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WHAT 9/11 MADE ME REALIZE

by Betsy Rizor

When people look at the notorious images of the Twin Towers crumbling into a cloud of puffy gray smoke and mammoth death toll it caused, they think of how terrible it was. And indeed, it was a hideous act, but what most people do not realize is how much worse it could have been. It is because of sound engineering that the towers stood for so long, allowing people to escape. If one thinks about it, it is amazing how many people did not die.

The World Trade Center can trace its history back as early as the 1950s when David Rockefeller, America's first billionaire, was campaigning for the project. Rockefeller's brother, Nelson, was the governor of New York City. With his help, David got the plans looked at by the Port Authority. It took them several years to finish the paperwork so that everybody was happy. They eventually decided that they would have fifteen million feet of floor space divided over seven buildings. The two main towers extended greater than one forth of a mile into the sky. At that height, they were taller than the Empie State building by one hundred feet.

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the Twin Towers became the front teeth of New York City. The South tower was 1,326 feet tall and the North tower was 1368 feet tall. Each tower weighed one half million tons and was roughly two hundred and eight feet on each side with one hundred and ten stories. All in all, the World Trade Center was large enough to have its own zip code.

Built in the 1960s, the materials used at the time were the best on the market. Instead of the normal heavy masonry walls, all the steel was lightweight and yet just as strong. The buildings were basically a series of metal boxes stacked on top of each other with a metal tube running down the middle, containing the elevators. The inner tube was responsible for most of the weight. Each steel floor deck was covered with four inches of concrete.

Like all buildings of similar age, the World Trade center was constructed to endure hurricane winds, earthquakes, and truck bombs. However, the site on which the towers were going to be placed posed a unique set of challenges. The builders were going to build on an old landfill where the Hudson River had been a couple hundred years before. Because of this, the ground was very unstable and they had to dig up nearly one million cubic yards of soil, down seventy feet, to find bedrock. They also had to solve the problem of water. Since the site is the former riverbed of the Hudson River, the water was seeping into the hole in the ground that they just dug. If this continued when the buildings were constructed, it would be quite a headache of problems. Therefore, they found a way to construct a three-foot wide concrete wall in the ground just outside of the base to act like a buried dam for all that river water.

One significant design element was the redundant design. Redundant design is basically constructed like a big metal net. Its purpose is that if one support is weakened or eliminated, the building or bridge will have multiple others to support itself with. This design element helped to keep the Twin Towers standing for so long despite tens of thousands of pounds of aviation fuel feeding the massive fires. All the steel in the support structure was covered with a coating which protected it from melting in a fire, however,at the impact site, the explosion blew off this coating, exposing the raw metal to the inferno.

One myth about the collapse is the chance of the Twin Towers falling sideways: this is a physical impossibility. To start with, any building as tall as the Twin Towers were is designed to bend slightly with the wind, but not enough to make the office workers seasick. If it was not designed to bend, it would snap in the wind rather than flex one way and then come back to the proper position. Also, the base of the tower is so wide, and the weight so heavy that it would take a substantial amount of force to knock it over. The task would requie a lot more than a plane or two.

In total, the World Trade Center collapse killed about 2,819 people. That figure includes 343 firefighters and paramedics, twenty-three New York Police Offcers and thirty-seven Port Authority Police Officers. Sixty companies lost personnel. Within Tower One 1,402 employees died, for Tower Two, 614. Six hundred and fifty-eight employees were lost at the Cantor Fitzgerald. The plane that hit the North tower had ninety-two people on board, including nine flight attendants and two pilots. The South Tower plane had sixty-five people including seven flight attendants and two pilots.

For any accounting, 2,819 people is a great number of human lives to lose. That not withstanding, the number could have easily been horrendously greater. It is thanks to mainly sound engineering that so many people survived.

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BETSY RIZOR, 16, is a Semi-Finalist in PeprallyUSA.com's 2003 Essay Contest

"Hello PeprallyUSA-
I heard about your web site through Air Force parents group. I wish you the very best in this much appreciated endeavor! How patriotic! How wonderful! I have you linked at- http://www.geocities.com/kathysmilitarylinks/index.html http://www.geocities.com/kathysmilitarylinks/mom.html I am passing around your site also. As a mom of 3 active duty, this kind of support is needed so much. Sincerely, Kathy A"

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