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This document provides a summary of events on September 11, 2001 through eyewitness accounts and news reports. It describes the experiences of Brian Clark, who was in the south tower of the World Trade Center during the attacks. It details his actions to evacuate others from the building and his escape. It also summarizes the timeline of events that day, including the crashes of four hijacked planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. The summary describes the collapse of the towers and the immediate response by officials and the media.
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- 1. SUNDAY, September 11, 2011 • $1.50 www.vicksburgpost.com Every day SinCE 1883 WEATHER Today: Partly cloudy; highs in the upper 80s Tonight: Partly cloudy; lows in the lower 60s Mississippi River: 15.2 feet Fell: 0.2 foot Flood stage: 43 feet A9 DEATHS Holder Horn Strong A9 TODAYINHISTORY 1936: Boulder Dam begins operation as President Franklin D. Roosevelt presses a key in Washing- ton to signal the startup of the dam’s first hydro- electric generator. 1941: Groundbreaking takes place for the Penta- gon, now headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. 1961: Hurricane Carla strikes the coast of Texas as a Category 4 storm; Carla is blamed for 46 deaths in the U.S. 2001: America sees its worst day of terrorism as 19 al-Qaida terrorists hijack four passenger jet- liners. Two smashed into New York’s World Trade Center, causing the twin towers to fall; one jetliner plowed into the Pentagon; and the fourth was crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed. INDEX Business................................ B9 Puzzles................................... B8 Dear Abby............................ B7 Editorial.................................A4 People/TV............................. B7 CONTACTUS Callus Advertising....601-636-4545 Classifieds....... 601-636-SELL Circulation......601-636-4545 News................601-636-4545 E-mailus See A2 for e-mail addresses ONLINE www.vicksburgpost.com VOLUME 129 NUMBER 254 4 SECTIONS TOPIC MANY MEDIA MaryElsaHocker seesitall C1 By The Associated Press NEW YORK — Ten years on, Americans will come together today where the World Trade Center soared, where the Pentagon stands as a fortress once breached, where United Airlines Flight 93 knifed into the earth. They will gather to pray in cathedrals in our greatest cities and to lay roses before fire sta- tions in our smallest towns, to remember in countless ways the anniversary of the most devastating terrorist attacks since the nation’s founding, and in the process mark the mile- stone as history itself. As in earlier observances, bells will toll again to mourn the loss of those killed in the attacks. Ceremonies also will consecrate new memori- als in lower Manhattan, rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere, concrete symbols of the resolve to remember and rebuild. But much of the weight of this year’s cere- monies lies in what will largely go unspoken — the anniversary’s role in prompting Amer- icans to consider how the attacks changed them and the larger world and the continuing struggle to understand 9/11’s place in the lore of the nation. “A lot’s going on in the background,” said Ken Foote, author of “Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy,” exam- ining the role that veneration of sites of death and disaster plays in modern life. “These anni- versaries are particularly critical in figuring out what story to tell, in figuring out what this all means. It forces people to figure out what happened to us.” The ceremonies honor those who “fought the first battle against terrorism — and they won,” Anniversaryisaboutremembering,rebuilding The associated press One World Trade Center has reached the 80th floor in this aerial photo, taken 10 days ago. See Anniversary, Page A6. 10 Years Later By Pamela Hitchins phitchins@vicksburgpost.com As the country marks the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Vicksburg engineer whose work was key to saving hun- dreds of lives at the Pentagon that day views it as the highlight of his career. Robert Hall, 62, is a 38-year veteran of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, most of that at the Engineer Research and Development Center on Halls Ferry Road. He led the team that developed building sup- ports and materials credited with keeping a section of the Pentagon from collapsing in the minutes following the impact of American Airlines flight 77 at 8:37 a.m. central time. “Anytime you do anything that is used is good,” Hall said in a recent interview. “The fact that what you’ve done has saved lives is — it’s the highlight of your career. You never dream .... you always hope that your prod- uct and your research works, but for it to be tested and for it to be proved to work suc- cessfully, and then for it to save lives is... it’s indescribable.” The Boeing 757 that terrorists crashed into the Pentagon at about 345 mph had taken off from Washington’s Dulles International Airport carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel. The deaths included 125 Pentagon employees, 55 of them members of the military, as well as the 59 passengers and crew onboard the aircraft. The first two floors of the impact section were obliterated by the crash and firebomb from the jet fuel, but the third, fourth and fifth floors did not collapse for more than half an hour, allowing many to get out of the building where sections continued to burn for hours. In addition, nearby sections that had recently been renovated with reinforcements devel- oped by Hall and other ERDC researchers were largely undamaged. “We had offices very close to the impact that were fine, and other offices 100 or 200 feet away that were completely blown out,” said Wayne Stroupe, public information officer at ERDC. “Those retrofits saved lives,” Hall said simply. Hall, a native of Crestview, Fla., came to ‘...Forittosavelivesis...it’sindescribable’ See Windows, Page A6. Robert Hall points out a window modeled after the retrofitted windows he designed at the Pentagon. KATIE CARTER•The Vicksburg Post Vicksburg team instrumental in saving Pentagon Marshall 26 / USM 20 Ole Miss 42 / Southern Illinois 24 Ark-Pine Bluff 27 / Alcorn 20 Auburn 41 / Miss State 34 LSU 49 / Northwestern State 3 Alabama 27 / Penn State 11 Jackson State 35 / Tenn State 29 Michigan 35 / Notre Dame 31 South Carolina 45 / Georgia 42 Belhaven 35 / Miss College 31 Florida 39 / UAB 0 college scoreboard September 11, 2001 - September 11, 2011 1 YeARS AFTeR A2 • Courage of Flight 93 vic- tims lauded at dedication • U.S. denies plot reports A4 • An editorial: Remain vigilant A6 • One man’s memo- ry, minute by minute A10 •Taliban truck bomb kills two in Afghanistan B9 • Chopper demand boosts Sirkorsky in post-9/11 wars C5 • 9/11 impact stretch- es across globe WORKING TO BRING RELIEFFROM BONE AND JOINT PAIN. As Vicksburg’s first rheumatologist, Dr.Ivory specializes in treating patients with arthritis,osteoporosis, gout and other diseases that cause muscle,bone,and joint pain. 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- 2. A6 Sunday, September 11, 2011 The Vicksburg Post NEW YORK (AP) — Close your eyes and picture Sept. 11. The memories are cauterized, familiar forever. The second plane banks and slides in, the fireball blooms, the towers peel away as if unzipped from the top Start with the Tuesday morning and the blue sky and walk through the day from two perspectives, inside and out. From that of a man who managed to survive above the impactzoneinthesouthtower and from that of the helpless, watching world. In those first two hours, before anyone could put together the full, awful pic- ture, chaos filled in the gaps. Brian Clark was working at Euro Brokers, on the 84th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center. He arrived at about 7:15 a.m., had his cup of coffee. A “loud double boom” is the first thing he remembers. Then flickering of the lights in his office. Something caught his peripheral vision. He spun around. His view usually looked out over the Hudson River. The river and the sky. “It was filled with flame,” he says. “Two yards from my nose is the window, and it’s right against the glass, almost swirling.” It was 8:46 a.m. For reference, Clark some- times tells people to imagine a three-by-three grid, like the first nine digits on a telephone keypad. The north tower sat where 1 would be, the south tower at 8. Clark’s office faced west, near the southwest corner of the 8 button. American Air- lines Flight 11 had crashed into the north face of the north tower, the top of the 1 button. Since the 1993 bombing of the trade center’s under- ground garage, Clark had vol- unteered as a fire marshal for his floor. Now, as if on autopi- lot, he grabbed the flashlight, grabbed the whistle. Just then, the network tele- vision morning shows, where the top stories of the day had included whether Michael Jordan might make a come- back in the NBA, cut for the first time to a live shot of the gashed north tower of the World Trade Center. Thefirstalertonthenational news wire of The Associated Pressmovedat33secondspast 8:53 a.m.: Plane crashes into World Trade Center, accord- ing to television reports. It was 8:55 a.m. Clark remembers a voice over the PA system: “Building Two is secure.” Eight minutes later, at 9:03, he was standing outside his office and talking with a co- worker, Bobby Coll. They were 2 feet to a yard apart, he thinks, eye to eye. In an instant, “the room exploded.” The feeling was of tremen- dous air compression. Then things so secure no one ever gave them a thought, things like the lights and the floor, came loose. For several har- rowing, torqueing seconds, it seemed the building itself might go over. The power went out. “Everything was full of con- struction dust,” Clark says. He remembers terrorism crossing his mind. It was 9:04 a.m. The AP alert says: “Explo- sion rocks second World Trade Center tower.” TV networks were in the middle of interviewing eye- witnesses to the first explo- sion when United Flight 175 approached, slipped into the south face of the south tower, and sent a mushrooming fire- ball out the other side. “That looks like a second plane,” Charles Gibson said on ABC. “And now,” Matt Lauer said on NBC’s “Today” show, “you havetomovefromtalkabouta possible accident to talk about something deliberate that has happened here. With people around the world now fixed on live pic- tures of the trade center, the puzzle was slowly coming into focus. In Sarasota, Fla., President George W. Bush was read- ing to schoolchildren when Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, whispered news of the second crash into his ear. The color appeared to drain from Bush’s face. Inside the south tower, Clark was trying to lead a small, snaking line of people toward a central stairway and down from the 84th floor. Three floors into the trip, they were met by a woman, heading up. “We’ve got to go higher,” the woman said. A debate ensued. Up or down. Clark shone his flash- light on whoever was talking. In the middle of the discus- sion, Clark heard a muffled scream for help coming from the 81st floor. He and a co- worker, Ron DiFrancesco, went to investigate. They squeezed through a crack between drywall and door frame. “I have this very clear vision of all my co-workers turning around and starting up the stairs,” Clark says. “And they all died.” Mid-rescue on the 81st floor, DiFrancesco was overcome by smoke, coughed and sturned back. Clark continued toward the stranger’s voice. It was Stanley Praimnath, an execu- tive with Fuji Bank It was just after 9:30 a.m. To the outside world, it was about to become clear that the disaster, whatever it was, was not limited to two skyscrapers in New York. “Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” the president told reporters and young children at the Florida elementary school. “ Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terror- ist attack on our country.” It was seven seconds past 9:43 a.m. Another alert on the AP wire: “An aircraft has crashed into the Pentagon, witnesses say.” It was American Flight 77. Seconds later, anotheralert said that the White House had been evacuated. Clark and Praimnath wound up at Trinity Church, two blocks downtown. They stood gripping the iron railing around the cemetery, close to what they later learned was the burial site of Alexander Hamilton. It was, Clark says, as if they had been invited to witness the destruction of the south tower. “Floor by floor, it kind of dis- solved in front of us,” he says. “The white wave.” It was 10:29 a.m. A second flash on the AP wire: “Second World Trade Center tower collapses.” It was 10:37 a.m. “Large plane crashes in western Pennsylvania, offi- cials at Somerset County Air- port confirm.” The official times were 10:03, for the crash of United Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pa., and 10:28 a.m., for the collapse of the north tower of the World Trade Center. In all, it had taken under two hours and almost 3,000 souls. The count was 40 in Penn- sylvania, 184 at the Pentagon and 2,753 at the World Trade Center. Clark, who lived then and lives today in Mahwah, N.J., got off the island of Manhattan by ferry. He walked east and found that ferries to Jersey City. He remembers chugging through the dust of Sept. 11. Only when the boat got to the Jersey side did Clark realize that both towers had collapsed. Minutebyminute Pentagon Interior Damage Without ERDC Technology 300 feet north of impact With ERDC Technology 50 feet north of impact Typical third floor views Ware said. “It’s something I don’t want to miss. It’s become a part of my life.” The nation’s focus today turns to ceremonies at the Pentagon, just outside Wash- ington, D.C., and in lower Manhattan for the dedication of the national Sept. 11 memo- rial. President Barack Obama planned to attend ceremonies at the sites of all three attacks and was scheduled to speak this evening at a service at the Kennedy Center. The New York ceremony begins at 8:30 a.m., with a moment of silence 16 min- utes later — coinciding with the exact time a decade ago when the first tower of the trade center was struck by a hijacked jet. And then, one by one, the reading of the names of the 2,977 killed on Sept. 11 — those who died in New York, as well as those who died at the Pentagon and in rural Pennsylvania. They include the names of 37 of Lt. Patrick Lim’s fellow offi- cers from the police depart- ment of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Lim, assigned to patrol the trade center with an explo- sives detection dog, rushed in to the north tower after it was hit to help evacuate work- ers. He and a few others sur- vived despite still being inside a fifth-floor stairwell when the building fell. In the years since, Lim said he has wrestled with survi- vor’s guilt, realizing the last of those he’d urged ahead of him were crushed when the tower collapsed. The 10th anniversary has forced Lim to revisit an expe- rience he’s worried too many people have pushed from their minds. But the approach of today’s ceremonies has con- vinced him of the value of revisiting Sept.11, both for himself and others. Some of the most powerful ceremonies will likely be the smallest and most personal. In Brown City, Mich. — with a population of about 1,300 and no direct connection to the attacks — firefighters will lay 343 roses on a 15,000-pound steel beam salvaged from the World Trade Center, in honor of the New York City brethren who perished in the disaster. Since venturing to New York in June to claim the beam and bring it home, the Michigan firefighters have finished building a brick plaza, lighted around the clock and crowned by three flagpoles. Already, this has become a local shrine, Chief Jim Groat says. A few days ago, a couple from St. Joseph, Mich. who happened to be driving through, pulled into the fire station lot when they spotted a sign for the memorial. Groat came out to speak with them and the woman explained that she was a flight attendant for American Airlines who’d been aboard a plane the morning of the attacks. Then she turned to face the steel beam from the trade center. “She just stood there and cried. She said she was just honored that somebody still cares,” Groat recalled. The chief observed silently, before offering an invitation. “Will I see you here on Sept. 11?” he asked. “I’ll be here,” she answered. Windows Continued from Page A1. Vicksburg in 1971 as a Mis- sissippi State University graduate student working with the Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District. Within a year he moved over to what was then called Waterways Experiment Station. “I came here to work on my masters and then go to a better life,” he said with a chuckle. “Then they sent me off to school to get my Ph.D. ...” — and Hall ended up staying, rising to chief of the Geosciences and Struc- tures Division of the ERDC’s Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory before retiring in 2009. Scientists at ERDC began looking at improving the abil- ity of structures to withstand explosives in the 1980s, Hall said, first against smaller “briefcase” explosives and then progressing as terror- ists built larger and more destructive bombs. “ERDC has been involved in anti-terrorism ever since the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks (in 1983), the Khobar Towers (1996), Oklahoma City (1995), the first bombing of the New York City Twin Towers (1993), all of those,” Hall said. “After the bombings of all the embassies overseas, we’ve worked with the Department of State and several differ- ent government agencies in protection of their critical infrastructure.” Tests were carried out on small- and full-scale models within ERDC’s experimental buildings and areas as well as off-site test areas at the Big Black River and Louisi- ana’s Fort Polk, he said. In cases where the full-scale is the size of the Pentagon, they’d work on components or quarter-scale models of components, such as a park- ing garage. “Yes,” he laughed, “they gave us permission to blow things up, but also (to) simu- late with computer applica- tions. Physical experiments are very expensive, so you want to be able to do that numerically on the computer as much as possible.” They worked to predict how a wall would react to an explosion — how it would break, how much debris would be cast around inside the room, what would happen to bricks used in its con- struction or to embedded windows. “You have to tie that window frame to the floor above and below, otherwise you just blow the wall out,” he said. “When that blast comes in, one of the great- est hazards is the breaking of the glass, and also that unreinforced masonry then becomes a projectile.” In addition to structural supports, Hall and his team experimented with lining the inside of walls with a mem- brane, a so-called geo-fabric. “We started anchoring it at the floor and the ceiling, and it turned out that that mate- rial ended up preventing those unreinforced masonry pieces from becoming pro- jectiles, and protecting the people inside,” he said. That technology was further developed by the Protective Design Center, a sort-of sister Corps agency of ERDC’s in Omaha, Neb., he said. “They took that technology and matured it, and that got transferred to the Pentagon,” he said. The “window-wall retrofit” had been completed in most of the areas of one wedge of the Pentagon on the day of the attack. “It is a terrible way to get the increased visibility and attention ERDC received after 9/11, but I’m glad we had the kinds of people who were able to tackle those problems and to produce solutions that really work,” said Dr. Jeffery Holland, ERDC’s director. After Sept. 11, the Corps worked with military offi- cials to get the Pentagon rebuilt within a year. Since, ERDC, which today spends about $1.2 billion annually at its seven research labs, has stepped up anti-terror research. Some of that over- laps with work done to pro- tect overseas military. “We always knew that what ERDC was doing was impor- tant, but the impact of what we were doing to support the nation’s military just really accelerated tremendously after Sept. 11,” Holland said. “I would say half of today’s total ERDC budget is anti- terrorism-related, and our budget has tripled since Sept. 11. So our largest increases are all in antiterrorism- related work efforts that sup- port our military and our nation.” Some of the specific tech- nologies are protected by security concerns, but areas include all of the locks and dams the Corps of Engineers manages, most of the major tunnels and bridges in the U.S., border security, and even terrain and data analy- sis, Holland said. In retirement, Hall has con- tinued his association with ERDC as a contractor, and is a consultant to other agen- cies and businesses. Hall and his wife, Jeanine, the presi- dent of Engineering Innova- tions, have two daughters — one who lives in Vicks- burg and like her father is an engineer at ERDC, and one a doctor of internal medi- cine in Mobile — and five grandchildren. He has been a member of Bowmar Baptist Church since his coming to the city, serv- ing as church deacon and elder, a member of the strate- gic planning committee and a teacher of youth and adult Sunday school classes for many years. “I enjoy that,” he said. “I enjoy the people.” He also likes to hunt and fish and serves on the board of Habitat for Humanity. As Hall looks back on the 10-year response of Ameri- cans to the Sept. 11 attacks, he said he is proud of the role his work played but thinks people need to enjoy the free- doms they have. “Even though we work so much in this protection area, I think people have to real- ize that if we try to protect everything, we protect noth- ing,” he said. “We are in a free society and freedom has risk. I think the society has to learn not to overreact to these terrorist activities, but appreciate the freedom that we have and realize that that freedom has a cost. We need to focus more on our freedom than on trying to hide behind reinforced structures.” 1 YeArS AFter September 11, 2001 - September 11, 2011 Anniversary Continued from Page A1.