Towers Falling Free Pdf

[Alexia Borson]

2I like how the teachers were dealing with the tragedy for a generation that was born after the towers fell. As a teacher in Queens in 2001, I taught the kids who lived through it. So, I was indeed fascinated by this. What blew my mind was that Miss Garcia (the teacher) was in 5th grade during 9/11!

4) The storyline with the father was nicely done. (Although, I will say, when he finally speaks, he almost says too much. Which I felt was a little out of character for him.) This was a very emotional and cathartic scene.

Revision. Throughout the novel, Dja is revising her essay about home. Have students compare and contrast the various versions of her essay. What changes in terms of content? Style? Organization? How does her essay reflect deeper understanding about both the topic and the process of writing? What writing lessons can they tease out of her revisions? Have students apply those lessons to a piece of writing that they are working on.

Duet Reading: September 11th, Characterization, Theme. Have some students in your class read Towers Falling and others read Somewhere Among by Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu. Compare and contrast how Emu experiences September 11th from Japan with how Dja finds out about the events as a result of the fifteenteenth anniversary. How are families depicted in the novels? What themes emerge? How are they similar and different from one another? Students can use the symbolism of the towers to work in pairs, writing about each book inside of the space of one of the towers.

In January, I took a few of my friends for Divine Liturgy at the Saint Nicholas National Shrine in Lower Manhattan for my 21st birthday. The original church had been completely destroyed in 2001 during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The new church was awe-inspiring, a testament to the faith of those who had spent years working to rebuild what had been so tragically lost. After Liturgy, I walked down to the tranquil 9/11 Memorial with my friends, trying to imagine what that area looked like 22 years ago. I had never seen the Twin Towers standing tall in all their legendary glory; it is almost impossible for me to picture the towers without black smoke and fire billowing from their windows.

Every life lost in pursuit of hubris is a waste and a tragedy. Say a prayer today for the 2,977 who died during the 9/11 attacks and the 5,000 and counting who have died because of 9/11-related diseases. But also remember and pray for those whose bitterness towards the world has numbed them from feeling empathy for the victims of such a devastating catastrophe.

The World Trade Center in New York City collapsed on September 11, 2001, as result of the al-Qaeda attacks. Two commercial airliners hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists were deliberately flown into the Twin Towers of the complex, resulting in a total progressive collapse that killed almost 3,000 people. It is the deadliest and costliest building collapse in history.

The North Tower (WTC 1) was the first building to be hit when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into it at 8:46 a.m.,[a] causing it to collapse at 10:28[e] after burning for one hour and 42 minutes.[f] At 9:03 a.m.,[g] the South Tower (WTC 2) was struck by United Airlines Flight 175; it collapsed at 9:59 a.m.[h] after burning for 56 minutes.

The towers' destruction caused major devastation throughout Lower Manhattan, and more than a dozen adjacent and nearby structures were damaged or destroyed by debris from the plane impacts or the collapses. Four of the five remaining World Trade Center structures were immediately crushed or damaged beyond repair as the towers fell, while 7 World Trade Center remained standing for another six hours until fires ignited by raining debris from the North Tower brought it down at 5:21 that afternoon.

The hijackings, crashes, fires and subsequent collapses killed an initial total of 2,760 people. Toxic powder from the destroyed high-rises was dispersed throughout the city and gave rise to numerous long-term health effects that continue to plague many who were in the towers' vicinity, with at least three additional deaths reported.[17] The 110-story towers are the tallest freestanding structures ever to be destroyed, and the death toll from the attack on the North Tower represents the deadliest terrorist act in world history.[i]

In 2005, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the results of its investigation into the collapse. It found nothing substandard in the towers' design, noting that the severity of the attacks was beyond anything experienced by buildings in the past. The NIST determined the fires to be the main cause of the collapses, finding that sagging floors pulled inward on the perimeter columns, causing them to bow and then buckle. Once the upper section of the building began to move downward, a total progressive collapse was unavoidable.

The cleanup of the World Trade Center site involved round-the-clock operations and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the surrounding structures that had not been hit by the planes still sustained significant damage, requiring them to be torn down. Demolition of the surrounding damaged buildings continued even as new construction proceeded on the Twin Towers' replacement, the new One World Trade Center, which opened in 2014.[19]

When they opened in 1973, the Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world. At the time of the attacks only the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the Willis Tower (known then as the Sears Tower) in Chicago were taller.[20] Built with a novel "framed tube" design that maximized interior space, the towers had a high strength-to-weight ratio requiring 40 percent less steel than more traditional steel framed skyscrapers.[21] In addition, atop WTC 1 stood a 362 ft (110 m) telecommunications antenna erected in 1978, bringing that tower's total height to 1,730 ft (530 m), though as a nonstructural addition, the antenna was not officially counted.

The towers were designed as framed tube structures, which provided tenants with open floor plans uninterrupted by columns or walls. The buildings were square and 207 ft (63 m) on each side but had chamfered 6 ft 11 in (2.11 m) corners, making each building's exterior roughly 210 ft (64 m) wide.[22] One World Trade Center (WTC 1), the "North Tower", was, at 1,368 ft (417 m), six feet taller than Two World Trade Center (WTC 2), the "South Tower", which was 1,362 ft (415 m) tall. Numerous closely spaced perimeter columns provided much of the structural strength, along with gravity load shared with the steel box columns of the core.[23] Above the tenth floor, there were 59 perimeter columns along each face of the building spaced 3 ft 4 in (1.02 m) on center.[23] While the towers were square, the interior cores were rectangular and supported by 47 columns that ran the full height of each tower.[22] All the elevators and stairwells were in the core, leaving a large column-free space between it and the perimeter that was bridged by prefabricated floor trusses.[23] As the core was rectangular, this created a long and short span distance to the perimeter columns.

The floors consisted of 4 in-thick (10 cm) lightweight concrete slabs laid on a fluted steel deck.[22] A grid of lightweight bridging trusses and main trusses supported the floors with shear connections to the concrete slab for composite action.[23] The trusses had a span of 60 ft (18 m) in the long-span areas and 35 ft (11 m) in the short-span area. The trusses connected to the perimeter at alternate columns, and were therefore on 6.8 ft (2.1 m) centers. The top chords of the trusses were bolted to seats welded to the spandrels on the perimeter side and a channel welded to interior box columns on the core side. The floors were connected to the perimeter spandrel plates with viscoelastic dampers, which helped reduce the amount of sway felt by building occupants.[23]

The towers also had a "hat truss" or "outrigger truss" between the 107th and 110th floors, consisting of six trusses along the long axis of core and four along the short axis.[22] This system allowed optimized load redistribution of floor diaphragms between the perimeter and core, with improved performance between the different materials of flexible steel and rigid concrete allowing the moment frames to transfer sway into compression on the core, which also mostly supported the transmission tower. These trusses were installed in each building to support future transmission towers, but only the north tower was ultimately fitted with one.[22]

Though fire studies and even an analysis of the impacts of low-speed jet aircraft impacts had been undertaken before the towers' completion, the full scope of those studies no longer exists. Nevertheless, since fire had never before caused a skyscraper to collapse and aircraft impacts had been considered in their design, their destruction initially came as a surprise to some in the engineering community.[24]

The structural engineers working on the World Trade Center considered the possibility that aircraft could crash into the building. In July 1945, a B-25 bomber that was lost in fog had crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.[25] A year later, a C-45F Expeditor crashed into the 40 Wall Street building. Once again, fog was believed to have been the contributing factor in the collision.[26] Leslie Robertson, one of the chief engineers working on the design of the World Trade Center, said that he considered the scenario of the impact of a Boeing 707, which might be lost in the fog and flying at relatively low speeds while seeking to land at either JFK or Newark Airports.[27] In an interview with the BBC two months after the towers collapsed, Robertson said: "with the 707, the fuel load was not considered in the design. I don't know how it could have been considered." He also said that the main difference between the design studies and the event that caused the towers to collapse was the velocity of the impact, which greatly increased the absorbed energy, and was never considered during the construction process.[28]

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