Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 11:39:12 -0400 To: politech at politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
From a friend in NYC:
>I just tired calling you...but i can't get through anywhere- NY, DC- it is
>hard to even find out if my friends and family are ok- they have suspended
>the primary elections, suspended the trains and buses, closed all bridges
>and tunnels- we are being told to evacuate the city but no one even knows
>where to go- i can see smoke from my building and I live all the way on
>110th street-
NSA and CIA -- their complexes are miles outside of Washington DC proper -- have been evacuated. From an NSAer: "I want to know as a member of the intelligence community how the fuck we didn't see this happening."
-Declan
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From: John Young <jya at PIPELINE.COM> Subject: New York Report Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 11:14:39 -0700
E-mail in Upper West Side of Manhattan is okay, local and national TV too. Radio is out due to loss of transmitters on the collapsed WTC towers. Our wire and wireless phones are on and off. Subways are partly out. We cannot see the WTC area from the roof of our building, so TV and Internet are all we got. I was about to leave for a meeting in the WTC area when the news broke.
Trying to locate a daughter who has a dot.com job near the WTC. Many friends nearby too.
A word on the structure of the WTC towers:
The WTC towers had a distinctive structural system which utilized the exterior wall framing for lateral bracing -- a so-called lattice framework. This allowed minimization of internal lateral bracing and opened up the floor plans. You can see the effect of that when the buildings collapsed, with the lattice framework crumbling and the interior imploding. The lattice works so long as it remains intact as a system: if a part of it goes, then the whole system goes.
The planes punched holes in the lattice, one tower punched on two sides, maybe the other too. Portions of the lattice of the second tower briefly remained standing after the collapse, then fell.
The system was considered daring at the time of construction, for it distributed loads more efficiently than legacy column-and-beam- supported systems. Probably the legacy systems would not have totally collapsed due to damage at upper floors, although floors above the damage would have come down if columns were weakened.
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From: Rembert Oldenboom <rembert at euronet.nl> Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 14:57:51 GMT Subject: Re: FC: Terrorists attack World Trade Center and Pentagon To: declan at well.com
Hi Declan,
I'm in Europe and it's almost impossible to reach any news site on the internet. The Washington Post site was the only one well reachable. Even local sites are unreachable now.
Guess this is something you won't hear in the US:
>From the Dutch television I understood the Dutch stock market had to be stopped as stocks were dropping extremely fast. Currently one Dutch tv channel is dedicated to what's going on in the US.
I learned from Dutch Teletext some other plane has crashed in Pennsylvania.
What the heck is going on? Dutch television could only describe what's going on as an act of war. Seeing CNN it's impossible to think otherwise.
Hmm... maybe interesting, not seen on tv yet:
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-crash-tradecenter-cla im.html
Palestinian Group Denies World Trade Center Crash
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:58 a.m. ET
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior official from the radical Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine denied Tuesday the group had any connection to a double
plane crash onto New York City's World Trade Center.
An anonymous caller had told Abu Dhabi television the DFLP was behind the
crash.
``I emphasize that the story released on Abu Dhabi TV by an anonymous person is
totally incorrect,'' Tayseer Khaled, a senior official from the DFLP politburo in the
Palestinian territories, told Reuters.
``The DFLP is against hijacking planes and against endangering the lives of
civilians who are not connected with the struggle of this region,'' he said.
Greetz,
Rembert Oldenboom Netherlands.
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From: "Warren E. Agin" <wea at SWIGGARTAGIN.COM> Subject: Re: What's going on? World Trade Center, Pentagon,
Old Executive Office Bldg Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 10:45:12 -0400 Organization: Swiggart & Agin, LLC
My wife called. News is that office towers in Boston are being evacuated and did I think she should pick up our son from school.
Wanted me to come home even though my office is on the 4th floor of a six story building.
Guess I won't get much work done today.
Regards,
- Warren Agin
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From: Mark Milone <milone at MINDSPRING.COM> Subject: Re: What's going on? World Trade Center, Pentagon,
Old Executive Office Bldg Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 10:11:15 -0400
I'm writing from midtown NYC. The South WTC building has collapsed. Phones are +not working. Buildings are issuing terrorist warnings...
- Mark
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From: "Stephen T. Middlebrook" <Stephen.Middlebrook at FMS.TREAS.GOV> Subject: Re: What's going on? World Trade Center, Pentagon,
Old Executive Office Bldg Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 10:13:17 -0400
I'm not in the Main Treasury building. We have our overlooking the Tidal Basin. I can see the pentagon smoke out my office window.
There was just a huge explosion someplace -- we heard it and felt it, but we can't figure out where it was.
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From: "Stephen T. Middlebrook" <Stephen.Middlebrook at FMS.TREAS.GOV> Subject: Re: What's going on? World Trade Center, Pentagon,
Old Executive Office Bldg Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 10:17:23 -0400
We're being evacuated now.
wish me luck
stm
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From: John Noble <jnoble at DGSYS.COM> Subject: Re: What's going on? World Trade Center, Pentagon,
Old Executive Office Bldg Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 11:10:13 -0400
At 10:13 AM -0400 9/11/01, Stephen T. Middlebrook wrote:
>I'm not in the Main Treasury building. We have our overlooking the Tidal
>Basin.
>I can see the pentagon smoke out my office window.
>
>There was just a huge explosion someplace -- we heard it and felt it, but we
>can't figure out where it was.
>
I have a view from the top floor of my building, at the highest elevation in Washington, looking down at the city from the northwest. The Secret Service has someone on the roof. You can see a lot of smoke at the Pentagon, but not even a plume of smoke from the area of the State Dept. or the Supreme Court, or anywhere else. The traffic below, on Wisconsin Avenue, is in evening rush hour mode.
John Noble
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From: Mark Milone <milone at MINDSPRING.COM> Subject: Re: What's going on? World Trade Center, Pentagon,
Old Executive Office Bldg Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 11:00:07 -0400
Try NYC traffic cams:
http://nyctmc.org/xbrooklyn.asp
- Mark
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From: Jonathan Wallace <jw at BWAY.NET> Subject: World Trade Center Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 10:14:55 -0400
I was exiting the subway under the building when the first impact happened....I +went upstairs, saw the two WTC buildings burning. There was a secondary +explosion, holes in buildings blocks away from the WTC, glass raining down. +People running and crying everywhere. I ran for the Brooklyn Bridge and got +home to Brooklyn on foot in time to see the building collapse on CNN.
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Subject: RE: Terrorists attack World Trade Center and Pentagon X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.4417.0 Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 08:36:39 -0700 Message-ID: <0DB13B7B9CF04B43B3BB03AED2D93C07455900 at mailbox.sfbg.com> From: "Nessie" <nessie at sfbg.com> To: <declan at well.com> X-UIDL: d766cb798571ac082918db2e61fc6532
> what kind of legislation we're likely to see in response
Two words: Reichstag Fire
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