by Sarah Masih
Imagine being in New York on September 11th, 2001, the darkest day in American history. It was a day of terror, grief, and darkness. What used to be the proud skyline of Manhattan, was now hidden by gray clouds of smoke. Screams and cries echoed around New York City.
On September 11, 2001, an Islamic extremist group named Al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks in numerous areas in the United States.

Two passenger planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people lost their lives that day.
TIMELINE
At 8:45 AM, an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
9:02 AM: A second Boeing 767 United Airlines Flight 175 sliced into the south tower near the 60th floor.
9:45 AM: The third American Airlines flight 77 circled over Washington, D.C before crashing into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters.
10:07 AM: The fourth plane crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. All the passengers aboard were killed.
10:28 AM: The World Trade Center’s North Tower collapses, 102 minutes after being hit by Flight 11.
11 AM: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani evacuates lower Manhattan, including more than 1 million workers and tourists. Firefighters spent the fateful afternoon searching for survivors in the midst of the World Trade Center’s rubble.
Imagine the condition of schools in that area. Imagine feeling the terror that those children must have felt. No phone signal. No assurance that their parents were okay, or even alive. News channels were flooded with scary headlines and frightening images.

Only six out of the many people inside the World Trade Center survived. Almost 11000 others were severely injured.
At 1 PM, President George Bush announced that U.S military forces are on high alert worldwide.
2:51 PM: The U.S Navy dispatched missile destroyers to New York and Washington, D.C.
5:20 PM: The 47 story World Trade Center, the last of the Twin Towers to fall, collapses after burning for hours.
8:30 PM: President Bush addresses the nation, calling the attacks “evil, despicable acts of terror” and declaring that America, its friends, and allies would “stand together to win the war against terrorism.”
The Pentagon Attack

The attack on the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S Department of Defense, led to a structural collapse of a portion of the building.
125 military personnel and civilians died in the Pentagon along with 64 people aboard the plane.
While all the losses on that day were devastating, structural damage analysis revealed that the death toll at the Pentagon could have been far worse if not for some critical engineering decisions made 60 years earlier. The construction started, coincidentally, on September 11th, 1941.
The U.S Army Corps of Engineers built the Pentagon with excess strength because they thought that it would be needed to store heavy supplies. Though the Pentagon never became a storage house, the excess strength did end up saving potentially thousands of lives on 9/11.
Pennsylvania Crash
