9/11! What a horrible event to have both seen and experienced! In total, workers sifted through more than one million tons of debris looking for remains and personal effects. They found 65,000 items, including 437 watches and 144 wedding rings.
21 Awful Truths About 9/11 and the Details That Got Buried in the Rubble:
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The number of children who lost a parent in the events of 9/11 was 3,051. Seventeen babies were subsequently born to women whose husbands died during the attacks. Nine months after 9/11, the number of births in New York City rose by 20% compared with the same month in 2000.
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According to researchers, alcohol consumption in Manhattan in the week 0f 9/11 increased by 25% compared with the same period the year before. Tobacco consumption rose by 10%, marijuana consumption by 3.2% and church and synagogue attendance by 20%.
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The total value of art lost when the Twin Towers collapsed exceeded $100 – million. Items included Alexander Calder’s sculpture WTC Stabile, Joan Miro’s epic World Trade Center Tapestry, a painting from Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablature series and others by Picasso and David Hockney.
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One of the unsung heroes of 9/11 was a guide dog, Roselle, a yellow Labrador who led her blind owner, Michael Hingson, down 78 stories of the North Tower and to the home of a friend.
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Three hours before the attacks, a machine called a Random Event Generator at Princeton University predicted a cataclysmic event was about to unfold.
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Only 291 dead bodies were recovered “intact” from Ground Zero. The parents of Lisa Anne Frost, 22, who was a passenger on United Flight 175, which hit the South Tower, had to wait almost a year before anything belonging to their daughter was found by workers sifting through debris.
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In total, workers sifted through more than one million tons of debris looking for remains and personal effects. They found 65,000 items, including 437 watches and 144 wedding rings as told in the beginning of the article.
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It took firefighters 100 days to extinguish all the fires ignited by the attacks in New York.
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Black boxes from Flight 77 were reportedly discovered in the Pentagon on Sept, 12th. Donald Rumsfeld later said data from cockpit voice recorder was unrecoverable, thought to be the first time in 40 years that a recovered cockpit voice tape yielded no data.
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The best-selling U.S. novel of 2001 was Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
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When the 9/11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, checked in at Logan Airport, in Boston, his name triggered an alert on the airport’s security system and his bags were never put in the plane’s hold.
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Five of the 9/11 hijackers stayed in a motel right outside the gates of the National Security Agency in the days immediately before the attacks.
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A Muslim prayer room was destroyed when the World Trade Center collapsed, along with a store of Koreans.
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Hundreds of memorials, flagpoles, crucifixes, and artworks have been made using steel from Ground Zero, including a cross in Shanksville, Philadelphia, where United Flight 93 crashed, made out of steel from the North Tower.
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Earlier this year, the official death count for 9/11 was raised by one to 2,753, New York’s Medical Examiner Office ruled that Jerry Borg, and accountant and part-time actor, had died in late 2010 from a lung disease caused by inhaling dust close to the World Trade Center.
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The top four search topics on Google in the week of 9/11, in descending order, were for; Nostradamus, CNN, the World Trade Center and Osama Bin Laden.
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In an exercise named “Vigilant Guardian” NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command), simulated at least four plane hijackings in the week prior to 9/11 and was scheduled to simulate another on the morning of the attacks.
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Property developer Larry Silverstein bought the 99 – year lease of the World Trade Center for $3.2 billion just six months before they were destroyed.
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The section of the Pentagon hit by Flight 77 had just undergone a $258 million rearmament, in which walls and been strengthened and reinforced windows had been installed. Many windows right next to the plane’s point of impact remained intact.
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John Patrick O’Neil, a special agent in charge at the FBI, who had investigated al – Qaeda and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, left the FBI due to policy disagreements. He took up a new job as head of security at the World Trade Center – where he died on 9/11.
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Scientists took advantage of the flight ban over the U.S. to conduct experiments on the effect of the atmosphere of jet planes. They found the days were a little warmer and the nights cooler.
By the Numbers:
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6.75 years it took to build the World Trade Center (WTC) from 1966 to 1973.
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102 minutes it took to destroy both towers, from the first impact to final collapse.
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56 minutes the South Tower (2 WTC) stood before collapsing.
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102 minutes the North Tower (1 WTC) stood before collapsing.
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12 seconds it took for each tower to crumble.
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2,992 people who died in the Sept. 11th attacks, according to the 9/11 report.
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125 military and civilian workers who died in the attack on the Pentagon.
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64 people who died aboard the flight that crashed into the Pentagon.
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44 people who died in the plane that crashed into rural Pennsylvania.
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19 Al – Qaeda hijackers who died in the Sept. 11th attacks.
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15 hijackers who were Saudi.
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23 NYPD officers who died at the WTC site.
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343 firefighters who died the WTC site.
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37 Port Authority police who died at the WTC site.
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3 EMS workers who died at the WTC Site.
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836 WTC responders, recovery workers, and volunteers who died after working at Ground Zero as of June 2010.
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50 in thousands, number of people who worked in the WTC complex.
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140 in thousands, the estimated number of people who visited the WTC complex daily.