438. Initial Coverage of the World Trade Center Bombing, 2/26/1993
I was nine when this happened, and I’m pretty sure I was home sick from school that day. I just remembered recently that it was on a Friday.
The main thing nine year old me took away from that day was being scared by seeing all the people exiting the building with soot around their noses during this dreary day with snowflakes flying around everywhere among the smoke.
In present day, another thing that sends shivers down me is seeing the people breaking the windows, waiting for help.
(I remember this shot so well [source])
Stupid nine year old me also thought that bombings were a common occurrence. I mean, we did have the Unibomber running around back then and PanAm flight 103 bombing had just happened a few years earlier.
Years ago, I found the news footage from that day, from CBS 2 in NYC, the only local news channel that had non-cable reception that day because their antenna wasn’t on top of the World Trade Center Tower One. 1. A baby Brian Williams is there. ABC7 from NYC also has a playlist on their YouTube Channel from their coverage.
9 things I learned from reading and watching the initial coverage:
1. At first, it was speculated that the bombing had something to do with ongoing civil war turmoil in Yugoslavia. 2
2. There was a class of Kindergarteners from Brooklyn on the observation deck at the time of the bombing. Another group of kids were stuck in an elevator for around 5 hours. 3 The kids didn’t get back home until around 7pm that evening.
3. People had to go down pitch dark, smokey stairwells, and commented that there were no alarms, no announcements, and no instructions. 4 A lady who was being interviewed by ABC7 said “we just kept following everybody else down the stairs, and everybody was going, ‘faster, faster!’ ... it just kept getting darker and smokier the further you went down.” Another said the place was a deathtrap, and that in five minutes there was already smoke on the 107th floor. 3. The World Trade Center Director, Charles Maikish said that the emergency communication systems were destroyed in the bombing.
4. A couple of hours later, there was a bomb threat at the Empire State Building. It obviously was a false alarm. I guess people weren’t taking it seriously, because check out all the people crowded around that entrance.
5. People were calling the local news channels for assistance. At around 13:52 of this clip, the news anchors tell a caller named John to not break the windows, and to stay low to the floor. Cell phones were still very out of range for most people, so I’m gonna assume while the power was out, phone lines were still working. Also, CBS2 superimposing the fdny and nypd phone numbers over footage of people having trouble breathing is unsettling.
6. 19 callers claimed responsibility for the blast in the hours following the bombing. (source)
7. 50,000 people were evacuated. Six people died, Port Authority Workers around the blast site, and a man who was in the garage at the time. It’s a miracle more people didn’t die that day from the smoke inhalation.
8. CBS News reporter Scott Pelley had some haunting words the next day:
“there is an uneasy feeling among some Americans that after yesterday, somehow something has changed. Perhaps forever. A loss of our sense of security.”
9. Honorable mention: Carl Selinger: the salad man. Carl had gone to the cafeteria to get lunch and was coming back up to his office via the elevator when the bombing happened. Carl ate half his salad while waiting, but decided to ration the rest of it just in case. It was a good thing he did, because he was trapped in the elevator for five and a half hours:
When Sergeant Timothy Farrell pried open Mr. Selinger’s elevator, he found him in the doorway, holding his salad. To this day, Sergeant Farrell said he remembers him as “the one with the salad.”
“I may have freed 25 or 35 people from the elevators that day, but how I remembered Carl was the fact that he wasn’t really physically upset, or emotional,” Sergeant Farrell, now retired, said at the lecture, which brought the two men together publicly for the first time. “He was calm, he was jocular. And he talked about how he wasn’t sure what happened — and how he had first started to eat the salad for lunch.”5
For Mr. Selinger, humor has helped. “He was after my salad! That’s the bottom line here,” he said of the moment he was rescued 25 years ago. 5
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1. Sontag, Deborah. “EXPLOSION AT THE TWIN TOWERS: Disruptions; Manhattan Is Held in the Grip Of Traffic Snarls and Anxiety.” The New York Times, February 27, 1993, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/27/nyregion/explosion-twin-towers-disruptions-manhattan-held-grip-traffic-snarls-anxiety.html. // https://web.archive.org/web/20180330012332/https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/27/nyregion/explosion-twin-towers-disruptions-manhattan-held-grip-traffic-snarls-anxiety.html
2. AP NEWS. “AP Was There: The 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center.” Accessed September 12, 2021. https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news-khalid-sheikh-mohammed-bombings-f4f1fd2b2d4b4a17b94ca7183fb65ba4.
3. C, Domenick and elieri. “LOOK BACK: Watch Archive News Coverage of 1993 World Trade Center Terror Bombing Attack.” ABC7 New York, February 25, 2020. https://abc7ny.com/3114288/ // https://web.archive.org/web/20201202035154/https://abc7ny.com/world-trade-center-bombing-1993-smoke-inhalation/3114288/
4. McFadden, Robert D. “EXPLOSION AT THE TWIN TOWERS: The Overview; BLAST HITS TRADE CENTER, BOMB SUSPECTED; 5 KILLED, THOUSANDS FLEE SMOKE IN TOWERS.” The New York Times, February 27, 1993, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/27/nyregion/explosion-twin-towers-overview-blast-hits-trade-center-bomb-suspected-5-killed.html. // https://web.archive.org/web/20110909150957/https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/27/nyregion/explosion-twin-towers-overview-blast-hits-trade-center-bomb-suspected-5-killed.html
5. Otterman, Sharon. “Finding Resilience, 25 Years After 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.” The New York Times, February 19, 2018, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/nyregion/first-terror-attack-world-trade-center-anniversary.html. // https://web.archive.org/web/20180221041320/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/nyregion/first-terror-attack-world-trade-center-anniversary.html
