September Eleventh: The Morning and What Came After

At eight forty-six in the morning on September eleventh, two thousand one, American Airlines Flight Eleven struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at the ninety-third floor. The tower had been designed to survive the impact of a Boeing Seven Oh Seven; the fuel load and the structural fires that followed were something the designers had not adequately modeled.

Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight One Seventy-Five struck the South Tower.

The South Tower collapsed at nine fifty-nine. The North Tower at ten twenty-eight. Two hundred twenty stories of steel and glass and office furniture and two thousand seven hundred forty-nine people fell into a pile of rubble sixteen stories deep. The pile burned for ninety-nine days.

Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven people died that morning. They were from ninety-three countries. Firefighters, police officers, office workers, bond traders, food-service workers, restaurant staff in the concourse below. The first responders who entered the towers as everyone else was leaving. Of those, roughly two thousand seven hundred fifty-three died at the World Trade Center, with a hijacked passenger jet in Pennsylvania and the attack on the Pentagon accounting for the remaining two hundred twenty-four. A generation later, thousands of first responders and recovery workers are still dying of cancers and respiratory diseases attributed to the site.

Lower Manhattan spent the following decade rebuilding, legally, physically, politically. The footprints of the two towers could not be built upon; that was a condition of the earliest community planning sessions. The two reflecting pools that occupy those footprints today are among the largest man-made waterfalls in North America. Their edges are inscribed with the names of everyone who died: on September eleventh, and in the nineteen ninety-three World Trade Center bombing that foreshadowed it.

The September eleventh attacks reshaped what followed them in ways that are still being calculated. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed three days later, provided the legal basis for two decades of war. The PATRIOT Act, passed six weeks later, expanded domestic surveillance authorities in ways that courts are still adjudicating. Immigration enforcement was reorganized from the ground up. The country entered a condition of permanent emergency that has never formally ended.

Every year on the anniversary, at eight forty-six in the morning, twin beams of light rise from Lower Manhattan visible for miles in every direction, straight up into the sky, stopping where the towers stopped. On clear nights they are visible from New Jersey, from Brooklyn, from the hills of Staten Island. They do not pretend to replace what was there. They mark the absence.