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It has been 21 years because the attacks of September 11th, however so most of the tales that emerged within the days that adopted are nonetheless recent within the minds of the 60 Minutes correspondents and producers who reported them.
60 Minutes reported at size on the far-reaching aftermath of the homeland assaults, each on the Sunday broadcast and on 60 Minutes II, a weekday version that resulted in 2005.
Under are a few of the most memorable tales that aired on our broadcasts within the weeks and months after the assaults.
An American City
Initially aired September 16, 2001
When 60 Minutes aired on the Sunday after the assaults, individuals everywhere in the nation had been nonetheless making an attempt to make sense of what had occurred 5 days earlier. The devastation had prolonged nicely past floor zero; it splintered into a whole bunch of small cities within the suburbs of New York Metropolis, the place households the place nonetheless ready for phrase on their lacking family members.
A kind of cities was Summit, New Jersey, a small city the place about one in seven adults labored in monetary providers in Manhattan. As 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley reported that first Sunday, the World Commerce Middle was solely 35 minutes away from Summit by rail, and within the car parking zone exterior the city’s prepare station, vehicles had been nonetheless sitting unclaimed by the commuters who had left them there that Tuesday.
Summit resident Debbie Rancke was among the many ready. Her husband, Todd, labored as a bond salesman at Sandler O’Neill on the 104th flooring of the World Commerce Middle’s south tower, and Debbie didn’t know what had occurred to him. However in contrast to the vehicles within the car parking zone, she didn’t sit idle. She and Todd’s sisters spent days trying to find Todd, canvassing New York Metropolis till they had been exhausted.
The morning after the catastrophe, there was nobody record of all of the useless, injured and lacking, so Debbie and her sisters-in-law began going to hospitals. The injured had been taken to 130 hospitals within the New York space. However Todd Rancke didn’t look like amongst them. The group discovered the grasp record with names of all of the injured, however they didn’t see “Rancke” recorded.
The subsequent day, the ladies went to New York Metropolis’s armory, the place a listing of the useless was coming collectively. Todd’s identify was not on that record, both.
“Simply assist me discover him,” Debbie implored Ed Bradley. “He is my complete life.”
In a follow-up report a yr later, Bradley reported that 33 residents of Summit had died on September eleventh, almost as many because the city had misplaced within the Vietnam Struggle. Todd Rancke was certainly one of them. Searchers had discovered his stays in April 2002, and together with them, his pockets, remarkably intact. Inside, images of his kids had been nonetheless lined in mud.
Survivors
Initially aired October 7, 2001
Out of just about 500 tales 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft reported for the printed, he has said the one which emotionally impacted him most was his October 2001 report about New York monetary agency Sandler O’Neill.
Headquartered on the 104th flooring of the South Tower, Sandler O’Neill misplaced 66 of its 171 staff within the World Commerce Middle assaults. However simply days later, the agency was decided to maintain going—whereas additionally offering logistical, emotional, and monetary help to the households of the workers who died.
60 Minutes documented as then-44-year-old managing associate Jimmy Dunne started to resurrect the corporate from a short lived workplace in midtown Manhattan, house that had been donated by Financial institution of America. Sandler O’Neill had misplaced its whole communications system, almost each piece of paper, and a couple of third of its individuals. As they tied to reassure purchasers that their firm was nonetheless very a lot in enterprise, staff had been additionally making an attempt to gather DNA samples to determine their deceased coworkers.
They labored by their grief. On spreadsheets usually used to report gross sales and earnings, an extended record of funerals, wakes and memorial providers was pinned up on the entrance of the workplace. However regardless of a lot loss, they had been capable of make it again to Wall Road, partially due to programmers and software program specialists who labored for Dunne’s faculty roommate. The group drove all night time from Chicago to pitch in and get many of the agency’s pc system up and operating earlier than the markets reopened six days after the assaults.
“They had been intent on destroying this nation,” the agency’s founding associate Tom O’Neill advised Steve Kroft. “I do not assume we appreciated the depth of their hatred. However I feel for each proportion that we would have underestimated them, I feel they very a lot underestimated us.”
In January 2020, Sandler O’Neill merged with Piper Jaffray Corporations to turn out to be Piper Sandler Companies.
The Kids of September
Initially aired October 17, 2001
5 weeks after the 9/11 assaults, Scott Pelley sought to know what life was like for the youngest of these left behind. He interviewed kids who misplaced a father or mother on September eleventh and requested how issues had modified since that Tuesday morning, the day their mother or dad went to work and by no means returned dwelling.
What Nicole Spinelli remembered from that morning was her father kissing her goodbye. Her father, Frank, labored as a overseas trade dealer on the World Commerce Middle. He all the time gave a parting kiss to Nicole, then 18, and her siblings earlier than he left, even when she protested how early the love got here.
“However he advised me one time, you realize, ‘Nikki, I kiss you and your brother and sister goodbye within the morning to, you realize, let you realize that if something ever occurred to me at work, that you’d all the time know that I cherished you,'” Spinelli recalled.
Mike Shaw was 16 years previous when he misplaced his father, Jeff, an electrician on the World Commerce Middle. 5 weeks after the assaults, Shaw was nonetheless calling his father’s cellular phone nightly to go away him a voicemail. He advised his dad what he did at college, what he had for dinner, how a lot he missed him. It turned a ritual that allowed him to really feel as if he had been nonetheless having a every day dialog along with his dad.
Tyler and Kelsie Williams mentioned goodbye to their dad, US Military Main Dwayne Williams, throughout a service at Arlington Nationwide Cemetery. Dwayne had began a brand new job on the Pentagon three months earlier than the constructing was struck within the assault. After their father died, the siblings started writing about him.
“I let mother lean on me as a result of now I stand in your sneakers,” wrote Tyler, then 17 years previous. “I do not know the way you probably did it, however you bought us by. Now if you look down at me, there’s a picture of you.”
Band of Brothers
Initially aired November 21, 2001
For many years, a small band of New York Metropolis’s bravest have routinely traded their firefighting hats and equipment in favor of bagpipes and kilts. These full-time firefighters are part-time musicians, acting at many division events — the comfortable and the unhappy, the weddings, the parades, and each on occasion, the funerals.
Then got here September 11, 2001.
Within the weeks that adopted the terrorist assaults on the World Commerce Middle, “each on occasion” turned on daily basis and, on some days, each few hours. By that Thanksgiving, the band had performed at about 300 memorial occasions.
A November 2001 60 Minutes II report advised the story of the band taking part in on the seemingly countless variety of funerals and memorial providers to honor their fallen brothers. On the time, the 70 members of the New York Metropolis Hearth Division Emerald Society Pipes and Drums had turn out to be full-time musicians, honoring extra colleagues in a matter of weeks than most had of their whole careers.
“Lots of people, they lose a member of the family, or they lose a good friend, perhaps it may need been a teenager, an previous particular person, a grandfather or one thing like that. It is often one particular person, separately, you realize,” mentioned Tim Grant, the band’s chief. “Everyone right here is aware of 20, 30 individuals. When do you ever in your life lose that many individuals in at some point that you realize?”
The Emerald Society continues to play. In March, instead of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, the band carried out just about to honor first responders and important staff.
The Miracle of the Pentagon
Initially aired November 28, 2001
Despite the fact that 125 individuals had been killed within the Pentagon on September eleventh, there was one thing miraculous considerably lucky about that day. Though the commandeered Boeing 757 obliterated the primary and a part of the second flooring, the third, fourth and fifth flooring remained, suspended in midair for 35 minutes. Lots of of individuals had the prospect to flee.
That’s as a result of, in a outstanding stroke of luck, the terrorists had hit the one part of the Pentagon designed to withstand a terrorist assault.
As Scott Pelley reported for 60 Minutes II in November 2001, a billion-dollar mission to renovate the Pentagon had been underway since 1993. The primary part was 5 days away from being completed when the terrorists hit it on September eleventh.
“We had made a number of modifications to the constructing as a part of that renovation that we expect helped save individuals’s lives,” mentioned Lee Evey, who was managing the Pentagon renovation on the time.
The Military Corps of Engineers had helped design the constructing’s new safety. The engineers studied previous assaults, together with the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon, Oklahoma Metropolis in 1995, the US embassies in East Africa and the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia.
“At Oklahoma Metropolis, the majority of the casualties had been brought on by the collapsing construction, so one of many issues we studied was tips on how to put redundant functionality in a construction to stop it from collapsing if it was attacked,” defined Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, who commanded the Corps of Engineers.
The Pentagon Renovation Program that started within the Nineties was accomplished in full in June 2011.
Beneath Floor Zero
Initially aired October 31, 2001
Seven weeks after September eleventh, smoke nonetheless wafted up from the rubble at floor zero. Firefighters had been nonetheless working to extinguish the subterranean fires on the web site, and people working to wash up suspected it could be many extra months earlier than the house can be totally cleared. Complicating the cleanup was the truth that particles from the falling towers had crashed by the roof at Six World Commerce Middle, plunging by the basements six tales underground.
On the finish of October 2001, 60 Minutes II took viewers on a uncommon tour of the location below floor zero. It’s an space that, previous to September eleventh had been one thing of an underground metropolis, consisting of a shopping center, rail tunnels, and parking garages. After the terrorist assaults, it turned an area the place the hassle to rebuild, each bodily and psychologically, confronted extraordinary challenges.
60 Minutes cameras filmed the respectable underground, as mangled vehicles hung suspended on hunks of concrete, their tires burned away and their hubcaps melted into puddles of aluminum. As they went additional into the darkness under the earth, the place the bottom was slick with oil and gasoline from the deserted vehicles, the crew was warned the ground may collapse at any time.
Because the cleanup group discovered, eradicating the particles underground was an engineering problem. When the World Commerce Middle was constructed, so too was an infinite retaining wall under floor that was designed to stop water from the Hudson River from flooding the six-story basement.
However past the logistics, the cleanup at floor zero was additionally mentally difficult as a result of, simply because it was a graveyard for vehicles, it was additionally the ultimate resting place for a whole bunch of individuals.
“To ensure that me to work right here on daily basis, I feel I’ve to segue away from the sacred floor concerns and transfer in the direction of a building web site,” mentioned Ken Holden, then the commissioner of New York’s Division of Design and Building and the town’s level man within the cleanup effort. “However I feel you possibly can’t work right here with out being cognizant of the truth that there are individuals, there’s struggling right here, there’s useless our bodies right here, and there is a have to deal with this floor in a fashion completely different than you’d in some other building web site.”
Frozen in Time
Initially aired Might 1, 2002
In Might 2002, 60 Minutes II returned to floor zero. This time, the cleanup and restoration had been virtually full.
Within the days after September eleventh, the World Commerce Middle web site was 1,500,000 tons of wreckage heaped in a pile, with virtually 3,000 of individuals nonetheless inside. After virtually eight months of nonstop work, digging every day and night time, each vacation and weekend, the gaping gap at floor zero lined 16 acres and reduce 70 ft deep.
With every shovelful, the particles was looked for human stays. It then sailed on barges throughout the Hudson to a landfill on Staten Island, the place the ruins had been separated, sorted, and searched once more. On the time of 60 Minutes’ 2002 report, 135 victims had been recognized on the landfill who weren’t discovered on the World Commerce Middle web site.
In whole, solely a little bit greater than 1,000 victims had been in the end recognized from the rubble.
Officer Dan Henry, a Port Authority policeman, was amongst these serving to to get well human stays. He was moved to maintain trying to find one particular person specifically—his brother, fireman Joseph Henry. Dan knew that, if Joseph had been by no means discovered, floor zero can be his last resting place, together with a whole bunch of different individuals.
“I feel there ought to be a nice-sized park with a lot of lovely timber and flowers and benches,” Dan mentioned when requested what he thought New York Metropolis ought to do with the location. “And I feel an enormous wall, large memorial wall with every sufferer’s identify on it as a result of you do not have a cemetery to go to. That is going to be the place the place we go on his birthday or Christmas, you realize, and say whats up.”
This text was initially revealed in September 2021.
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