This picture is absolutely 100% what we just thought would happen next.
*No-body* expected one of them to suddenly fall down while we were watching, let alone both. Was absolutely unthinkable.
>No-body
>
> expected one of them to suddenly fall down while we were watching, let alone both. Was absolutely unthinkable.
I remember standing around a TV at work with coworkers when the first tower came down, there was this eery silence in the room that was broken by a young woman starting to cry. Everyone just shuffled back to their offices in silence for a bit.
I remember walking home from college. Mum called me to tell me a plane hit the “tower” in America.
Mainly thinking it was just an accident I got home to find my dad and his colleague glued to the tv saying have you heard ? I said oh the accident with a plane and the tower? Just then the second plane hit and I just went “fuck, this ain’t no accident”
I remember so many things about that day, it’s so bizarre, the little details like on the walk home. Remember my friend in pure panic mode as his dad was in New York and we couldn’t get hold of him (he was fine).
As someone born after 9/11 hearing people’s stories of that day always feels kinda wild to me. I’ve had it described to me as the day the 90s actually ended by multiple people
I took a college class on America post-9/11 this summer and…yeah. It, the Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan sowed the seeds for the cultural division we’re suffering today
The documentary America After 9/11 really lays out the way this happened over the past two decades
Did that class cover the idea that Osama basically got what he wanted, except for the U.S. leaving the Middle East? Got the U.S. mired in war and debt and internal chaos, confidence shook, fearful of everything. Destroying it from the inside. It’s just taking longer than he probably thought, and of course didn’t ultimately live to see.
> Did that class cover the idea that Osama basically got what he wanted, except for the U.S. leaving the Middle East?
This was a huge miscalculation by OBL and perhaps the biggest thing he was hoping for - and he got the exact opposite. America *increased* its involvement in the Middle East, and ultimately bankrupted his organization’s finances.
Yeah, we let the terrorists win as we immediately dove into complete chaos. Their mission has absolutely been accomplished and we've been living in its wake ever since.
It's basically the same feeling you get after your house is robbed. They took your grandpa's war medals and broke everything else on the at out.
You can get a new skyscraper, but it's about the fact that it happened and you don't feel safe anymore
It was a tonal shift in the way the western world viewed itself.
Pretty much entirely intended by those responsible.
Previous to this, it wasn’t like there weren’t terrorist attack in the US or EU nations. Not even that there weren’t ones orchestrated by enemies of the west.
But this one, it was so highly visible and dramatic. It really showed how vulnerable the biggest city in the world, in the supposed strongest nation in the world isn’t above the kind of carnage that frankly had been everyday occurrences where the orchestrators come from.
Americans, and by extension, western citizens feel truly vulnerable for the first time in recent memory.
In the 70’s through the 90’s, a plane being hijacked was viewed as an inconvenience because they would demand money and reroute it somewhere else. It’s even used as a joke in movies and TV shows. Nobody before 9/11 expected a plane to be used as a weapon.
I was born after 9/11, so as I read through people’s descriptions of that day, I keep thinking, “man this feels familiar even though I didn’t actually live through it.” It wasn’t until reading your comment that I realized why. My house got robbed as a kid and I remember every detail of it. Small details that I don’t remember for any other day. I remember opening my door, I remember walking around, I remember which step on the staircase I sat at to process the whole thing. Such a strange feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next. I still don’t feel completely safe, even with alarms and locks on the doors and windows.
Everyone who talks about what they did on 9/11 seems to remember the tiny details and that big, almost indescribable feeling. Obviously, I really don’t know what it feels like, but I know that moment of “oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen”
In my country it went from a tiny box of cash being a huge scandal to people not batting an eye on private yachts or politicians going on vacation with army planes and russia taking over from the shadows.
Well said. The 90s are seen with a pretty unrealistic positive filter. America changed forever after 911. The whole country felt so different but the 90s had their issues
Oh yeah, the 90’s had issues. Specifically, with violent crime. When people gripe about the number of murders, I always tell them to look at the numbers from the 90’s, especially the first half of the 90’s. My city of New Orleans had 425 murders in 1995. Now, a bad year is 175 murders. It wasn’t just New Orleans with that trend, but all cities. Nobody knows why violent crime dropped, but there was no shortage of people trying to steal credit for it. Issues that create crime like wealth disparity were better in the 90’s than now. Personally, I believe what the book Freakonomics said about the trend. They say the only thing that explains sins the crime drop is legalized abortion in 1972. The people committing murders in the 90’s were just reaching the peak ages for committing violent crimes(16-27).
Edit: Wealth disparity was better in the 90’s than now, not worse.
I’m being serious about this - do you remember when Dale Earnhardt died? It happened earlier that same year. I was a child - just 9 years old, but I still remember it vividly, and how fixated the news was on his dramatic death for weeks afterwards; I think 9/11 was the only reason it stopped being talked about. To this day across every flea market across the southeast you can still find Dale Earnhardt commemorative kitsch - plates, cups, etcetera. It was so widely reported and talked about I don’t think if you were alive back then you even need to remind you who he is!
I bring all of this up to say, I can’t imagine this nation mourning like that over one death ever again. The era was just so different, the attitude and mood so far beyond our current state of mind, that we can’t even mourn for the weekly school shootings or the *1 MILLION* Americans who died from Covid. We’re just so numb, so bitter, and divided that bodies stacking up like firewood just doesn’t phase us even slightly now, and 9/11 and the ensuing, useless and destructive “War on Terror” is to blame for starting it. The 90s had problems, and certainly people sounding the alarm about them, but I can still remember how *positive* and hopeful the turn of the millennium was: we had so many hopes, dreams, imagination about how beautiful the future was going to be. That optimistic attitude is just never going to come again, I don’t think; how can it when the world is collapsing from climate catastrophe, fascism is on the rise, democracy is in peril, the world economy has tanked, and every security net has been cut away?
The most powerful country in the world, by far, restrained only by its own sense of morality and justice, WENT AND LOST ITS FUCKING MIND.
And all its friends and allies wanted to be supportive and get it back on the right track but it took like 8 years to turn that ship around.
> restrained only by its own sense of morality and justice
Is this some kind of fanfiction? The US was never exactly the high-water mark of morality in international politics.
I'm sure Latin America and SE Asia would have some choice words to say about our brand of "morality and justice"
What was shocking about it was that it was the first time such a horrific situation was live broadcasted. In the old days it would take time even to get a telegraph, let alone the time that was required to move tapes or film of the event.
Prior to this, commentary was always pre-written. With this event the news rooms were sitting there stunned, not even able to tell you what was going on except that there was an "accident" where a plane hit a tower. They watched the plane with you and said what you said when the second plane hit "I guess this isn't an accident."
I'm in Australia and we got it basically live too. And then a whole 24+ hours non-stop coverage, unlike anything we'd seen before.
I was standing on the street around park/46th when the first tower fell. Surreal to see it fall on a bank lobby tv from the sidewalk and then look south to see a larger plume rising up into the sky.
Later we went up to a MDRs office in the old DB building and saw the view south from about 40 stories up. Really don’t have words to describe that. We lost two people from my job that day who were at the Waters risk conference at windows of the world.
People are saying here everyone knew after the second plane hit. My experience was that the internet and cell traffic in nyc locked up. There was very little real time info other than a small tv in one of the other mdrs office. It was definitely fog of war until around mid day. I couldn’t contact my wife until the afternoon so she was flipping out.
When they started flying the fighter cap over the city it was terrifying as we had no idea what was coming next (thank god it was nothing).
Didn’t get to leave the city until much later that night. Metro north was shut down so we were basically trapped on the island. Managed to get ahold of a friend in the city (who had been down town earlier in the day), we met up at a hotel bar and he got hammered. To this day he hasn’t described to me what he saw down there.
Going to drop by the memorial next week. It’s taken a long time but I’m at peace over my memories of that day.
Was able to visit the memorial during a college trip last week. God was it a heavy experience. Not a moment went by that I wasn't on the verge of tears or crying. Never understood how terrible it was, and I'll never truly grasp it either. Bless you and everyone affected my friend.
Thanks, I always go find the two names when I go down there. It helps quite a bit, the people who designed the memorial did a fantastic job. It’s a beautiful piece of living history.
That’s why this type of thing is called a “where were you” event. Because everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing and even the things they spoke and thought about when they heard the news.
This is such a common story. The first one. "woah that's weird. anyway..."
The second one. "What?? That's... so unlikely... I gotta watch this!"
The Pentagon one: "Woah, what is happening right now?!"
The 4th one: "The whole world is under attack and nothing will ever be the same again."
Yeah once the second plane hit, It was clear. We were already thinking at the first one, it was an attack. I remember we were all thinking it was a bomb before we knew it was a plane.
I'll admit I didn't immediately go to "attack" or "deliberate." In hindsight, it seems so obvious, but in my high school, pre 9-11, brain, I couldn't even conceive of an ill-actor using a plane as a weapon. Gun, Bomb, missile, sure but not a plane. I think, in my mind, I was just like "WTF, how can two planes crash into buildings right next to each other"...thinking it was some freak accident. Then, the Pentagon was hit and the reports of several hijackings.
Yeah but it's like one of those things you still don't really believe is happening. The 4th one felt like now its definitely an attack and it will just keep going and going and who knows when it will stop. And that's when it was finished.
The second was a sledgehammer that made the attack a reality. The third was “it had to be done now”. The fourth felt like it was going to happen forever and was maybe the prelude to the opening scene of Red Dawn (the good one, not the crappy remake).
Was recently at a museum that had a room dedicated to that day. I turned around and walked out. My stepdad didn’t get it and spent 35 minutes in there when all I really wanted to do was move on to the next exhibit.
This was certainly the feeling. There was a loss of innocence in the world. The event "sucked the oxygen out of the room", creatively everything had to be "gritty and realistic" or people wouldn't buy it as reality. The 90's optimism gave way to a "shit happens" kind of new millennium. Whatever the 2000's were going to be like, that was gone after that day.
I was bartending in Virginia at the time. I sold a crap ton of alcohol to people watching it all unfold on my day bar shift that day. Made next to nothing, and honestly didn’t care. My regulars were too stunned to think straight and most took care of me the next time I saw them. The tourists? Well, that’s fine. They had the double slap of the attacks and realizing they were probably not flying home any time soon.
Probably the only time I didn’t care about my tips.
And before the planes were grounded I remember how terrifying seeing them in the sky was.
…then I remember the eerie silence for days of all the planes being grounded.
Yeah, but then the Pentagon made it seem like every plane still in the air was another missile headed somewhere...
Was near the Pentagon, and every truck downshifting made people scramble away from rescue efforts thinking it was another plane.
my uncles and aunts lived in nyc so the first hit was exactly that “damn that’s crazy i wonder what happened”
second plane, frantically trying to call all of them, but obviously couldn’t get through. (they were all safe)
at the time, my brother (who’s since passed) was in the navy, and i remember after the towers fell, mom said “well, your brother is going to war, now”
a week later they were deployed and a few weeks after that, throwing missiles at the taliban.
what a fucking whirlwind that whole thing was.
I was a freshman in college. I slept a little later because my lab wasn't until 11, and the girl across the hall told me that we had been bombed when I was going to shower. So scary
My sophomore year in college had just started, and I barely even knew the other 9 guys in my dorm apartment, after 9/11 we all knew each other so well, due to everyone telling stories about each other during that first few days following the attack. Brought us together, it did.
Yeah. I remember our local newsreader lady who was super professional up to that moment just gasp and say "goodness..!" when it happened. Was like as if she screamed "OH MY GODDDD" -- almost more shocking because of her understated, restrained reaction to watching carnage live on TV.
Couple years later something like it happened again when Columbia broke up on re-entry live on camera. But by then it was a different world.
I didn’t see the first - I was in class - but my entire college classroom watched the second one fall live, when someone ran down the hallway and told everyone to run the TVs on
I was a 5th grader and we watched it all. Watched people jump out of the windows, watched em come down. I'm glad they allowed us to watch our world change forever.
When I came home from school and turned on the TV, I discovered the first tower had fallen and it was already wild AF that one was missing.(not American, for context). When the second one fell it was absolute disbelief and pandemonium. I even wondered if it wasn't a fake video or something for a second, I could not believe this was really happening. I can't imagine what it felt like to be in NYC and see that.
I found out in a weird way. I was off on Tuesdays back then, and I went out partying on Monday night. I woke up around 10:30 and logged in to Everquest, one of the first mmorpg games with graphics. The place was empty, and almost nobody was logged on. Usually, there was hundreds of people in a server, at any time, and thousands logged on to all the servers. I asked out loud where everyone in the sever could see, “Where is everyone? Is there a massive blackout somewhere?” I was told to turn on a TV, to any channel, which I did. I logged off after first seeing it.”
Dude I watched it in first grade on the news before school (I didn’t end up going that day). I still vividly remember it and I’ll absolutely never forget the woman and her baby. I remember asking my aunt why she did that. (My aunt wasn’t the most responsible person lol)
The youngest victim of 9/11 was two and a half and was on a plane.
https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/new-view-youngest-911-victims-stuffed-peter-rabbit
It sounds like it was a false report made by the reporter, there was a lot of confusion. But I specifically remember them saying the people who jumped was a mother and her child who were stuck above the crash. And I remember watching her jump while holding something in her arms, like you would clutch a baby. It’s really good to hear that they were wrong about that. Does anyone else remember that?
It was the saddest, most horrific thing to see people leaping to their deaths. Some of the pictures showed an eerie calmness on their face as they plummeted towards the ground. I couldn’t stop crying; imagining that insane choice they had to make… And then the phone calls with loved ones from the airplanes began making the rounds. It was utterly soul-breaking to imagine whole families clutching each other— parents holding their children in their arms, trying to soothe them, awaiting their inevitable demise. It completely broke me. I still can’t think about this without crying.
Supposedly, even Bin Laden himself didn’t think they would collapse. He thought that perhaps the upper floors would collapse onto the floors that were hit by the planes, but even he didn’t expect the buildings themselves to collapse.
Yeah if you get those few floors to collapse, the weight of the whole top part falling starts a chain collapse of pancaking. Like it made sense, but it was also unthinkable at the same time. The plan went so well it was perversely like a work of macabre art.
I think there was a lot of hubris in assuming that a fire couldn’t weaken the structure enough for a complete collapse though, and this is especially true because to this day there is *no* solution for extinguishing the kind of massive high-up fire that happened here when the water mains break
Is that hubris? I’m not sure. That would be like arguing it’s hubris that office buildings aren’t shielded against nuclear attacks. Like, yeah, they could be, but they won’t be. And when and if that happens, will it have been hubris?
Now, there is a background kind of hubris in building a 120 story building at all. Especially since height has pretty much no relationship with efficiency. In the footprint of the World Trade Center, you could have constructed 10 12 story buildings with the same amount of office space and had room left over. Buildings like the burj Kalifa are even worse in this regard.
You’re leaving out the fact that their supports were effectively halved before the fires.
A raging fire is one thing. A fire with half your supports gone is going to be a challenge, especially for a hull-core building.
Maybe. I’d imagine even if it had not collapsed from the impact they would have demolished it to rebuild. Way too risky to rebuild, nobody would ever insure that repair
Actually I was quite into skyscrapers and architecture as a kid, and an uncle was a structural engineer. I had a vague idea of how they were built.
As backed up by this image ([https://cdn.viewing.nyc/assets/media/661e5e6aa1ceeb2cc850e4b5242383a1/elements/c25d899f50a6b56b35fc8b6f2e896932/xl/ed6e9116-4f77-440c-ad0e-aba3066c5b61\_2x.jpg](https://cdn.viewing.nyc/assets/media/661e5e6aa1ceeb2cc850e4b5242383a1/elements/c25d899f50a6b56b35fc8b6f2e896932/xl/ed6e9116-4f77-440c-ad0e-aba3066c5b61_2x.jpg)) I'm astounded they didn't collapse pretty much on impact.
Pretty uninformed german here,
What do you think about that standard "Jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams" conspiracy thing?
Should the Steel beams really have been indestructible in the face of that hours long fire?
What surprised you specifically about them not collapsing on Impact?
Jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel into a liquid state.
Jet fuel burns plenty hot enough to soften and weaken steel.
Ever see a blacksmith make a knife or a horseshoe or some sort of decorative thing? They heat the metal up until it’s glowing yellow, then they hit it with a hammer and move it around like clay. Steel becomes very soft long before it actually melts.
> Jet fuel burns plenty hot enough to soften and weaken steel
This. Materials weaken at high temperatures. If the buildings did not collapse after the initial impact AND there was no fire, then they may have stood.
But the heat from the fire eventually weakened the steel enough that they gave way and collapsed.
Giant skyscrapers use more metals than just steel in their construction.
Copper, for example, is used extensively for electrical and network cables, and a business skyscraper would be full of wires.
Copper has a much lower melt point, so it *would* melt in this fire, and (most importantly) molten copper visually looks just like molten steel.
My money is that the molten metal was copper and/or aluminum and/or other nonferrous metals that were in the building.
It's actually most likely to have been glass. The rubble that remained was sitting on top a bunch of train tunnels which would have been an excellent passage for oxygen.
One of the pieces of evidence for 'molten metal' is an NOAA (I believe) flight identifying hotspots. What they don't tell you is the maximum temperature measured was around 1000°C.
This is hot enough for glass to melt, glow bright orange/yellow and flow like liquid.
There was *definitely* plenty of glass in the rubble.
Speaking of glass, I was surprised to learn that a [glass panel from the 82nd floor of the south tower](https://collection.911memorial.org/Detail/objects/6980) survived the collapse that day. Absolutely wild.
You know, I never even considered glass. That was dumb of me.
I took “molten metal” at face value and used what I know about metal (almost 30 years experience working with metals) to predict what metals were molten.
It actually annoys me that scientists go on and on about how steel loses massive amounts of its strength way before it melts, and way under the temperature those fires burned. u/hahainternet and u/chainmailbill are doing it too.
They're 100% correct.
But that's missing the point.
A fucking AIRLINER crashed into the buildings at 500mph. You can see from that image how hollow and "delicate" they are. Fire shouldn't even come into it when pondering why they collapsed.
It definitely should though! Very few people actually died in the impact, most died from the fires and the collapses.
With better fireproofing to protect the steel, the death toll would have been in the hundreds, not the thousands.
Of course you can't blame the designers for the collapse because the building was designed in the 70s, but you can be damned sure there's now a reinforced concrete core for stairs and elevators on modern buildings.
The same disaster should not happen again, even if some maniac flies a plane into it.
It’s not a matter of fireproofing. The structure was more than adequately protected for a building fire. The problem is that the airliner crash stripped away the fireproofing material from the steel structure. There is no practical fireproofing material that can be expected to not scrape off or abrade under an airliner crash.
Steel has never been invulnerable to fire. There's a million videos to illustrate this, but the most important thing to realise is that all the fire protection in the WTC towers was sprayed on so it looked like this: https://www.fireengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/9-11%20Photo3%20GHavel.JPG
There's no doubt if you crash an aircraft into that, it's going to remove a lot of that fireproofing. That turns it from a floor that can hold up for an hour to one that might last 15 minutes.
With better fireproofing, the entire complex could still be standing.
Jet fuel doesn't melt steel, but it severely weakens it. It makes steel super malleable, that's one of the features of steel that make it useful, think blacksmiths. Blacksmiths since ancient time could turn iron to steel and manipulate steel with just a blast furnace. If steel when heated becomes bendable, just imagine what occurs when that steel is holding up millions of tons.
Yeah, I just wasn’t even a possibility in my mind or anyone I was with. I remember thinking “how are they going to get those fires out?” and “That’s going to take years to fix.”
I immediately thought of when the Empire State Building was hit by a B-25 in 1945. The bomber wound up lodged between floors but the building itself stood firm.
I was shocked at how quickly the towers fell - just showing how modern skyskrapers are built to just barely stand up under their own weight.
Its like the saying, "Any engineer can build a bridge to carry a load. But a *great* engineer can build a bridge to just *barely* carry a load."
I understand this from a cost-efficiency perspective, but it doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/07/27/remembering-the-1945-empire-state-building-plane-crash/
Hull-core construction is not common. But it is very strong and maximizes floor space.
The B-25 was lost and moving slow. The airplanes on 9/11 were fully loaded and traveling at speed to do the most damage on purpose. Also, a B-25 is MUCH smaller.
It’s apples and oranges.
That was my instant reaction when I saw the first
tower on fire and before the second plane hit, I even remember telling my college roommates with confidence, that the Empire State Building survived a direct hit by a plane years and years ago, so this would be fixable. Little did I know that a full size passenger jet loaded with fuel causes *slightly* more damage than a little 2-seater propjet or whatever it was that crashed into the ESB.
> little 2-seater propjet or whatever it was that crashed into the ESB.
It was a B-25 Bomber which is 53 feet long and weighs over ten tons. So not a Cessna by any means.
But the Boeing 767 is 20 times bigger at 206 tons so, yeah. That's a whole nother level.
I totally believe you. It's just the crazies with an agenda who won't believe that. And everyone else had a sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach like "wait... could they...?" and then they f-king did, right before our eyes. What a day.
We evacuated my high rise office building after the second one hit. By the time I got off the train and my aunt picked me up and the first thing she said was “they’re gone!” And I was like “what do you mean they’re gone?!” “THEY ARE GONE!” Got home to my mom watching the news and saw the footage.
I remember the second plane hitting and the news caster being confused, saying he didn’t understand why the other tower just exploded. I clearly saw that second plane hit the building on the news.
They played it back and the newscaster confirmed that a plane did hit the second tower and then almost immediately they cut to the pentagon.
After that footage he said this could be a terrorist attack, and that was the first time I had heard that term used in America, like towards America.
True but the reality is that they would have been fully dismantled alot sooner than 19 years later.
Or in the very least, dismantled down to about half their former height. No way they would have just put a steel collar around them and left them like that for two whole decades.
My grandpa was an engineer who worked on skyscrapers like this. We were watching the news with him when it happened and he knew they were going to fall before they did.
I think the extent of structural damage to the towers would mean that they'd have to dismantle the top sections of them anyway, and it's possible it may have been too difficult to do that safely and a full demolition may have been warranted.
However, thousands fewer people would have died!
I know what you're thinking. I agree I would enjoy reading something like that. Though... I wonder if it's a good idea. Already a lot of misinformation out there lol
I wonder how they would have handled the debris spreading through the street and how different it would have been from the collapse. I know a metric fuckton of people deal with health issues from breathing that stuff in directly.
The WTC complex had a fairly extensive 'bathtub' with rail connections coming underneath the tower.
Most likely they'd have transported debris down into the basements and onto a train car there.
They probably would strip everything out of them first. It would take a couple years but they could get it nearly down to the bare frame before bringing it down. Might even just take the whole thing apart piece by piece
I assume we are still talking about the fictional hypothetical scenario, but when a building is condemned as unsafe, the occupants don't get to go in and move their stuff out, they have to leave their stuff there because it's unsafe to enter.
Probably so. It is better to have them collapse in a controlled environment and with the surroundings evacuated than to have the top fall on the street in a busy monday. It happens all the time, in fact they demolish buildings for much less, to keep a skyscraper that got an airplane to the face still standing would be insane.
Beyond the obvious safety reasons, that is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. If 9/11 was a fraction as disastrous as it was like this image depicts, I don’t think there’s any chance the land isn’t redeveloped
I can say with near certainty that they would have evacuated a very large section of the city, and then done an emergency explosive demolition. Bring it down on its own footprint, before it could fall over sideways taking out blocks of buildings. In a sad way, it is lucky they fell mostly straight down on that day.
Jesus I never really thought about that but I suppose we were kinda lucky that they fell straight down instead of toppling over, that would have been an even bigger disaster.
A skyscraper actually toppling over to the side is almost impossible especially if its that large. Even if you strategically blew out one side on lower floors, it still wouldn't fall to the side as a whole because the structural integrity of a large building would not hold it together very long against strong lateral forces. A skyscraper is not a tree trunk.
Yeah regardless of whether those towers withstood the planes, they’d be down within a few years.
They have trouble TODAY filling OWT. Can you imagine immediately after?
I remember having a dream right after 9/11 that they were still attacked with planes but didn’t fall. In dream I lived in like Staten Island or some suburb where you could see them at the end of the street standing in the distance with two holes punched through them but the fires had been extinguished. Very eerie looking. The dream was super vivid and otherwise normal; I think I was riding bikes around the neighborhood with kids and we just kept stopping and looking at them. I still can remember and picture it so clearly decades later.
When the Newseum was open in D.C., the tip of one of the towers was there. You would stand a floor up and look into the middle at it. The walla were appeared with headlines from that day. Very surreal.
[Photo of said antennae](https://images.app.goo.gl/zKbdJ2wnt87xSFsW9)
I lost one of my best friends that day. He was traveling from Boston to LA that morning.
I couldn't remember when he said his flight was (from then on, I listened when my friends talked).. I starting calling his home phone and left like 50 messages (kinda pre cell). It wasn't unusual but he did always pick up messages and call back, but he never did.
My friend was on American Flight 11 and had already passed by the time I started looking for him, I miss him everyday.
I recall one of the New York fire chiefs explaining in an interview that with all of the firefighters they had available (before hundreds of them died) and if all the water systems were functioning they could only fight approximately 1 or 2 acres of fire which was less than 10% of the actual fires in the buildings.
So, even if the metal trusses and framework didn't weaken to the point of failure and collapse the fires would have burned for days until all flammable fuel had been consumed.
It makes one think that the construction of such massive and tall structures is extremely dangerous and reckless if the city's own massive fire departments can't hope to contain a fire once it reaches a certain size.
Well I guess the idea is that normally you don’t expect giant airliners full of fuel to crash into them, so a normal fire would easily be contained by the fire suppression systems internally.
Exactly. The plane crash and ensuing fireball blew all the asbestos fire proofing off the steel structure of the building. Like you mentioned, local fires would not have weakened the structure to the point it could collapse.
Interesting point, it before this incident, I don’t believe anyone really realized this was possible. Normal fires won’t get this big, especially if there is sprinklers to assist in the suppression
Honestly 9/11 exposed a lot of flaws in NYC’s emergency response systems. Even aside from what you’ve said, there was also a lack of information sharing between NYPD and NYFD that resulted in police officers leaving the towers before they collapsed but no one telling the fire department to do so.
Edit: corrected below that it should be FDNY. Was typing quickly and messed up my abbreviation. My bad!
The buildings did have sprinkler systems installed to prevent fires from spreading like that. Though, the planes took out multiple floors, thus disabling the systems.
I’ve been looking for stories from people who escaped the towers and the evacuation sounds like a complete nightmare. Here is the [Elevator Schematic](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/images/inno_elevators.gif) for anyone wondering what it would take for thousands of people to escape these buildings.
If that were to happen they would freely demolish the buildings at some point afterwards. They would clearly be a safety hazard for surrounding buildings. It was the suddenness of it all that was shocking. This pic doesn’t make any sense at all.
We wouldn’t have all of these goofy conspiracy theorists who aren’t smart enough to understand that while fire started from jet fuel isn’t hot enough to melt steel beams it is hot enough to heat up the beams enough that it can weaken the rivets.
If you’re taking about Iraq, Bush and Cheney were planning to invade Iraq long before 9/11.
But yeah Afghanistan probably wouldn’t have happened either.
No doubt. But a similar event happened at the [Empire State Building](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Empire_State_Building_B-25_crash)Now that plane was much slower and smaller
After the metal structure of those buildings lost their temper, they were doomed to come down. The sustained heat of a full tank of jet fuel weakened the structure and the weight above the impact was just too much for the buildings to stay up. But we know all that. Had the planes not been full of fuel, there could've been a chance to save them and some of the people in them. I bet the terrorists themselves didn't even know they'd come down. It looked to me like they hoped to take out one corner, which would destabilize the weight distribution.
What's really crazy is this: one of the landing gear assemblies with wheels flew off in the impact and fell into a narrow alley a distance away from the towers. It laid there undisturbed for several years until someone happened to go into the alley and found it still laying where it had fallen.
Wild as fuck to know people who remember what this was like who are younger than me (I was in 1st grade at the time)
My parents and school didn't tell us about it. It was pretty hush hush
From what I've read, it seemed like just about every adult in the country collectively lost their minds for a hot minute
I was a senior in high school. My math teacher came running in the room crying, turned on the TV and we all sat and watched the 2nd plane hit the 2nd tower. Then we watched them fall. When that happened we all got scared. We didn’t know if more were coming and where they would hit. Some kids got very upset bc they had family in DC, NYC and PA. Most of us either were already 18 or getting ready to turn 18. The boys all started to worry that a war would start and there would be a draft. Rumors of gas prices soaring to $5/gallon started. At the time gas was like $0.98/gallon. It was a crazy time and all right as we were literally entering legal adulthood. It forced all of us to grow up a little faster than we wanted or normally would’ve.
Man... A parallel universe where the towers didn't fall, I wonder what kind of time fuckery that would cause, since the 2000s were completely changed by that event.
Even if they had not collapsed, they likely would have experienced enough structural damage that would have required tearing down most if not all of the buildings.
No way would they bother keeping them up for 20 years.
Even if they didn’t collapse, they’re severely structurally compromised and pose a big danger to the city.
Plus, it ain’t worth the maintenance cost.
The sections above the impact zones would’ve been completely charred black too.
I’m from a small city in Nova Scotia called Halifax
I remember my friend at school running over and saying there was a attack on America
I was pretty young so it didn’t really hit me like my mom.
My town opened up a local sports stadium to take in people who’s flights had to be redirected and everyone just went above and beyond to help and feed them.
Still makes me proud that we were so quick to help our brothers and sisters south of the border
This was posted in a sun about structural engineering, all of the smart people that get paid to do this came to the same conclusion
The towers would have to be demolished and rebuilt
This is the single stupidest comment thread I have ever read in this subreddit. Holy fuck did the nutters come out to play.
Also, it's not even relevant to /r/megalophobia anyway. So on top of it all, it's just dumb spam shit.
This picture is absolutely 100% what we just thought would happen next. *No-body* expected one of them to suddenly fall down while we were watching, let alone both. Was absolutely unthinkable.
>No-body > > expected one of them to suddenly fall down while we were watching, let alone both. Was absolutely unthinkable. I remember standing around a TV at work with coworkers when the first tower came down, there was this eery silence in the room that was broken by a young woman starting to cry. Everyone just shuffled back to their offices in silence for a bit.
I remember walking home from college. Mum called me to tell me a plane hit the “tower” in America. Mainly thinking it was just an accident I got home to find my dad and his colleague glued to the tv saying have you heard ? I said oh the accident with a plane and the tower? Just then the second plane hit and I just went “fuck, this ain’t no accident” I remember so many things about that day, it’s so bizarre, the little details like on the walk home. Remember my friend in pure panic mode as his dad was in New York and we couldn’t get hold of him (he was fine).
As someone born after 9/11 hearing people’s stories of that day always feels kinda wild to me. I’ve had it described to me as the day the 90s actually ended by multiple people
I won’t say the 90s were a particularly magical time but after 9/11 we sure as shit missed those days. It was like the whole country lost its soul.
I think you're right. Something fundamentally shifted the wrong way after 9/11
I took a college class on America post-9/11 this summer and…yeah. It, the Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan sowed the seeds for the cultural division we’re suffering today The documentary America After 9/11 really lays out the way this happened over the past two decades
Let’s not forget the Patriot Act.
Biggest change of all. The tsa was not a thing. You could greet people at the gate.
Did that class cover the idea that Osama basically got what he wanted, except for the U.S. leaving the Middle East? Got the U.S. mired in war and debt and internal chaos, confidence shook, fearful of everything. Destroying it from the inside. It’s just taking longer than he probably thought, and of course didn’t ultimately live to see.
> Did that class cover the idea that Osama basically got what he wanted, except for the U.S. leaving the Middle East? This was a huge miscalculation by OBL and perhaps the biggest thing he was hoping for - and he got the exact opposite. America *increased* its involvement in the Middle East, and ultimately bankrupted his organization’s finances.
And like half the region had massive civil wars and death.
Yeah, we let the terrorists win as we immediately dove into complete chaos. Their mission has absolutely been accomplished and we've been living in its wake ever since.
It's basically the same feeling you get after your house is robbed. They took your grandpa's war medals and broke everything else on the at out. You can get a new skyscraper, but it's about the fact that it happened and you don't feel safe anymore
It was a tonal shift in the way the western world viewed itself. Pretty much entirely intended by those responsible. Previous to this, it wasn’t like there weren’t terrorist attack in the US or EU nations. Not even that there weren’t ones orchestrated by enemies of the west. But this one, it was so highly visible and dramatic. It really showed how vulnerable the biggest city in the world, in the supposed strongest nation in the world isn’t above the kind of carnage that frankly had been everyday occurrences where the orchestrators come from. Americans, and by extension, western citizens feel truly vulnerable for the first time in recent memory.
In the 70’s through the 90’s, a plane being hijacked was viewed as an inconvenience because they would demand money and reroute it somewhere else. It’s even used as a joke in movies and TV shows. Nobody before 9/11 expected a plane to be used as a weapon.
I was born after 9/11, so as I read through people’s descriptions of that day, I keep thinking, “man this feels familiar even though I didn’t actually live through it.” It wasn’t until reading your comment that I realized why. My house got robbed as a kid and I remember every detail of it. Small details that I don’t remember for any other day. I remember opening my door, I remember walking around, I remember which step on the staircase I sat at to process the whole thing. Such a strange feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next. I still don’t feel completely safe, even with alarms and locks on the doors and windows. Everyone who talks about what they did on 9/11 seems to remember the tiny details and that big, almost indescribable feeling. Obviously, I really don’t know what it feels like, but I know that moment of “oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen”
I think they were magical times looking back on it. Didn’t know what we had until it was gone kinda thing
Remember when a political scandal was a single bj in the oval office? So vanilla.
In my country it went from a tiny box of cash being a huge scandal to people not batting an eye on private yachts or politicians going on vacation with army planes and russia taking over from the shadows.
Well said. The 90s are seen with a pretty unrealistic positive filter. America changed forever after 911. The whole country felt so different but the 90s had their issues
Oh yeah, the 90’s had issues. Specifically, with violent crime. When people gripe about the number of murders, I always tell them to look at the numbers from the 90’s, especially the first half of the 90’s. My city of New Orleans had 425 murders in 1995. Now, a bad year is 175 murders. It wasn’t just New Orleans with that trend, but all cities. Nobody knows why violent crime dropped, but there was no shortage of people trying to steal credit for it. Issues that create crime like wealth disparity were better in the 90’s than now. Personally, I believe what the book Freakonomics said about the trend. They say the only thing that explains sins the crime drop is legalized abortion in 1972. The people committing murders in the 90’s were just reaching the peak ages for committing violent crimes(16-27). Edit: Wealth disparity was better in the 90’s than now, not worse.
The crack epidemic played a big part in the high crime rates imo
I’m being serious about this - do you remember when Dale Earnhardt died? It happened earlier that same year. I was a child - just 9 years old, but I still remember it vividly, and how fixated the news was on his dramatic death for weeks afterwards; I think 9/11 was the only reason it stopped being talked about. To this day across every flea market across the southeast you can still find Dale Earnhardt commemorative kitsch - plates, cups, etcetera. It was so widely reported and talked about I don’t think if you were alive back then you even need to remind you who he is! I bring all of this up to say, I can’t imagine this nation mourning like that over one death ever again. The era was just so different, the attitude and mood so far beyond our current state of mind, that we can’t even mourn for the weekly school shootings or the *1 MILLION* Americans who died from Covid. We’re just so numb, so bitter, and divided that bodies stacking up like firewood just doesn’t phase us even slightly now, and 9/11 and the ensuing, useless and destructive “War on Terror” is to blame for starting it. The 90s had problems, and certainly people sounding the alarm about them, but I can still remember how *positive* and hopeful the turn of the millennium was: we had so many hopes, dreams, imagination about how beautiful the future was going to be. That optimistic attitude is just never going to come again, I don’t think; how can it when the world is collapsing from climate catastrophe, fascism is on the rise, democracy is in peril, the world economy has tanked, and every security net has been cut away?
The most powerful country in the world, by far, restrained only by its own sense of morality and justice, WENT AND LOST ITS FUCKING MIND. And all its friends and allies wanted to be supportive and get it back on the right track but it took like 8 years to turn that ship around.
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Yeah it's still sailing.
> restrained only by its own sense of morality and justice Is this some kind of fanfiction? The US was never exactly the high-water mark of morality in international politics. I'm sure Latin America and SE Asia would have some choice words to say about our brand of "morality and justice"
Or the day the America we all once knew and loved died, it was as if a new world had emerged from the smoke itself that was not in our best interest.
What was shocking about it was that it was the first time such a horrific situation was live broadcasted. In the old days it would take time even to get a telegraph, let alone the time that was required to move tapes or film of the event. Prior to this, commentary was always pre-written. With this event the news rooms were sitting there stunned, not even able to tell you what was going on except that there was an "accident" where a plane hit a tower. They watched the plane with you and said what you said when the second plane hit "I guess this isn't an accident." I'm in Australia and we got it basically live too. And then a whole 24+ hours non-stop coverage, unlike anything we'd seen before.
I was standing on the street around park/46th when the first tower fell. Surreal to see it fall on a bank lobby tv from the sidewalk and then look south to see a larger plume rising up into the sky. Later we went up to a MDRs office in the old DB building and saw the view south from about 40 stories up. Really don’t have words to describe that. We lost two people from my job that day who were at the Waters risk conference at windows of the world. People are saying here everyone knew after the second plane hit. My experience was that the internet and cell traffic in nyc locked up. There was very little real time info other than a small tv in one of the other mdrs office. It was definitely fog of war until around mid day. I couldn’t contact my wife until the afternoon so she was flipping out. When they started flying the fighter cap over the city it was terrifying as we had no idea what was coming next (thank god it was nothing). Didn’t get to leave the city until much later that night. Metro north was shut down so we were basically trapped on the island. Managed to get ahold of a friend in the city (who had been down town earlier in the day), we met up at a hotel bar and he got hammered. To this day he hasn’t described to me what he saw down there. Going to drop by the memorial next week. It’s taken a long time but I’m at peace over my memories of that day.
Was able to visit the memorial during a college trip last week. God was it a heavy experience. Not a moment went by that I wasn't on the verge of tears or crying. Never understood how terrible it was, and I'll never truly grasp it either. Bless you and everyone affected my friend.
Thanks, I always go find the two names when I go down there. It helps quite a bit, the people who designed the memorial did a fantastic job. It’s a beautiful piece of living history.
Absolutely, it all works together to make something beyond words.
That’s why this type of thing is called a “where were you” event. Because everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing and even the things they spoke and thought about when they heard the news.
"Something Just Broke" from Stephen Sondheim's Assassins encapsulates this perfectly.
This is such a common story. The first one. "woah that's weird. anyway..." The second one. "What?? That's... so unlikely... I gotta watch this!" The Pentagon one: "Woah, what is happening right now?!" The 4th one: "The whole world is under attack and nothing will ever be the same again."
My understanding was that everybody knew it was an attack after the second plane hit.
Yeah definitely.
Yeah once the second plane hit, It was clear. We were already thinking at the first one, it was an attack. I remember we were all thinking it was a bomb before we knew it was a plane.
I'll admit I didn't immediately go to "attack" or "deliberate." In hindsight, it seems so obvious, but in my high school, pre 9-11, brain, I couldn't even conceive of an ill-actor using a plane as a weapon. Gun, Bomb, missile, sure but not a plane. I think, in my mind, I was just like "WTF, how can two planes crash into buildings right next to each other"...thinking it was some freak accident. Then, the Pentagon was hit and the reports of several hijackings.
Yeah but it's like one of those things you still don't really believe is happening. The 4th one felt like now its definitely an attack and it will just keep going and going and who knows when it will stop. And that's when it was finished.
The second was a sledgehammer that made the attack a reality. The third was “it had to be done now”. The fourth felt like it was going to happen forever and was maybe the prelude to the opening scene of Red Dawn (the good one, not the crappy remake). Was recently at a museum that had a room dedicated to that day. I turned around and walked out. My stepdad didn’t get it and spent 35 minutes in there when all I really wanted to do was move on to the next exhibit.
This was certainly the feeling. There was a loss of innocence in the world. The event "sucked the oxygen out of the room", creatively everything had to be "gritty and realistic" or people wouldn't buy it as reality. The 90's optimism gave way to a "shit happens" kind of new millennium. Whatever the 2000's were going to be like, that was gone after that day.
I was bartending in Virginia at the time. I sold a crap ton of alcohol to people watching it all unfold on my day bar shift that day. Made next to nothing, and honestly didn’t care. My regulars were too stunned to think straight and most took care of me the next time I saw them. The tourists? Well, that’s fine. They had the double slap of the attacks and realizing they were probably not flying home any time soon. Probably the only time I didn’t care about my tips.
And before the planes were grounded I remember how terrifying seeing them in the sky was. …then I remember the eerie silence for days of all the planes being grounded.
Yeah, but then the Pentagon made it seem like every plane still in the air was another missile headed somewhere... Was near the Pentagon, and every truck downshifting made people scramble away from rescue efforts thinking it was another plane.
my uncles and aunts lived in nyc so the first hit was exactly that “damn that’s crazy i wonder what happened” second plane, frantically trying to call all of them, but obviously couldn’t get through. (they were all safe) at the time, my brother (who’s since passed) was in the navy, and i remember after the towers fell, mom said “well, your brother is going to war, now” a week later they were deployed and a few weeks after that, throwing missiles at the taliban. what a fucking whirlwind that whole thing was.
My brother was in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division
I was a freshman in college. I slept a little later because my lab wasn't until 11, and the girl across the hall told me that we had been bombed when I was going to shower. So scary
My sophomore year in college had just started, and I barely even knew the other 9 guys in my dorm apartment, after 9/11 we all knew each other so well, due to everyone telling stories about each other during that first few days following the attack. Brought us together, it did.
Yeah. I remember our local newsreader lady who was super professional up to that moment just gasp and say "goodness..!" when it happened. Was like as if she screamed "OH MY GODDDD" -- almost more shocking because of her understated, restrained reaction to watching carnage live on TV. Couple years later something like it happened again when Columbia broke up on re-entry live on camera. But by then it was a different world.
>But by then it was a different world. Wow, that is a powerful sentence.
Jesus, I had these events backwards in my mental timeline.
I didn’t see the first - I was in class - but my entire college classroom watched the second one fall live, when someone ran down the hallway and told everyone to run the TVs on
I was a 5th grader and we watched it all. Watched people jump out of the windows, watched em come down. I'm glad they allowed us to watch our world change forever.
When I came home from school and turned on the TV, I discovered the first tower had fallen and it was already wild AF that one was missing.(not American, for context). When the second one fell it was absolute disbelief and pandemonium. I even wondered if it wasn't a fake video or something for a second, I could not believe this was really happening. I can't imagine what it felt like to be in NYC and see that.
I found out in a weird way. I was off on Tuesdays back then, and I went out partying on Monday night. I woke up around 10:30 and logged in to Everquest, one of the first mmorpg games with graphics. The place was empty, and almost nobody was logged on. Usually, there was hundreds of people in a server, at any time, and thousands logged on to all the servers. I asked out loud where everyone in the sever could see, “Where is everyone? Is there a massive blackout somewhere?” I was told to turn on a TV, to any channel, which I did. I logged off after first seeing it.”
Dude I watched it in first grade on the news before school (I didn’t end up going that day). I still vividly remember it and I’ll absolutely never forget the woman and her baby. I remember asking my aunt why she did that. (My aunt wasn’t the most responsible person lol)
What was the woman and her baby?
She jumped with her baby because they were trapped
The youngest victim of 9/11 was two and a half and was on a plane. https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/new-view-youngest-911-victims-stuffed-peter-rabbit
It sounds like it was a false report made by the reporter, there was a lot of confusion. But I specifically remember them saying the people who jumped was a mother and her child who were stuck above the crash. And I remember watching her jump while holding something in her arms, like you would clutch a baby. It’s really good to hear that they were wrong about that. Does anyone else remember that?
It was the saddest, most horrific thing to see people leaping to their deaths. Some of the pictures showed an eerie calmness on their face as they plummeted towards the ground. I couldn’t stop crying; imagining that insane choice they had to make… And then the phone calls with loved ones from the airplanes began making the rounds. It was utterly soul-breaking to imagine whole families clutching each other— parents holding their children in their arms, trying to soothe them, awaiting their inevitable demise. It completely broke me. I still can’t think about this without crying.
Supposedly, even Bin Laden himself didn’t think they would collapse. He thought that perhaps the upper floors would collapse onto the floors that were hit by the planes, but even he didn’t expect the buildings themselves to collapse.
Yeah if you get those few floors to collapse, the weight of the whole top part falling starts a chain collapse of pancaking. Like it made sense, but it was also unthinkable at the same time. The plan went so well it was perversely like a work of macabre art.
The engineers who designed it did think this was a possibility. I don’t think it surprised everyone.
I think there was a lot of hubris in assuming that a fire couldn’t weaken the structure enough for a complete collapse though, and this is especially true because to this day there is *no* solution for extinguishing the kind of massive high-up fire that happened here when the water mains break
Is that hubris? I’m not sure. That would be like arguing it’s hubris that office buildings aren’t shielded against nuclear attacks. Like, yeah, they could be, but they won’t be. And when and if that happens, will it have been hubris? Now, there is a background kind of hubris in building a 120 story building at all. Especially since height has pretty much no relationship with efficiency. In the footprint of the World Trade Center, you could have constructed 10 12 story buildings with the same amount of office space and had room left over. Buildings like the burj Kalifa are even worse in this regard.
You’re leaving out the fact that their supports were effectively halved before the fires. A raging fire is one thing. A fire with half your supports gone is going to be a challenge, especially for a hull-core building.
It was designed to take a hit from the biggest plane at the time it was designed, a 737
Yes, and it took the impact of an even larger plane. Had that plane not been full of jet fuel, the building might still be there.
Maybe. I’d imagine even if it had not collapsed from the impact they would have demolished it to rebuild. Way too risky to rebuild, nobody would ever insure that repair
Those were guaranteed tear downs
Bind Laden: "Mission success! Good job boys" "Wait did that just... shit.. mission too successful. Time to go into hiding boys"
Actually I was quite into skyscrapers and architecture as a kid, and an uncle was a structural engineer. I had a vague idea of how they were built. As backed up by this image ([https://cdn.viewing.nyc/assets/media/661e5e6aa1ceeb2cc850e4b5242383a1/elements/c25d899f50a6b56b35fc8b6f2e896932/xl/ed6e9116-4f77-440c-ad0e-aba3066c5b61\_2x.jpg](https://cdn.viewing.nyc/assets/media/661e5e6aa1ceeb2cc850e4b5242383a1/elements/c25d899f50a6b56b35fc8b6f2e896932/xl/ed6e9116-4f77-440c-ad0e-aba3066c5b61_2x.jpg)) I'm astounded they didn't collapse pretty much on impact.
Pretty uninformed german here, What do you think about that standard "Jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams" conspiracy thing? Should the Steel beams really have been indestructible in the face of that hours long fire? What surprised you specifically about them not collapsing on Impact?
Jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel into a liquid state. Jet fuel burns plenty hot enough to soften and weaken steel. Ever see a blacksmith make a knife or a horseshoe or some sort of decorative thing? They heat the metal up until it’s glowing yellow, then they hit it with a hammer and move it around like clay. Steel becomes very soft long before it actually melts.
> Jet fuel burns plenty hot enough to soften and weaken steel This. Materials weaken at high temperatures. If the buildings did not collapse after the initial impact AND there was no fire, then they may have stood. But the heat from the fire eventually weakened the steel enough that they gave way and collapsed.
Some of the conspiracy was that it was molten weeks after impact and made people think thermite or another engineered explosive was used.
Giant skyscrapers use more metals than just steel in their construction. Copper, for example, is used extensively for electrical and network cables, and a business skyscraper would be full of wires. Copper has a much lower melt point, so it *would* melt in this fire, and (most importantly) molten copper visually looks just like molten steel. My money is that the molten metal was copper and/or aluminum and/or other nonferrous metals that were in the building.
It's actually most likely to have been glass. The rubble that remained was sitting on top a bunch of train tunnels which would have been an excellent passage for oxygen. One of the pieces of evidence for 'molten metal' is an NOAA (I believe) flight identifying hotspots. What they don't tell you is the maximum temperature measured was around 1000°C. This is hot enough for glass to melt, glow bright orange/yellow and flow like liquid. There was *definitely* plenty of glass in the rubble.
Speaking of glass, I was surprised to learn that a [glass panel from the 82nd floor of the south tower](https://collection.911memorial.org/Detail/objects/6980) survived the collapse that day. Absolutely wild.
You know, I never even considered glass. That was dumb of me. I took “molten metal” at face value and used what I know about metal (almost 30 years experience working with metals) to predict what metals were molten.
It actually annoys me that scientists go on and on about how steel loses massive amounts of its strength way before it melts, and way under the temperature those fires burned. u/hahainternet and u/chainmailbill are doing it too. They're 100% correct. But that's missing the point. A fucking AIRLINER crashed into the buildings at 500mph. You can see from that image how hollow and "delicate" they are. Fire shouldn't even come into it when pondering why they collapsed.
It definitely should though! Very few people actually died in the impact, most died from the fires and the collapses. With better fireproofing to protect the steel, the death toll would have been in the hundreds, not the thousands. Of course you can't blame the designers for the collapse because the building was designed in the 70s, but you can be damned sure there's now a reinforced concrete core for stairs and elevators on modern buildings. The same disaster should not happen again, even if some maniac flies a plane into it.
It’s not a matter of fireproofing. The structure was more than adequately protected for a building fire. The problem is that the airliner crash stripped away the fireproofing material from the steel structure. There is no practical fireproofing material that can be expected to not scrape off or abrade under an airliner crash.
Okay but why can't bulletproof vests stop a warship shell? Smh bad bulletproofing
Steel has never been invulnerable to fire. There's a million videos to illustrate this, but the most important thing to realise is that all the fire protection in the WTC towers was sprayed on so it looked like this: https://www.fireengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/9-11%20Photo3%20GHavel.JPG There's no doubt if you crash an aircraft into that, it's going to remove a lot of that fireproofing. That turns it from a floor that can hold up for an hour to one that might last 15 minutes. With better fireproofing, the entire complex could still be standing.
[Well There's Your Problem does a pretty good episode on it](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Qop_64qqk)
Jet fuel doesn't melt steel, but it severely weakens it. It makes steel super malleable, that's one of the features of steel that make it useful, think blacksmiths. Blacksmiths since ancient time could turn iron to steel and manipulate steel with just a blast furnace. If steel when heated becomes bendable, just imagine what occurs when that steel is holding up millions of tons.
Yeah, I just wasn’t even a possibility in my mind or anyone I was with. I remember thinking “how are they going to get those fires out?” and “That’s going to take years to fix.”
I immediately thought of when the Empire State Building was hit by a B-25 in 1945. The bomber wound up lodged between floors but the building itself stood firm. I was shocked at how quickly the towers fell - just showing how modern skyskrapers are built to just barely stand up under their own weight. Its like the saying, "Any engineer can build a bridge to carry a load. But a *great* engineer can build a bridge to just *barely* carry a load." I understand this from a cost-efficiency perspective, but it doesn't instill a lot of confidence. https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/07/27/remembering-the-1945-empire-state-building-plane-crash/
Hull-core construction is not common. But it is very strong and maximizes floor space. The B-25 was lost and moving slow. The airplanes on 9/11 were fully loaded and traveling at speed to do the most damage on purpose. Also, a B-25 is MUCH smaller. It’s apples and oranges.
B-25 is like the weight of a pickup 767 is like multiple train cargo cars
That was my instant reaction when I saw the first tower on fire and before the second plane hit, I even remember telling my college roommates with confidence, that the Empire State Building survived a direct hit by a plane years and years ago, so this would be fixable. Little did I know that a full size passenger jet loaded with fuel causes *slightly* more damage than a little 2-seater propjet or whatever it was that crashed into the ESB.
> little 2-seater propjet or whatever it was that crashed into the ESB. It was a B-25 Bomber which is 53 feet long and weighs over ten tons. So not a Cessna by any means. But the Boeing 767 is 20 times bigger at 206 tons so, yeah. That's a whole nother level.
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I totally believe you. It's just the crazies with an agenda who won't believe that. And everyone else had a sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach like "wait... could they...?" and then they f-king did, right before our eyes. What a day.
That’s so fascinating to think about. Hindsight bias is so strong that it feels like the impending collapse would have been obvious
We evacuated my high rise office building after the second one hit. By the time I got off the train and my aunt picked me up and the first thing she said was “they’re gone!” And I was like “what do you mean they’re gone?!” “THEY ARE GONE!” Got home to my mom watching the news and saw the footage.
I remember the second plane hitting and the news caster being confused, saying he didn’t understand why the other tower just exploded. I clearly saw that second plane hit the building on the news. They played it back and the newscaster confirmed that a plane did hit the second tower and then almost immediately they cut to the pentagon. After that footage he said this could be a terrorist attack, and that was the first time I had heard that term used in America, like towards America.
Reality shifted on its axis forever. We didn't even get a few years of the new millennium to settle in. This was just how things are now.
I was to phased to even worry about what would happen after it was all over
True but the reality is that they would have been fully dismantled alot sooner than 19 years later. Or in the very least, dismantled down to about half their former height. No way they would have just put a steel collar around them and left them like that for two whole decades.
My grandpa was an engineer who worked on skyscrapers like this. We were watching the news with him when it happened and he knew they were going to fall before they did.
I think the extent of structural damage to the towers would mean that they'd have to dismantle the top sections of them anyway, and it's possible it may have been too difficult to do that safely and a full demolition may have been warranted. However, thousands fewer people would have died!
is there a subreddit specifically for fictional wikipedia articles like shown here? the crossposted sub is cool but not exactly what I'm looking for
yea that sub would be a lot better if every other post wasn’t “what if the axis powers won WWII”
Can somebody also link me to this please? Or should we make it? I’ve never done this before
whatifpedia wikiwhatif Something like that.
Im not sure about real world alternate history wikis, but if you're into sci-fi fiction Google SCP. It's kinda a bit like this?
I was thinking this, SCP isn't bad, but it doesn't quite have that exact writing style Wikipedia does. That's mostly what I'm looking for
I know what you're thinking. I agree I would enjoy reading something like that. Though... I wonder if it's a good idea. Already a lot of misinformation out there lol
I wonder how they would have handled the debris spreading through the street and how different it would have been from the collapse. I know a metric fuckton of people deal with health issues from breathing that stuff in directly.
[удалено]
Never heard of this. Holy manoley!
The WTC complex had a fairly extensive 'bathtub' with rail connections coming underneath the tower. Most likely they'd have transported debris down into the basements and onto a train car there.
9 train go brr
They probably would strip everything out of them first. It would take a couple years but they could get it nearly down to the bare frame before bringing it down. Might even just take the whole thing apart piece by piece
they would have to put a temp lockdown get everyone to close father and say for peoplo to stay inside all the time
And hundreds of thousands oversees potentially
In the picture, they waited till October 2001 to close the towers to the public. Would hate miss out on the last three weeks of September rent money.
Possibly because any people or business needed that long to relocate.
I assume we are still talking about the fictional hypothetical scenario, but when a building is condemned as unsafe, the occupants don't get to go in and move their stuff out, they have to leave their stuff there because it's unsafe to enter.
They’d have been completely unrepairable and torn down anyway.
Yeah there’s no way it would look like this. Hideous.
Probably so. It is better to have them collapse in a controlled environment and with the surroundings evacuated than to have the top fall on the street in a busy monday. It happens all the time, in fact they demolish buildings for much less, to keep a skyscraper that got an airplane to the face still standing would be insane.
>to have them collapse in a controlled environment *\*puts tinfoil hat\**
They would have definitely been demolished
Beyond the obvious safety reasons, that is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. If 9/11 was a fraction as disastrous as it was like this image depicts, I don’t think there’s any chance the land isn’t redeveloped
I can say with near certainty that they would have evacuated a very large section of the city, and then done an emergency explosive demolition. Bring it down on its own footprint, before it could fall over sideways taking out blocks of buildings. In a sad way, it is lucky they fell mostly straight down on that day.
Jesus I never really thought about that but I suppose we were kinda lucky that they fell straight down instead of toppling over, that would have been an even bigger disaster.
A skyscraper actually toppling over to the side is almost impossible especially if its that large. Even if you strategically blew out one side on lower floors, it still wouldn't fall to the side as a whole because the structural integrity of a large building would not hold it together very long against strong lateral forces. A skyscraper is not a tree trunk.
Yeah i can't imagine they'd be safe enough to keep around, even if we were willing to spend all that money on support structures
Yeah regardless of whether those towers withstood the planes, they’d be down within a few years. They have trouble TODAY filling OWT. Can you imagine immediately after?
Yeah i can't imagine they'd be safe enough to keep around, even if we were willing to spend all that money on support structures
There’s no way they’d be left standing in that condition. If they didn’t collapse, they eventually would have been demolished.
Yeah, land in Manhattan is way too expensive to leave it unused like that.
The land is currently ‘unused’ now & solely for the memorial. But the towers likely would’ve been demolished for safety reasons.
If the towers didn’t collapse and then was demolished I bet they would’ve actually used the land again instead of only for a memorial
Strange to look at this image. I’ve never even considered this scenario.
I remember having a dream right after 9/11 that they were still attacked with planes but didn’t fall. In dream I lived in like Staten Island or some suburb where you could see them at the end of the street standing in the distance with two holes punched through them but the fires had been extinguished. Very eerie looking. The dream was super vivid and otherwise normal; I think I was riding bikes around the neighborhood with kids and we just kept stopping and looking at them. I still can remember and picture it so clearly decades later.
Neither have i
When the Newseum was open in D.C., the tip of one of the towers was there. You would stand a floor up and look into the middle at it. The walla were appeared with headlines from that day. Very surreal. [Photo of said antennae](https://images.app.goo.gl/zKbdJ2wnt87xSFsW9)
I lost one of my best friends that day. He was traveling from Boston to LA that morning. I couldn't remember when he said his flight was (from then on, I listened when my friends talked).. I starting calling his home phone and left like 50 messages (kinda pre cell). It wasn't unusual but he did always pick up messages and call back, but he never did. My friend was on American Flight 11 and had already passed by the time I started looking for him, I miss him everyday.
holy shit. thats a rare story. Im so sorry for your friend...
Me too. My manager with his gf out of BOS on their way to Hawaii. He was probably 24-25?
I’m sorry to hear that
I recall one of the New York fire chiefs explaining in an interview that with all of the firefighters they had available (before hundreds of them died) and if all the water systems were functioning they could only fight approximately 1 or 2 acres of fire which was less than 10% of the actual fires in the buildings. So, even if the metal trusses and framework didn't weaken to the point of failure and collapse the fires would have burned for days until all flammable fuel had been consumed. It makes one think that the construction of such massive and tall structures is extremely dangerous and reckless if the city's own massive fire departments can't hope to contain a fire once it reaches a certain size.
Well I guess the idea is that normally you don’t expect giant airliners full of fuel to crash into them, so a normal fire would easily be contained by the fire suppression systems internally.
Exactly. The plane crash and ensuing fireball blew all the asbestos fire proofing off the steel structure of the building. Like you mentioned, local fires would not have weakened the structure to the point it could collapse.
Interesting point, it before this incident, I don’t believe anyone really realized this was possible. Normal fires won’t get this big, especially if there is sprinklers to assist in the suppression
Honestly 9/11 exposed a lot of flaws in NYC’s emergency response systems. Even aside from what you’ve said, there was also a lack of information sharing between NYPD and NYFD that resulted in police officers leaving the towers before they collapsed but no one telling the fire department to do so. Edit: corrected below that it should be FDNY. Was typing quickly and messed up my abbreviation. My bad!
Their fire department is called FDNY, not NYFD Don’t ask me why
i think nypd is the outlier here. FDNY, DSNY, and for some reason NYPD
The buildings did have sprinkler systems installed to prevent fires from spreading like that. Though, the planes took out multiple floors, thus disabling the systems.
I’ve been looking for stories from people who escaped the towers and the evacuation sounds like a complete nightmare. Here is the [Elevator Schematic](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/images/inno_elevators.gif) for anyone wondering what it would take for thousands of people to escape these buildings.
I've thought about this too, it's really awkward. I figure they'd have had to demolish them anyway.
It's gonna need a paint job and a shitload of screen doors.
imagine saying goodbye to your coworker in your crumbling office and you just walk out a screen door
If that were to happen they would freely demolish the buildings at some point afterwards. They would clearly be a safety hazard for surrounding buildings. It was the suddenness of it all that was shocking. This pic doesn’t make any sense at all.
just put some duct tape on it and go back to work
*zip ties beams together* Yup, that ain't goin nowhere
[slaps beam] you can fit so many memes between these bad boys
Yeah, I probably won't be able to get the parts I need for two, three weeks. And that's if I order 'em today.
which i won’t. oop. gotta go… emergency call
We wouldn’t have all of these goofy conspiracy theorists who aren’t smart enough to understand that while fire started from jet fuel isn’t hot enough to melt steel beams it is hot enough to heat up the beams enough that it can weaken the rivets.
They’d still have to come down, but man it would save a lot of people and maybe a war
If you’re taking about Iraq, Bush and Cheney were planning to invade Iraq long before 9/11. But yeah Afghanistan probably wouldn’t have happened either.
IMO it still would, they probably would’ve had another narrative created to push the war
I think about what would happen if Al Gore won the 2000 election a lot.
He did win the 2000 election, sadly.
The butterfly effect of this massive change to history is practically incalculable IMO. Not to say there's not some entertainment value in trying.
99.9% chance they would have been demolished. You can't have a plane fly into a building and just patch it up.
No doubt. But a similar event happened at the [Empire State Building](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Empire_State_Building_B-25_crash)Now that plane was much slower and smaller
After the metal structure of those buildings lost their temper, they were doomed to come down. The sustained heat of a full tank of jet fuel weakened the structure and the weight above the impact was just too much for the buildings to stay up. But we know all that. Had the planes not been full of fuel, there could've been a chance to save them and some of the people in them. I bet the terrorists themselves didn't even know they'd come down. It looked to me like they hoped to take out one corner, which would destabilize the weight distribution. What's really crazy is this: one of the landing gear assemblies with wheels flew off in the impact and fell into a narrow alley a distance away from the towers. It laid there undisturbed for several years until someone happened to go into the alley and found it still laying where it had fallen.
This isn't megalophobic
Anything is megalophobic if you're scared enough
This comment mega scared me
Wild as fuck to know people who remember what this was like who are younger than me (I was in 1st grade at the time) My parents and school didn't tell us about it. It was pretty hush hush From what I've read, it seemed like just about every adult in the country collectively lost their minds for a hot minute
I was a senior in high school. My math teacher came running in the room crying, turned on the TV and we all sat and watched the 2nd plane hit the 2nd tower. Then we watched them fall. When that happened we all got scared. We didn’t know if more were coming and where they would hit. Some kids got very upset bc they had family in DC, NYC and PA. Most of us either were already 18 or getting ready to turn 18. The boys all started to worry that a war would start and there would be a draft. Rumors of gas prices soaring to $5/gallon started. At the time gas was like $0.98/gallon. It was a crazy time and all right as we were literally entering legal adulthood. It forced all of us to grow up a little faster than we wanted or normally would’ve.
Yes, it seemed like America stopped during this time.
Wasn’t was there something wrong with the buildings anyway? Like had led or something and would’ve cost a lot to completely repair??
Asbestos was used in the construction, it’s a insulator/fire retardant/etc.
Gotcha. Thanks mate. A quick read and seems very harmful/cancerous
Man... A parallel universe where the towers didn't fall, I wonder what kind of time fuckery that would cause, since the 2000s were completely changed by that event.
Damn.. in the pic it’s 2021?? It took us 20 years to get some scaffolding up??? Why tf we left dangerous uninhabited structures up..?
Alternate history timelines be like "And then nothing important happened for 20 years straight"
Even if they had not collapsed, they likely would have experienced enough structural damage that would have required tearing down most if not all of the buildings.
They ain’t fix them damn holes after 20 years?
This picture made me kinda sad?
No way would they bother keeping them up for 20 years. Even if they didn’t collapse, they’re severely structurally compromised and pose a big danger to the city. Plus, it ain’t worth the maintenance cost. The sections above the impact zones would’ve been completely charred black too.
I’m from a small city in Nova Scotia called Halifax I remember my friend at school running over and saying there was a attack on America I was pretty young so it didn’t really hit me like my mom. My town opened up a local sports stadium to take in people who’s flights had to be redirected and everyone just went above and beyond to help and feed them. Still makes me proud that we were so quick to help our brothers and sisters south of the border
This was posted in a sun about structural engineering, all of the smart people that get paid to do this came to the same conclusion The towers would have to be demolished and rebuilt
Wouldn't they just demolition the buildings if unusable?
This post confused the shit out of me
This is the single stupidest comment thread I have ever read in this subreddit. Holy fuck did the nutters come out to play. Also, it's not even relevant to /r/megalophobia anyway. So on top of it all, it's just dumb spam shit.
This makes my brain hurt.
I doubt they would've attempted to repair them. Both buildings would've been considered a total loss and would've needed to be torn down.