Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.
Stephen Stills
December 7, 1941, the day on which 2400 Americans died at Pearl Harbor, will never be forgotten by Americans. As FDR proclaimed, it was “a date which will live in infamy,” and it changed the world forever. It is certain that September 11, 2001 will join Pearl Harbor as a day of infamy, and it will change the course of history in equally profound ways.
For those of us watching helplessly from a distance, it is truly impossible to grasp the enormity of the events that occurred in New York and Washington D.C. Even the heroic rescuers on the scenes, immersed in the carnage and devastation, testified to the same kind of numbness and incomprehension. The scale of these disasters - in human and material loss, and in economic and political consequences - is too great to be encompassed by our imaginations.
Sometimes, numbers put things in perspective; they enable us to create images of unimaginable scenes and events. Perhaps numbers can help us comprehend the vastness of the devastation in New York.
The World Trade Center was a complex a seven buildings regarded as the largest commercial complex in the world. The twin towers that crowned the World Trade Center were completed in 1973 at a cost of $800 million (about $3 billion in 2001 dollars). At that time, with a height of a quarter mile, they were the tallest buildings in the world. At the time of their destruction, they were still among the six tallest buildings in the world.
A single floor of the towers had an area of about 45,000 square feet - more than an acre. The total floor area of the two towers was over a third of a square mile, the equivalent of 180 football fields, or more than the total floor space of a major university. Beneath the towers was a cavernous parking garage that held 2000 cars. The exterior of the towers glistened with the reflections of 43,500 windows, which amounted to about 14 acres of glass - enough for 30,000 automobiles. The 97 passenger elevators in each tower could transport 55 people at a time, at a rate of 18 miles per hour, or two floors every second; but they carried no one to safety on the day of the attack. By contrast, each tower had only three stairways that served as the escape route for thousands of people.
The towers could have withstood the impact of a jet liner - without 24,000 gallons of aviation fuel on board. The collapse of the towers was due to the melting of their steel skeletons in the fire storms ignited on the upper floors. The sprinkler systems in the buildings, loaded with millions of gallons of water, had as much effect as spitting on a forest fire. As a result, 200,000 tons of vaporized steel and 425 cubic yards of powdered concrete, together with everything they supported, now lie in a nine-story tomb called ground zero. What took seven years to build came to Earth in a matter of minutes.
Numbers begin to fail us when it comes to the towers’ occupants and their possessions. Approximately 50,000 people worked in the two towers alone. It’s reasonable to estimate that their offices held roughly 50,000 personal computers and telephones, 50,000 desks and file cabinets, perhaps 5000 photocopy machines, refrigerators, and coffee makers. All told, there were 7000 sinks and toilets, 40,000 doorknobs, and several thousand drinking fountains, now buried in two billion tons of shattered architecture.
Ten days after the attack, 170 people are confirmed dead with an agonizing 6400 people still missing at the World Trade Center alone. If the unthinkable is true - that over 6000 people perished in the attack - then this day resulted in the greatest loss of life on American soil since the Civil War. Of the 6000 who died, at least 300 were fire fighters on a rescue mission, 200 were Britons, 150 were Israelis, and 125 were Muslim-Americans. Eighty different nations lost citizens in an attack presumably targeted at Americans. Of the 6000 who died, 80 would have had heart surgery, 22 would have died from other causes, 50 would have been married, and 150 would have seen a newborn child within the next year. Of the 6000 who died, 35 were bound to wheelchairs. The casualties represent over 200 billion hours of employment not worked and 230,000 years of life not lived.
But there is far more that lies beyond the grasp of numbers. The attack left widows, widowers, and orphans in its indiscriminant wake, absolutely contradicting Stalin’s grim observation that “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic:” Numbers will never explain the genocidal rage that led to the attacks. Numbers cannot measure the innocence and heroism of those who died. There is not a number small enough to quantify a pail of debris taken from the ruins. There are not numbers large enough to measure blood donated or tears shed. We don’t know a geometry that can describe the chaos at ground zero. And there are not enough dimensions to capture the realities and mysteries of the world after the attacks. Words, let alone numbers, will never describe a severed hand, a charred photograph, or an earring in the dust. We have no mathematics of grief. This is a time when numbers fail, when we must go where numbers have never been.
September 2001