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Investigating 9/11: An Unimaginable Calamity, Still Largely Unexamined
By JIM DWYER
September 11, 2002
Of course the country had to understand what went
wrong. One of the largest structures ever built had failed, at a
terrible cost in lives. When warned of danger, those in charge had
shrugged. Many died because the rescue effort was plagued by
communication breakdowns, a lack of coordination, failure to
prepare.
These findings on the sinking of the Titanic entered
the public record after the Carpathia docked at the Chelsea piers
in Manhattan on April 18, 1912, with the 705 survivors plucked from
the North Atlantic. Starting the next morning at the
Waldorf-Astoria, the barely dry witnesses provided a rich body of
facts about the accident, the Titanic, and maritime practices to
the United States Senate Commerce Committee, which held 18 days of
hearings. Their testimony gave form to a distant horror, shaping
law and history.
No inquiry remotely similar in scope, energy or
transparency has examined the attacks of last Sept. 11, the
devastating collapse of two of the world's tallest structures, the
deaths at the Pentagon or on United Airlines Flight 93 in
Pennsylvania. A handful of tightly focused reviews have taken place
mostly in secret, conducted by private consultants, or by
Congressional committees.
One year later, the public knows less about the
circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad
daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic,
which sank in the middle of an ocean in the dead of night.
That hardly seems possible, considering that 9/11
iconography has been absorbed into everything from football
pageants to pitches by speakers peddling lessons in leadership. And
yet, says John F. Timoney, once a senior police commander in New
York and the former police commissioner in Philadelphia, the events
of Sept. 11 are among the most rare in American public life: true
catastrophes that have gone fundamentally unscrutinized. "You can
hardly point to a cataclysmic event in our history, whether it was
the sinking of the Titanic, the Pearl Harbor attack, the Kennedy
assassination, when a blue-ribbon panel did not set out to
establish the facts and, where appropriate, suggest reforms," Mr.
Timoney said. "That has not happened here."
In Washington, a special joint Congressional
committee met a dozen times in secret to investigate the
performance of the intelligence services, but planned public
hearings have been postponed.
In New York, which suffered the greatest loss of
life in the attacks, no formal review of the emergency response was
opened until January, when Michael R. Bloomberg succeeded Rudolph
W. Giuliani as mayor. And even then, the city proceeded with
maximum circumspection. The new administration commissioned
McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, to assess the
Police and Fire Departments separately. Mr. Bloomberg pointedly
said that the two reports "should not be described as
investigations; they have not attempted moment-by-moment
re-creations of the events of 9/11." The purpose, he said, was only
to identify "specific and important opportunities" for
improvement.
Nor has there been a wide public demand for answers,
to the frustration of a handful of victims' families. Why this
national reluctance to face the country's bloodiest modern disaster
in all its dimensions? The familiar narrative and images of heroism
surely offer comfort and pride. Any wide-ranging study is bound to
find unflattering profiles of self-inflicted wounds, poor
preparation, even a kind of mass stupor in the face of rising
threats. Islamic fundamentalists had, after all, been killing
Americans and attacking American symbols for a decade, in New York,
in Saudi Arabia, in Africa, in Yemen. They tried to knock over the
twin towers in 1993, and were caught plotting to crash hijacked
airplanes into landmarks in 1994 and 1995.
Legislators who examine even lame and flimsy
intelligence operations run the risk of seeming to make matters
worse by opening up methods to scrutiny by enemies. Now the F.B.I.
is investigating Congressional staff members and senators to see if
they were the source of news reports that said the National
Security Agency had bobbled hints of a pending attack.
In New York, different questions have undermined
searching inquiries into the emergency response. The adequacy of
the building code for skyscrapers, while a technical issue, is by
definition a matter of life and death. Also by definition, it is a
question of costs for the real estate industry. A joint
government-industry task force is now studying the New York codes,
separate from the emergency responses. After the 1993 trade center
bombing, a similar group made almost no changes because of
resistance from the building industry, said Alan Reiss, who was the
director of the trade center until last summer. By shaping basic
structural requirements, the codes resonate on issues as basic to
survival as the number of lifeboats a ship like the Titanic must
carry: these laws effectively determine how rescue workers attack
fires, whether people can escape from elevators and how many
stairways are necessary.
At least 1,100 people survived the initial impacts
from the planes, but were trapped. How many might have been saved
if the buildings had stood longer? The city has not explored that
question.
While Mr. Bloomberg endorsed proposed changes in
police and fire management practices, the mayor has been plainly
uninterested in revisiting the specifics of what went wrong on
Sept. 11, saying that it was far more pressing to maintain
flexible, well-equipped forces than to spend months going to school
on the last calamity. "Every single major event is different from
all others," the mayor said when he released the McKinsey reports
last month. "The training of how you would respond to the last
incident is not really important."
Yet officials in New York City did have a blueprint
for an attack of this sort, and it was the last attack. In 1993,
fundamentalists parked a truck bomb in the trade center basement.
Six people were killed. For rescuers, "Communications in that
complex was the No. 1 issue, a big problem that had to be fixed,"
said Dennis Smith, the author of "Report From Ground Zero" (Viking,
2002) and a retired firefighter who has studied both attacks. The
firefighters returned Sept. 11 carrying the same radio equipment,
with one big difference: the department had arranged to link the
radios to a system of boosters and cable lines. Even so, nearly
every surviving firefighter reported problems sending and getting
messages. Yet Fire Department officials did not obtain the single
known recording of their operations inside the tower until after
The New York Times reported its existence in July. At that point,
the response study had already been drafted.
Mr. Reiss, of the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, said the Fire Department needed to figure out why the
changes did not work. "I felt like we spent a lot of money, we
tried to do the right thing, but it didn't work," he said.
Mr. Reiss was not interviewed for the Fire
Department report, which recommends that the city create tax
incentives for other high-rise owners to install the sorts of
technical improvements made at the trade center — the very ones
that, for unexplored reasons, did not work.
Another residue of the 1993 attack was the use of
helicopters by the police, who had landed on a roof and removed
people stranded on the upper floors. The firefighters, whose
department has no helicopter, saw the police as showboats taking
risks.
Afterward, the Port Authority, with the agreement of
the Fire Department, decided to lock the roof doors as a security
measure. On Sept. 11, some 200 people tried to get onto the south
tower's roof but could not open the door. The police decided a
landing was too dangerous. One pilot noted that he did not see
anyone on the roof. The city studies did not consider the wisdom of
locking roof doors in skyscrapers, and do not mention if such
arrangements exist elsewhere.
As the towers were burning, Randy Mastro, a lawyer
who served as deputy mayor under Mr. Giuliani, was asked on CNN if
the city had changed its approach since 1993. Indeed it had, he
said.
In 1993, Mr. Mastro said, "There was no coordinated
city response. There was no Mayor's Office of Emergency Management.
Rudy Giuliani established that. It's been one of the hallmarks of
his tenure. And unfortunately, there are circumstances like this
one where that coordinated effort has to come into play and is
coming into play now."
The belief in the coordinated public safety efforts
of the Giuliani administration turned out to be much like the
belief in the unsinkability of the Titanic. Early in the crisis,
the Office of Emergency Management had to be evacuated. It had been
placed in the trade center complex by Mr. Giuliani, against advice
that it was unwise to put an emergency center in a terrorist
target. The Police and Fire Departments barely spoke on 9/11. They
set up separate command posts. The firefighters stayed on the
ground, 900 feet below fires that the police in helicopters were
seeing up close. The two departments had not practiced helicopter
operations for at least a year before the attack.
Literally as Mr. Mastro was speaking, the police in
the sky were urging that everyone pull back from the tower, saying
that a collapse appeared inevitable. This message was sent over
police radios, but went unheard by firefighters. As many as 100 of
them were resting on the 19th floor of the north tower. "A wall of
firemen, shooting the breeze, as if we were in a park," said Deputy
Chief Joseph Baccellieri, the commanding officer of the New York
State Court Officers Association.
The McKinsey consultants evaluated 16 tasks
undertaken by the police on 9/11. None involved cooperating with
other agencies. Important as that is, the McKinsey consultants
wrote, it was "outside the scope" of their assignment.
As for Deputy Chief Baccellieri and other witnesses
who saw crowds of doomed firefighters resting on the 19th floor,
they all said they would gladly share their accounts with anyone
investigating the events of Sept. 11. So far, no one has
called.
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© Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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