In Part II of this September 11th 2001 series, Bash Halow recalls the crowd’s reaction to the fall of the first and then second Tower.
The South Tower Collapses
None of us expected the South Tower to collapse. All of those near me were watching when it happened. I remember the sound it made was muffled and distant and did not fit the catastrophic sight it was to behold (it’s interesting that others recall the sound as thunderous and in the pictures I took people are holding their ears). It fell slowly and directly to the ground. It did not topple. It exploded outwardly, below the hole the plane had made, and fell into a ballooning cloud of smoke and debris. At the muted sound, the crowd walking north turned and gasped. Some began to run, though all of us were clearly out of harm’s way. Many in the crowd began to cry. It was knee-jerk reaction. After so many years of knowing the skyline, the sight of only one tower was extraordinary. The cloud that the fall created spread slowly and apocalyptically out, far beyond the base of the towers and engulfed all of the downtown buildings in a thick, cumulus cloud of dirty white. Those people that were on the Esplanade near Stuyvesant High School saw the cloud coming and began to run in a panic. Those of us that were farther north realized that a life-threatening stampede was possible. I pressed myself against the fence along the water thinking that I could hold onto the wire if the crowds became overwhelming.
My Wife Works There!
Some women and men walked towards the Towers, into the flow of the evacuees. They were crying. Sometimes they stopped to ask people if they had heard which floors had been hit. Their loved ones worked in the building. It seemed ridiculous and pathetic that these people expected to find their family and friends in the cataclysm that was in front of us, still they walked on. One woman pushed a baby carriage. With the billowing smoke, against the sudden surge of evacuees, it was a delirious plan. We tried to stop her, but she would not listen. In several of my photos, a man is seen walking nervously south, but after the tower collapses, he presses his fist into his mouth, turns away, and retraces his steps north again.
But there were many who were frantic. After the attack, few cell phones worked because a major cellular telephone tower was located on top of Trade Tower One, so people without service advanced on those who were able to get connections. They formed straggling huddles all along the Esplanade and when you passed you could here people shouting out their loved ones’ phone numbers, so that they could establish some kind of contact, so that they could find out if their family member was still alive.
In the torrent evacuating, I began to see some people who were covered in dust and one or two with minor injuries. Still, most that passed were fine, or so they seemed. Their clothes were not soiled and they bore no visible wounds, but their faces were eerily stoic, completely out of context with the enormity of what unfolded behind them.
Are We At War?
A jet fighter roared overhead. Some of us began to fear that we were at war. Another suggested that the Holland Tunnel, which was underneath the area on which we stood, was probably a target as well and that we were in danger. We were talking like this, with the know-it-all attitude of idle watchers, when the North Tower collapsed.
The North Tower Too
It was equally as unexpected. The hole on the North Tower was much farther up and it did not look like there was sufficient weight above it to bring the tower to the point of collapse. Still, we had been watching a hot fire burn on one side of the tower for some time and I now presume that it was this tremendous heat that buckled the steel and caused the area just below the hole to melt outwardly in a rush of the same white smoke that accompanied the South Tower’s demise. Like the one that fell before it, this Tower collapsed straight down, then cleaved in two before disappearing into volcanic bulges of smoke and dust. The crowd groaned when this second tower fell and so many cried. The thick flow of people continued north and all of us that had been watching turned and joined them. Once I began walking, I understood a little of the blank-faced feeling; it was a heavy, mute despair. It made looking back too draining, too hopeless. Still, I made myself look because I kept needing proof that what I had watched actually had happened. But the preposterous absence of the Towers only reinforced my feeling that all of this could not be real.
It is still beyond my ken. I can’t imagine anyone’s day, especially the marble blue one that we were having, ending so gruesomely. I can’t imagine those people’s fate that gave them no other option but death by fire, death by leaping, or death by crushing debris. And all of this while those of us below were watching in the sunshine. Taking the sun. Imagine that! I was getting a tan. I could not and still can’t imagine their world. I saw most of the headlines, the earthquaking photos, the hours and hours of television coverage, but I’m not sure I ever internalized what over three thousand people dead means.
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