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Published: June 26th 2017
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Geo: 40.7489, -73.9917
Today we are off for an official guided tour of the horrific events and localities associated with this dreadful event.
UP AND OUT BY 0809 - late by recent standards.......we head off sharing the lift with a young severe looking couple dressed in matching ponchos........I wryly smile and chirp loudly "dressed for bad weather then"...stoney silence and they strutt off looking pinched. We arrive at the vast lobby and down onto 7th Avenue. Cathy has already befriended the concierges outside. "Hi I was looking out for you yesterday - how is your aunt in Brooklyn after her operation" she squeaks against the roar of the Manhattan traffic!!!!. Not quite true but she does have the ability to make friends with everyone quickly.
We are at once hit with a cacophony of sound and rich tapestry of humanity.......tooting yellow cabs - smart business men - tourists from around the world.......down and outs......all mingle and jostle and hurry to their destinations or sit watching the world go past. Our destination this morning was the 9/11 Centre close to Wall Street. The very words "Nine Eleven" at once evoke memories that will never fade. It was an event equal in stature to Pearl
Harbour in 1942 (bringing the USA in WW2) and has shaped the course of history ever since. The war in Afghanistan and events in the Arab World today can be directly traced back to the US backlash to 9/11. It is engrained in the psyche of every New Yorker and was witnessed in real time by over 2 billion worldwide.
We take a Brooklyn bound express subway train to Wall Street crammed full of stockbroker types and young women in smart summer attire. Wall Street and its significance in the global economy never fails to impress.....
A few hundred yards away we start to enter the old World Trade Centre Zone. 13 years on it is full of construction workers and activity. An enormous new Tower (The One World Tower) part of 7 new towers has been completed close to the site of the original twin towers.
At 1,776 feet tall, One World Trade Center is the tallest building in the Western World and some 400 feet higher than the originals.
Over to Cathy.......I was asked to be a 'guest writer' this morning - probably because of the difficulty in putting into words the whole 9/11 effect had on the western world - it
is impossible to even begin to vocalise the experiences of thousands of ordinary people - mothers, fathers, children - in that cataclysmic day - as they have done so movingly.
Many visitors were in tears, the images and oft-repeated videos that we'de viewed many times over the past 13 years remain grotetesquely as shocking now as then, the boarding pass of one of the hikackers, the answer phone messages of the victims playing on speakers, images of people throwing themsleves out of the towers, blood stained shoes, the remains of an ambulance and a huge piece of twisted metalwork with the impact of the nose of the plane clearly visible - transport you back to that September morning.
Thank you.......the visitor centre is actually under ground zero between the original towers and is vast. Escalators take you down below ground into a huge subterranean world dominated by relics and foundations of the original towers. This is an amazing exhibition and does full justice to the magnitude of the event. No stone is left unturned even transcripts of flight stewardess Madeline Sweeney on American Airlines Flight 11 that hit The North Tower are in evidence....
"I see water. I see buildings. I see buildings!
We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God we are flying way too low. Oh my God!" (Flight 11 crashes)
-- Sweeney's last words on the inflight call with American Airlines manager Michael Woodward.
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