Recently
people in Hawaii had a nuclear scare, as a false alert went out
warning of an incoming missile. Those to blame for this event include
a person operating a computer system, and the designers of the
computer system, who made it too easy for such an operator to make a
mistake. The incident reminded of the time I thought I was actually
witnessing a nuclear bomb going off.
I
have lived through two different terror bombings of the World Trade
Center in New York. The first occurred on February 26, 1993 at 12:17 PM. I had a
12:30 lunch date with the woman who was then my fiancee and is now my
wife. The lunch date was in the Sbarro's restaurant on the ground
floor of the World Trade Center.
What
occurred was an interesting illustration of how people will
misidentify something they have never seen before, interpreting it as
something they have seen before. Upon entering the World Trade
Center, I saw a huge cloud of dust in its halls. The bomb had gone
off a few minutes before I came in. At this time almost no one was
thinking about any chance of terrorism in New York. So I did not at
all think to myself: this must be a terrorist attack.
Instead, I said something like, “Wow, I can't believe how careless
those construction workers were – look at all the dust they kicked
up.” Even with this huge cloud of dust in the halls, the food servers
at Sbarro's kept trying to do their jobs. The police then told
everyone to leave the building.
The
first bombing of the World Trade Center did relatively little damage.
People kind of said, “Those clumsy terrorists – their attempts at
destruction are a joke.” Only a few years later, the people at the
company where I was working had the idea of moving to a new building,
and they chose the World Trade Center, which would turn out to be a
horrible mistake. It's amazing how everyone paid little attention to
a threat that had been clearly announced by the 1993 bombing.
I got
into work at 7:00 AM on the morning of September 11, 2001, and took
the elevator up to the fortieth floor of the World Trade Center. I
was completely absorbed in what I was doing on my computer when the
first hijacked jet liner crashed into the building. There was a very
loud noise, and a tremendous jolt, like some giant hand was shaking
the whole building.
I
jumped up to look out the window, and then immediately saw a huge
fall of flaming debris. It looked rather like a huge chunk of the
upper building was collapsing in flames. Terrified, I yelled at the
top of my lungs, “Get the f*** out!” I then ran for the stairs.
As I
started to run down the stairs, I had a fleeting thought that a
nuclear bomb had exploded. People had long feared that someone would
sneak a small nuclear bomb into the city. What I had witnessed up
until this point was consistent with a small nuclear weapon going off
at ground level.
My
chances looked good after I had passed down a few flights of stairs.
There was no one in front of me. Then I encountered some smoke on
the stairs. I remember thinking: this is it, I'm going to die. But
the smoke cleared as I passed down several floors lower. At
some point I encountered lots of water pouring out into the stairway.
But after passing down a few more floors, I passed through the part
that was flooded.
Eventually
the stairs started to fill up with people exiting the building, and
the stairways become clogged with people. The downward flow of
people stopped entirely. I thought to myself: what could be causing
the delay? It turned out to be a delay caused by people letting
firefighters walk up the stairs. What went on at this time made no
sense from a safety standpoint. No one should have tried to walk up the stairs until they had become uncrowded, so that as many people as
possible could have exited. I will never forget the worried,
tired look of the brave firefighters as they walked up those stairs.
Many of them never made it out.
Finally,
after about 20 minutes, I got down to the ground floor. I was now in
the elevator lobby of the World Trade Center. I looked in amazement
at one of the elevator entrance doors. They were all charred and
black, as if someone had torched them with a flame thrower. This
could have been flames traveling down the elevator shaft.
I
made it into the shopping mall area of the World Trade Center, and
was drenched by sprinklers that had been activated by the fire.
Finally I made it out of the building. When I looked up at the top of
the building, I saw a huge column of black smoke rising up from the
top of the building. I walked home all the way from lower Manhattan
to the Jackson Heights neigborhood of Queens. While passing around
the Times Square area, I saw some giant TV screen showing the World
Trade Center buildings collapsing. I was dumbfounded. I thought the
buildings would last for a thousand years.
I
knew one person who died in the attack, a very smart young man named
Scott. Scott first appeared on our work scene in a rather lowly
position, but later I overheard him interviewing for a programming
position in a cubicle near mine. I was amazed by what I heard – it
was like he had an encyclopedic grasp of the technology we were
using. I wasn't surprised at all when he was hired as a programmer,
nor was I surprised when he started rising up in the company as a
technical manager. Apparently he had risen rather high in the
company by September 11, 2001, for he worked on one of the high
floors of the World Trade Center where pretty much only the upper
echelons worked. It was, tragically, a case of rising too fast and
too high in the organization, because nobody on those highest floors
of the World Trade Center made it out.
They
have made an impressive memorial to those who died in the World Trade
Center attack. It is a beautiful and dignified monument. But in a
book of alternate designs submitted for the memorial, I saw a design
I liked a lot more. The design proposed a structure consisting of
thousands of suspended bells, each with the name of a person on it.
The great thing about such a design is that it could have turned the
World Trade Center area from a place of sorrow to a place of joy –
because children would have taken great delight in ringing all the
suspended bells.
Memorial at the World Trade Center
Sadly,
there is a substantial risk of another terrorist attack, perhaps one
much worse than the September 11 attacks. The problem is that the
materials to make nuclear bombs are scattered all over the world. If
you are in a skyscraper, and you ever think a nuclear attack has
occurred, don't look out the window like I did – for it could be a
flash that could blind you. Instead, run for the stairwells, and try
to stay there as long as you can, doing what they call “shelter in
place.” The area inside a stairwell of a skyscraper offers
excellent shielding against radiation. The radiation from a nuclear
bomb would decrease by about 50% every day. So anyone willing to wait
several days in a stairwell could then emerge into an environment with much less radiation.
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