 Reactions To The Terrorist Attacks On The United States FTLComm - Tisdale / San Jose - Wednesday, September 12, 2001 This morning, a full twenty-four hours since three of the world's largest buildings were attacked by deliberately crashed commercial passenger aircraft, the enormity of the event is just beginning to sink in as we learn of the magnitude of what has happened. I really couldn't face eating breakfast alone and listening to the radio as the tragic stories unfold and so I went to Hannigans where I found the normal more cheer of our little town seems always to lift us up even when or hockey team loses the folks at breakfast can smile. But not this morning, they talked in the low tones of aware people, aware of the sadness and lose of so many people who had gone to breakfast yesterday and today are statistics. For me the realisation that as the second aircraft cranked around in a banking turn over the Hudson (above left) the passengers in the left hand window seats all would have seen the massive plume of smoke from the North tower and realise that the fanatic at the controls was heading their aircraft toward the South tower. I talked to someone who had walked around the huge site on which the buildings stood and then ridden to the top observation location to take pictures of Manhattan looking North toward Times Square up Broadway which you can see stretching toward the top of this picture. Then he told me something that as yet I had heard no one on television discussing simply because they all have been to New York and seen this building and do not think of those of us who have not and assume we all know what lies beneath. When a documentary film maker explained this morning that the rubble of those two massive building seen above, now covers about ten city blocks it struck me that this is about the size of our little town. Of course that should be no surprise with only a few more than two thousand of us living here there were over fifty-thousand folks who went to work in those two buildings every day. But what about underneath them. This is where the fellow I talked to this morning helped me out and the feeling of despair set in once more. As you look down on this huge complex your will recall that it is under the jurisdiction of the New York Port Authority and this is because it is under the former World Trade Center that a two level subway station is located, the terminal for passengers getting off or on the subway to board or disembark from the Satten Island Ferry. A massive shopping mall several stories deep sits beneath what is now a monumental pile of rubble. In that vast dark and confused environment there will be survivors, buried alive many still alive in spaces that would have held up under the crumbling one-hundred ten floors of buildings from above. Yesterday we carried reactions from San Jose, a huge suburb of San Francisco, the destination of one of the four high jacked and crashed planes. Below is what Kevin McIntyre tells us late yesterday: |
Today the fastest way to get information is via the web. My wife woke me up at 7:05 and tuned in CNN, The World Trade Center had been hit. During the course of the day I was on CNN, MSNBC and CBC Newsworld International along with the web. At 9 AM PST I called my brother at his home in Hawaii [6 AM] and woke him up: "get out of bed and turn on CNN....". Throughout the morning my emails have spanned 1/4 of the globe: a friend back in N.E. Saskatchewan said local radio reports told of a crash in Colorado. A cousin who works in an office building in Regina couldn't get clear radio broadcasts, had heard that too and a coworker had family in Colorado they couldn't reach. A few mouse clicks took me through Yahoo to www.denverpost.com which carried no report of that story. From a friend in Delaware, the Dover Air Force Base was on alert to be the designated morgue. Two of my wife's coworkers are New Yorkers: they both were silent and said that given the dense terrain of Manhattan, you wouldn't want to be there. No phone calls were able to be placed to the area. While CNN & MSNBC focused near exclusively on New York, the Pentagon and Pittsburgh were also involved. The web was slow, but reports could be read from there. Our RCA DirectTv system carries CBC Newsworld International, by 2PM I'd tuned to that. They gave a broader report from the American North East along with more global reactions. These terrorists may have bitten off more than they can chew, every other terrorist group out there has disavowed their actions. They are now as marked as a Mafia hit man who took out a Don without family approval. They may be hunted down by their own. |