On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed, 400 were police officers and firefighters, in the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in NYC, at the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., and in a plane crash near Shanksville, PA. Below are some quick facts about this attack.
- 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. A bombing in February of 1993 killed six people according to dosomething.org.
- On any given workday, up to 50,000 employees worked in the WTC twin towers, and an additional 40,000 passed through the complex.
- Some of the terrorists had lived in the United States for more than a year and had taken flying lessons at American commercial flight schools. Others had slipped into the country in the months before September 11 and acted as the “muscle” in the operation as reported by history.com.
- After the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the rescue and recovery clean-up of the 1.8 million tons of wreckage from the WTC site took 9 months.
- Passengers aboard United Flight 93, heard about the previous airplane attacks and attempted to retake control of the plane from hijackers. As a result, the hijackers deliberately crashed the plane in a Pennsylvania field instead of at their unknown target.
- While video accounts of the WTC attack aired immediately, no video footage of the Pentagon attack was publicly released until 2006.
- Though both the police and fire departments of New York City had their own emergency response procedures, the two departments did not have a coordinated response plan to a major incident.
- The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 resulted in the largest loss of life by a foreign attack on American soil.
- 18 people were rescued alive from the rubble of the World Trade Center site.