding floor by floor and obscuring itself in dust with “a slow, building rumble like rolling thunder that will not stop as the tower cascades toward the ground.” “It felt for a moment as if the entire city was going to crumple into the ocean,” wrote one witness. Standing at the foot of the tower, brokerage executive Howard Lutnick describes it as “the loudest thing I had ever heard – like a jet engine right in my ear.” Watching from Brooklyn, novelist John Updike says “It sank down as if somebody had yanked it.” The building falls in ten seconds, hitting the ground at nearly the speed of free-fall. The more than 200,000 cubic yards of concrete in the structure are pulverized by the force of the collapse and explode outward in a gigantic cloud of silicate dust, as bystanders desperately flee. An AP reporter on the scene wrote “Windows shattered. People were screaming and diving for cover. People walked around like ghosts, covered in dirt, weeping and wandering dazed.” As the smoke dissipates and it can be seen that the tower has vanished, an elderly woman gasps “It can’t be. It just can’t be. Where did it go? Oh, lord, where did it go?” A man approaches the immense pile of rubble and calls out ”Is anyone there? Show me an arm. Show me an arm.” There is no response.
• The Marriott Hotel, adjacent to the South Tower, is nearly cut in two by the collapse and at least 40 firefighters are killed or trapped there. The lobby area of the North Tower is also badly damaged. The North Tower shakes violently, but almost no one inside it realizes that the other tower has fallen. The collapse of the South Tower forces officials to abandon command posts in the North Tower lobby, the Marriott, and the nearby streets, temporarily throwing rescue operations into confusion.
• Mayor Giuliani and some of his aides are nearly trapped by the collapse of the South Tower when the nearby office building they’re in is damaged and fills with smoke. They escape through the basement and a network of tunnels. A few minutes later they are forced to run from the immense dust cloud released by the collapse of the North Tower.

Of the 599 people murdered at the South Tower, 60 were passengers on Flight 175, of which 3 were children aged 2 1/2, 3 and 4 and 168 were New York City firefighters and/or paramedics. I was unable to find any statistics on how many NYC and PAPD officers were killed in 2 WTC.

Tags: 9/11, featured, South Tower

Category: My Opinions