Twisted Metal 2 New York

[Stetson Saenz]

Shecrawled under her desk. When it seemed safe, she looked up into the blue, cloudless sky of that day. Smoke and flames were raging from a black hole in the North Tower. Countless papers and shiny bits of metal rained through the air. Looking down into the narrow street, she saw a wave of humans filling it side to side, everyone fleeing in the same direction.

Somewhere around Broadway and Canal, Ruby looked back and saw the black-smoke pillar of fire from the South Tower suddenly turn white, and surge out fiercely; she thought it must have been around 10am. She was witnessing the collapse of the building, the first to fall. A fighter jet roared overhead, and people cowered in doorways; was it one of ours, or one of theirs? At Times Square, a stranger lent her his cell phone (then not so common) and she phoned me to tell me she was alive. The tight dress shoes she had worn to the office were too painful for hiking; she took them off and continued barefoot, reaching our home on West 104th Street some time in the afternoon. She had walked about 7 miles.

When he got to work, everyone was glued to the radio. But in a short time, it became difficult to listen to the news; the seismology department was being inundated by calls from reporters and all kinds of government officials. In the initial chaos, it was unclear exactly what was going on, what kinds of explosions had occurred, and the exact sequence of events. Callers were desperate for information from any possible source. Had the seismic network picked up anything?

Kim received his first query, from a New York Times reporter, shortly after the collapse of the South Tower. There was no operating seismometer in New York City at that time; the closest was in a basement on the Lamont campus itself. Kim rushed over to the big rotating drum that continuously records its signals on paper. Sure enough, the needle had jumped. With signals coming in electronically from 33 other seismometers scattered across the region, Kim headed to his office to try and work out the exact time and magnitude of the collapse. While he was doing this, the second tower came down.

From then on, all he did for the next several days was stare at data, make calculations, confer with colleagues and try to get a few hours of sleep. He does not recall ever seeing visual images of the plane impacts or the falling buildings until the following night, when he finally went home and saw on television what most other people had already seen a hundred times.

Over succeeding weeks, Kim and his colleagues worked up precise seismic signatures of both the jet impacts and the building collapses. Their first official product, coauthored by 12 Lamont seismologists and grad students, was a November 2001 paper published by the American Geophysical Union, It described the waves generated by the attacks, their potential effects, and the precise timing of each event. Working with federal investigators, the New York Fire Department, the Port Authority and others, they distributed seismic data, which was later combined with photos, videos and eyewitness reports to form a comprehensive account of the attacks.

In the days following the attacks, Kim and many others discovered something else: Among more than 8 million New Yorkers, there are few degrees of separation. Nearly everyone knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone who was missing. For our part, Ruby and I had rung in the millennial New Year, Jan. 1, 2000, at the Brooklyn home of our close friends Bob and Sally. At this wonderful party, we met two of their other good friends, Brooklyn firefighter Dave Fontana and his wife, Marian. We liked them a lot, and talked about all kinds of things, from sculpture to baby names. (For a girl, we all agreed on Willow, though none of us later ended up using that name.) Shortly after the attacks, Bob called to tell me Dave Fontana had been in the South Tower when it came down. He never had a chance to name another baby. Bob and I wept together at his empty-coffin funeral.

Another was 41-year-old Weibin Wang, who had immigrated from China and studied earthquake mechanics at Lamont. In 1999, instead of pursuing seismology, he bagged a good-paying job at the financial firm of Cantor Fitzgerald. He and his wife, Wen Shi, moved with their three kids into a suburban house not far from Kim with his wife. On weekends, Weibin Wang cooked for the family and took the kids to piano lessons. In March 2001, he became an American citizen. On Sept. 11, he was at work for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 103rd floor of the North Tower. He was never heard from again.

Some time later, Kim and Gerald Baum of the Maryland Geological Survey tried to help pinpoint the time when the hijacked United Airlines flight 93 slammed into a field near Shanksville, Penn., killing everyone on board. They came up with 10:06 am, but the signals were mixed with too much noise, and they turned out to be unreliable; using radio transmissions and other data, the 9-11 Commission put the crash three minutes earlier. And Kim could not come up with any signal at all from the crash of a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon at about 9:37 am. He speculates that the marshy sediments on which much of Washington is built had absorbed the impact. Or, additionally, that the Pentagon is built over a massive, largely secret labyrinth of reinforced underground spaces that scattered the energy.

For the seismologists, the events highlighted the fact that New York City did not have a single operating seismic station. This, although Manhattan is cut by several known faults, has a history of small to moderate earthquakes, and could be subject to much larger ones. In 2002, Kim and his colleagues filled some of the gap by installing stations in Central Park and at Fordham University in the Bronx.

As for us. Ruby was ordered to return to work just three days after the attacks, and had to walk every day near the towering, smoking pile of twisted metal, rubble and dust, where workers were pulling out red-hot steel beams, and conducting a hopeless search for life. The streets were littered with aircraft parts, pieces of Fire Department trucks and a lot of unidentifiable debris. For months, a rancid, chemical stench hung in the air, both outside and in her workplace. She felt it clung to her clothes and body everywhere, all the time. She still works nearby.

Five years ago, approaching the 15th anniversary of the attacks, I visited the 9/11 Memorial, and took some of the photographs you see here. I was alone; Ruby has refused to ever set foot in the place.

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