The Week That Changed Us All

In aftermath of terrorist attacks, searching for normalcy

By Fred Bruning | STAFF WRITER

September 16, 2001

At lunchtime, James Staton often stands on the cobblestone apron below the Brooklyn Bridge and gazes across the East River to Manhattan. "I love to look at the skyline," said Staton, 35, a heating systems technician. "It's just so peaceful here."

Last week, the tranquil urban panorama that so moves Staton was abruptly and sorrowfully altered - and so, too, was America's notion of security and invincibility.

"Whatever normal we had, we have a new normal now," said a Long Island priest, soothing his stricken parishioners.

Astonishing attacks by suicide skyjackers Tuesday felled the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, leaving a tangle of death and destruction in place of the structures whose size and haughty excess had symbolized New York. "It's indescribable to see them both gone," Staton said.

Plowing a stolen airliner into each of the 110-story towers on Tuesday morning, before most workers could even grab a bagel, was a sinister feat unparalleled in the annals of terrorism. But it was, horrifyingly, only part of a broader plot whose dimensions might not yet be known.

Minutes after one tower, and then the other, burst into flames like stupendous matchsticks, another airliner sliced into a wing of the Pentagon, the nerve center of the U.S. Defense Department, a short distance across the Potomac River from the solemn monuments and stately government buildings of Washington.

There was more. Shortly after the Pentagon was hit, a fourth plane ditched in the sloping, summer-green terrain of southwest Pennsylvania. Only later was it learned that the Pentagon assault may originally have been intended for the White House and that hijackers in the plane lost 80 miles outside Pittsburgh - perhaps when heroic passengers tried to overcome their captors - may have been speeding toward yet another target in New York or Washington.

Tense hours followed when Americans were free to wonder where the next blow would strike and whether they would survive, and, even if they did, whether their country ever would be the same. So much that was happening had never happened before. Profound confusion might have been the only rational response.

"Why?" someone wrote in the dust covering a crushed auto near the World Trade Center.

U.S. authorities banned all air travel. Federal buildings in Washington were evacuated, including the White House. Defense Department personnel - Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among them - streamed from the Pentagon. President George W. Bush, who learned of the attacks in Florida, boarded Air Force One but did not return immediately to the capital, stopping instead at air bases in Louisiana and Nebraska, a decision that some second-guessed but that the White House subsequently defended with a startling revelation: Terrorists intended to take down the president, too.

In lower Manhattan, the scene exceeded what even the most delirious Hollywood director would dare put on the screen. To use a suddenly apt cliché, the place looked like a war zone. Chased by a thick, choking haze, office workers fled past smashed cars and bent girders. Flames burst from broken Trade Center windows. With fire at their backs, several people jumped to their deaths 90 stories below.

Then, the convulsive events of the morning took a sharp turn toward apocalypse.

The towers crumbled.

Within 40 minutes of one another, the two towers gave way with what seemed no more resistance than empty milk cartons under a schoolboy's fist. How many people died still is not known. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said last night that 4,900 - twice the number of casualties at Pearl Harbor in 1941 - were unaccounted for, including passengers and crews on the doomed airliners. Previously, Giuliani had said the number of the dead eventually could prove to be "more than we can bear."

The city set up a center for families to register missing loved ones. Among the items they were told to bring: hair brushes and toothbrushes belonging to relatives, which could provide DNA samples.

Immediately, a rescue effort was launched on a scale fit for a city that advertises itself as the center of the universe. Firefighters and police officers - many of their partners caught inside the towers when the buildings went down - searched for survivors. Doctors and nurses streamed into the zone that TV broadcasters soon began calling "ground zero." Coming out, the workers looked bedraggled but not beaten. They wolfed down grub offered by McDonald's and the Red Cross and poured Poland Spring water over their heads before putting the bottles to their lips.

Mike Cutino, 52, a volunteer firefighter from Nesconset, had been working for 61/2 hours when he finally took a breather. He had helped pull two bodies out of the rubble, Cutino said. Heat seared one corpse to a beam, he said, and physicians had to amputate a leg before the remains could be evacuated. "I'm exhausted," Cutino said. He was going to rest, he said. Then he was heading back to the heap.

It was dirty, depressing work in risky circumstances, even more so when Building 7 in the Trade Center complex crumbled and added its tonnage to the mess. The 47-story building had been evacuated, but the job of relief workers would be even tougher, the environment even more perilous.

"Tires popping from the fires," recalled firefighter Michael Milner, who lives in Jericho and is assigned to Rescue Four in Queens. "Gas tanks exploding in parking garages. As we were working on the pile you could hear structural steel on some of the partially damaged buildings cracking."

Elsewhere, evidence of mayhem abounded.