« An ode to a tampon would once upon a time have been understood as a mock ode, and none but a man would have written it | Main | The Fifteenth September 11 »
September 11, 2016
The fall was said to take about ten seconds.
It would vary according to the body position and how long it took to reach terminal velocity — around 125mph in most cases, but if someone fell head down with their body straight, as if in a dive, it could be 200mph.
When they hit the pavement, their bodies were not so much broken as obliterated.
Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid-air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel-bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre.
And yet, tragically, they are in many ways the forgotten victims of September 11. Even now, nobody knows for certain who they were or exactly how many they numbered. Perhaps worst of all, surprisingly few even want to know.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at September 11, 2016 12:25 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
One paper (USA Today?) made a serious effort to put a number on the number who jumped to their death.
Their ballpark estimate:200.
Posted by: JamesG at September 11, 2016 8:50 AM
This picture, and this day, still gives me a lump in my throat.
Posted by: Melinda at September 11, 2016 3:27 PM
The Official Version of 9/11 goes something like this…
Directed by a beardy-guy from a cave in Afghanistan, ( This well appointed Suite http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid3.htm according to the London Times): nineteen hard-drinking, coke-snorting, devout Muslims enjoy lap dances before their mission to meet Allah…
Using nothing more than craft knifes, they overpower cabin crew, passengers and pilots on four planes…
And hangover or not, they manage to give the world’s most sophisticated air defense system the slip…
Unfazed by leaving their “How to Fly a Passenger Jet” guide in the car at the airport, they master the controls in no-time and score direct hits on two towers, causing THREE to collapse completely…
Our masterminds even manage to overpower the odd law of physics or two… and the world watches in awe as steel-framed buildings fall symmetrically – through their own mass – at free-fall speed, for the first time in history.
Despite all their dastardly cunning, they stupidly give their identity away by using explosion-proof passports, which survive the fireball undamaged and fall to the ground… only to be discovered by the incredible crime-fighting sleuths at the FBI…
…Meanwhile down in Washington…
Hani Hanjour, having previously flunked 2-man Cessna flying school, gets carried away with all the success of the day and suddenly finds incredible abilities behind the controls of a Boeing…
Instead of flying straight down into the large roof area of the Pentagon, he decides to show off a little…
Executing an incredible 270 degree downward spiral, he levels off to hit the low facade of the world’s most heavily defended building…
…all without a single shot being fired…. or ruining the nicely mowed lawn… and all at a speed just too fast to capture on video…
…Later, in the skies above Pennsylvania…
So desperate to talk to loved ones before their death, some passengers use sheer willpower to connect mobile calls that otherwise would not be possible until several years later…
And following a heroic attempt by some to retake control of Flight 93, it crashes into a Shankesville field leaving no trace of engines, fuselage or occupants… except for the standard issue Muslim terrorists bandana…
…Further south in Florida…
President Bush, our brave Commander-in-Chief continues to read “My Pet Goat” to a class full of primary school children… shrugging off the obvious possibility that his life could be in imminent danger…
…In New York…
World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein blesses his own foresight in insuring the buildings against terrorist attack only six weeks previously…
While back in Washington, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz shake their heads in disbelief at their own luck in getting the ‘New Pearl Harbor’ catalyzing event they so desired to pursue their agenda of world domination…
And finally, not to be disturbed too much by reports of their own deaths, at least seven of our nineteen suicide hijackers turn up alive and kicking in mainstream media reports…
And If you don’t believe this, you are a conspiracy theorist.
Posted by: Bill Jones at September 11, 2016 3:49 PM
And the necessary reaction to the 9/11 treason:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
9
Posted by: Bill Jones at September 11, 2016 6:31 PM
"Despite all their dastardly cunning, they stupidly give their identity away by using explosion-proof passports, which survive the fireball undamaged and fall to the ground… only to be discovered by the incredible crime-fighting sleuths at the FBI…"
==========================
To me, a former army demolitions specialist, and a building designer with an understanding of the magnitude of those building collapses, that right there is the most incredibly unbelievable part of all of it.
You can't melt steel and preserve paper in the same space at the same time.
Posted by: ghostsniper at September 11, 2016 7:15 PM