On the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States seemed like the safest place in the world to live.
Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor six decades earlier, the country had not been attacked on its own soil.
It looked like war was something that happened in other places. That might be what made the huge terrorist assaults that day so surprising.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 were unlike anything before in terms of how much damage they did and how quickly they were seen.
Americans had heard or read about past tragedies in history, but this was the first one that hundreds of millions of people saw happen. The effect on society was huge and lasted a long time.
American Airlines Flight 11 was the first plane to hit its target. At 8:46 am, it flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan.
Within minutes, live pictures of the flaming skyscraper were being shown on the morning news. A lot of people thought it had to have been an accident.
At 9:03 am, seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 impacted the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
When a third plane hit the Pentagon, which is the US military’s headquarters, and a fourth plane landed in a field in Pennsylvania, few people thought this could be anything but an attack on the US.
People were stuck on the floors above the impact zone of the World Trade Center because the stairwells were broken and they couldn’t get out.
Some people ran to the roof, expecting for help from above, but the way was barred.
Some went back to their desks. They rang home. They said goodbye, and then the floors slid out from under them. First the south tower fell, and then the north tower plummeted, turning thousands of people into dust in an instant.
The fourth and last airplane, United Airlines airplane 93, crashed at 10:03 a.m. near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh. Passengers resisted the four hijackers. People think that the aim of Flight 93 was either the White House or the Capitol.
The cockpit voice recorder from Flight 93 showed that the crew and passengers tried to take control of the plane from the hijackers after discovering through phone calls that Flights 11, 77, and 175 had fallen into skyscrapers that morning.
The hijackers rolled the jet and crashed it on purpose as it became clear that the passengers would be able to take control.
These attacks were the worst terrorist strikes in history, killing 2,996 people (including the hijackers) and hurting more than 6,000 more.
There were 265 deaths aboard the four planes (none of which survived), 2,606 in and around the World Trade Center, and 125 at the Pentagon.
Most of the people who died were citizens. The rest were 343 firefighters, 72 police officers, 55 military personnel, and 19 terrorists.
At least 200 individuals dropped or jumped to their deaths from the blazing towers, like the man in the picture who plummeted. They landed on the streets and rooftops of other buildings, which were hundreds of feet below.
New Jersey lost the second most people after New York. The assaults killed people from more than 90 countries. For example, the 67 Britons who perished were more than in any other terrorist act in the world.
The damage to the World Trade Center and the infrastructure around it hurt New York City’s economy and caused a global economic downturn.
To stop terrorist attacks, many countries made their anti-terrorism laws stronger and gave police and intelligence services more power.
The civilian airspaces of the U.S. and Canada were blocked until September 13, and trading on Wall Street was stopped until September 17.
Many businesses closed, people evacuated, and events were canceled out of respect or fear of more assaults.
It took eight months to clean up the World Trade Center site, and it was done in May 2002. The Pentagon was fixed in less than a year.
Right after the attacks, people rapidly started to think that al-Qaeda was behind them.
The George W. Bush administration’s official response was to start the War on Terror and invade Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban, which had not followed U.S. orders to kick al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan and send al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden back to the U.S.
Bin Laden ran away to the White Mountains, where U.S.-led forces attacked him, but he was able to get away.
Bin Laden first said he had nothing to do with the attacks, but in 2004 he officially took credit for them.
Al-Qaeda and bin Laden said that the U.S. supported Israel, had troops in Saudi Arabia, and put sanctions on Iraq as reasons for their actions.
The U.S. military found bin Laden in a bunker in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after he had been on the run for almost ten years. They killed him on May 2, 2011.
(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / Library of Congress / US Army Archives).
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