9/11 facts: Haunting and lesser known facts about the World Trade Centre Twin Tower attacks
AFTER 17 years, the world still continues to try and unravel more answers about 9/11. These are some of the haunting and lesser known stories.
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AFTER 17 years, the world still continues to try and unravel more answers to what happened to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
These are some of the haunting and lesser known facts from the terror attack that changed America and the rest of the world forever.
HUMAN REMAINS ARE STILL UNIDENTIFIED
More than 1,100 victims of the hijacked plane attacks have not been identified. A team from a New York lab is still trying to identify the remains found at ground zero.
The 22,000 pieces of human remains found at the site since the attacks have all been tested — some 10 or 15 times already.
At first, they examine a bone fragment found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. It has yet to be matched to DNA.
Cut and ground to a fine dust, the remains are then mixed with two chemical products that can expose and then extract DNA. But success is not guaranteed.
“The bone is the hardest biological material to work with,” said Mark Desire, assistant director of forensic biology at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York.
“And, on top of that, when they’re exposed to things that were present at ground zero, fire, mold, bacteria, sunlight, jet fuel, diesel fuel, all these destroy DNA. So you could physically have a sample with very small amounts of DNA there.”
So far, only 1,642 of the 2,753 people who died in the attacks in New York have been formally identified. The 1,111 others have yet to yield identifiable information.
Several years have sometimes passed without the lab adding a name. But no one is giving up.
“These are all the same protocol that we had in 2001, but we were able to improve the process for each of the steps, out of necessity,” Desire said.
A NEW ‘TOWER OF VOICES’
Called the “Tower of Voices”, this 93-feet tall embodiment of a musical instrument holds 40 wind chimes to honour 40 victims killed on United Airlines flight 93.
The US National Park Service states the “intent is to create a set of 40 tones that can signify through consonance the serenity and nobility of the site while also through dissonance recalling the event that consecrated the site”.
“The Tower of Voices serves as both a visual and audible reminder of the heroism of the 40 passengers and crew. There are no other chime structures like this in the world. The shape and orientation of the tower are designed to optimise air flow through the tower walls to reach the interior chime chamber,” the Park Service also states.
“The chime system is designed using music theory to identify a mathematically developed range of frequencies needed to produce a distinct musical note associated with each chime.”
It is located at the already-existing Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
9/11 SURVIVORS GET INKED TO HEAL
Healing Ink, a non-profit organisation that helps survivors of terrorism and violence heal through the art of tattooing, has inked around 20 people in New York City.
Each recipient shared their story with the tattoo artist to decide on what tatt they wanted to get.
Tom Canavan was one of the 18 survivors buried under the Twin Towers’ debris. He got his tatt last year.
“I wish I never had to go through it,” Canavan, who works as a facilities dispatcher at the 9/11 Memorial, told Fox News.
“I wish I never had to get a tattoo like this, but this is the reality of things and my legacy now is this tattoo. I’m the voice of people who can’t tell you what happened there.
“It’s very deceiving because…when you see that cloud, all you see is smoke and dust on TV, but when you’re inside of that, you see file cabinets, chairs, computers, people, phones, everything just falling, everything just coming down all over the place — very chaotic — I was fortunate enough to get away from that.”
FINAL MINUTES OF UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 93
Back in 2006, jurors heard the sounds of the 9/11 hijacking after the audio from the United Airlines Flight 93 cockpit voice recorder was made public.
Prosecutors seeking the execution of al-Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui played the tape for the first time in public.
The 31-minute tape contains eerie audio, with passengers saying they didn’t want to die.
Others were heard screaming “No, no, no!” and “Oh, God!”
The tape also was aired to 9/11 families at federal courthouses in six cities.
Listen to some of the audio below:
THE ‘SURVIVOR STAIRS’ LIVE ON
A set of stairs that were still intact from the World Trade Center attacks can still be seen in the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York .
The Vesey Street artefact, known as the “Survivors’ Stairs,” remains as an authentic “silent witness” to the events of 9/11.
The stairway served as a vital route to escape.
While they were intact, they did get damaged during the nine-month recovery period, according to the museum’s website. It is also the sole vestige above ground of the World Trade Center, a major 20th-century architectural complex and engineering achievement.
The stair remnant originally weighed 175 tonnes and stood 22-feet tall.
HIDDEN MARKINGS AT NEW SUBWAY
This year, a New York City subway station reopened for the first time since it was destroyed in the World Trade Center attack 17 years ago.
The Cortlandt St station will now be called WTC Cortlandt. Raised lettering on a white marble mosaic titled 'Chorus' covers the walls of the station. It features text from the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE 9/11 DUSTMAN?
Edward Fine emerged from the World Trade Center walking up Broadway with a paper towel covering his face. The incredibly striking image appeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine and went around the world. Now, Mr Fine is still alive and working as business consultant. He is currently the President of Carpe DM Consulting in New York City.
He had been on the 79th floor of the North Tower — between the 93rd and 99th floors.
He told The Mirror in 2011: “It was a bizarre coincidence that I ended up in the World Trade Center that morning. We had just recently started an investment banking business and I had set up an appointment for my son with a firm in WTC.
“But at 10.30pm on September 10 he called to say he was sick and asked if I could go instead.”
He then recalled: “So I was standing there in the hallway on 79th and 30 seconds later I hear a loud explosion. There is glass, smoke and fire coming down the corridor towards me. I hear people screaming. I was at an intersection of two corridors and ducked to safety. I discovered later that jet fuel was pouring down the elevator shafts.”
Mr Fine found an emergency exit and began to help others out.
He recalled: “There’s no one on the staircase. We are flying down that staircase. We get down 24/25 flights going full-out and now people are starting to pour into the staircase and things became very slow.
“Around the 40th floor a woman was holding wet paper towels and offering them to people. It was hot, really hot, and I said, ‘I’ll take one of those’. That was a decision that probably saved my life. I wiped myself off and put the paper towel into my pocket and then continued down the stairs. It was taking forever.
“I eventually got out to the ground and walked about a block away to a little area near a church. I sat down for two minutes because my knees were killing me.”
Mr Fine then started walking as the building behind him was collapsing.
“I’m now holding my breath and suddenly I remember I had that wet paper towel in my pocket and I took it out and put it over my mouth and nose,” he told The Mirror.
“I was able to breathe from that. I felt that saved me.”
HOW ‘THE LAST COLUMN’ GOT ITS FIRST MARKS
The Last Column, which now remains in the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s Foundation Hall, has lots of markings and tributes placed on it.
George Luis Torres, from the New York Fire Department’s Squad 41, was involved in the search for survivors. At the time, the FDNY was looking for six of its men who had gone missing.
In March 2002, a tool marked by Squad 41 was found at the southeast portion of ground zero. According to the museum’s blog, they made a conscious decision to go back to that area when it could be accessed.
But it was hard for Torres to keep track of the beam where he hoped the Squad 41 members would be found. Torres and two others helped him mark the location on an exposed beam.
They sprayed SQ 41 in yellow paint on the column to show the exact spot where they located traces of their men. He was also requested to spray E 214 and L 111 by other recovery workers nearby.
The column was later covered with other unit identifications and tributes.
“The Last Column” is now described as a “symbol of loss, remembrance and of the community at ground zero”. While it was removed from the site on May 30, 2002, to mark the end of the recovery effort, the beam came to the 9/11 Museum in 2009.
THE SQUEEGEE HANDLE THAT SAVED LIVES
Polish immigrant Jan Demczur has given hundreds of interviews about how he escaped from the Twin Tower attacks. He was a window washer, who was stuck in the north tower elevator at the 50th floor.
He managed to rescue several others by digging with his squeegee handle. The tool that saved their lives, the Squeegee handle, was brought into the collections of the National Museum of American History in 2002 when Congress designated the museum as the official repository for materials honouring 9/11 victims.
In 2014, the Squeegee handle along with 26 other artefacts was moved to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
EERIE RELICS LEFT BEHIND
The National September 11 Memorial and Museum also has this pay phone on display, which was originally located on the 107th floor South Tower Observation Deck.
Before smartphones, visitors could place calls from more than a quarter mile above street level and describe the panoramic views of NYC.
On 9/11, the WTC Path Station was also evacuated, and the station’s signal was recovered from the station.
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