That was sort of my thinking. I think tower 2 would still stand, but what damage would have occured to the foundation and slurry wall ‘bathtub’ if only one fell? The only info we have concerns both towers falling.
Thanks for giving some perspective on that - I always assumed that those pieces of the WTC structure sticking out of the ground were remnants from the tower where it stood. But omparing your description and the photo with this map those shards must have come right over the top of the hotel and embedded in the street.
Incidentally I didn’t realise the hotel was damaged so extensively. Was anyone killed there or was the Marriott evacuated in time?
The Marriott was successfully evacuated, as were 4, 5, 6 and 7 WTC and the surrounding buildings. With very few exceptions, fatalities were either a) in one of the towers and at or above the impact of each aircraft or b) for whatever reason (fire and rescue workers, that photographer, some building administrators) remained at or moved into the area during or after evacuations or c) on board one of the aircraft.
As it happens, the collapse of the north tower essentially completed the destruction of the Marriott and all but collapsed 6. There was much much less left of those buildings following the collapses than there was of 4 and 5, which were left as shells.
I actually had a friend staying at that Marriot, and we were supposed to meet up that night to see THE MUSIC MAN on Broadway. They sounded an alarm when the first plane hit and evacuated as soon as the second plane did. It took a couple of years for the hotel to reopen. Presumably with Davey’s tickets still sitting on the nightstand for a year or two, long after the show had closed (he ended up with some relatives in Queens, but had a hell of a time getting there.)
The One Bankers Trust Plaza = the Deustche Bank building I was talking about. One Liberty Plaza (the old Merrill Lynch building) across another street was also damaged a little but stayed up; the confusion between the two buildings in the media became a joke among the firemen: “Dammit, One Liberty Plaza has collapsed again!” One Liberty is fine now. In this gallery is a nice pic of the bank building. Oddly, the smaller beige 1907-vintage building next to it is fine and is being rehabbed–it was masonry and built in a way that it didn’t collapse. One Bankers Trust Plaza has a fifteen-story gash in it that shines through the black mesh they’ve put up to contain the mold and asbestos–when they turned its electricity back on it was and remains quite an eerie sight in the dark.
OMG, Davey was at the Millenium Hilton across the street, NOT the Marriot which was practically between the towers! Geez! At first I forgot that and was freaking out watching the coverage of the disaster. But the rest of the stuff I wrote applied to the Millenium, not the Marriot. BTW, while most office workers in the restored surrounding buildings refused to take windows facing Ground Zero for a while, the Millenium is trying to use it as a selling point. :eek: :dubious: :dubious: :dubious:
Personally, I think the more interesting questions about only one plane on Sept. 11 revolve around the politics. Would the whole Patriot Act and Homeland Security and concerns about profiling and do-not-fly list and everything else have occurred if only one plane had been flown into a building.
I stood in what was at once time the intersection of West Street and Vesey Street on the morning of September 12th, 2001. The huge vertical steel slivers were embedded well close to the street proper. Certainly appeared to make the sidewalk line. ( Well, what was the sidewalk line. Before Hell opened up … )
If viewed carefully, as the towers each fell, one can gain a sense of the vertical compression forcing random immense hunks of that skin structure off and away, sloughing down and away as each tower slid down into its own footprint.
The pieces were embedded vertically into the ground. Deeply, it seemed to me at the time.
Yes. Politically, it didn’t matter what buildings fell and what targets were hit – the attacks would have served the same purpose, of being a convenient excuse for the Bush Administration’s ulterior goals. The only way things would have gone different is if the attacks were foiled before they could have been carried out.
The psychological dimensions would have a nasty spillover effect. Few people would want to move into the remaining tower and the incidence of “vicarious trauma” and PTSD would be, um, sky high. No doubt some unions/surviving employees in the surviving tower would sue for psychological trauma and file lawsuits preventing employers from reopening. The surviving tower would also be off limits for months, perhaps several years, while the recovery effort at the destroyed tower continued. There’s also the issue of significant asbestos contamination inside the remaining building, as its HVAC system would have blown hazardous wastes into 90-plus stories of office suites, necessitating a laborious topto-bottom analysis and cleanup. Fear begets fear and any building located just 120 feet from a major collapsed building will sustain significant structural damage. Securing affordable insurance is another complication, given that the remaining building would be in someone else’s crosshairs and they would be highly motivated to topple it. Risk averse employers would start seeking alternatives worksites, perhaps starting a pscho-economic ( :rolleyes:) domino effect. The media, meanwhile, would reinforce this dynamic by constantly airing interviews of those in the remaining tower, asking such loaded questions as: “What it’s like to live so close to terror?” and “Do you have a parachute under your desk?”
Didn’t they inspect the fallen damage to check and see what happened? Oh, thats right, they didn’t, it was immediately taken away so no one could. Too bad.
Dr. Frederick Mowrer, assosiate professor in fire protection engineering dept at U of Maryland "I find the speech with which potentially important evidence has been removed and recycled to be appaling."NYT 12-25-01
Good Egg, you may want to just answer the question the OP asked, instead of trying to turn this into Conspiracy Theory 101. We are in IMHO, after all. If you’d like to posit your suggestion that there were bombs in the towers before the planes hit, I suggest you start a new thread in Great Debates so we can thoroughly rip you a new one there.
And, so I’m not accused of trying to be a moderator, allow me to address the OP by saying that I think the impact of the first tower falling would be enough to make the second tower unstable (to say the least) and hopefully would have been dismantled both out of respect for the victims and for the sake of the NYC skyline.
You views are ill-considered, & that comes from Me, the only Doper who has held more ill-considered beliefs than Homer Simpson. I have wised up by exposure to Unca Cecil, so I can state your “professor” is fulla balloon juice.
If you believe you have something to say against ignorance, gather your arguments, assemble them into a coherent whole, and post it in Great Debates. This is not the forum for what you’re trying to do.
Don’t surrender the war just because you lost a battle. I don’t buy what you’re selling, and many here won’t, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re talking out of your ass. Follow TYM’s suggestion, and good luck.
