#NeverForget #9/11 #WSJ
Get ready for the internet to fill with reflections in connection with the 25th anniversary of murderous, tragic, and heroic events of September 11, 2001
Read the story here of how the security director at Morgan Stanley trained the 2000 plus Morgan Stanly employees on 22 floors of the World Trade Center South Tower to evacuate two by two singing, leaving space for first responders who might be going up. This effort paid off: all but 13 employees survived. Security Director Rick Rescola was one of the 13 who did not make it.
Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower by contrast lost hundreds of employees.
Read the story. Drills matter. Situational awareness matters.
Then bear with peculiar RantWoman reflections on the other side.
Flash back to 1993, the first bombing at the World Trade Center. The bombing was a car bomb in a parking garage under one of the towers.
The bombing was sufficient to do serious damage but nowhere near enough to, say collapse a skyscraper.
Enter RantWoman's fairly recent graduate school career. People who knew RantWoman as an undergrad might never have predicted that RantWoman would take courses in International Business and read the Wall Street Journal on the bus on the way to work--on Wall Street, but in Seattle.
Right. The BUS. And a job at an organization that had the word COOPERATIVE in its name. Still it was kind of IT job one could get at the time without a computer science degree if one's humanities degree comes with the skills to analyze report writing requests and collaborate on projects. (Jobs like this are definitely still to be had even though #AI changes everything.)
RantWoman specifically remembers riding the bus to work at some point after the 1993 bombing and reading a long back page of the front section story about how if one wanted to take down the towers flying an airliner full of jet fuel into the towers would be one way to do it.
Did Osama Bin laden read the Wall Street Journal? Did Osama Bin Laden just cook up the idea separately based on his education as a structural engineer?
RantWoman remembers mentally filing the story under "would someone actually try it?: along with reasons not to want to work in the World Trade Center.
RantWoman probably has more to say, but start there.
